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thecloserkin · 6 years ago

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book review: Jeannette Ng, Under the Pendulum Sun (2017)

Genre: Gothic fantasy

Is it the main pairing: Yes

Is it canon: Yes

Is it explicit: No

Is it endgame: Yes

Is it shippable: It is lit

Bottom line: HOW IS THIS BOOK EVEN REAL. When they put me in the ground I hope they bury me with a copy of this book so I can read it in the afterlife.

Miss Catherine Helstone, a clergyman’s daughter, sets sail for the infidel lands where her brother Laon is a missionary and from whence his letters home have grown increasingly cryptic and erratic. The twist is, he’s not spreading the Good Word in India or Africa or the New World — he’s in Fairie asdfgkkjkdfjdk. Catherine hasn’t seen him in three years. She’s so worried about him that she strong-arms the Missionary Society of London into bankrolling her ticket to Arcadia, on the grounds that the previous guy who held the post met a messy & mysterious end, and she is the properest person to prevent the same fate befalling Laon. Because she’s highkey in love with him. Well, that revelation takes half the book to unfold, however the opening line is “My brother and I grew up dreaming of new worlds.” For the first 25% of the book she doesn’t even lay eyes on Laon, she just shows up in Arcadia and stays in his house while he’s gone on some unspecified errand. And what a house it is.

I feel like I’ve spent my whole life reading about impossibly grand, potentially sentient haunted houses. Such houses are drenched in secrets. You need a first-person narrator to really experience the affect of the house, preferably someone who’s unfamiliar with the setting and disoriented by the mind games it plays: Jane Eyre in Mr. Rochester’s house leaps to mind. Jane Eyre btw nearly marries her first cousin to take up the missionary life with him (before deciding to go back to Rochester). See, the reason Jane’s cousin proposed to her was because ties of blood were thought to be not strong enough to bind—when you’re out in the field converting heathens you need an acknowledged romantic attachment. So the fact that Cathy follows her brother to Arcadia tells you everything about how important he is to her. She would have followed him to perdition. Think of that immortal Sylvia Plath quote: I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will.

To return to the subject of incest in haunted houses: The Fall of the House of Usher? Atmospheric, creepy af, but the implied relationship is presented decidedly unsympathetically. The Thirteenth Tale? The incest is canon but you are not supposed to be rooting for the incestuous couple. Crimson Peak? She’s mentally ill and it’s not even the fucked-up kind of shippable a la Jaime/Cersei. Flowers in the Attic? Shippable, but the dubious consent squicks me out. A Spell of Winter? Comes closest, in that they were 100% in love, but it was a situational in love if you know what I mean—where is my tormented passion with 200 pages of obsessive pining??? Now do you see why I lost my fucking mind when I read Under the Pendulum Sun? I have been waiting for this book for MY ENTIRE GODDAMN LIFE.

Laon may be absent from the house, but he is very much present in Cathy’s thoughts. She can’t go five paragraphs without mentioning some innocuous detail, fondly remembered from their shared childhood.

In youth, I had shared Laon’s restlessness. University had only nourished and nurtured his ambitions, but education had stifled mine. I had been taught to tame my wild impulses and desires that had agitated me to pain. I had folded it with my soul and learnt to drink contentment like you would a poison. Drop by drop, day by day. Until it became tolerable.

If this isn’t shades of Cersei & Jaime, mirrors cracked by patriarchy!!! Seriously this is exactly how Cersei must have felt, after 8 years of crossdressing in each other’s clothes, the day the master-at-arms put a sword in Jaime’s hand and she got… what, embroidery? Cathy cried the first time Laon went off to Latin & Greek lessons without her. He smuggles his books to her afterwards, of course, and they do spend plenty of time poring over the classics together. But it’s not the same as being granted that education in her own right. In the great tradition of clergymen’s daughters, Cathy is “genteel enough to be educated and accomplished, but never useful. Caught between the world of labour and that of letters,” she goes on to become a lady’s companion and later a governess—which for a gently-reared lady is a kind of social death. Jane Fairfax in Emma certainly saw it that way. Wellborn women generally embark upon the vocation of governess as an avenue of last resort. Which is to say, there’s not a lot of scope for independent ambition for a girl in Cathy’s position. She’s twenty-five when she comes to Arcadia, and what is incredible is not that she doesn’t mention any suitors or romantic dalliances but she doesn’t even mention any friends by name. It’s like her whole world is Laon, her thoughts are consumed by him, her memories are dominated by him. It must have been very lonely growing up on the Yorkshire moors.

When I was young and I walked on the moors with Laon, I could not imagine a wilder place, given over to nature. The biting chill in our faces and the mists hanging over the endless, treeless dales. We chased each other, through the rippling heather, through ruined farmhouses. We would pretend that we were the only people left alive in the world.

And so, here I was: clutching the compass he had left behind, knot tightening within my heart, under the light of the pendulum sun.

Mark that metaphor of the knot tightening around her heart—it will continue to crop up. She’s been in love with him a long time, even if she won’t admit it to herself. Ffs he left her a compass when he took up his missionary duties, and if that isn’t a metaphor for his heart I dunno what is.

Laon and I used to play games, scaring each other under the sheets … I still remember huddling against him, hooking our fingers together and promising under every token that we held sacred that if one of us were to die, we would come back and haunt the other.

This is at once wholesome and macabre—they would give up heaven and hope of salvation in order to HAUNT the other as a GHOST because they’re that scared of being separated from each other? ICONIC.

I longed to hear my brother’s sermons again. He had a passion that surged under the measured cadence of his voice and, more than that, I had begun to miss his discordant singing.

She misses his sermons! She misses his voice even if he can’t carry a tune! She misses everything about him!

I missed Laon. I used to tickle him in church to keep him awake. All too often, we’d giggle and bicker under our breaths until our father cast us a stern gaze from the pulpit and we’d silence. I’d keep holding his hand, though, as he needed my nails in his palm to not fall asleep.

He would reach across the table and wind my hair behind my ear. Reaching for a pin to secure the distracting hair, I told myself that it was nonsense to miss the softness of his touch or the stroke of his fingers.

That night, I dreamt. Laon and I were children again, when his hands were no bigger than mine. We were running, tumbling through the heather …

I tried to imagine his voice. I remembered the curve of his ears against my lips and the warmth of his hands in mine. We had not laced together our fingers for a very long time. He didn’t even shake my hand before he left.

This girl sure spends a lot of time thinking about holding her brother’s hand!!! Here the text begins to tease at the rupture that happened before he left, and the non-supernatural causes of their long estrangement. Oh here she is asking theologically thorny questions of her tutors at boarding school:

My palms stung for days afterwards as I was whipped for impertinence. I gritted my teeth through the pain as I wrote to Laon about it, my letters curling all wonky.

Awwww he’s her #1 confidante, the one she turns to for comfort and validation. It’s been tough not having him around these last few years:

More than ever, I missed Laon. I wanted to tell him about this, to press my forehead against his and whisper to him what I knew like old secrets shared in the dark under blankets and sheepskins.

It’s just that everyone seems to take Cathy for granted—offhand she says she’s darned more socks than educated young minds—and Laon is the only one who sees her and values her. Every memory of their childhood closeness is somehow sweet as well as mega suggestive?! Here are some more super suggestive lines:

”You don’t only ever want things you could have.”

”It is dangerous eating forbidden foods.”

That last line refers to the well-known injunction against mortals eating or drinking anything while sojourning in the faerie realm: Once you taste fae food the Fair Folk get to keep you forever. In the mythology of this story, it’s okay to eat as long as you sprinkle salt on it first. You have to put salt in everything you consume, though, even your hot chocolate—just another reminder that Arcadia is inhospitable and alien and if you set one foot wrong your soul is forfeit. For the moment Cathy is confined to the manor, because there’s a geas that guarantees her safety on the property but not beyond it. So she wanders around this creepy-ass house that features doors into empty air, lanterns guttering out, moths that eat away the ink on your parchment. The other inhabitants include: A ghostly housekeeper she never sees, a gnome handyman lately converted to Christianity, and a changeling fae girl who Cathy suspects to be her brother’s mistress. Cathy obtains the journals of Reverend Hale—the priest who preceded Laon—and sets to work deciphering them.

My brother’s house became to me a place of questions without answers.

Later on, when Laon returns, he straight up begs her to leave it alone:

”Don’t do this,” he pleaded. “Don’t try to solve this place. It won’t end well.”

This, of course, is the sort of admonition ignored by the heroine of every Gothic romance—warnings destined to fall on deaf ears as she plunges ahead to unravel the mystery. Ok but let’s talk about the scene where Laon comes back, encounters Cathy and concludes she is a PHANTOM conjured up to torment him:

”If you are trying to seduce me, spirit, I’m afraid I’m quite incapable at the moment.” “I … I am your Cathy. Your sister.”

But of course any spirit would take the form of his sister, the person dearest to his heart. “Seduce” is an interesting word choice, isn’t it? But listen to the way she says “your Cathy”!!!

”Why do you plague me so? Does it please you to see me like this? Have you tortured me enough?” ”Is it so impossible that I am indeed your sister? Can you not believe that I could and would follow you? Can you not believe that I have the strength and the love to come? Can you not believe that I would care—“ “Catherine!” His walking stick clattered to the floor.

And then he TAKES HER IN HIS ARMS. They fall down and roll around, his face muffled in her shoulder, and she “dared not look at him” which is code for “if I look at him I will kiss him” until they’re interrupted by a servant and guiltily spring apart. She’s so glad to have him back. Listen to the easy way they tease each other:

”Oh, hush, you are nothing like Lord Byron.” I took the page from him. “Your poetry is abysmal.” “Exactly like him then,” said Laon.

I SNORTED.

”You used to crawl into my bed when there was thunder. I was always fairly sure it was just an excuse, you would fall asleep so quickly when you clung to me.” “You were warm,” I muttered in half confession, avoiding his gaze. “And your bed smelt nice.” “My bed smelt of me.” My voice grew smaller and my fingers agitated. “Exactly.”

HE SMELLED NICE. And who can resist the all-powerful bedsharing trope amirite? The problem is, just because Laon is physically present doesn’t mean he stops being emotionally distant:

I found myself studying the rhythm of his gait, the set of his jaw and the weariness in his shoulders. There was so much between us that remained unspoken, and for all that I could read from the way he moved and held himself, it was not enough.

There are oceans of unsaid things between them. Plus, every time she lays a hand on him—and after their reunion it’s always Cathy initiating the touch—he acts like it physically pains him. How do you react to that, to your brother recoiling from you touch?

”I am not an ornamental hermit,” said Laon, his anger spilling over. I placed a hand on his shoulder and he flinched at my touch but calmed.

The sight of my own helpless brother disarmed me. I reached out a comforting hand to him, laying it on his shoulder … He leaned into my touch and I could see his demeanor soften before he pulled away.

”You need me here, Laon.” I put my hand on his shoulder; he flinched and pulled away. ”You aren’t safe here.” his eyes flickered to me and then away again. “It’s not about that … It’s not that I need you, it’s that I want—“ he stopped. His voice sounded as though it was about to break. He turned and simply left.

Laon does that at lot—breaks off in the middle of sentences. He’ll say things like, ”Is it not enough that—“ and then just stop. Like he has to clamp the words down before he can betray his true feelings to Cathy. He tells her she has to leave in two weeks, which is an entirely arbitrary deadline based on the fact that he can’t stop either worrying about her or wanting her:

”It is very dangerous out there, Cathy. In the mists. Anything … I cannot—“ “What cannot you do, Laon? … Have you not done it all? Have you not gone to university? Have you not left England? Have you not made yourself a grand explorer?”

What he cannot do, and what he longs to do above all, is protect her. He’s been petitioning the Faerie Queen to grant the Church some concessions, like license to travel & preach all over Arcadia, and it doesn’t sound like he’s getting anywhere. Cathy’s presence is both keeping him sane and driving him to distraction.

Though my eyes were on the fire, his were on me. I could feel his gaze on my skin and I ached to touch him again.

She ACHES for hiS TOuCH omg i am L I V I N G. Did I mention she DREAMS about him, like, constantly?

That night, I dreamt of Laon. He lay under a willow in a garden, resting his head on the lap of a pale, pale woman. She wound her arms around him and he sighed as she stroked his face … The dream continued for some time, and when I finally awoke, I found my eyes gritty and sore from unshed tears, and my heart aching.

She later recognizes the “pale, pale woman” as the actual Faerie Queen who invites herself to Laon’s house on a sort of Royal Progress. This is Cathy greeting the queen and registering that she’s the woman from her dream:

I withered under her gaze and that knot of pain in my chest grew heavier and tighter. She smiled, and I could see again those lips brushing against my brother’s ears.

The thing is, Cathy invokes the imagery of lips brushing against ears in reference to her own memories of growing up with Laon, “his lips brushing against my ear in mimicry of a secret.” It gets worse. She’s summoned to the Faerie Queen’s chambers and the bottom drops out of her stomach when she sees the bed:

I remembered attaching my green ribbons to our old sheets. They had been our mother’s in her dowry, and when Laon had inherited them I had sewn on the green ribbons on an extravagant whim. I had worn those ribbons in my hair running through the moors. I remember him trying to snatch them from me as we rolled about in the heather. Those were Laon’s sheets on Mab’s beds.

Those are literally the sheets that made up their mother’s trousseau, that Cathy herself had painstakingly embellished with her own handiwork. In an era when all your clothes and linens had to be hand-sewn without aid of machines, it was indeed extravagant to spend that much time adding green ribbons to a perfectly serviceable set of sheets. The symbolic significance though—Cathy would have sewn them on for Laon, would have expected Laon to sleep on them. WHAT KIND OF FUCKING MESSAGE IS THIS BITCH TRYING TO SEND??? Cathy can’t be blamed for wondering. It makes her blood boil to imagine Laon in the Faerie Queen’s arms. If the goal was to make Cathy insanely jealous by flaunting her hold over Laon, well, achievement unlocked I guess.

The Fairie Queen takes up residence. She insists on (1) a masquerade ball and (2) a boar hunt. The ball is a highly bizarre affair—the dancers are clockwork automatons, the guests materialize out of paintings—but one thing it does is force Cathy and Laon to confront their frankly off-the-charts level of physical attraction to each other:

He loomed over me and I felt that prickle of annoyance that I have known all my life about his height. “You— you’re…”he hesitated before finishing. “You’re quite pretty.” The knot within my heart tightened. I simply could not remember the last time he had remarked upon my appearance. He said nothing when I twirled before him in old dresses on the eve of my first dance at the squire’s house. Nothing when the village girls and I gigglingly contemplated the prospect of marriage and asked his assessment. Nothing when I attended his first sermon in my best dress and mother’s brooch. He must not have done so since we were children. My brow furrowed, trying to make sense of that knot within me. It ached with a visceral familiarity, as though I had borne it all my life without knowledge of it. “I’m sorry,” said my brother. “I should not have said anything.” “No … I hadn’t realized how long it was since you last said that.” A smile wavered at the corner of his lips.

��Cathy, do you think me handsome?” … I took a step closer, to see him better. A flush rose within me, unaccustomed to the nearness of him. Without asking, I reached behind him and undid the ribbon of his domino mask. It fell free of his face, and I kept staring. For the first time in a long time, I simply looked at my brother’s face. It was strange, as I had thought it so familiar, but it was to his moods and changes, the subtle quirk of his mouth or flash of his eyes …. Would she think him as beautiful as I did?

Ok first of all to reach behind someone’s head and remove their mask is the most intimate of gestures. Second of all, Cathy and Laon encounter another pair of siblings at the ball who are codependent as hell and not tryna hide it, of the “he stroked her hair with the lightest of touches…. she drew a nail across the skin of his jaw” variety. Those two are described as waltzing across the floor in a hold “too close to be decent,” which could also describe their relationship in general tbh. What’s interesting is that while Laon and Cathy do not waltz together at the actual masquerade, that night she dreams about waltzing with him. The significance of the waltz versus one of the regular old country dances is the waltz is deemed waaaaay more risqué; you spend the whole dance with one partner and there’s a lot more skin-to-skin contact. Halfway through the ball, the Faerie Queen claps her hands, dispels the illusions that festoon the hall and voila, the fae revert to their true shapes! The singing birds are revealed to be human prisoners in chains! Cathy’s elaborate ballgown disappears!

”Cathy …” My brother choked out my name. I looked confused at his face. He was staring at me intently. The hunger in his eyes was both alien and achingly familiar. That knot within me tightened and I felt a warmth spread across my skin. “You—“ His jaw clenched and his lips pulled into a tight line. He did not stop staring, though, even as I could tell he was trying to stop … I was completely naked underneath the gossamer thin fabric. I could feel my brother’s gaze upon my skin, his study of my shape.

He can’t tear his eyes from her naked body and I don’t care how cliched it is, I am HERE FOR IT. She flees up to her room then, and it’s in the context of her mortifying exit from the ball that she has the dream where she’s waltzing with Laon:

We were at once running through the heather and arguing over his departure to become a missionary. We were bickering over toy soldiers, getting lost in the garden. We were gazing upon our father’s coffin and despairing over our inheritance of debts. All moments of our intertwined lives tangled before me. I felt that old, familiar knot within my chest tighten. My fingers traced against his flesh and I found the words that were written there …. As I read his bound soul, his hands uncovered mine. We followed each unutterable word, each branded red and raw in the book of human skin … I found my own name written upon the book of his soul.

This is (1) unbearably poetic (2) inevitable. Their whole lives have been leading to this. And then the next day she confronts him in the stables before the hunt:

“You can’t do this alone. You need me here.” “You don’t understand, Cathy …” “If not me, then someone else, a wife, Miss Davenport.” My voice was hollow even to my own ears; I did not want him to marry. To utter the words twisted the knotted pain in my chest, the knot I did not want to give a name to. I remembered feeling it every time he flirted with another woman, every time the ladies at church would flutter by and giggle at the prospect of an attachment. I had carried it within myself for so long, heavy as a stone. For the first time, I felt the true weight of it, across my shoulders and tight around my chest. I felt a spinning sense of unbalance even as that weight and pain anchored me. “You need someone and it should be me. You should not be alone here.” “I want you here. More than anything.” “Then why are you sending me away?”

Do you hear that? The weight of her painful passion for her brother has anchored her for so long that she’s unbalanced by the loss of it. When she places the look in his eyes as lust, when the knot in her chest begins to loosen the tiniest bit, she’s flailing bc she doesn’t know what to do with herself. At this point I need to spoil the central twist of this story so I urge you all in the STRONGEST terms to please go read it then come back ok?

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Gothic fiction is full of doubles. Not like, literal doppelgängers, but characters whose existence is designed to cast certain traits of the protagonist’s into sharp relief. Fresh off the boat the very first person that Cathy meets in Arcadia is Miss Ariel Davenport, the aforementioned changeling whose function in Laon’s household is unclear. Ariel is weird. She rambles on about esoteric subjects, asks non sequitur questions, and claims an unearned intimacy by calling Cathy by her Christian name. Ariel was swapped for the “real” Ariel Davenport as a baby, and grew up thinking she was human. Here’s how she found out she wasn’t:

”I do know I don’t need food. I don’t starve, I just feel hungry … Ariel Davenport’s family died in a workhouse. I watched them starve when I did not. Whatever fae gears were inside me kept turning.”

What a brutal awakening. Ariel talks a lot about how she doesn’t fit in, how she doesn’t really belong in Arcadia but when she tries to do human things like embroider a handkerchief or love someone there’s an offness to it:

”But it’s not quite the same. Doesn’t come naturally.”

Ariel’s name recalls the spirit from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, who also got a pretty raw deal—she was a genie-in-a-bottle enslaved to a magician with delusions of grandeur— and Ariel Davenport likewise never grows enough of a spine to openly cross her master. Her “master” would be the Faerie Queen, the one at whose court Laon is currently detained. She’s the one pulling all the strings. There’s a reason that Ariel was sent to stay with Laon and Cathy, and the reason, as you may have surmised, is that Cathy is a changeling too. DUN DUN DUN.

That’s the revelation that shatters her. It’s Ariel who discloses the truth to her, a truth the reader has probably divined already from other hints; it’s Ariel who, transfigured into various animal guises, is the quarry of the hunt. Cathy plunges a knife into Ariel’s heart (!) bc someone’s gotta do it, the Queen has decreed Ariel must die for sport and at least this way Laon’s hands will be clean of murder. It’s ok if Cathy does it, she tells herself, because she doesn’t have a soul. And the consummation of her and Laon’s relationship happens right on the heels of that, because you can’t really expect a mainstream audience to be invested in a love scene unless you assure them it’s not really incest since they’re not blood-related, so that checks out. She’s trying to wash Ariel’s blood off when he knocks on her door:

No, Catherine Helstone’s brother. I corrected myself … He was not mine to call my own.

I did not turn around. I did not want to see the look in his eyes. I feared his pity, his revulsion, his anger. I dreaded it all, but above all, I feared his absence.

Ahsjhdjfhdjfd he drops his greatcoat on the floor, rolls up his sleeves, and takes up a washcloth to bathe her:

”We used to share a copper bath like this by the fire,” he said conversationally. I could hear the strain in his voice, see the slight tremble in his motions. “When we were small enough to both fit inside the tub. You hated washing your hair because of the soap in your eyes.” Did I giggle when he upended buckets of water over my head or was I angered? Did I sit patiently as he scrubbed my back or did I squirm at his touch. The water was lukewarm but Laon’s touch was anything but cold. I followed his every movement, the nonsense patterns upon my skin. I was holding my breath, listening to his. I could feel him, warm and solid behind me, his breath hot on my shoulder, at the base of my neck. Shivers spidered down my spine and spread over me. I ached … And then, his hands were on me again, strong, demanding. I revealed in his force; it proved to me that I was not breaking, that I would not shatter. He tightened his grip on my hips and I gasped. Fleetingly, I felt real.

That’s the crux of it. Her entire life has been a sham; being loved by Laon is the only thing that’s left, the only thing that’s real. You can see her already begin to doubt her recollection of the past, wondering “did i giggle…? did i squirm…?” because HONESTLY IT COULD’VE BEEN INCEPTION. HOW DO U KNOW WHATS REAL. She’s spent the first half of the novel spinning us endless anecdotes from her childhood with Laon, and now this happens, it destroys the foundations of her identity:

All my memories seemed so distant. My imperfect, simulacrum mind with its imperfect memories … I told my youth to myself like a story, trying to remember who I was. I told myself about the little papers I wrote with Catherine Helstone’s brother, the names we gave the toy soldiers and the fantastical yet tediously mundane lands they explored … It all seemed so very insubstantial. Except that memory. I flushed warm whenever my thoughts brushed against it. Unlike everything else, I remembered with embarrassing clarity, every touch between us, every biting kiss and each hot breath. I was a moth, speared like a specimen by his scrutiny. I lay under him, pinned. His gaze, his touch, his grip made me real.

This is Cathy two or three days ago talking to Ariel about her earliest memory:

”I always liked to think that my first memory was of Laon. I was three, maybe and we were playing. I don’t remember what, but we were hiding under a table and we had to be very quiet. The tablecloth was red and I think I remember his fingers against my lips.” “Is it real?” “Of course it is,” I said. I touched my fingers to my mouth, lingering on that memory, the vivid feeling of his skin against mine.

If she doesn’t even have her memories of Laon, what does she have??? What is true and what is a forgery? This is from her waltz dream the night before:

We were surrounded by faceless automatons, by soulless far, by mindless beasts. He was the last real thing within these borders, under this unreal sun.

So the Queen and her retinue depart. Cathy and Laon are not atm seeing eye to eye because he’s wracked by guilt for the carnal sin they’ve committed, and she’s wracked by guilt because she, you know, murdered Ariel. I’m not at all surprised at Laon, though—this is after all the man who wrote in his journal:

Sometimes this cross is heavy beyond endurance. I carry it in repentance for the sins of my heart, for that is the same as the sins of the flesh. To look upon a woman in lust is to have committed adultery with her already . I know this and I bear it. I feel that I shall bear it for all my days.

For all his days, he says—he’ll go to his grave loving Cathy and that’s the tea. But right now she’s hurting, and she more or less keeps to her bed:

He did not ask if I was going to leave the room or when; he recognized this childish habit already. I had done it after the funeral of Catherine Helstone’s sister when I was seven and a half, then again for a while after her father’s. I remembered counting the threads in the quilt, willing my world to be just that warm, soft embrace. He had taken care of me then … He still gazed at me in hunger when he thought I wasn’t looking. I yearned for that closeness, that reality, but I could not bring myself to deserve it. Day after day, I ate because he bid me to.

He has looked after her in her grief before and he does so again now. She spends the next few chapters avoiding his name and referring to him as “Catherine Helstone’s brother.” What jolts her out of her funk is, one day they crawl into the belly of a beached whale and catalogue the wonders contained therein. It’s an adventure, and she doesn’t initially go willingly:

Deaf to my protests, he had gathered me into his arms, deposited me onto the floor and proceeded to roll my outdoor stocking onto my feet. Despite my squirming and kicking, he persevered.

Lmao this is peak sibling interaction. Once they’re inside the belly of the beast, of course, it turns into something else:

He was standing very close to me and all at once I was all too aware of him. I forgot why I was fighting so hard to put aside our attraction, forgot all the reasons I gave myself for why I shouldn’t. Each memory seemed to lead me inexorably to this point where I was standing before him, slightly too close and far too afraid. I had not wanted to give name to this passion, not wanted to acknowledge it. I could have gone to my grave not knowing why I felt this ache whenever I saw Catherine Hailstone’s brother. I could have passed this life blind of my own longing and ignorant to his. I could have … He was simply there, too close, too real and too beautiful.

So OF COURSE they tumble into bed in Cathy’s tower room amidst their scribbled notes (they’re working on translating the Bible because “the mother tongue is the best missionary”) and the ink is blotted onto Cathy’s skin holy shit how appropriate is that. All those Greek and Latin texts they pored over as kids, the sermons he practiced on her, all of that was leading up to this: Cathy Helstone, the wife and helpmeet that Reverend Helstone DESERVES. I am strongly put in mind of two other stories stop for a second and hear me out: (1) Pygmalion, the tale of the sculptor who falls in love with his own creation and brings her to life and (2) Tam Lin, the ballad about a fellow who’s abducted by the Faerie Queen and whose ladylove rescues him through sheer grit and pluck—her trial is to hold onto him and not let go while he transforms into every dangerous beast under the sun. In the beginning it seemed like Laon = Tam Lin but now it’s Cathy who’s fallen into the Faerie Queen’s clutches.

we lay curled up against each other like the working dogs used to by the fire. He looked over at me and with a lazy, contented smile on his lips, he said, “Cathy—“

”Don’t call me that,” I said, cutting him short. Panic welled up at the back of my throat at that name. “I’m not —“

”Cathy,” he said again, pressing his face against the curve of my neck. I felt his warm breath upon my skin and giddy pleasure spread from those lips; I calmed. “Let the other be Catherine. And you can be Cathy. You will always be my Cathy and you will always be my sister.” I raised an eyebrow at that, and he had the decency to look sheepish. “And other things, true,” he said. “But either way, you shouldn’t think of yourself as less real. And I do have to call you something.”

”I’m not real.”

”You feel real to me.”

I love how her being “other things” to him doesn’t in any way negate her being his sister. Lord, that “you feel real to me” is everythinggggggg. At the same time I can’t blame Cathy for being assailed by doubt:

”it’s possible that no memory before I set foot on fae soil is real … I can’t trust my own mind.”

”I know my sister like I know my own mind. I would know if you —“

”You thought I was an illusion created by the mists to torment you.”

”I had imagined you so many times … I knew I had to leave, I wanted you too much … So, believe me. I did not doubt you because you are not who I know you to be. I doubted you because of my own weakness. You are the sister I are up with, the sister I have loved and love now. And that’s all that matters.”

Laon goes as far as to try to obtain receipts to prove her realness: They attend a Goblin Market where everything is for sale—for a price. He offers to sell an arm, a leg, a lung and an eye in exchange for Cathy’s memories??? It’s half of him for half her soul, I guess. Find yourself a man who looks at you the way Laon Helstone looks at his sister:

”Cathy, I love you.” Unlike his earlier declarations, he said it quite plainly as though it were an observation about the weather … “I’ve loved you, adored you, desired you for as long as I remember … As a sister, as a lover, it doesn’t matter … You doubt the truth of your mind and your memories, and if this can give you answers … Then I’m willing to pay the asking price for that.”

This speech absolutely melted me. She talks him down from selling an arm for her soul, but I mean, as far as God’s concerned the way she feels about Laon skates perilously close to idolatry:

For all that we had the books of our faith before us, he stood between me and every impulse of religion, even as he reached out to me with the promise of intercessory grace, he eclipsed such hopes of heaven. I had made an idol of him, and for all my excuses that this but a return to the childish hero worship I had once had for him, this went deeper. When he clasped his hand around mine in prayer, when I knelt before him, I thought not of God, that Lord of Hosts, nor of Jesus, the Redeemer, but of him, simply and eternally.

So to recap: Laon and Cathy are holding onto each other for dear life in this godforsaken hellscape of a ruined castle-manor where the weather has to be summoned with arcane spells and the flowers, instead of thriving or wilting naturally, have to be individually painted with the change of seasons. Come to find out, they are literally in hell. Not purgatory, hell itself. Which would explain how all Laon’s proselytizing has amounted to one (1) successful convert. That’s a piss poor track record by any metric. And their lone convert didn’t even accept Jesus Christ as his savior on Laon’s watch. It happened when the other guy, Reverend Hale, was here. What happened was Reverend Hale’s wife decided to take her Communion bread unsalted, and was promptly CONDEMNED TO HELL FOR ETERNITY because remember the first rule of Arcadia: Don’t eat anything unless you salt it. She is the madwoman in the attic, the “woman in black” that Cathy has caught glimpses of from time to time. It was an experiment designed to show that God’s grace extended even unto Arcadia. It didn’t work, but I guess anyone who witnessed this crazy stunt would have developed a newfound respect for humans and their faith. What this means is that the madwoman in the attic is not after all the original Catherine. She is not Laon Helstone’s sister, which was the working assumption of both Cathy and the reader up till now.

A fire breaks out in the kitchen. Cathy and Laon are unharmed by the conflagration. This is because in the house they are still protected by the geas — the one that is centered on Laon, the one that Cathy was told extended to her too because “Blood binds blood. And blood knows blood.” But the entire point of Cathy being a changeling is that she does not share Laon’s blood. Something doesn’t add up. A rider arrives with a letter. It’s dated months and months ago, from the London Missionary Society. Someone has been carrying on a correspondence with Reverend Helstone’s sister in their name, but it isn’t them, and they sure as hell did not sponsor Cathy’s passage to Arcadia. The truth hits Laon and Cathy at the same time:

My mouth was a grave of words, each thought dying there and it was their rot that I tasted, that filled me with gut-wrenching revulsion. He laughed, threw his head back and just laughed. His wide shoulders shook with his senseless mirth until his eyes too were filled with tears. “I thought you were an apparition to tempt me.” His beautiful mouth twisted cruel. “I thought the mist spat you out to make me sin, to pull me down, to drag me to hell. I thought I could outrun myself, my own sins, my own sister. I thought—“ “Laon, no …” I wasn’t sure what I was objecting to, but I wanted him to stop. I wanted myself to stop. “But they did better than that.” I flung myself at him, covered his lips with mine. Tear-stained hands cupping his face, it was not a kiss so much as a hard, stubborn meeting of lips. It needed to stop. Everything needed to stop, to silence. Gasping, he choked out, “You’re my sister.” My cheeks were against his face and my tears were his. We were broken mirrors of one another. “You’re my sister,” he said again. He did not push me away.

!!!!! SHE’S REALLY HIS SISTER AFTER ALL NOT A CHANGELING IT WAS ALL PART OF THE FAERIE QUEEN’S PLAN!!!! Here she is confirming it:

”My grand scheme.” She made a gesture towards the clockwork that framed her throne. “The sins that I have set in motion, the gift that I have given you. Had I not summoned you to Arcadia, would you have seen these wonders? Had I not placed into my own home, remade for your pleasure, would you have realized your love?”

And it wasn’t like she lied about it—the fae can’t lie, after all. That’s why they’re so deadly at weaponizing the truth. She just left a trail of breadcrumbs and let people (aka Ariel) draw their own conclusions, and spill those conclusions to Cathy. You have to admire how elegantly she sprung the trap. And certainly neither Laon nor Cathy appears to regret falling into each other’s arms. It’s just that once again Cathy’s whole world has been turned upside down:

There was an acidic taste at the back of my throat … Our love had been the last pure, real thing that I had clung to and it was slipping away … Every kiss, every caress that had passed between us came to the fore of my mind, now tainted by new, old knowledge.

Okay but you know here is what else Cathy has also said on the subject of forbidden knowledge (one of the oldest senses of the verb “to know” is to know someone biblically):

The world was made with words. If I looked hard enough, I could read those words still. They flowed in the veins of the world, written on their seams. They told me this tree would reach the heavens. They told me nothing was forbidden. They told me knowledge could not be a sin.

Being expelled from Eden was not altogether a bad deal for Adam and Eve. And we are talking Edenic parallels here, since it’s revealed one of the Faerie Queen’s names is Lilith, aka Adam’s first wife. When I was younger and thought myself very superior I was of the Phillip Pullman School of “it is better to know sin than to remain ignorant and innocent,” but it’s not that simple. Cathy and Laon came to Arcadia to save souls; now it looks like they’ve lost theirs. Laon has spent more than half his life wrestling with theology: he is a preacher, and singularly unsuited to doing anything else. I keep circling back to that image of words written on the seams of the world, and I think about Cathy’s waltz dream where she read her name on the book of Laon’s soul, and the masquerade ball before that where they encountered the too-close pair of siblings whose skin was actually branded with words??? Not tattoos actual words of fire. Cathy could only kind-of read them, not being fluent in the Arcadian tongue. Cathy and Laon have spent half this novel translating scripture. Words are the building blocks of reality. If you notice in the passage where she finds out they’ve been sinning this whole time, it opens with “My mouth was a grave of words.” Anyway, Cathy is all to pieces because a person can only sustain so many blows to their sense of self in quick succession:

Lantern in hand, I drifted through the castle, numb from new knowledge: I was human. I was in love with my brother. I was in hell.

She’d need time to process even one of those revelations, let alone all three at once. And in the end they decide to stay in Faerie and do missionary work together. Because, Cathy points out, if “the mother tongue is the best missionary” and here they are in Hell, it can only help their cause that they are both fluent in sin. GIRL, A+ LOGIC. If anyone wants to read a short (<2k) fic about Cathy and Laon embarking on the next chapter of their lives, I highly recommend this one, where the Author’s Note muses, “What's the biggest theologically-evocative Molotov cocktail I could throw in their path?” and the story goes with “Cathy gets pregnant” asddfggkgjgk.

Friends, I do not scruple to say that Jeannette Ng has written the perfect incest book for me. I still can’t believe it’s an unabashed love story. Where the main pairing is canon and also endgame. It all unfolds inexorably, and when I found out Cathy was a changeling it didn’t feel like a cop-out, unlike other stories where “they’re stepsiblings!” or “one of them’s adopted!” absolutely does feel like a cop-out. Because Cathy’s identity crisis is at the core of the story. When I found out she wasn’t a changeling that felt inevitable too. It’s just such a powerful meditation on memory, that most fallible of human faculties. It’s such a power move to saturate the narrative with memories of Cathy and Laon playing as children, and then reveal that even those fragments aren’t necessarily authentic:

We chased each other through the mists, like we were children again, playing on the moors … Was I imagining now how much i had relished his closeness then? Was it simply newfound desire that was igniting all past memories or had I always flushed warm under his gaze?

It’s unlikely had they remained in England they would have gotten together. The Fairie Queen had to pull out all the stops for this to be endgame. Can we all just ... RESPECT.

#cause of death #book review #under the pendulum sun

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ravenaveira · 6 years ago

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Who’s most likely on the chopping block SPOILERS AHEAD

Ok in the latest trailer we see literally everybody's getting bodied and it looks like pretty much everyone's gonna die or at least a majority of them will but realistically speaking I dont think KH3 is gonna be THAT dark

HOWEVER I do believe there will be SOME deaths as KH3 is supposed to be the darkest kh game I dont see Nomura letting this be a and they all lived happily ever after ending, but I believe its going to be a more bittersweet ending where the good side wins but at a great cost

So the next question is, whos actually gonna die? well I have some theories on whos the most likely to die and whos most likely gonna survive

For starters Mickey Donald and Goofy are pretty much set in stone they’ll be fine, its not TOTALLY impossible but I highly doubt Nomura or Disney would kill off those iconic characters so lets just mark them off right now to the SAFE list

Aqua, Terra, Ventus and Lea are more unknown, they could die or they could not but I’ll explain why its so up in the air

Aqua can and will be saved so it doesnt make much sense for her to die after we go through all this to save her, that being said she could die trying to protect everyone just like she did in the past but I still think to bring her back only to kill her off is highly unlikely so IMO Aqua is safe

Terra is a gamble, hes been on thin ice since BBS and I always assumed he would eventually die anyway I just didnt know when but I always figured he would eventually muster up the strength to free himself and die to protect his friends, I felt like Terra would possibly end himself to prevent Xehanort from using him to hurt any more people, in this case, I see Terra possibly doing that in this situation and I feel like Terra’s ‘death’ is long overdue since at least to me its been hinted thats where his arc was heading since the end of BBS, so IMO Terra is marked for death

Ventus is also a high possibility, if it wasnt Xehanort it was Vanitas trying to kill Ven although in Vanitas case his reasoning is alot more complicated but the fact remains they have both tried to ‘kill’ him in some way shape or form and have been searching for him for years and now that they’ve finally FOUND him the chances are pretty high that Ven is gonna die, he is in a VERY vulnerable position and unable to fight or defend himself and thanks to Aqua nobody knows where he is or how to save him so Ven is definitely in the danger zone and thats why IMO Ventus is hanging by a thread

Lea is a gamble too, he’s already ‘died’ once, became Axel, died again and became Lea again, to have him die a 3rd time seems excessive but it would be heart-wrenching if he is killed by one of his former friends Saix, Xion or Roxas which although having Lea die AGAIN as I said would be excessive this would DEFINITELY be a dark and tragic ending for Lea and the impact would be much bigger than it was the previous times and it’ll hold that much more weight to it seeing him suffer from the loss of Isa and then keep remembering Xion and Roxas as well only to have one of them be the one to take him down for good is just beyond sad, so even though it may be excessive the impact would be massive which is why IMO Lea is marked for death

Now to move on to the main two, Riku and Kairi

For starters even with my personal bias against Kairi Im not stupid enough to think shes gonna die infact I think its the opposite, Kairi is HIGHLY unlikely to die and here’s why

She’s part of the main trio that we’ve followed from the start, she’s Sora’s love interest, she’s technically the main female, she’s a princess of heart, she’s a keyblade wielder, in other words she’s too tightly woven into the story that for Nomura to take her out would not only be bold af but also extremely unexpected, its not often that you see a member of the main cast killed off but if they are its almost never the love interest which is why I believe Kairi is safe

Their also hyping up the romance way too much for them to just kill her off, unless this whole ‘oath’ and ‘dont think twice’ is just one big red herring and they pull a 180 not only would that be risky af but also pretty danm genius cuz nobody would see that coming but I will not be mad at it and infact would appreciate Nomura even more for takin such a huge risk that not many others would take, although I already know majority of the fandom wouldnt agree with me on that and I think Nomura is aware of the shitstorm he would get if he did that aswell so yea Kairi is definitely safe

Riku not so much, unlike Kairi, Riku is not a love interest or atleast not the one Nomura intended, true Riku is also a part of the main trio but the rival/best friend always has the higher chance of dying to protect the MC than the main female/love interest does

You also have to look at Riku’s character arc, his growth from giving into the darkness and doing horrible things to his journey of redemption, I believe his final atonement would be giving his life to protect Sora who in the past he had hurt so much, this and it leaves Sora still alive to save the world and defeat Xehanort since in the scene we see Sora doesnt have his keyblade and hes on his knees about to be attacked by a swarm of heartless and Riku being the last man standing protects him and if not for Riku, Sora would have died there, but Riku despite all odds against him, gives his all in protecting Sora

Someone made an interesting comparison of when Axel was fading away after ‘putting his whole being into an attack’ from the looks of the trailer Riku is DEFINITELY giving his all in this attack, Riku is ready and willing to die for Sora which is why Riku IMO is marked for death

But I also dont think Riku is gone for good, I think he might become a nobody and he IS the only one in the main trio who hasnt had a nobody, granted because he’s never been in a situation TO have one but now is the perfect time with the perfect setup for this to happen and come into play

How exactly this will play out in the future? I have no idea and until we play the game I cant think of any theories BUT I dont think Riku’s gonna be gone for good, I think he’ll have a Lea situation where he becomes a nobody, ‘dies’ then returns to being his somebody again, or in other words is revived/reborn

Anyway thats all for my theories on who’s most likely to die on the heroes side but what about the villains?

Saix is definitely marked for death, same for most of the seekers of darkness, Vanitas and Ventus MIGHT actually make peace and accept one another and reunite so in a way you could say Vanitas ‘dies’ or he could go tragically and be killed being separated from Ven forever once again

And of course Xehanort is definitely gonna die, he’s the only one I am atleast 98% sure is going to die because at this point he has to unless they go the Iron Blooded Orphans route where literally almost all of the good guys DIE and the bad guys actually WIN with our heroes just having to live in hiding defeated Xehanort is almost gauranteed to die so IMO Xehanort is dead

Now to explain my ranking before I end this post so some of you who may be confused understand what I mean

Marked for death - means they have a target on their back and are within the enemies crosshairs and are highly likely to die unless they are saved by some deus ex machina and a miracle happens

Hanging by a thread - means that they are close to death but not quite sure if they’ll actually die hence why their hanging by a thread, maybe it’ll snap maybe it wont just gotta wait and see how things play out

Safe is self explanatory and the same applies for Dead

Thats everything, let me know if you agree or disagree or you think someone else will die that I didnt mention and why

#kh3 #trailer spoilers #kingdom hearts #theories

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bsd-hq-writer · 6 years ago

Note

I hEaRd U wRiTe BnHa... request for a gal that can invoque a Golem (made of whatever is surrounding her) that copies her movements. She's in 1-A, wanting to be a hero. But she's also an artist. Would fall for Hitoshi (cuz she's kind af, tho pretty smart and fun), Todoroki or Midoriya. Kissus! SZ

This is a great request, and I had a great time filling it! I went pure fluff with this one and I one-hundred percent did it with Hitoshi, cause this tired boy needs more love! ~Admin Ghost

Metal was great, there was never enough metal around and it always made your golems harder hitting as you directed them through the fight. Today’s one on one battles had you matched up against Sato, who had already taken down a couple of your golems, but you had kept them small enough that you still had the energy to make a couple more. The rubble of the battleground was great because you didn’t have to expend as much energy to break the materials up and assemble them into a golem, but finding good material was harder. Bricks were decent for structure, but not very durable, metal was much stronger but heavier to move, and concrete was plentiful, but again it wasn’t super durable either.

Sato rounded the corner of another building, already raging through another round of his sugar rush and despite the cuts he was covered with, from the glass fisted golem you used before this one, he was still going full steam. You got yourself into a fighting stance and your golem copied you. Every move you made was made by the golem, and it stayed at the exact distance from you that it was created at, like a puppet. You let Sato get closer before throwing your golem at him, the first punch was a write-off as he smashed right through it, but the second fist came immediately after, sending a swift uppercut into his jaw using a chunk of an I-beam you’d used some extra energy to detach. He bellowed and you let the broken arm batter him again in order to give you another opening to smash him with the metal fist. He was ready as he sent a flurry of punches directed at the shoulders of your golem and you instantly regretted not reinforcing those. You, however, didn’t regret putting another chunk of that beam into the golems foot as you smashed Sato right in the chest and knocked him flat.

In the end, you won due to the fact you could keep yourself relatively well hidden as not to get captured before you managed to score a knock out blow with a condensed Golem. Yet Aizawa still managed to find something to criticize.“With your position as hidden as it was, you could have held off on sending your golems out to fight, sometimes the best method of defense is to wait out your opponent, let them tire themselves looking for you, instead of wasting energy,” he lectured you tiredly, “but you still won, so you pass, you can leave now,”

Getting let out early was a relief since Aizawa was doing some personal matchups, he had agreed to let people go as they finished their fights. Honestly, some of them were clearly for one person’s benefit, but her’s had seemed rather mediocre, more of a battle of stamina between the two of them.

“If you think much harder, I wouldn’t be surprised if you started muttering,” a voice broke you from your train of thought.

“Oh geez, Shinsou, you startled me,” you let out the breath you had sucked in, “Want to got sit out on the lawn again? I got let out early,” you offered quickly. Shinsou had caught your eye in the sports festival, though he’d done it for a very different reason than anyone else. “What so I can lie around and let you drawn me some more?” he chuckled, “I’m not sure what to make of being your only model,” “You’re not-” you stopped mid-sentence as Shinsou’s quirk took hold and at his command, you spoke the truth, “You’re the only model in this sketchbook,- Geez, Shinsou!”

“Haha, it’s not like I didn’t already know, but hearing it from your mouth makes me feel somewhat better,” he chuckled as you punched his arm. He flinched but it was all show, he had been training lately, still making his bid for the hero course.

That had sparked a minor animosity between the both of you, a spot had been freed up in the hero course and you had been the general studies student picked to fill the hole. Not that you knew Shinsou much, other than from when the general studies classes got together, but he had really stood out in the sports festival, something you had missed due to an unfortunate bout of the flu. Even still you had been training hard and when the spot opened you didn’t hesitate to put your name forward. The day it was announced, and you earned a few glares, but none more spine-chilling than Shinsou’s.

A week after your transfer he caught you in the library watching footage from the sports festival and sketching him idly. He hadn’t actually told you that until you became friends, but by then you had filled half the sketchbook, he just accepted it. It took him a while to convince you he didn’t care, but after a while, you just started asking him when you wanted to draw.

“So how come I never see any of these drawings in the student gallery?” Shinsou asked idly as you drew him up in a tree that you insisted was perfect for some perspective sketches.

“Cause I mostly sculpt, you know with my quirk?” you said offhandedly, “I figured out I can half make my golems short of fusing their movements to mine,”

“Those are yours?!” Shinsou gasped.

You didn’t stop sketching, but there was a blush creeping up your face, “Yeah, I thought you knew,”

“No way!” He jumped out of the tree down to where you sat, “Which ones?!”

“The dragon and the swan are the two I have on display right now,” You fidget with your hands. You submitted your pieces anonymously and yet you found yourself telling Shinsou outright, you wondered if he was using his quirk again, but at the same time maybe you had just wanted to admit it to someone other than Midnight, who managed the art displays.

“I saw the swan go up and I was instantly taken by fascination and when I found it was anonymous it drove me crazy because…” he seemed to reign in his excitement at the last moment, “It’s fine, you have your reasons,”

“Shinsou…” you sighed. He looked really conflicted like he also wanted to admit something. He was a pretty private person after, and you seemed to realise just how close you two had grown in the past months.

“You can continue, I don’t mind, cause I know you,” You prompted him and he looked up into your eyes, slightly taken aback at your soft tone.

“I,” he cleared his throat nervously, “I thought it was so beautiful, but so deadly at the same time. The glass you used, the jagged edges, really made it meaningful. Swans are an icon of beauty, but at the same time are the most ill-tempered birds. Its such a powerful parallel, and glass reflects that, literally and figuratively. Glass shards are deadly, but at the same time they refract the light cast down on them into such wonderful patterns littered with tiny rainbows,” He began to ramble, “And the way the lights are set up its absolutely glittering, I couldn’t believe it was just broken glass,”

You couldn’t believe the way his eyes were basically shining, he genuinely loved it and you felt your heart swell, “I didn’t even think anyone would look that closely, the lighting is part of the sculpture, Midnight helped me set it up just right,”

“I had to spend a while looking at it from all angles, and I was amazed at just how much the perspective changes,” Shinsou took your hand in his and shook it, “I’m glad it was your art, because-”

You waited a moment for him to continue but he didn’t, “What is it? You can be honest,”

“Because it reminds me of you,” Shinsou said quietly, “Beautiful,”

That sent the blush that had been creeping up your face straight to your ears and your voice came out as a sputter of sounds. That drew a laugh from Shinsou that surprised you. He wasn’t the kind of guy to just burst out laughing, but here he was laughing at your nervousness so openly.

“I shouldn’t laugh, sorry,” He said after he regained composure.

“It’s fine,” you cut in before he could say more to embarrass you, “I like the sound of it, your laugh I mean,”

It was Shinsou’s turn to be surprised, and you didn’t miss the way his face changed colour before he put you under his quirk’s control.“Just stand still for a moment,” he told you as you froze in place obediently, even though you wanted to berate him for using his quirk now of all times, “Jeez, this isn’t exactly how I wanted to confess, but I can’t really see a way around it now,” You felt his control slip as he settled his hands lightly on your arms, squeezing them slightly before letting them slide down to link your hands.“I don’t really think I want a way out, do you?” You hummed looking up at him, sharing a moment of eye contact before his gaze fell again to your hands clasped together warmly.

“No, I like this,” he nodded slowly. It looked to you like he was waking up from a long sleep and you itched to be able to draw this moment so you could keep it forever, but you couldn’t bring yourself to scratch that itch, especially when he stepped closer, closing the space between you and slipping his hands around your waist, still holding you gently as if you were made of the same glass you used for your sculpture.

“I won’t break,” you let yourself press closer, your faces centimetres apart, “Will you?” you almost whispered as his head seemed to drift closer to yours.

You always imagined your first kiss would be explosive, full of sparks and fire. That had seemed like the perfect first kiss, the one all the girls at your middle school had raved about having behind the gym or in a supply closet, not that you’d really believe these girls really had liked the boys that much as the declarations came with a scoff and an inevitable denial.

This was different. This was perfect. You barely registered when your lips met, but suddenly he was so close and it was gentle and warm. This was a boy you genuinely liked, holding you and kissing you, somehow able to express himself so thoroughly with such a small gesture.

“Shinsou,” you sighed as you broke apart but when he shook his head, you had to smile and fix your error, “Hitoshi,”“F/N” he grinned, clearly satisfied with the situation at hand.

#Anonymous #Admin Ghost #bnha #BNHA FANDOM #female reader #reader #shinsou x reader #shinsou hitoshi #bnha shinsou #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #scenario #scenarios #golem quirk

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ask-svt-hearteu · 7 years ago

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Hogwarts! Vernon

@hellonanibear requested: "hi loves :-) I was wondering if I could request a Hogwarts!AU with Vernon please?? I'm a real big Harry Potter fan (Ravenclaw Pride tbh) but I noticed you guys don't have one for him yet and I'd like to request one please since your Hogwarts!AUs are some of the best I've read! ☺️💙"

admin note: Tysm lovely hope you enjoy! <3

so Hansol’s a second year Gryffindor

half-blood

he has a little sister too who he loves and tries showing her magic despite not knowing too much about it himself

was shook the whole time though

from buying his books and getting picked by his wand

and asks his mom everything she can remember about Hogwarts

so he can imagine it himself

sorted into Gryffindor

which can be entertaining

bc the guy gets scared of really weird and random things sometimes

would jump at the sound of his own laughter probably tbh

things like spiders and bugs //COUGH COUGH RONALD WEASLEY TYPE//

but don’t ever think he doesn’t have enough bravery to be in Gryffindor

he will take on anything and anyone for his friends

like how someone accidentally casted Seungkwan's wand on the roof by a stray spell

dead af climbed hundreds of feet above

no broomstick or anything

just to get it back

his best friend is Seungkwan, second year hufflepuff of course

honestly what a duo they are

Vernon was sitting by himself in a carriage on the Hogwarts express his first year

minding his own business, looking out the windows in awe at the landscape speeding by

and Seungkwan runs into the carriage with his robes

ON FIRE

bc boo diva thought he could show off some A+ magic to make some friends

at least he tried?

things didn’t go as planned obviously

and Hansol being the ever calm and collected person he was

wasn’t screaming or anything lmao

dumped his water bottle

BUT NOT ON THE FREAKING FIRE BC WHY WOULD HE BE SENSIBLE AND DO THAT

no he dumped it on Seungkwan’s head

mostly by accident

but uh yea SEUNGKWAN IS STILL ON FIRE

and Joshua and Seungcheol see the smoke and run in on the two first years panicking and screaming

like “DON'T YOU CHILDREN KNOW FIRE IS DANGEROUS?!?!”

and they help put out the fire

and honestly find the kids endearing enough to invite them to sit with them

starting the iconic 13 member friend group that everyone in Hogwarts knows

and Verkwan’s friendship was literally born out of burnt robes ashes :,,,))

“So you got a name?” Seungkwan asked, sassy as always

“Hansol, but everyone calls me Vernon.”

“I’m Seungkwan.”

“Really I thought your name was ‘boy on fire’.”

“You’re funny, wanna be friends?”

“Sure.”

“You’re my puppy now.”

man these two started out the same height

but imagine how surprised Seungkwan got when throughout the year,

Hansol outgrew him by a few centimeters

were pretty devastated when they weren’t sorted into the same houses

“I’ll grab the talking hat you distract the teachers.”

"We can hang out in your dormitory every other day"

and so they hang out all the time

because if Hansol is left to wonder around, he might just walk off the castle grounds and get lost

would walk around thinking about stuff by himself

and fall into the lake or something

and everyone would be panicking EXCEPT FOR HIM

trying to figure out how to get him to swim back to shore

so he and Seungkwan walk together around a lot

claiming a corner of the campus for themselves

and all the prefects know Hansol by hair color or just general outline

and everyone in their friend group looks out for them because they’re the youngest

even Chan who’s younger than the both of them by a year

he takes care of the two of them too because he's pretty mature

they get in trouble a lot when they’re together

detention for hexing papers to fly everywhere in charms

and when they found out Seungcheol and Joshua were their prefects after coming back from summer break

didn’t make things easier for them at all

“I SWEAR HANSOL DONT PLAY WITH THE FIREPLACE, I DONT WANNA BURN DOWN THE COMMON ROOM.”

"Whatchu going to do daaaaaad give me detention?"

"Yea."

"Oh, sorry...? I love you? PLEASE I DON'T WANT DETENTION HYUNG!"

no one really calls him Hansol too much

except for his friend group

honestly this is so confusing to everyone when Seungkwan comes bounding up to him in the halls yelling in a singsongy voice “HAAAANNNSSSSOOOOLL~~~~”

“Why is he calling Vernon, Hansol?”

but that just shows who really knows him

even the teachers call him Vernon

Verkwan is such a troublesome friendship

always breaking the rules to sit together

but that whole group always does that

or sneaking out after curfew

and doing who knows what

there's always a classroom that has all the desks bewitched to spout out confetti or glitter the next day but no one has solid evidence so Verkwan hasn't been caught yet

can’t even split them up by separating them across the classroom

would end up sending notes back and forth

at some point the teachers gave up

and made the both of them announcers for quidditch matches

thinking that might calm them down when they’re together and using their energy towards something productive

honestly so biased though

each one will cheer for their friends only

“MINGYU-HYUNG BLOCKED IT IN YOUR FACES”

“JUN-HYUNG CATCHES THE SNITCH AND WINS IT AGAIN AS EXPECTED”

“JIHOON STOP SMOOCHING YOUR GF AND JUST WIN ALREADY- OW sorry professor!”

Hansol rapping the scores for the whole stadium

and everyone either loves it

or doesn’t say anything unless you want 12 other guys coming after you

wands drawn

despite being a kid who causes a lot of trouble

and doesn’t seem to study whatsoever

he does pretty decently in most of his classes

best class is care of magical creatures

but tbh doesn't really study

and again manages to pass stuff

but doesn't enter the library unless he wants to bother Joshua, Wonwoo, or one of his other hyungs about something

really laid back and chill, doesn't stress over schoolwork that much

he doesn’t mess up too often either MOSTLY

but when he does, he does it spectacularly

generally involving colorful explosions and fire

has a pet cat named Mr. Chwe

but Hansol just calls him Chewy

it’s the cutest fluffiest thing you’ve ever seen

besides Hansol of course

it's silver fur is honestly so pretty and Hansol loves it to death

anyway

one day you were looking for your owl, Cara

because you wanted to send a letter home

when a silver kitty passed in front of you outside

"Hey there!" you bent down to stroke its fur for a bit and it purred while laying on the ground in front of you

"Chewy!" you looked up as surprise, surprise

Vernon ran up to Chewy

and basically stopped dead in his tracks

because you're pretty DON'T DENY IT

and Vernon be shooketh

awkward human bean

someone protect him TT

and he kind of just stammers his introduction

which you think is really cute

"Hi, I-I-I'm Vernon."

and you giggle a bit bc DAMN VERNON IS REALLY CUTE LIKE YOU THOUGHT THE CHEWY WAS CUTE BUT OMFG

and he smiles because you laughing is really cute

"Chewy is it?" you smile asking him

"Yea!" and you watch as Vernon's face basically lights up as he starts telling you about how he got his cat

and you find out he's in the same year as you

which is surprising because you're familiar with his friend group

everyone at Hogwarts knows them

and you always kind of thought he was older than you

you're a ravenclaw yourself so you run into Chan sometimes

and Vernon goes on really excitedly telling you about Chewy's life story

how Chewy had basically eaten some chocolate Vernon had dropped in diagon alley

and how it got sick

and Vernon felt awful and just had to figure out how to make it feel better

until he found out the heartbreaking news of Chewy not having a family

and he basically begged his parents for days to keep Chewy will secretly hiding Chewy in his trunk

no one really knows how he did it though don't ask one of the older kids they'll claim to know no magic that can fix that cough cough liars they had to help Hansol ok? no one could say no

and you stand there just taking it all in

how Vernon was willing to go on and on about his pet to some stranger

and you were all for it tbh

and perfect timing

right as Vernon finishes his story, your owl Cara flies down from her roost to land on your shoulders

Cara is a beautiful amber color and you smile as Vernon kind of just stares at Cara in awe

"WOW IS THAT YOUR OWL, IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL."

"It is," you laugh, "Cara and I go way back."

and he just stares at you waiting for you to explain the story

and so you tell him and you both laugh at the varying adventures that you tell each other about your pets

and you both also realize you had care of magical creatures together

and you both really love animals and just never talked before

and Cara and Chewy are just following you and Vernon

Chewy following Cara with his eyes

and Cara being like "Have you never seen an owl before, you cat?"

and when you both leave

you feel all warm inside because you made a friend

or someone you really liked who knows

the next few weeks really zoom by

you talk to Vernon in care of magical creatures more now

and even Seungkwan can't help but feel like you're encroaching on his best friend

"Y/n, I know you might not know me, but since you're friends with Hansol, you have to be friends with me."

"Hansol?"

"Yea that's his real name, did he not tell you?"

"Hmm, I guess not, he said his name is Vernon."

and you're kind of like ???

because did he not consider you a close enough friend to call him by his real name?

but also why does it bother you? Vernon was just a friend... right?

and so obviously

when feelings get confusing

you're just like welp instead of working this confusion out I'm just going to pretend like they don't exist

even if you stare at Hansol a bit too long during care of magical creatures

and he always comes up to talk to you about homework help and stuff since you're in Ravenclaw

and in the same year

and all the hyungs take notice

"Hey you're Hansol's friend huh?"

"He usually doesn't even try doing his homework but lately he's actually been doing stuff."

"Oh you're that person that got Hansol doing his homework, wow thank you what did you promise him chocolate for life?"

and it's overwhelming but you find yourself having twelve new friends

bc you're friends with Hansol

and one day

"Hey Vernon! Do you wanna go work on that potions paper together?"

"Sure y/n! But uhhhh.... you can call me Hansol, it's my real name haha." he blushes but you don't notice

"Why do you go by Vernon then?"

"It's just what a lot of people know me as and I stopped correcting them, and only my really close friends call me that."

you feel your heart swelling

"Ok,,,, Hansol."

man the smile on his face when you said that

in the next few weeks you guys hang out more to do study sessions for upcoming exams

and one day when you're sitting at the windowsill of an empty classroom

Cara flies in through the open window landing beside you

carrying papers in her claw

"Cara, are you stealing people's notes again?" you laugh picking up the sheet to read it

and written at the top

"Vernon"

you're almost screaming because wow what a coincidence

"Cara, this is Hansol's" you frown

and you look at some of his doodles on the scroll of paper

and you see little heart doodles

around initials you can't really read because the ink smeared

but the meaning seemed pretty clear

he must have a crush on someone

you found yourself a bit sad

since that was Hansol's business and not really any of yours

but

you had to admit your feelings for him weren't all that straight forward and clear cut as they seemed

you sighed but continued working

the least of your worries, a silly crush on a boy who didn't like you

and the next few weeks, Cara kept bringing you Hansol's stuff

once it was a chocolate frog

and another time it was a little folded paper star with his initials on one side and a little heart

it's like your owl was trying to play matchmaker for you two

"He probably doesn't like me" you giggle when Cara dropped another one of Hansol's things in front of you

this one was a really pretty pale blue colored quill

"He might actually need this ya know."

and eventually you have a whole shoebox of random stuff Cara stole from Vernon

and you're like 'I have to return them at some point'

until Cara drops a card I front of you

and you're like ??? did you steal from Vernon again???

and on the card is a simple "Thanks to you I did pretty well on my exams, thanks for everything~ Hansol"

and you laugh as you read the post script

"PS I asked Cara to deliver it especially since she always hangs around my dormitory window"

"Awww Hansol, I'm sorry, Cara's been taking your stuff." you say to yourself laughing

"Cara, you're such a troublemaker." you gently pet her wing

and Cara sares at you like 'please just watch what happens'

and your amber owl is riiiiiiiigggghhhhhtttttttt

you gather up the shoebox with missing items to return to Hansol

and when he sees you he comes bounding right up with a huge smile on his face

until it sees the stuff in the box

and his face falls

"Hey Hansol."

"Hey y/n"

"Cara kept taking your stuff, so I came to give it back." you smile raising up the box

"About that......." Hansol starts blushing

"You see, at first I noticed Cara taking my stuff" Hansol started not meeting your eyes

"but after a bit, I ended up just giving her stuff, thinking she'd give it to you."

"Why would you do that?" you giggle blushing as well

"Well stuff like the chocolate frog, I wanted to share with you and I saw the quill in hogsmeade and it reminded me of you bc it was pretty and you're really pretty...."

you freeze blushing like crazy

"pretty..... PRETTY COOL AND YEA I LIKE YOU SO."

you're standing shocked

"And so I gave it to Cara because I thought you'd like it. So all that stuff's yours not mine, you can keep it." he smiles at you and playfully ruffles your hair

his hand lingering on your head as he pushes a stray lock of your hair back behind your ear

"I mean, if you don't like me that's ok, I just didn't want to lose one of my closest friends and best tutor ever" he smiled sheepishly

"No Hansol, I..."

his eyes met yours

"I like you lots too." you giggle

and it's that cute giggle that reminds his of when her first saw you

and he's so relieved he finally told you

that he just gives you a hug right then and there

"Yeeeeeeeeeessssss be mine then." he says not letting you go

"Haha of course." and you feel your cheeks burning

and the moment is just too cute and perfect

until Seungkwan notices you two

and basically yells

"HANSOL, Y/N, WHAT ARE YOU TWO DOING?!?!?!?"

and from then on it's official

"Honestly, she's such a good influence making him do his homework and stuff" proud prefect Seungcheol

you two are the cutest ever

walking around campus with Cara and Chewy

tbh Chewy and Cara are like the bestest friends

and Seungkwan just being lowkey jealous that you're taking all Hansol's attention

"He was my friend first!!!"

but he thinks you guys are hella cute too

how could he not

you and Vernon sitting together for meals, only having dessert and getting into food fights

bc how could you let whip cream just sit on top of your pumpkin pie without smearing some on his face

before he gets you back with the frosting off cupcakes

and it's a big mess

and he grabs napkins and helps you wipe your face

one hand on your cheek as he leans down to kiss your cheek

"Hey!" you giggle

"Sorry not sorry!" Seungkwan making barfing gestures behind the two of you lmao forever third wheeling

him making you sit next to him when he wants to sit outside

just so he can lay his lead in your lap

and drift off while you're reading a book for some assignment

and you get a bit distracted every time he moves because he's so freaking adorable

and you end up just watching him nap

until he peeks open an eye surprising you

and quick as a cat

sits up to peck you on the cheek

"For a Ravenclaw, you aren't fast enough to pick up when someone's fake sleeping"

"Oh please Hansol, those snores from you were so real." you laugh

"Maybe, maybe not"

and he takes your hand in his and looks you straight in before pressing his lips against yours

and you smile at how beautiful and surreal it all feels

"Don't think I'll ever get over how pretty you are." he says tilting his face to the side a bit giving you a cute look

"Please Hansol lol."

"I'm not joking though!"

he holds onto your arm as he lays back down on your lap and looks up at you

"You're prettier than Chewy." he grinned slyly

"DID YOU JUST COMPARE ME TO YOUR CAT HANSOL?"

The Seventeen Hogwarts AU Series:

MASTERLIST

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