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nostalgebraist · 3 months ago

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notes on ada or ardor, from the "summer of ardor 2013" reading group

This post contains my notes on the novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov, which I wrote in 2013 in connection with a small reading group for the book that I hosted for a few of my friends.

I've posted these notes online before, in several places. However, I recently discovered that all of its incarnations had disappeared, lost in the devouring maw of Web 2.0 you-are-the-product enshittification. (It was originally posted through "Facebook Notes," a feature that doesn't exist anymore; I also put it up as a series of "Goodreads Stories," a feature that also doesn't exist anymore.)

So, I'm putting them up again here, on tumblr.

I'm not under any illusions that tumblr will be around forever, and eventually I expect this copy to go the way of the others. Maybe when it does, I'll finally do the right thing and put it up on my (currently unused) personal website. But pasting it into the tumblr box is slightly easier, so here we are.

Looking back over these notes, I feel quite proud of them. I think I was underselling them in the original intro to the Goodreads edition, which (for the record) said the following:

These notes are certain [sic] inferior in comprehensiveness and erudition to, say, Brian Boyd's notes on Ada Online, or the Kyoto Reading Circle notes. In place of those qualities they mostly substitute bad jokes and webcomic references. The reasons you might, however, want to read this notes in addition to the existing sources are as follows: 1) Unlike everyone else, I try to avoid spoilers 2) I'm just a regular guy writing notes for his friends to read, which may be a good thing if you're an ordinary reader who doesn't want their face blasted off by endless scholarly discussions of minutiae

In fact, I actually went much further into "scholarly discussions of minutiae" than this would seem to suggest – with extensive citations of Boyd and others as needed – and I think I did a pretty good job of it, while not losing sight of bigger themes and stuff.

More generally, I feel like these notes really showcase my love and enthusiasm for the book.

----

The notes are divided into 11 sections, each of which covers a block of chapters we read in a particular week of the reading group. The goofy thematic titles for each of the weekly chapter blocks (e.g. "Oh, Inverted World" for the first one) are my inventions, part of my notes rather than the book itself.

I tried to avoid spoilers for later chapters when writing about earlier ones, though of course if you read the notes all the way through, you'll eventually get fully spoiled.

Except for one small added note (clearly signposted), these are given in their original 2013 form without any edits.

1. Oh, Inverted World (Part 1, Chapters 1-8)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chapters 1-8)

Let's review what we know so far. The story is apparently set on another planet (called "Demonia" or "Antiterra" -- I don't think these terms have come up yet, but I'm mentioning them for the sake of ease of reference). Its history and geography are quite similar to those of earth, although names are often different, and the dates of historical events can vary by up to 100 years. On Antiterra the northern reaches of North America have a mild, warm climate and, politically, form not an independent country (Canada) but a subsection of the U.S. called "Canady," which contains a "province" called "Estoty" which is inhabited largely by Russian-speakers in the west ("Russian Estoty") and Francophones in the east ("French Estoty"). What we call Russia on earth is called "Tartary" on Antiterra, and was settled by Tartars after the Russians were expelled to North America. (If you want some clarification on all of this, there is a very nerdy page about it called "The Geography of Antiterra" at http://www.dezimmer.net/ReAda/AntiterraGeography.htm .)

The mentally ill on Antiterra often have hallucinatory visions of our earth, which they call "Terra." This tendency began in a sort of fad in the Antiterran 1860s. A mysterious event called the "L disaster," which caused electricity to be banned, was responsible in some unspecified way for caused the Terra mania. At the time our protagonist, Van Veen, is writing, electricity has been made legal again, but in the story so far (covering the 1860s and 1880s) it is illegal and electrical devices have been replaced with hydrodynamic equivalents, such as the "dorophone" (hydrodynamic telephone). On the other hand, on the evidence of Ch. 6 at least, Antiterrans in 1884 (the date of Van and Ada's first meeting) have flying carpets and household robots. What little we see of conventional religion on Antiterra is peculiar: people say "thank Log" (short for "logos," maybe?) rather than "thank God," mention is made of "Faragod" ("the god of electricity"), and demons are seen as good rather than evil figures.

That's the setting; what about the story? The first three chapters are a convoluted and uninviting description of Van and Ada's ancestry, as well as (in Ch. 3) an account of the Terra mania and some of the differences between Antiterra and Terra. These three chapters make numerous but oblique references to the fact that Van and Ada, the two romantic leads, are not actually cousins -- as the family tree at the start of the book says -- but brother and sister: they are both actually the children of Demon and Marina, not of Demon and Aqua (Van's putative parents) and Dan and Marina (Ada's putative parents). After a description of Van's first amorous and sexual experiences in Ch. 4, we finally get some narrative traction in Ch. 5, where we start following 14-year-old Van in 1884 as he visits his relatives in Ardis Hall and meets his "cousin"/sister Ada -- who's a pedantic weirdo, but Van's, like, totally into it. That's pretty much it so far.

All of this is being described retrospectively, in the third person, by a very (implausibly?) old Van (he was born in 1870 and Ch. 4 says he "started to reconstruct his deepest past" in "the middle of the twentieth century"), with some notes in the margin by a similarly old Ada. The notes have been preserved in the text we're reading, which is curious in itself (an unedited, or partially edited, manuscript?).

One big question this book presents to the reader is whether Antiterra is real or whether it's something Van (who, in this latter conception, actually lives on our earth) has made up. When I first read the book, I thought "Antiterra is fake" was a plausible theory but by no means certain. Now, upon re-reading, it seems more and more obvious to me that Antiterra is just clearly fake -- the alternate Antiterran names are constantly shifting, for instance. So some of my notes below will talk about why I think Antiterra isn't real. (There is no critical consensus on this point, but that may just be because not enough people are paying attention.)

SOME RELEVANT TEXTS

As you probably know, Brian Boyd has been annotating Ada on his website. The annotations aren't done, and may never be -- he's up to Chapter 34 now, which is only a few chapters further than he'd gotten to when I first read the book two years ago. I will quote from these annotations often, but if you're worried about spoilers (for plot or for discoverable secrets) I don't recommend looking at them (although I used them heavily on my first read-through).

Boyd has also written a critical monograph called "Ada: The Place of Consciousness." I don't strongly recommend it, as it has the typical Boyd faults (justifies inherently implausible theories with over-complicated webs of evidence, expects first-time readers to have super-naive responses that no first-time readers actually have in practice, etc.) and in terms of the Boyd virtues (e.g. obsessive attention to detail) it has nothing to recommend it over the annotations. A better, and shorter, book is "Nabokov's Garden" by Bobbie Ann Mason (published -- really -- by Ardis Press in Ann Arbor), which gets closer to the heart of what Nabokov is doing than Boyd ever seems to.

There is also a set of annotations that Nabokov prepared himself to aid translators, called "Notes to Ada, by Vivian Darkbloom." Your copy may include them at the back. These are pretty sparse and pedestrian, but they are worth mentioning from time to time.

Ada makes a whole bunch of references to books and to visual art. According to Boyd and Mason, some of the more important textual reference points are:

Pushkin (Eugene Onegin) Tolstoy (Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Childhood/Boyhood/Youth) Chateaubriand (Atala/Rene)

Of these I have only read Anna Karenina.

NOTES

A note on pronunciation: "Ada," as Chapter 5 indicates, is pronounced "ahh-dahh," so that it sounds like "ardor" spoken in a non-rhotic accent. "Van" has the same type of "a" sound, since it is an abbreviation of "Ivan." "Veen" is, I think, pronounced like "vain," both for resonance with the word "vain" and because that's how it's pronounced in the Dutch surname "van Veen," which Van's name is supposed to remind us of. I've heard some people pronounce it like the first syllable of "Venus," though, and "Venus" is another intended resonance of the name.

" 'All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,' says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor 3.05 Ltd., 1880)." (1) -- this inversion of the opening sentence of Anna Karenina (which Nabokov, incidentally, insisted should be called Anna Karenin in English) is many things. It's Nabokov making fun of bad translations. It is our narrator, Van Veen, declaring that his family, although sui generis (so to speak), is a happy one. It is an indication that we are entering a mirrored world in which some things may be different from what we're used to -- indeed, may take precisely the opposite form. It's an indication that this book will be (among other things) a parody of 19th century novels. Above all, it is a bizarre opening line that sets the tone for this bizarre book.

"Demon's twofold hobby was collecting old masters and young mistresses. He also liked middle-aged puns." (4) -- now that's my kind of 19th-century libertine! (Note, incidentally, that since Antiterra is also known as Demonia, Demon is effectively named after the earth [or the version of the earth he lives on], which is a good match for names like Marina and Aqua.)

" 'I deduce,' said the boy, 'three main facts . . . " (8) -- this first (textually, not chronologically) conversation between Van and Ada is wonderfully and implausibly dense. The upshot here is that the two have discovered the secret of Van's birth: Marina substituted her baby, whom Demon fathered, for Aqua's dead son, and the mentally impaired Aqua believed that the baby really was her child. This makes Van the son of Marina and Demon (rather than Aqua and Demon), and since the pair already knows that Ada's true father is Demon rather than Dan, this means they are both children of Marina and Demon -- full siblings. (This contradicts the family tree printed at the beginning, and -- despite numerous hints in the coming pages -- was actually missed by some early reviewers of the novel, who went through the whole thing believing that Van and Ada were cousins. Martin Amis, writing in 2009, thinks they are "half-siblings." My nerdrage knows no bounds.)

"by the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother" (8) -- here's Boyd with the genealogy of this phrase: "Van says 'the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother' in allusion to the opening chapter of another famous novel, Ulysses (pub. 1922), by James Joyce (1882-1941). In the opening chapter Buck Mulligan, looking seaward, and like Van and Ada also showing off in the first conversation in the novel, exclaims: 'Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton' ([Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986], 4; 1.77-78). 'Algy' here is Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909): 'I will go back to the great sweet mother, / Mother and lover of men, the sea' ('The Triumph of Time,' pub. 1866, ll. 257-58). 'Epi oinopa ponton' means 'over the wine-dark sea,' a Homeric formula recurring throughout the Odyssey. Notice that Nabokov's 'dark-blue great-grandmother' wittily combines the 'grey' color term in Joyce's recycling of Swinburne's phrase and the 'great sweet mother' in Swinburne, with the 'great' again wittily given an improbable new value in 'great-grandmother.' "

Chapter 2 -- according to Boyd, the bad play Marina acts in here is a parody of bad translations/adaptations of Eugene Onegin. Unlike some of you, I haven't read Eugene Onegin, so the jokes are lost on me.

"the Baron, a physical wreck and a spiritual Samurai, had gone over to Japan forever" (14) -- for some reason I can't stop laughing over the weird, unexpected use of the word "Samurai" here. (It seems ripe for being turned into some sort of surrealist compliment/insult, e.g. "Rob, you are a physical wreck and a spiritual Samurai!")

"Van, I trust your taste and your talent but are we quite sure we should keep reverting so zestfully to that wicked world which after all may have existed only oneirologically, Van? marginal jotting in Ada's 1965 hand; crossed out lightly in her latest wavering one." (15) -- this is the first of what I think of as "moments of instability," moments when the book suggests that there is some crucial secret of its nature that we are not privy to. What is it that "may have existed only oneirologically"? Van and Ada's highly detailed ideas about what their parents' courtship was like? Antiterra as a whole? (If the latter, this would explain why Ada later crossed out the comment, since Chapter 3 makes it clear that Van is determined to stick with the Antiterra idea.) "Reverting" suggests regression (towards something worse, more immature) as well as turning something over (from the root "vert") as images are turned over by a mirror.

"The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated)" (17) -- strange that he would have to point the latter out in a world in which the L disaster is "well-known historically." "L" can stand for "electricity" (the L disaster has caused electricity to be banned) -- also "Ladore"? (Or Lenin. Or other, more spoilery options.)

"1869 (by no means a mirabilic year)" (19) -- Boyd's annotation for this reads as follows: "a pun on annus mirabilis (Latin, 'wonderful year,' applied especially to 1666, the year of London's Great Fire, in John Dryden's 'Annus Mirabilis,' 1667); on aqua mirabilis, sometimes shortened simply to mirabilis, 'a distilled cordial made of spirits, sage, betony, balm and other aromatic ingredients' (W2), since Aqua is about to be introduced; and as Proffer suggests on Russian mir, 'peace,' and Latin bellum, 'war,' since 1869 was the year Tolstoy's War and Peace was completed." Now that's a pun!

"Marina, with perverse vainglory, used to affirm in bed that Demon's senses must have been influenced by a queer sort of 'incestuous' (whatever that term means) pleasure (in the sense of the French /plaisir/, which works up a lot of supplementary spinal vibrato), when he fondled, and savored, and delicately parted and defiled, in unmentionable but fascinating ways, flesh (/une chair/) that was both that of his wife and that of his mistress, the blended and brightened charms of twin peris, an Aquamarina both single and double, a mirage in an emirate, a geminate gem, an orgy of epithelial alliterations." (19) -- And that is a sentence!

"Demon Veen married Aqua Durmanov -- out of spite and pity, a not unusual blend." (19) -- Karkat would be proud!

"Abraham Milton" on p. 18 becomes "Milton Abraham" on p. 21. Curiouser and curiouser.

"this our sufficient world. . . . Sufficient for your purpose, Van, entendons-nous. (Note in the margin.)" (21) -- second moment of instability. What is Van's "purpose"? This one is easier to make sense of under an "Antiterra isn't real" theory, since in that case Antiterra is sufficient for Van's purposes (i.e. for the reasons that led him to invent it), but not, e.g., for the purposes of other people whose real actions might be misrepresented there. If Antiterra is real, then Ada is either reminding Van of the general fact that some people are less satisfied with the world than he is, or reminding him in particular of people who hope their souls will transmigrate to Terra after death.

With its mystical manias and its college students dropping out to join 'fashionable' social causes, the Antiterran 1860s seem to imitate the Terran 1960s, in which Nabokov was writing.

Strange to have "Anna Karenin, a novel" (25), with that helpful explanatory clause, when on the first page the same novel (with a less accurate name) was "famous." "Manipulate each other" sounds more sexual than what actually happens in A.K., fitting for Ada's combination of 19th century stylings and sexual frankness.

" ' . . . it would have been so much more plausible, esthetically, ecstatically, Estotially speaking -- if she were really my mother.' " (30) -- an enigmatic outburst. Boyd's annotation for "Estotially" says "given the incest laws in Estoty?"

"such details of his infancy as really mattered (for the special purpose the reconstruction pursued)" (31) -- third moment of instability. (What is this "special purpose"? Is is the same as "your purpose" on p. 21?)

"He knew she was nothing but a fubsy pig-pink whorelet and would elbow her face away when she attempted to kiss him after he had finished" (33) -- this will turn out to be pretty representative of how Van sees women.

Chapters 5 and 6 -- we are now past the abstruse genealogical/scene-setting chapters, and, suddenly and somewhat incongruously, we're dropped into a Wes Anderson movie or something. Everything is visually lush and sort of cutesy. Something like this tone will persist, with various interruptions, for quite a while, but don't be fooled into thinking this is all the book has to offer.

"Ardelia" (36) -- Van's misremembering of "Adelaida" (Ada).

"the tiny, tremulous poodlet" (37) -- I present this phrase without comment.

" 'I used to love history,' said Marina. 'I loved to identify myself with famous women. There's a ladybird on your plate, Van. Especially with famous beauties -- Lincoln's second wife or Queen Josephine.' " (38) -- that's Marina for you. Also we can now add "Lincoln" to the two variants of "Abraham Milton."

" . . . jikkers were banned by the airpatrol; but four years later Van who loved that sport bribed a local mechanic to clean the thing, reload its hawking-tubes, and generally bring it back into magic order . . . " (44) -- I'm 99% sure the jikkers with their "hawking-tubes" were the inspiration for the flying carpets called "Hawking mats" that appear in the Hyperion series by science fiction writer Dan Simmons, which I coincidentally happened to be reading concurrently with Ada in summer 2011. (Simmons is a Nabokov fan and uses the name "Ardis" in the series as well. Of course when he uses "Hawking" it's also a reference to Stephen Hawking.)

"Owing to a mixture of overlapping styles and tiles (not easily explainable in non-technical terms to non-roof-lovers)" (45) -- "non-roof-lovers" is certainly not a category that enters my mind very often.

"le Docteur Chronique, I mean Crolique" (49) -- [insert weed joke here]

"Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago" (53) -- Vivian Darkbloom explains: "play on 'Zhivago' ('zhiv' in Russian means alive and 'mertv' dead)."

"Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce’s poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like it? He did." (54) -- Apparently Finnegans Wake existed in 1884 on Antiterra. Boyd says: "The famous lyrical prose passage involving two washerwomen by the Liffey, at the end of the 'Anna Livia Plurabelle' chapter (I.viii) of Finnegans Wake (1938) -- a passage Joyce recorded in his own voice -- includes the refrain 'Tell me,' which in its last transformation becomes 'Tell me, tell me, tell me elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone.' (216.03-04). Though a great admirer of Ulysses, Nabokov thought Finnegans Wake 'a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room. . . . Finnegans Wake’s façade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity.' (Strong Opinions 71)"

"The retractile head and diabolical anal appendages of the garish monster that produces the modest Puss Moth" (55) -- "Diabolical Anal Appendages" is a great band name.

"Les Malheurs de Swann" (55) -- Vivian Darkbloom: "cross between Les malheurs de Sophie by Mme de Ségur (née Countess Rostopchin) and Proust’s Un amour de Swann."

2. Youth in Revolt (Part 1, Chapters 9-16)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chs. 9-16)

So, starting around Ch. 10 or so, we find ourselves REALLY CLEARLY situated inside the mind of a teenage boy. Everything is openly sexualized, even the food ("enormous purple pink plums, one with a wet yellow burst-split" [62] -- eww). Nabokov usually isn't this overt about this kind of stuff (if he includes it at all), and it was pretty startling to me the first time I read this book.

Back then these chapters startled me in a number of ways, really -- most of them having to do with the way they realistically, perhaps too realistically, take us into the world of adolescents with all their horniness and haughtiness. Van and Ada, who were likable enough in the previous section, begin to grate in this one. Take, for instance, the way their sense of superiority to Mlle Larivière infects not only their own dialogue but also the narration:

". . . the story lacked 'realism' within its own terms . . . That was the fatal flaw in the Larivière pathos-piece, but at the time young Van and younger Ada could not quite grope for that point although they felt instinctively the falsity of the whole affair." (87)

If we take this as an editorial comment from Nabokov himself (rather than just from old Van), it seems pretty self-indulgent: he has created a character who is an incompetent writer, has attack her writing in the voices of his other characters, and now attacks her in the narration itself -- pointing out flaws that he created to begin with! What's even worse is how close Van, and especially Ada, are to Nabokov in various ways -- e.g. Ada's interest in botany and entomology and her distaste for bad translations -- which makes this close to self-congratulatory self-insert 19th-century-novel fanfiction.

Is this interpretation false? Well, I think so, but for reasons that only become clear later on. For the moment, I'll just say that if your reaction to these chapters is "get off my lawn, you damn kids," your reaction is valid, and probably what Nabokov intended. (I mean, not to say their romance doesn't have some appeal; of course it does.)

NOTES

"punctuating Ada’s discourse with little ejaculations" (62) -- see what I mean about sexualizing everything?

" 'It was sort of long, long. I mean (interrupting herself)… like a tentacle… no, let me see' " (62) -- I rest my case.

Chapter 12 is beautiful and odd in its own unique way.

"among the instruments in the horsecart" (72) -- "horsecart" is an anagram for "orchestra." Darkbloom: "horsecart: an old anagram. It leads here to a skit on Freudian dream charades ('symbols in an orchal orchestra')."

"Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van’s arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: 'real things' which were unfrequent and priceless, simply 'things' which formed the routine stuff of life; and 'ghost things,' also called 'fogs,' such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a 'tower,' or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a 'bridge.' 'Real towers' and 'real bridges' were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral 'thing' might look or even actually become 'real' or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid 'fog.' When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with 'ruined towers' and 'broken bridges.' " (74) -- I like this passage, and this system. I've forgotten a lot of stuff from this book but this has always stuck in my mind.

"The wasp was investigating her plate. Its body was throbbing. 'We shall try to eat one later,' she observed . . . " (75) -- Ada, you are so WEIRD.

" . . . the child was permitted to wear her lolita . . . a rather long, but very airy and ample, black skirt" (77) -- how Japanese of her. Seriously, though, this is one of the many throwaway references to Lolita in Nabokov's later work, which have always gotten on my nerves for some reason. I guess it's poking fun at the public's perception of him as primarily "the guy who wrote Lolita," but it also seems like more fuel for that very perception? I dunno.

" . . . thus dubbed after the little Andalusian gipsy of that name in Osberg’s novel" (77) -- Osberg is an anagram of Borges, to whom Nabokov has often been compared.

"with red poppies or peonies, 'deficient in botanical reality,' as she grandly expressed it, not yet knowing that reality and natural science are synonymous in the terms of this, and only this, dream. (Nor did you, wise Van. Her note.)" (77) -- another moment of instability at which I can only smile and nod. No clue what this means.

"[thus in the MS. Ed.]" (79) -- so the manuscript has been edited, but in a hands-off way, preserving errors and marginal notes rather than removing them or smoothing them out.

"'But, my poor Mathilde, the necklace was false: it cost only five hundred francs!' " (83) -- this story is the Antiterran equivalent of Maupassant's La Parure (thanks, Boyd). I do wonder if there's any intended parallel here to Van being substituted for Aqua's child.

"Being unfamiliar with the itinerary of sun and shade in the clearing, he had left his bicycle to endure the blazing beams for at least three hours." (86) -- even the most trivial details in this book are just so entertainingly described.

Chapter 15 -- I really like the way this chapter seems to be a parody of "loss of innocence" scenes, complete with the heavy-handed Tree of Knowledge symbolism. Since it rings true that Van and Ada might retrospectively view their lives in parodic terms, the scene also works "normally," as characterization, even while it also works as a parody.

"to snatch, as they say, a first shy kiss" (95) -- the innuendo pile doesn't stop from getting taller, if you believe Boyd: "Pun. Cf. Boyd 1985/2001: 243: 'seems to allude to a stock expression -- but the actual idiom is "steal a kiss." Why then that "as they say" just after snatch? Because, of course, there is one colloquial use of "snatch" ': vulva." (On the other hand, I remember the phrase "snatch a kiss" appearing in the romance-novelly chapter of Ulysses, so unless that was the same joke, it may just be an antiquated idiom . . . )

"with only that stray ardilla daintily leavesdropping" (98) -- hard to read even a few words of this book without encountering some sort of mischief. "Ardilla" means squirrel in Spanish, FYI.

3. And I'll Bury My Soul in a Scrapbook (Part 1, Chapters 17-24)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chs. 17-24)

Van and Ada's romance begins in earnest with an appropriately pyrotechnic backdrop; DIY sex ed is facilitated by the vast Ardis library; poems are transmogrified and crossbred; Lucette gets in the way; the style is sometimes gorgeous and sometimes playful or jokey to the point of tedium. The attic scene at the end of Ch. 1 fits somewhere in here, chronologically speaking. Meanwhile, the density of references has gone up precipitously, so I've written a lot more notes, most of which are quoted or cribbed from Boyd. There is the feeling of a steady rise in difficulty after the easy early Ardis chapters, like a musical piece that slowly builds in complexity.

If you're up to date, can you leave a comment saying whether you like the book so far? Just curious. I know this book is polarizing, and I don't want to feel like I'm leading you down a very long blind alley.

NOTES

Compared the leering and arch chapters directly preceding it, Chapter 17 is rather lovely. The tone in much of Part 1 seems to waver between romantic and satiric, with one of the two dominating the other in each chapter (speaking roughly).

"Their lips were absurdly similar in style, tint and tissue. Van's upper one resembled in shape a long-winged sea bird coming directly at you, while the nether lip, fat and sullen, gave a touch of brutality to his usual expression. Nothing of that brutality existed in the case of Ada's lips, but the bow shape of the upper one and the largeness of the lower one with its disdainful prominence and opaque pink repeated Van's mouth in a feminine key." (102) -- just felt like noting this down because it's an example of this book's excellent descriptions of sensory detail. Note the motif of Van's "brutality" (Ada's reaction to Van's hand-walking performance in Ch. 13: "I felt there was something dreadful, brutal, dark, and, yes, dreadful, about the whole thing" [86]).

"Nose, cheek, chin -- all possessed such a softness of outline (associated retrospectively with keepsakes, and picture hats, and frightfully expensive little courtesans in Wicklow)" (103) -- unsubtle foreshadowing: apparently Van will be soliciting courtesans later on.

"pascaltrezza" (103) -- Darkbloom: "pascaltrezza: in this pun, which combines Pascal with scaltrezza (Ital., 'sharp wit') and treza (a Provençal word for 'tressed stalks'), the French 'pas' negates the 'pensant' of the ‘roseau’ in his famous phrase 'man is a thinking reed.' " Sick pun, bro!

"Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive." (103) -- okay, I'm going to have to stop noting down every cool or cute line in this chapter or else I'll just be noting down the whole thing. Boyd quibbles: "Rembrandt . . . is generally much less festive than such compatriots and contemporaries as Franz Hals (c.1581-1665) and Jan Steen (1625/6-1679). Van may particularly have in mind the decidedly festive 'Self-portrait with Saskia' . . . "

"What (Ada asks) are eyes anyway? Two holes in the mask of life. What (she asks) would they mean to a creature from another corpuscle or milk bubble whose organ of sight was (say) an internal parasite resembling the written word 'deified'?" (104) -- my quote moratorium has lasted less than a page, it seems.

" . . . the most tragic and almost fatal point of my life . . . How I used to seek, with what tenacious anguish, traces and tokens of my unforgettable love in all the brothels of the world!" (104) -- this chapter seems intent on briefing us about the shape of the overall plot. Note that a moment ago we got a reminder that Lucette died young ("at eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty-five, finis" [104]), though technically that could be deduced from the family tree at the beginning.

" 'I am sentimental,' she said. 'I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.' " (105) -- Boyd: "Damozel is an archaic variant of 'damsel,' revived by Sir Walter Scott and other romantics after him 'to express a more stately notion than is now conveyed by damsel' (OED). Eglantine, especially [sic? -Rob] the sweetbriar (Rosa eglantera). Edmund Spenser (c.1552-1599) in The Faerie Queene (1590-96) uses both words toward the end of Book III, Canto VI (The Garden of Adonis), 'eglantine' in stanza 44, 'damozel' in stanza 54."

"a cad" (105) -- presumably Demon.

"after Mlle Larivière had threatened to smear poor Ada's fingertips with French mustard and tie green, yellow, orange, red, pink riding hoods of wool around them" (106) -- Boyd cites Jay Alan Edelnant's Ph.D. thesis, which notes that "this sequence implies 'green thumb' and 'pinkie.' ".

"born between Paris and Tagne (as he'd better, said Ada, who liked crossing orchids)." (106) -- Boyd notes that "Tagne" is not a real place and "seems a back formation from 'montagne' in the poem (106.25), as if it were 'mon Tagne,' 'my Tagne.' " The poem that follows is a hybrid ("crossing orchids") between the most famous poems of Baudelaire and (the actual) Chateaubriand (the latter poem will show up again in Ch. 22, where V&A will play with various phrases of the form "mon [X]"). Darkbloom translates it as "my child, my sister, think of the thickness of the big oak at Tagne, think of the mountain, think of the tenderness -- "

"Lucette’s and Lucile’s" (106) -- "Lucille, incidentally, was the true name of Chateaubriand’s sister, with whom he was in love" (Vera Nabokov).

" . . . and briefly attaining a drugged beatitude into which, as into a vacuum, the ferocity of the itch would rush with renewed strength." (107) -- a good description of this familiar experience.

"Nowadays it seems to be getting extinct, what with the cooler climate" (108) -- apparently the Antiterran climate has been growing closer to the Terran one?

"Suddenly Van heard her lovely dark voice on the staircase saying in an upward direction, 'Je l’ai vu dans une des corbeilles de la bibliothèque' -- presumably in reference to some geranium or violet or slipper orchid." (125) -- Ada's utterance, "I saw it in one of the wastepaper-baskets of the library," is actually (presumably) a response to Blanche asking about the location of her slipper, which she lost at the start of Ch. 19 ("Yes, she rushed down the corridor and lost a miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase." [114]).

"She wore -- though not in collusion with him" (126) -- Boyd's annotation reads: "Why might we have thought that Ada had donned her black shorts and white jersey in collusion with Van?" I dunno, man.

From Boyd's Forenote to Ch. 21: "The prohibition against knowing about sex matches the Edenic prohibition against tasting of the Tree of Knowledge, and the theme of Ardis as Garden of Eden somehow resounds even amid the hush of the library. Just as the solitary couple in the left panel of Bosch’s Garden of Delights gives way to the throngs of sensualists, fructivores and sexual acrobats in the triptych’s central panel, in an endless slow merry-go-round of desire, so Van and Ada returning now as lovers to the library sample sex as something endlessly repeated through time: in evolutionary terms, from Serromyia flies and the lowliest farm animals to geishas and Casanovas; in cultural terms, from Oriental erotica, Shastras and Nefzawis, to litterateurs and sexologists."

"May 1, 1884 . . . 14,841 items" (130) -- I quote Boyd's annotation here because it's the kind of hyper-minute and hyper-trivial analysis only Boyd, for better or for worse, can provide: "The echo of the date ('1, 1884') in the number of items in the library (which would have been even closer had Nabokov chosen April 1, 1884: 1-4-1884: why did he choose 'Mayday' rather than April Fool’s Day?; and see 133.01 and n.) and the palindromic quality of '14841' (which also happens to be the sum of the squares of 120 and 21, the latter the number of the chapter -- is this significant, in this self-referential section? -- and the former a near palindrome of it, with 'nothing' added -- was that intended?) reflect Nabokov’s abilities as mathematical prodigy in his infant years, and his preoccupation with pattern in both nature (butterfly wing-markings, for instance) and art (versification, for instance)."

"A bawdy critic in a collection of articles which she now could gleefully consult (Les muses s'amusent)" (133) -- Nabokov's invention, title means "The Muses Have Fun." (Boyd)

"Ivan Ivanov" (134) -- sounds like a reference to Van, but Boyd notes also: " 'Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov' is the archetypal Russian; see for instance Bernard Guilbert Guerney’s translation of Gogol’s Dead Souls (but not in Gogol himself), ch. 11: 'why, on several occasions caricatures had actually been put out depicting Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov talking with John Bull' (1942; New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966, 252.)"

"Kapuskan patois" (136) -- Boyd: "Kapuskan patois: Which, judging by the sample, seems to consists of a mix of French, American and Spanish, the European languages (except for Portuguese) of Earth’s Americas. Kapuskasing is a town in northern Ontario (49.25N, 82.26W), in an area of Ontario where French and English are both widely spoken." As for the "Kapuskan" quote itself: "This comically transparent macaronic passage yields: 'The only sure method of deceiving nature is for a strong-guy to continue-continue-continue until the pleasure brims; and then, at the last moment, to switch to the other groove; but because an ardent or a heavy woman cannot turn over quick enough, the transition is helped by the position of torovago.' "

"Heinrich Müller" (136) -- Darkbloom: "author of Poxus, etc." Of course this is Henry Miller, author (on Terra many decades later) of Sexus, etc. (For a good time, check out Gore Vidal's review of Sexus.)

"My sister . . . " (138) -- for the song by Chateaubriand on which this is based (which was crossbred with Baudelaire back in Ch. 17), see here. (If you want to avoid a quotation from a later chapter of Ada, stop reading at the sentence beginning "The poem, with score and tune . . . ")

"Ma soeur, te souvient-il encore / Du château que baignait la Dore?" (138) -- straight from the Chateaubriand: "My sister, do you still remember / The castle bathed by the Dore?"

"Sestra moya, tï pomnish' goru / I dub vïsokiy, i Ladoru?" (138) -- Darkbloom's trans.: "my sister, do you remember the mountain, and the tall oak, and the Ladore?"

"Oh! qui me rendra mon Aline / Et le grand chêne et ma colline?" (138) -- Darkbloom's trans.: "oh who will give me back my Aline, and the big oak, and my hill?" Slight alteration of the final sestet of the Chateaubriand: "mountain" has been changed to "hill" and "Helene" has become "Aline," the name of Chateaubriand's elder brother's wife (significance?). Darkbloom on the original: "The final (fifth) sestet begins with 'Oh! qui me rendra mon Hélène, Et ma montagne et le grand chêne' -- one of the leitmotivs of the present novel."

"Oh! qui me rendra, mon Adèle / Et ma montagne et l'hirondelle?" (138) -- now the name is "Adele" (now the addressee rather than the object) and the "great oak" is the "swallow." Adele brings "Adelaida" (Ada's real name) to mind just as "Lucile" below does for Lucette/Lucinda.

"Oh! qui me rendra ma Lucile, / La Dore et l'hirondelle agile?" (139) -- now it's "the Dore" and "the agile swallow." Lucile is the real name of Chateaubriand's sister. "Agile swallow" comes from an utterance of Mlle Lariviere's ("And see that agile swallow!" [87]), as do some other bits here.

"Oh, who will render in our tongue" (139) -- pun on earlier "rendra" ("give back").

"say 'chort' (devil) . . . which he had never heard her do before" (139) -- Van's forgetting that he had her say "chort" on p. 96. Speaking of devils, note that "Ada" means "of hell" (i.e. it's the genitive of "hell") in Russian.

"To the average physiologist, the energy of those two youngsters might have seemed abnormal" (139) -- part of a motif about Van and Ada's exceptional nature; cf. the earlier mention of the "demon blood" (20) they inherited from their father (which brings us back, thematically, to hell).

"yclept" (141) -- "Meaning 'called,' 'named,' this word, elsewhere obsolete, survived as an allowable archaism in poetry." (Boyd)

" 'I kept for years -- it must be in my Ardis nursery -- the anthology you once gave me; and the little poem you wanted me to learn by heart is still word-perfect in a safe place of my jumbled mind, with the packers trampling on my things, and upsetting crates, and voices calling: time to go, time to go. Find it in Brown and praise me again for my eight-year-old intelligence as you and happy Ada did that distant day, that day somewhere tinkling on its shelf like an empty little bottle. . . . ' " (146) -- well, that's heartbreaking. Note that Van, typically (as we shall see), does not comment on the pathos of the situation.

"Here, said the guide . . . " (146): Nabokov wrote, in third person, to Bobbie Ann Mason: "The poem Peter and Margaret is of course Nabokov’s own composition. Not a single reader (as far as he knows) has understood that it is a stylized glimpse of a mysterious person visiting the place, open to tourists, where in legendary times ('legendary' in Antiterra terms) a certain Peter T. had his last interview with the Queen’s sister. Although he accuses the old guide of being a 'ghost,' it is he, in the reversal of time, who is a ghostly tourist, the ghost of Peter T. himself. It is a very beautiful little poem, it should send a tingle down the spine of the reader." For a full report on the reference here and the way this poem by the fictional "Robert Brown" emulates Tennyson and Browning, see here.

"But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years -- problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space -- and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die" (153) -- death has poked its head into the frame a number of times in these chapters ("the most tragic and almost fatal point of my life" [104], "a fatidic shiver" [146], " their . . . in many ways fatal romance" [148]), and it does so again in this remarkable sentence. Et in Arcadia ego?

"just finished reading her new story" (154) -- this one is based on Maupassant's "La Petite Roque" (AKA "Little Louise Roque"). There's a summary here.

4. The Second Law of Thermodynamics (Part 1, Chapters 25-34)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chs. 25-34)

In which Van learns you can never really recapture your childhood.

The story now shifts into a new phase: where Van's preoccupying monomania used to be his attraction to Ada, it is now his jealousy of anyone who might, conceivably, have designs on her. There is a newly neurotic tone to many of these chapters, and Van's characteristic allusiveness starts to seem defensive rather than expressive or simply playful. Meanwhile, Lucette herself has become infatuated with Van. (What is it with this family?)

NOTES

"kitchen Kim with his camera" (156) -- pay close attention to Kim and his camera.

"Tel un lis sauvage confiant au désert" (157) -- "Thus a wild lily entrusting the wilderness" (Darkbloom). A quote from Les Trois Règnes de la Nature by Abbé Jacques Delille (in context: "Thus a wild lily / Entrusting to the wilderness the perfume it exhales, / Hides its virginal beauty from the indiscreet winds"). Delille seems to have been one of the many, many authors on Nabokov's shit list.

" . . . and this attire was hardly convenient for making klv zdB AoyvBno wkh gwzxm dqg kzwAAqvo a gwttp vq wjfhm Ada in a natural bower of aspens; xliC mujzikml, after which she said: . . ." (157) -- just when you thought this book couldn't get any weirder, it just starts throwing glitchy gibberish at you with no warning whatsoever. Of course, all is explained in the next chapter, but I really like the audacity of it. (The joke here is that if you actually decode the text, it's completely tame, at least on a surface level: "making his way through the brush and crossing a brook to reach Ada in a natural bower of aspens; they embraced.")

"the letter scene in Tschaikow’s opera Onegin and Olga" (158) -- Boyd: "Nabokov mocks here the inaccuracies of theatrical adaptations of literary texts, including the Chaikovsky adaptation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (see 10.11-12.20 and nn. and 511.34: 'the preposterous libretto'). The letter scene, itself specifically parodied at 11.02-20 (and nn.), of course focuses on Tatiana as letter-writer. A version that had misconstrued Pushkin’s story enough to have her sister Olga share the title with Onegin might even omit Tatiana altogether. In Pt. 1 Ch. 2 the show in which Marina plays the letter-writing role seems to be called Eugene and Lara (13.22), which at least preserves as well as distorts some of Tatiana’s surname (Larina); but by now, the disintegration has become even more complete, as the other Larina girl takes over the title role."

"I don't know. I adore you. I shall never love anybody in my life as I adore you, never and nowhere, neither in eternity, nor in terrenity, neither in Ladore, nor on Terra, where they say our souls go." (158) -- "adore"/"Ladore" here resonates nicely with the unspoken (but, in this book, always present) "ardor."

"Stumbling on melons, fiercely beheading the tall arrogant fennels with his riding crop" (159) -- Darkbloom: "allusions to passages in Marvell’s 'Garden' and Rimbaud’s 'Mémoire.'" (From Marvell's Garden: "Stumbling on melons, as I pass, / Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.") [TV narrator voice] "Previously on Ada or Ardor": Rimbaud's poem was referenced a number of times in Van and Ada's esoteric lunch-table conversation in Ch. 10.

In Chapter 27 we begin to get a sense of Van's conventionally masculine double standard about infidelity.

"Villa Armina: Marina never realized it was an anagram of the sea, not of her." (163) -- Ouch!

"garbotosh" (165) -- reference to a famous poster for the film Anna Christie, which pictures Greta Garbo wearing a macintosh. As it happens, all of the physical characteristics listed later in this passage are consistent with the idea that Cordula is supposed to look like Garbo. Garbo was rumored to have had affairs with women. (She also -- perhaps relevantly? -- played the title character in the 1935 adaptation of Anna Karenina.)

"ambivert" (165) -- apparently this means "a type of person intermediate between the introvert and the extrovert," though of course it sounds as though it means "bisexual."

"by his amour-propre, not by their sale amour" (168) -- "amour-propre" can mean either "self-love" or "clean love"; the former appears to be the actual meaning here, but the latter allows the phrase to appear to contrast more directly with "sale amour" ("dirty love"). Darkbloom: "pun borrowed from Tolstoy's 'Resurrection.'"

"On the contrary: a private picture of their fondling each other kept pricking him with perverse gratification." (168) -- another "yep, Van sure is a teenage boy" moment. (It wasn't until I copied this quote down here that I noticed the retrospectively obvious innuendo in "pricking." Maybe it's best to assume that every word of this book is some sort of innuendo until proven otherwise . . . )

"Adula" (168) -- resonates of course with "adulation."

"the entire treatment of the Marcel and Albertine affair" (169) -- Van refers to the theory that the character Albertine in In Search of Lost Time is really a gender-swapped male, i.e., that her affair with Marcel is actually a veiled depiction of a male homosexual affair.

"(On fait son grand Joyce after doing one's petit Proust. In Ada's lovely hand.)" -- the previous sentence links up to Joyce's Ulysses in several difficult-to-catch ways, described by Boyd here. Note that Van's monologue about Proust was itself in the style of Proustian dialogue.

"He could solve an Euler-type problem" (171) -- an insignificant detail, but as a math guy I'm of course curious what exactly is meant by this phrase. There are many problems associated with Euler, who was one of the most prolific mathematicians ever. In the French translation of Ada this becomes "a problem in Euler integrals." Euler integrals are certain special mathematical functions, which doesn't nail down what the problems in question are, but gives us a general idea of what sort of knowledge is involved -- calculus, probably. (Van is 10!)

"I have often wondered why the Russian for it" (175) -- by "it" he means "cheating."

"Van worked under Tyomkin, at the Chose famous clinic, on an ambitious dissertation he never completed, 'Terra: Eremitic Reality or Collective Dream?' " (182) -- the nature of the Terra pathology, along with the nature of time and space, will be one of Van's major interests as an adult.

"a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time" (185) -- "ardis" means "point of an arrow" in Greek, so this is a modification of the conventional phrase "the arrow of time."

"Thus the rapture young Mascodagama derived from overcoming gravity was akin to that of artistic revelation in the sense utterly and naturally unknown to the innocents of critical appraisal, the social-scene commentators, the moralists, the idea-mongers and so forth." (185) -- yep, we're definitely reading a Nabokov book here.

"Van on the stage was performing organically what his figures of speech were to perform later in life -- acrobatic wonders that had never been expected from them and which frightened children." (185) -- this makes explicit what might already have been clear: the connection between Van's interest in card tricks, acrobatic feats, etc. and his penchant for playing tricks with words.

"and (I have a note here, for the ghost of a novel) 'the low cut of her black dress allowed the establishment of a sharp contrast between the familiar mat whiteness of her skin and the brutal black horsetail of her new hair-do.'" (188) -- a vertical A-B-A (or, equivalently, A-D-A) pattern. The novel in question here is presumably Ada itself, which apparently means that this bit is some earlier note or thought that has been incorporated into the text. Note that the dramatic arc of Ada follows something like an A-D-A pattern, and that the title itself contains more than one such pattern (the word "Ada" is one, and the fact that "Ada" sounds like "Ardor" makes the phrase "Ada or Ardor" another).

"'My teacher,' she said, 'at the Drama School thinks I'm better in farces than in tragedy. If they only knew!'" (191) -- a self-conscious nod to the tension between comedy and drama in this novel?

"her only true love, the head of the arrow" (192) -- another ardis.

"I'll have them reassembled in Ladore when I motor there one of these days." (193-4) -- and here's another attempt to triumph over the ardis of time, this one much closer to the sort of examples found in introductory physics textbooks. The collecting of the necklace pieces seems like a pretty transparent metaphor for the lovers' attempt in this scene to recapture what they had in 1884.

Note that Ada has become less interested in biology (nature) and more interested in acting (artifice). Bobbie Ann Mason sees this as an effect of the corrupting influence of her "unnatural" affair with Van.

"Her director, G.A. Vronsky" (197) -- Vronsky is Anna's lover in Anna Karenina. His name is combined here with "the 'common Russian-Jewish name' Gavronsky" (Boyd citing Alfred Appel). Cf. Marina's lover "Baron d’Onsky" (13).

"what begins with a 'de' and rhymes more or less with a Silesian river ant" (199) -- "Since the Oder is the main river of Silesia, a historical region of eastern Europe now mostly in Poland although with small portions in Germany and the Czech Republic, the riddle spells the hint: 'deodorant.'" (Boyd).

"She smelled of damp cotton, axillary tufts, and nenuphars, like mad Ophelia." (199) -- cool sentence. Nenuphars are water lilies.

"The indecent 'telegraph'" (201) -- the banning of electricity has had amusing consequences for Antiterran profanity.

"(reversing the action of Dr. Ero, pursued by the Invisible Albino in one of the greatest novels of English literature)" (203) -- Darkbloom: "thus the h-dropping policeman in Wells’s Invisible Man defined the latter’s treacherous friend." Could additionally be a reference to Ellison's Invisible Man. (In an interview, Nabokov discusses the notion of meeting literary figures in heaven: "It would be fun to hear Shakespeare roar with ribald laughter on being told what Freud (roasting in the other place) made of his plays. It would satisfy one's sense of justice to see H. G. Wells invited to more parties under the cypresses than slightly bogus Conrad.")

"the sunglasses of much-sung lasses" (203) -- that's a pretty good one.

"two black and one golden-red head" (204) -- a possible A-D-A, although it seems more likely that Van is in the middle (in which case it's an A-D-A by gender, I guess).

5. Father Lucifer (Part 1, Chapters 35-38)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chs. 35-38)

The Ardis of 1888 continues to be awkward. Scrabble is played. Demon stops by and wants to ask whether Van and Ada are involved, but never manages to.

To be honest, with the exception of the Scrabble scene, I'm not that fond of these chapters -- the plot has been lagging lately and the reader could be forgiven for wondering whether any of this is going anywhere or whether the rest of the book will be comprised of minor, unpleasant Veen family interactions described at great length. Mark my words, though: the next section (the rest of Part 1) is utter gold, and is what convinced me I loved the book the first time around.

And as always, no matter how slow the plot is, there's plenty of trivia to note! Speaking of which, Boyd's online notes end at Ch. 34, although note that there are some interesting notes (composed with Boyd's help) here that go up through Ch. 38. After this, we're flying blind.

NOTES

"the oars crippled by refraction" (217) -- nice metaphor.

"my acarpous destiny" (219) -- "acarpous" means "fruitless."

"A diligent student of case histories, Dr. Van Veen never quite managed to match ardent twelve-year-old Ada with a non-delinquent, non-nymphomaniac, mentally highly developed, spiritually happy and normal English child in his files, although many similar little girls had bloomed -- and run to seed -- in the old châteaux of France and Estotiland as portrayed in extravagant romances and senile memoirs." (219) -- a self-conscious nod to the implausibility of Ada the character. Minor evidence for theories of the "Van invented Ada" variety (of which I am fond).

"Captain Grant's Microgalaxies" (220) -- Darkbloom: "known on Terra as Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant, by Jules Verne."

"ailleurs" (220) -- "go away" (?), lit. "elsewhere."

The ending of Ch. 35 has been "scrawled on a separate writing-pad page" and is apparently by a very old Van, possibly on his last night before death. It is appropriately (?) strange. Mentions of the process of composition sometimes coincide with especially abstruse and odd passages (cf. the sections alternately written by Van and Ada in Ch. 12). Is this an indication that these were written last, by an older senile Van / Ada, who either wrote strangely because they were senile or simply died before having the chance to revise this material (or both)?

"and now a century later seems to be again in vogue, so I am told, under the name of 'Scrabble,' invented by some genius quite independently from its original form or forms." (222-3) -- cf. earlier " 'We [Van and Ada in 1884] played mostly Scrabble and Snap,' said Van." (163)

"Lucette would later recall how her sister's triumphs in doubling, tripling, and even nonupling (when passing through two red squares) the numerical value of words evolved monstrous forms in her delirium during a severe streptococcal ague in September, 1888, in California." (223) -- like the Noodle Incident, this is all the more hilarious for its lack of specificity. ("Evolved monstrous forms"?)

"Baron Klim Avidov" (223) -- anagram for "Vladimir Nabokov" (Kyoto Reading Circle notes).

"Avidov . . . at a particule" (223-4) -- "The gist of this short incident is that Avidov was accused by the Englishman Keyway of his pretentions to aristocratic lineage by using the French 'de' before his name (d’Avidov)." (Kyoto Reading Circle notes)

"By July the ten A's had dwindled to nine, and the four D's to three. The missing A eventually turned up under an Aproned Armchair, but the D was lost" (224) -- A-D-A reference, of course, and maybe another arrow of time / entropy thing? (The "A" of paradisiacal Ardis lost and then regained.)

"it was pitiful to see Lucette cling to her last five letters (with none left in the box) forming the beautiful ARDIS which her governess had told her meant 'the point of an arrow' -- but only in Greek, alas." (225) -- I'm sure you could do some "clinging to Ardis" / "arrow of time" thematic stuff with this. (I have kind of a one-track mind today, it seems.)

"the amusing VANIADA" (226) -- this coinage will turn up again.

"TORFYaNUYu" (227) -- there is a peat motif (yes, you heard me, a peat motif) in this book: "Veen" for instance means "peat bog" in Dutch. (Boyd has written an article called "Ada, the Bog and the Garden: or, Straw, Fluff, and Peat: Sources and Places in Ada.")

V&A's virtuosic triumphs over Lucette in Ch. 36 leave me wondering exactly what they feel they have to prove (numerous decades later!).

"some 'blue' (peat-bog) land" (236) -- peat again.

"his "prebrandial" brandy (an ancient quip)" (238) -- cf. "he liked . . . middle-aged puns" (4).

"You look quite satanically fit, Dad." (239) -- I wonder what exactly "satanically" means on Antiterra, where religion seems to have been tweaked somewhat, and demons are benign figures. (Note the reference to the Eden story later in this chapter, and the Eden reference that dominates Ch. 15.)

" 'You’ll live to reach Terra, and come back a wiser and merrier man' " (241) -- this may be fortune-teller frivolity, but it is interesting to wonder whether it has any deeper meaning in the context of the plot.

"the sweetest word in the language rhymes with 'billiard' " -- Kyoto Reading Circle: "The word is 'milliard,' thousand million, that is, billion."

"That’s very black of you" (241) -- Kyoto Reading Circle: "Converted 'white of you,' a Southern racist compliment which means 'good of you.' "

"Filius aquae" (243) -- Darkbloom: " 'son of water,' bad pun on filum aquae, the middle way, 'the thread of the stream'." But, as the Kyoto Reading Circle observes, this is also a reference to Van's parentage (he is not "filius aquae," "son of Aqua"). This chapter is packed with hints about Van and Ada's parentage, particularly to the fact that Ada is Demon's daughter.

"Tell him I’m the youngest Venutian? Does he belong, too? Show the sign? Better not. Invent." (244) -- in Ch. 28, Dick offered Van a membership to the "Villa Venus Club." Apparently Van is now a member.

"Old Demon, iridescent wings humped" (245) -- one of several references so far to Demon's "wings." Presumably a flight of fancy rather than a literal description, but then so much of Van's tale is difficult to believe that a literally winged father might not be so out of place. (But if the wings really existed we might expect some remark about how he had been named for them, when in fact we just hear that Demon is "a form of Demian or Dementius" [4].)

"which Ada de Grandfief here has twisted into English" (246) -- yet another colorful version of "translate."

" 'Which is amply sufficient," said Demon, "for my little needs, and those of my little friends.' " (247) -- cf. "Sufficient for your purpose, Van" (21).

"the unfortunate plant used to be considered by the ancient inhabitants of the Ladore region not so much as a remedy for the bite of a reptile, as the token of a very young woman’s easy delivery" (247) -- the reference to the pains of childbirth here continues the Adam and Eve reference begun in Ada's preceding line, in which she links snakes and "corruption."

" 'I'm Fanny Price, actually' . . . 'In the staircase scene' " (249) -- not having read Mansfield Park, I can't divine the significance of either of these statements. Google leads me to this: "The stairs leading to the attic also have significance in the novel. A week after Fanny’s arrival at Mansfield Park, Edmund finds his cousin sitting on the stairs that lead to the attic. Her placement on the stairs reinforces the view of Fanny as a person between two worlds. She can no longer live with her family in Portsmouth and does not feel that the Bertram house is her home either. She is never completely part of the Bertram family until later in the novel; and in her first years with the family, Fanny does not feel fully accepted as a member of the household."

"this gemel planet" (256) -- "gemel" is a heraldic term meaning "coupled" or "paired."

"the young hospital nurse Dan had been monkeying with ever since his last illness (it was, by the way, she, busybody Bess, whom Dan had asked on a memorable occasion to help him get 'something nice for a half-Russian child interested in biology')" (256) -- the 12th birthday gift Ada received and hated back in Ch. 13 ("a huge beautiful doll -- unfortunately, and strangely, more or less naked; still more strangely, with a braced right leg and a bandaged left arm, and a boxful of plaster jackets and rubber accessories, instead of the usual frocks and frills" [84]).

"certicle storms" (258) -- Darkbloom: "certicle: anagram of 'electric.' " Electricity may be taboo, but Antiterrans still need a way to refer to natural electrical phenomena. (Also brings "cervical" to mind?)

"Antiamberians" (258) -- apparently some sort of anti-electricity group. The word "electricity" itself comes from the Greek word for "amber." Philip Pullman, thinking along the same lines, had his otherworldly characters in the His Dark Materials trilogy use "anbaric" (from the Arabic for "amber") energy.

"young Bout hurried in dragging the long green cord (visibly palpitating in a series of swells and contractions rather like a serpent ingesting a field mouse) of the ornate, brass-and-nacre receiver" (260) -- a hydrodynamic telephone sure is a funny image.

"his key: 221" (262) -- Demon is linked a number of times in this Chapter to Sherlock Holmes, who lived on 221 Baker Street (Kyoto Reading Circle).

"till dee do us part" (263) -- "dee" is the first letter in Demon's name: when Demon finally discovers their affair, Ada expects him to order them to stop. Also, possibly, a reference to the negative associations of the "D" segment of the A-D-A sequence (if this book is about paradises lost and then regained, "A" is the paradise while "D" is its absence).

6. Van/Ada, Blanche/Van, Rack/Ada, Percy/Ada, Van/Cordula, Hurt/Comfort, Mpreg (Part 1, Chapters 39-43)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chs. 39-43)

Shit just got real.

NOTES

"Speaking as a character in an old novel" (266) -- this "old novel" motif is starting to get a bit worn out.

"One of your aunt's servants is the sister of one of our servants and two pretty gossips form a dangerous team" (271) -- the former servant is Blanche. (Cf. "better than waste them on her, let him give them, she said, to Blanche's lovely sister" [277].)

"Percy, you were to die very soon -- and not from that pellet in your fat leg, on the turf of a Crimean ravine, but a couple of minutes later when you opened your eyes and felt relieved and secure in the shelter of the macchie; you were to die very soon, Percy; but that July day in Ladore County, lolling under the pines, royally drunk after some earlier festivity, with lust in your heart and a sticky glass in your strong blond-haired hand, listening to a literary bore, chatting with an aging actress and ogling her sullen daughter, you reveled in the spicy situation, old sport, chin-chin, and no wonder. Burly, handsome, indolent and ferocious, a crack Rugger player, a cracker of country girls, you combined the charm of the off-duty athlete with the engaging drawl of a fashionable ass. I think what I hated most about your handsome moon face was that baby complexion, the smooth-skinned jaws of the easy shaver. I had begun to bleed every time, and was going to do so for seven decades." (273) -- enjoyably spiteful paragraph. Strange to think of Van, over ninety, having lived with Ada for decades, writing this as though still angry at Percy. (I always tend to assume that Van's uses of the first person indicate heights of emotional intensity or involvement, though that may be too simple.)

"It was, he understood, a collation of shepherds." (274) -- no idea what to make of the shepherds. Suggestions welcome.

"Ada strolled up. 'My hero,' she said, hardly looking at him, with that inscrutable air she had that let one guess whether she expressed sarcasm or ecstasy, or a parody of one or the other." (278) -- doubles, of course, as a description of Ada the book.

"We do not care to follow the thoughts troubling Ada, whose attention to her book was far shallower than might seem; we will not, nay, cannot follow them with any success, for thoughts are much more faintly remembered than shadows or colors, or the throbs of young lust, or a green snake in a dark paradise." (280-1) -- strange to point this out when the book almost never follows Ada's thoughts, and the excuse rings hollow since Van's thoughts are, by contrast, followed relentlessly. I wonder what that "green snake in a dark paradise" means. There have been various Eden references (Shattal tree, dinner party), but none that seem to match up satisfactorily with that phrase.

"Therefore we find ourselves more comfortably sitting within Van while his Ada sits within Lucette, and both sit within Van (and all three in me, adds Ada)." (281) -- all three are in Ada the book, of course . . . "and all three in me" also makes me think of the Trinity. (If older Ada is incarnating in younger Lucette, then Ada is the Father and Lucette is the Son, which would make Van the Holy Spirit, which is funny since the Holy Spirit, unlike the other two, is believed by some to be female. [Is this my silliest line of speculation yet?])

"Van was lying in his netted nest under the liriodendrons, reading Antiterrenus on Rattner." (283) -- cf. p. 230: "Van lay reading Rattner on Terra, a difficult and depressing work." Mirror-reflection motif, of course.

"I've seen him in Sexico" (286) -- now that is a good bad movie title.

"It was not the sly demon smile of remembered or promised ardor, but the exquisite human glow of happiness and helplessness. . . . They stood brow to brow, brown to white, black to black, he supporting her elbows, she playing her limp light fingers over his collarbone, and how he 'ladored,' he said, the dark aroma of her hair blending with crushed lily stalks, Turkish cigarettes and the lassitude that comes from 'lass.' " (286-7) -- the writing has returned to romantic gorgeousness; it's been a long time since we've been here. Note that the style of this passage, and the use of the adore/Ladore pun, recalls the passage on p. 158-9 when Van and Ada part for the first time. Van seems to view his relationship with Ada in the most idealized terms at moments that directly precede their partings.

"That's a beautiful passage, Van. I shall cry all night (late interpolation)." (287) -- not sure what to make of this, but it seems significant.

"she was wearing his diamonds for the first time" (288) -- apparently Van did repair the diamond necklace after all?

I love Chapter 41. Nabokov is very good at rendering the moment when it all comes crashing down, and much of Ch. 41 is a wonderfully well-written, aching and hilarious depiction of what it feels like when your brain hits a fact it just can't deal with. In a lot of Nabokov's novels, though, this moment happens at the end, while here it's right in the middle: the demonic D of the A-D-A pattern ("till Dee do us part"). An A-D-A dramatic arc, if plotted with something like "happiness" on the vertical axis, would form a "V" shape (or, if mirror-inverted -- with both paradises exposed as false? -- an "A" shape).

"her quaint English, elegiac and stilted, as spoken only in obsolete novels" (292) -- this has the form of a diss towards Blanche, but its impact is kind of distorted by the fact that all sorts of things in Ada, including Ardis Hall itself, are describes as reminiscent of "old novels." "Obsolete novels" is kind of a strange notion in the context of this book, which is itself written in an archaic mode.

" 'Van,' she said, 'I must tell you my dream before I forget. You and I were high up in the Alps . . . ' " (296) -- the coincidence of Van and Ada's dreams here recalls dream coincidences in Anna Karenina and Ulysses. (Nabokov, in this interview: "Activist, demonstration-struck students of the present decade would, I suppose, either drop my course after a couple of lectures or end by getting a fat F if they could not answer such exam questions as: Discuss the twinned-dream theme in the case of two teams of dreamers, Stephen D.-Bloom, and Vronski-Anna.")

"Aqua used to say that only a very cruel or very stupid person, or innocent infants, could be happy on Demonia, our splendid planet. Van felt that for him to survive on this terrible Antiterra, in the multicolored and evil world into which he was born, he had to destroy, or at least to maim for life, two men." (301) -- unless I'm forgetting something, this is the first appearance of either of the names of Van's planet. Given that they will appear frequently from here on out, this seems statistically unlikely to be a coincidence. It's as if Van has invented these nasty-sounding terms to express his despair at this particular moment, and only later retconned them in as "official" names for his (fantasy) planet.

I remember reading somewhere that the duel in Ch. 42 is heavily derivative of Eugene Onegin. The author I was reading claimed this as reason to doubt the duel ever actually happened. (Which makes sense if, and only if, you're working in a general framework that says Van has access to something like western literature as it exists on earth.)

"In 1884, during my first summer at Ardis, I seduced your daughter" (309) -- clarifies that Ada is Demon's daughter, in case the reader still hasn't picked up on it.

"Van noticed a speckled movement on his right: two little spectators -- a fat girl and a boy in a sailorsuit, wearing glasses, with a basket of mushrooms between them. It was not the chocolate-muncher in Cordula's compartment, but a boy very much like him, and as this flashed through Van's mind he felt the jolt of the bullet ripping off, or so it felt, the entire left side of his torso" (310-11) -- I feel like this is significant (either Cordula and the boy or their doppelgängers appear as here like angels of [near-]death?), but I have no idea where to go with it.

Van's prepared monologue to Rack (314-15) is so weird I almost want to call it another "moment of instability." Death has been an important motif up until this point; now Van meditates, seemingly without prompting, on the afterlife. The futility of this magisterial proclamation (which Rack doesn't even appear to hear) is hilarious, but the passage is unnerving in a way that goes beyond that comedic function. There is a feeling that the book is going off the rails, that we and Van, not Rack, are in fact plummeting into "the panic and pain of infinite night" (315).

"kissing her rosy hot face and kneading her soft catlike body through her black silk dress" (318) -- to contrast with the swoonyspoony purple prose in the highest-pitch V&A encounters, Van's exciting moments with other women get assigned this down-to-earth porn-novel style. (I may be imagining this contrast -- I'll have to see whether it persists in the rest of the book.)

"But, of course, an invaluable detail in that strip of thought would have been -- perhaps, next to the pitcher peri -- a glint, a shadow, a stab of Ardis." (320) -- of course Van is trying to link the death of Percy -- far away, having nothing to do with him or Ada -- with his own desire to kill Percy and its motivation. Is that all that's going on here, though? Another odd, extended passage which, like the earlier monologue, serves to remind us that we're not in Kansas/Ardis anymore. (Incidentally, in this passage two open parentheses are closed with only one close parenthesis -- this is the case both in my edition and on Ada Online. Is this meant to be unsettling? Stop me before I read into trivial details again!)

"anxious to enjoy Cordula as soon as humanly and humanely possible" (320) -- nice turn of phrase.

"When in early September Van Veen left Manhattan for Lute, he was pregnant." (325) -- a funny piece of trivia: some early editions (including some of the copies at the NYU library) have "he was pregnant" idiotically "corrected" to "she was pregnant." Anyway, this parting shot for Part 1 is a anticlimactic parody of the climactic important of pregnancy in 19th-century fiction. (In the Darkbloom notes, VN says it's specifically a reference to Kitty Levin's pregnancy in Anna Karenina.) The genesis of a creative work is a poor substitute for a real pregnancy as a culmination to a story so concerned with sex and romance -- a fact only accentuated by the relatively minor status of the creative work in question (which we'll learn about in the next section).

7. L. Van Hubbard and the Modern Science of Mental Health (Part 2, Chapters 1-5)

GENERAL REMARKS (Part 2, Chs. 1-5)

This week's section is more varied than some. Van reads letters from Ada; writes a science fiction novel based on his patients' experiences; visits a chain of high-class brothels whose origins and peculiarities are described in more detail than we really need, thank you very much; riffs on dreams; and has an incredibly awkward reunion with Lucette.

NOTES

"I implore you for breath [sic! Ed.] of understanding" (332) -- there are several editor's notes in Ada's letters here (from the fictional, Nabokov-created editor). They call into question turns of phrase that seem like deliberate wordplay, which makes one wonder just who this editor is and whether their competence can be trusted. It also raises the question of why these particular instances of wordplay are being singled out in this wordplay-heavy book. Does the editor, for instance, have some grudge against Ada's (the character's) writing style?

"[Los Angeles, mid-September, 1888]" (332) -- Ada's "severe streptococcal ague," which made her delirious, occurred "in September, 1888, in California" (223). But if this has had any influence upon this letter, I can't discern it.

"He and I have gamed at Nevada, my rhyme-name town" (333) -- apparently either Vegas or Reno has been replaced with a city called "Nevada" on Antiterra. Similarly, the use of the word "Manhattan" in the book seems to indicate that instead of a New York City, Antiterra just has a city called Manhattan.

"Van, you are responsible (or Fate through you is responsible, ce qui revient au même) for having let loose something mad in me when we were only children" (334) -- the idea that Van has somehow corrupted Ada will recur.

"in early Thargelion, 1888" (335) -- Thargelion is . . . apparently the second month of spring in the Attic Greek calendar? Maybe Sam can explain this reference to me.

"as they were bound to be in the long ruin [sic! "run" in her blue stocking. Ed.]" (335) -- another problematic "sic." Also, I confess I don't know what the editor means by "in her blue stocking." Has Ada herself has made this correction in blue pen? [2024 edit: huh, apparently I didn't know the term "bluestocking" (meaning "feminist") back in 2013.]

"When Van retrieved in 1940 this thin batch of five letters, each in its VPL pink silk-paper case, from the safe in his Swiss bank where they had been preserved for exactly one half of a century, he was baffled by their small number. The expansion of the past, the luxuriant growth of memory had magnified that number to at least fifty." (336) -- this seems to call into question much of the book so far, since if Van can misremember a simple fact this severely, how the hell did he remember all of the little novelistic details he's included? Van does provide an excuse for this particular case a moment later, but this is a strong reminder that we aren't supposed to take Ada as a purely factual account.

"the impeccable paranymph" (337) -- a paranymph is an attendant in a ceremony, originally an attendant to the bridge and groom in an ancient Greek wedding.

I really like Chapter 2, mostly for the fact that it sheds light on Terra, one of this book's enduring mysteries.

"In his struggle to keep the writer of the letters from Terra strictly separate from the image of Ada, he gilt and carmined Theresa until she became a paragon of banality." (339-40) -- "carmined" here could indicate that Theresa is an analogue of Lucette, a redhead.

"his anagram-looking name, Sig Leymanksi, had been partly derived by Van from that of Aqua’s last doctor" (340) -- the doctor was "Sig Heiler" (28). Darkbloom on Sig Leymanksi: "anagram of the name of a waggish British novelist keenly interested in physics fiction." The novelist in question is Kingsley Amis.

"with Theresa swimming inside like a micromermaid" (340) -- Michael Maar in his book "Speak, Nabokov" links Lucette with the Little Mermaid of the classic fairy tale. I remember very little of his discussion, but I imagine this was part of the evidence. (The Little Mermaid of the Disney movie, which long postdates Ada, was a redhead, but I can't find any indication that this was a traditional feature.)

"a sumptuously fripped up, trite, tedious and obscure fable, with a few absolutely marvelous metaphors marring the otherwise total ineptitude of the tale." (344) -- anticipates, of course, one subset of the Terran reactions to Van's later work "Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle."

"Osberg (Spanish writer of pretentious fairy tales and mystico-allegoric anecdotes, highly esteemed by short-shift thesialists)" (344) -- remember that "Osberg" is an anagram of "Borges." Ouch!

"The Perfumed Garden" (344) -- this book, a "fifteenth-century Arabic sex manual and work of erotic literature" (Wikipedia), actually exists, and according to Bobbie Ann Mason is a significant source for Ada. I don't remember much about Mason's appendix on the subject, though.

Chapter 3 is something else, that's for sure. The best interpretation I can come up with is that it, or some subset of it, is an erotic dream of Van's that has been incorporated into the text. He is clearly half-asleep as he writes the end of Chapter 2. Van's sleepy state of mind may explain the sudden mentions of Eric van Veen and his dream in that section, which at that point have never been mentioned and are a mystery to the reader. If Van falls asleep with thoughts of Eric van Veen in his mind, it makes sense that he would dream of floramors. The narrative action in Ch. 3 (what little of it there is) has the sudden shifts and strangeness of dreams, and the exposition has the implausibility of the sort of "backstory" that dreams often present as given knowledge, as well as the extravagant elaborations often characteristic of sexual fantasies. Having awoken, Van recounts his dream (Ch. 3) and then, inspired, proceeds to riff on dreams in general, and erotic dreams in particular, in an imagined psychology lecture (Ch. 4).

There are problems with this. The most obvious is, of course, that if Van is doing this, why doesn't he tell us? It seems especially perverse to spend a brief paragraph on erotic dreams -- beginning with "Van's sexual dreams are embarrassing to describe" -- if in fact the previous chapter was an extended description of one. There's also the fact that the Venus club has been mentioned before, so we're clearly supposed to believe it exists, even if we don't believe every detail from Ch. 3. And although much of the design of the Villa Venus club resembles a sexual fantasy, there's actually a pre-existing justification for this in the idea that it was the sexual fantasy of a horny teenager, realized in reality after his death.

"David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction (in no way related to the Veens of our rambling romance)" (347) -- a reminder that "van Veen" is, in the real world, usually encountered as a Dutch surname. So if we want to play the plausibility game, it seems more likely that David and Eric van Veen were real names, and "Ivan Veen" a pseudonym inspired by them, than vice versa. (But since so many Nabokov characters have zany names, this is probably a pointless exercise, unless we want to call into doubt absolutely everything.)

"a chain of palatial brothels that his inheritance would allow him to establish all over 'both hemispheres of our callipygian globe' " (348) -- that's definitely the best use of the word "callipygian" I've ever seen. (Not that it has much competition.)

Note that, according to Nabokov in an interview, the image of Van holding a young prostitute in a ruined villa was the first seed of Ada the novel in his mind, and he was pleased with himself for managing to work it into the finished product.

"impeccable buttocks" (351) -- a funny phrase given the etymologically literal meaning of "impeccable": "unable to sin."

"a well-known oneirotic device" (354) -- a hint that this a dream.

"subsidunt montes et juga celsa ruunt" (355) -- "mountains subside and heights deteriorate."

"was not sure if her name was really Adora, as everybody maintained" (357) -- compare to earlier "Adula" (168), formed by merging the names of Ada and Cordula.

"but the soft little creature in Van's desperate grasp was Ada" (358) -- this could mean several things. Most conservatively, Van is trying to recapture Ardis by imagining that prostitutes like this one are Ada. But it is also possible that this is a literal description of a dream shift: a stranger in his dream has just turned into Ada. This seems especially plausible given the way the word "Ada" comes at the end of the sentence, forming the "punchline" of the sentence and perhaps of the whole chapter. This kind of ambiguity is characteristic of Van's style (remember Demon's "wings" -- and there will be more examples).

"Van Veen [as also, in his small way, the editor of Ada]" (365) -- the brackets seem to indicate that this comment is from the editor, but then the lack of an "Ed." seems to indicate otherwise. Maybe Van is imitating the editor.

"At sixteen she looked considerably more dissolute than her sister had seemed at that fatal age." (367) -- the use of the word "fatal" in this book is very odd (see e.g. Ada as "pale fatal sister" [307]). How is sixteen a "fatal" age? "Fatal" can mean something like "fateful" and I assume that's the primary meaning in most of these cases. That the word has another, more common meaning provides resonance with the death motif and a link between death and fate.

"Two ideas were locked up in a slow dance, a mechanical menuet, with bows and curtseys: one was "We-have-so-much-to say"; the other was 'We have absolutely nothing to say.' " (370) -- that's a good way of putting it.

"ejaculated Lucette" (370) -- the beginning (I think) of a series of silly sexual innuendoes in this scene, similar to those in the early Ardis sections. Intuitively enough, this tendency toward innuendo seems to be a hallmark of scenes in which Van is in the presence of an attractive woman and doesn't have a steady girlfriend.

"[thus in the MS. Ed.]" -- we saw this phrase once before, in Part 1 Ch. 13 (p. 79). There, too, Van wrote the start of a paragraph twice. I would conjecture that this mistake reflects the feverish anxiety that characterizes the present chapter -- which Van may be reliving as he writes -- except I don't think anything similar can be said of Ch. 13. (This could also be an indication that these chapters were written late, and thus revised relatively little before Van's death.)

"It certainly came from Lucette's sister. He knew that shade and that shape. "That shade of blue, that shape of you" (corny song on the Sonorola)." (372) -- indication that Ada writes in blue pen? (See earlier "blue stocking.")

"The mental in Van always rimmed the sensuous: unforgettable, roughish, villous, Villaviciosa velour." (373) -- sensuous words for a sensuous sensation. "Villous": "(of a structure, esp. the epithelium) Covered with villi." ("Villi": "small, finger-like projections that protrude from the epithelial lining of the intestinal wall.") "Villaviciosa" is the name of several places in Spain and the Philippines. "Velour": "A plush woven fabric resembling velvet, chiefly used for soft furnishings, clothing, and hats."

"[quite possibly, this is not remembered speech but an extract from her letter or letters. Ed.]" (374) -- this could probably be said about almost any of the speech in this book, couldn't it?

"We were Mongolian tumblers, monograms, anagrams, adalucindas." (375) -- cf. the description of Marina as experienced by Demon: "an Aquamarina both single and double, a mirage in an emirate, a geminate gem, an orgy of epithelial alliterations." (19)

"campophone" (376) -- could be from Latin "campus" (field) or the Greek root "kamp-" meaning "bend." The latter seems more likely, especially since "phone" is Greek and we've seen "dorophone" from Greek "hydro." It's unclear what a "campophone" is, and since it affects the radiators, it seems to be a type of dorophone.

"polliphone" (376) -- could be from Latin "pollex" (thumb) or Greek "polloi" (many, majority). (I don't actually know Greek so I could be screwing up these Greek roots.) Might also be a reference to Pollux, one of two famous twins? The phones are morphing, like Abraham Milton / Milton Abraham / Abraham Lincoln.

"Bergson is only for very young people or very unhappy people, such as this available rousse." (377) -- as I mentioned a while ago, Bergson seems to have been a source for Van's, and Nabokov's, views of time. (From this interview: "At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin.")

"Vandemonian" (377) -- "a white inhabitant of Tasmania," according to Merriam-Webster.

"A ribald contemporary of Justinus, the Roman scholar." (384) -- at least on Terra, this is false, as Herodas and Justin were separated by several centuries. (That's one thing that's nice about the alternate world: it gives Van an alibi for each lapse in his erudition.)

"campophoned" (385) -- back to "campophone" from "polliphone."

" 'I also know,' said Lucette as if continuing their recent exchange, 'who he is.' She pointed to the inscription 'Voltemand Hall' on the brow of the building from which they now emerged. Van gave her a quick glance -- but she simply meant the courtier in Hamlet." (386) -- Voltemand was the pseudonym under which Letters From Terra was published, hence Van's misinterpretation.

8. Cameras and Obscurities (Part 2, Chapters 6-9)

GENERAL REMARKS (Part 2, Chs. 6-9)

Ardis regained? Peeping Kim. Two sisters and a brother. Three sisters.

NOTES

"He . . . had a structurally perfect stool (its cruciform symmetry reminding him of the morning before his duel)" (389) -- Van has aesthetic standards for everything, it seems. As it turns out, if we go back to Part 1 Ch. 42 -- the morning before Van's duel -- we find the very same phrase ("He shaved, disposed of two blood-stained safety blades by leaving them in a massive bronze ashtray, had a structurally perfect stool" [309-10]). I remember Boyd pointing this out in The Place of Consciousness. Apparently some reviewers complained about the repetition, but Boyd claims that they don't appreciate the "structural perfection" of the whole book, in which repetitions have some special role. (I don't remember this part of Boyd's argument very well -- it struck me as pretty silly and hence I have retained only this, its silliest detail.)

"libellula" (390) -- "a genus of dragonflies, commonly called Skimmers" (Wikipedia). Since Van "broke down on '…ulla,' " what he's actually said is "I saw you circling above me on libel," but I dunno if that has any significance.

"denunciation of demoniac life" (391) -- presumably "demoniac life" means "life on Demonia" (similar to e.g. "earthly existence"), but the associations of the word "demon" in this book are complex and I don't really know what to make of them. There's the planet Demonia (Antiterra), V&A's father Demon, incidental uses of words like "demoniac" and "satanic," and the fact that demons are good rather than evil figures in Antiterran religion. As Maar has noted, there's a longstanding association between demons/hell and pedophilia in Nabokov, perhaps indicating that N identifies pedophilia as some sort of ultimate or absolute evil -- e.g. Humbert Humbert says that the girls to whom he is attracted have a "not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac)" nature, and in Nabokov's early poem "Lilith," the pedophilic narrator realizes in the last line that he is in hell.

"Veen and Dean" (393) -- this seems to encourage us to pronounce "Veen" to rhyme with "Dean," for symmetry -- but then see e.g. "Vain Van Veen" (299), which gives an identical push in the opposite direction.

"He was omniscient. Better say, omni-incest" (394) -- someone should write an article called "The Omni-Incest Narrator in Ada."

"mossio votre cossin" (396) -- "monsieur your cousin" (Darkbloom).

"Mademoiselle n'aurait jamais dû recevoir ce gredin" (397) -- "should have never received that scoundrel" (Darkbloom).

"Sumerechnikov! He took sumerographs of Uncle Vanya years ago." (399) -- Darkbloom: "His name comes from Russ. sumerki, twilight; see also p. 43." The Darkbloom annotation for p. 43 identifies sumerki as "dusk" rather than "twilight." On p. 43 itself, we find "The late Sumerechnikov, American precursor of the Lumière brothers, had taken Ada’s maternal uncle in profile with upcheeked violin, a doomed youth, after his farewell concert." The Lumiere brothers were real people, the inventors of the earliest motion-picture equipment in history. This all sheds some light on Van's quip "The Twilight before the Lumières" (399).

The density of unusual words ("leering caruncula in the unreticent reticulation" [401]), and of multilingual wordplay, has increased in this chapter, possibly to accompany Ada's return to the frame.

"it was Mr Ben Wright's last petard at Ardis" (401) -- Darkbloom: "Mr Ben Wright, a poet in his own right, is associated throughout with pets (farts)." Wright was "fired after letting winds go free while driving Marina and Mlle Larivière home" (140), and in 1888 he has been replaced as coachman by a guy named . . . Trofim Fartukov (actually from Russ. fartuk, apron). This also (see p. 418) appears to be the true origin of "pet" as V&A's pet name for Lucette. It is perhaps a sign of the basic goodness of our blessed Terra that no scholar, to my knowledge, has written at any length about the intricacies of farting in Ada.

"Bright derision can easily grade, through a cline of glee, into a look of rapture" (402) -- good sentence.

"this Love under the Lindens by one Eelmann transported into English by Thomas Gladstone" (403) -- Darkbloom: "O'Neil, Thomas Mann, and his translator tangle in this paragraph." We can add "transport" to the stack of derisive replacements for "translate."

"But, in the sudden storm, calculations went to the canicular devils." (403) -- cf. "l’ardeur de la canicule" and "the ardor of your little canicule" (95). "Canicule" refers to the "dog days" of summer ("the hot period between early July and early September").

"Art my foute. This is the hearse of ars, a toilet roll of the Carte du Tendre!" (406) -- Darkbloom explains all. "Foute: French swear word made to sound 'foot.' " "Ars: Lat., art." "Carte du Tendre: 'Map of Tender Love,' sentimental allegory of the seventeenth century." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_of_Tendre )

"I will either horsewhip his eyes out or redeem our childhood by making a book of it: Ardis, a family chronicle." (406) -- trivia note: in Nabokov's last novel, Look At The Harlequins!, the protagonist, an alternate universe version of Nabokov, writes a body of work that strongly resembles Nabokov's own. His equivalent of Ada is titled "Ardis." (The actual book "was entitled at first Villa Venus, then The Veens, then Ardor, and finally Ada," according to this essay.)

"Knabenkräuter" (408) -- Darkbloom: "Germ., orchids (and testacles)."

"She married our Russian coachman . . . Oh she did? That's delicious. Madame Trofim Fartukov. I would never have thought it." (408) -- why doesn't Van remember this from Ada's letter? (" . . . as your sweet Cinderella de Torf (now Madame Trofim Fartukov) used to say . . . " [334].)

"She had never realized, she said again and again (as if intent to reclaim the past from the matter-of-fact triviality of the album), that their first summer in the orchards and orchidariums of Ardis had become a sacred secret and creed, throughout the countryside. Romantically inclined handmaids, whose reading consisted of Gwen de Vere and Klara Mertvago, adored Van, adored Ada, adored Ardis's ardors in arbors. Their swains, plucking ballads on their seven-stringed Russian lyres under the racemosa in bloom or in old rose gardens (while the windows went out one by one in the castle), added freshly composed lines -- naive, lackey-daisical, but heartfelt -- to cyclic folk songs. Eccentric police officers grew enamored with the glamour of incest. Gardeners paraphrased iridescent Persian poems about irrigation and the Four Arrows of Love. Nightwatchmen fought insomnia and the fire of the clap with the weapons of Vaniada's Adventures. Herdsmen, spared by thunderbolts on remote hill-sides, used their huge "moaning horns" as ear trumpets to catch the lilts of Ladore. Virgin chatelaines in marble-floored manors fondled their lone flames fanned by Van's romance. And another century would pass, and the painted word would be retouched by the still richer brush of time." (409) -- this delightful paragraph seems like a particularly overt and silly instance of the kind of tall-tale embellishment that we are supposed to imagine Van and Ada have applied to most parts of their story (to one extent or another).

Chapter 8 starts off with lots of long jeweled sentences, then descends into obscure weirdness after the Veens get drunk.

" 'Van, too, was upset,' replied Ada cryptically and grazed with freshly rouged lips tipsy Lucette's fanciest freckle." (413) -- notice how the sound echoes here (cr[yptically]/gr[azed]/fr[eshly]/fr[eckle], [graz]ed/[roug]ed, lips/tips[y], f[anciest]/f[reckle]) create the sensory impression of the words "grazing" one another.

"Nikak-s net" (415) -- Darkbloom: "Russ., certainly not."

"vorschmacks" (416) -- Darkbloom: "Germ., hors-d'oeuvres."

"in a nulliverse, in Rattner's 'menald world' where the only principle is random variation" (416) -- "menald": "speckled, variegated." Not sure what Lucette is getting at here.

"you cannot demand pudicity on the part of a delphinet!" (416) -- "delphinet" appears to be a Nabokovian coinage. It seems to be a diminutive of some "delph-" word . . . the flower genus "Delphinium"? The name "Delphine"? Suggestions welcome.

"the flat palpitating belly of a seasand nymph" (418) -- Lucette/mermaid connection.

"Thus seen from above" (418) -- the long, elaborate visual description here is the opposite of the quickly escalating action one might expect from an erotic scene like this. The joke is how far this passage is from ordinary sex writing; it's hard to imagine anyone getting turned on by it. (Which recalls the debate over whether Lolita was pornographic.)

". . . but I know somebody who is not simply a cat, but a polecat, and that's Cordula Tobacco alias Madame Perwitsky." (420) -- huh??? Google searching for "polecat slang" reveals only that in the South it means "skunk," and a "perwitsky" is apparently a "tiger weasel." No idea what she means here.

"After a while he adored [sic! Ed.] the pancakes" (420) -- OK, the editor has a point here. If this is wordplay on "ordered," it's pretty feeble. There may be an element of self-parody here -- after all this isn't too far from some of the more frivolous of Van's/Nabokov's clearly intentional jokes.

"Esmeralda and mermaid" (421) -- Lucette/mermaid.

"for the first time in my fire [thus in the manuscript, for 'life.' Ed.]" (421) -- similar to the case just mentioned. I wonder what we're meant to make of the varying frequency of editorial comments -- most chapters have none, but (e.g.) Chs. 1, 5, and 8 of Part 2 have several. Maybe this is an indication of compositional order.

"The whole matter secretly nauseated Van (so that, by contrast, her Natural History passion acquired a nostalgic splendor)." (425) -- there's a wry nod to the nature of adolescent love in the fact that Van, though obsessed with Ada, never actually shares her central passions. First he's bored with her interest in natural history, then he's so bored with her interest in acting that he looks back fondly on the natural history phase.

"I seem to have always felt, for example, that acting should be focused not on 'characters,' not on 'types' of something or other, not on the fokus-pokus of a social theme, but exclusively on the subjective and unique poetry of the author" (246) -- Reminder Number (n+1) That We Are Reading A Vladimir Nabokov Novel

"In 'real' life we are creatures of chance in an absolute void" (426) -- cf. Lucette's "in a nulliverse, in Rattner's 'menald world' where the only principle is random variation" (416). As before, I'm not sure what we are supposed to make of this idea. There's a recurring idea, I think, that Antiterra is variegated/motley/diverse, perhaps in a "random" way ("the multicolored and evil world into which he was born" [301]). Rattner's "menald world" is presumably Antiterra. Does Terra, by contrast, possess some sort of unity or harmony?

"so that the title of the play might have been The Three Sisters" -- this (technically just "Three Sisters") is in fact the title of the real play on Terra. Much of the rest of this chapter probably makes more sense if you've read the play . . .

"We all know those old wardrobes in old hotels in the Old World subalpine zone." (430) -- but of course!

"the rose sore of Eros alone" (431) -- oh my god, this is a double anagram and a really good phrase in its own right. Picture me as Sweet Bro stricken with awe.

9. The Many-Worlds Interpretation (Part 2, Chapter 10 to Part 3, Chapter 4)

GENERAL REMARKS (Part 2, Ch. 10 to Part 3, Ch. 4)

Where Part 1 ended with a parody climax, Part 2 ends with a real climax -- in fact two real climaxes, the latter of which is suddenly defused in one of this weird book's weirdest moments.

Then, after a lurching fast-forward through many Ada-less years, we get yet another cringe-inducing encounter with desperate Lucette in Part 3 Ch. 3. At this point, Van's refusal to indulge Lucette's desires is beginning to seem almost perverse; it's understandable that he doesn't want to lead her on when he doesn't love her, but that kind of consideration hasn't stopped him from becoming involved with other women. For much of the book Van has come off simply as an amoral aesthete, but as we near the end, he is -- between the blinding of Kim and his conduct with Lucette -- starting to seem like something much worse.

This raises a number of questions: how are we supposed to feel about the coming Van-Ada reunion (which we know is happening because of Ada's annotations to the manuscript) if Van is such a bastard? And why, when Van makes up numerous details (e.g. in the Ardis chapters) that he couldn't possibly have remembered, does he allow himself to come off so badly in the latter parts of the book? If he has no commitment to strict factual accuracy, why not just twist the facts to make himself look better in the Lucette scenes? It would be one thing if Van's guilt over his own mistakes were a major theme of his book (and it may in fact be, in some hidden sense), but Van is curiously silent on these issues, as though expecting the reader to take his bad behavior in stride. Issues like these make this book (to me) both fascinating and intensely creepy in a way that would not be possible if Van's flaws were dealt with more overtly.

NOTES

"He set off at once for Manhattan, eyes blazing, wings whistling." -- Demon's wings again.

"The only personage they had not reckoned with was the old scoundrel usually portrayed as a skeleton or an angel" (433) -- so Antiterrans depict Death roughly the same way Terrans do, despite the differences in religion.

"but [Dan's] death had shown an artistic streak because of its reflecting (as his cousin, not his doctor, instantly perceived) the man’s latterly conceived passion for the paintings, and faked paintings, associated with the name of Hieronymus Bosch." (433) -- Dan, like Aqua, has descended into madness before dying. There is a symmetry to this: each of V&A's parents has a sibling (of the same gender) who has died in this way, and madness is now attested to on both the Durmanov and Veen sides of the family. There is an antisymmetry in the content of the madness -- Aqua dies dreaming of heaven-like Terra, while Dan dies haunted by visions out of Bosch's depiction of hell. (According to Boyd the reference here is to Bosch's triptych The Last Judgment. Demon brings up "that other triptych," the Garden of Earthly Delights; Mason's book contains some discussion of The Garden of Earthly Delights as a broader influence upon Ada.) Have Van or Ada inherited the mental illness that plagued their aunt and uncle? (Who are their putative mother and putative father -- and what's the significant of that?) It's interesting that Nabokov encourages us to think about this possibility just before the bizarre ending of Part 3.

"might still be living with dull little Cordula de Prey . . . but Cordula was not dull and had not been present" (434) -- Van invents a thought process for Demon, then disputes it. The point of contention is odd, since Cordula has come off as pretty "dull" in all of Van's own accounts of her thus far.

"looking forward to another day of increasing happiness (with yet another uncomfortable little edge smoothed away, another raw kink in the past so refashioned as to fit into the new pattern of radiance)" (434) -- a nice statement of Van's broader MO.

"According to Bess (which is 'fiend' in Russian)" (435) -- actually, it means "demon" (e.g. Dostoyevsky's novel "Bésy," usually translated "Demons").

"how incestuously -- c’est le mot -- art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet" (436) -- this remark of Demon's calls back to the peculiar phrase " 'incestuous' (whatever that term means) pleasure" (19) used to describe Demon's enjoyment of his mistress Marina's similarity to his wife Aqua.

"what we have to study [in Bosch], as I was telling your cousins, is the joy of the eye, the feel and taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with him, or the exquisite surprise of an unusual orifice" (437) -- hilarious.

"Jeroen Anthniszoon van Äken" (438) -- the real name of Hieronymus Bosch.

"hell curs, k chertyam sobach’im" (438) -- the Russian is "to hell's hounds" or "to the canine devils" (so roughly the equivalent of "hell curs"). "Canicule" may be relevant here (Ada/hell connection)? The Russian phrase appears two other times in Ada, translated differently each time: "hydrodynamic telephones and miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach'im (Russian 'to the devil')" (23), and "But, added Ada, just before being whisked away and deprived of her crayon (tossed out by Marina k chertyam sobach'im, to hell's hounds" (151).

"Norbert von Miller" (440) -- mentioned earlier by Marina on p. 261.

"Kim who would have bothered Ada again had he not been carried out of his cottage with one eye hanging on a red thread and the other drowned in its blood" (441) -- so Van did blind Kim after all. (That Van actively did this -- that Kim wasn't just a casualty of coincidence like Percy and Rack -- is confirmed at the end of the chapter.) Boyd, in The Place of Consciousness, makes much of the fact that this gruesome detail is mentioned almost in passing and could easily be overlooked in a book with so many lurid incidental details. To fully grasp the nastiness of Van's character, we must pay attention.

"his father had made himself up as Boris Godunov" (443) -- an play by Pushkin titled "Boris Godunov" was adapted by Mussorgsky into an opera, so this calls back to the bad Eugene Onegin adaptation Demon watches in Part 1 Ch. 2.

"My first is a vehicle that twists dead daisies around its spokes; my second is Oldmanhattan slang for 'money' " (444) -- a "van" is certainly a vehicle, though I can't find anything online about "veen" as slang for money.

"My second is also the meeting place of two steep slopes." (444) -- "ravine"?

"Right-hand lower drawer of my practically unused new desk -- which is quite as big as Dad’s, with Sig’s compliments." (444) -- this Freud joke is one of the several details in this passage that remind us of Aqua's suicide.

"Then, standing before a closet mirror, he put the automatic to his head, at the point of the pterion, and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger. Nothing happened -- or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the faked serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind. Anyway, what he held in his right hand was no longer a pistol but a pocket comb which he passed through his hair at the temples." (445) -- moment of instability! In the poem Pale Fire, the phrase "[And here time forked.]" appears shortly before Hazel Shade's suicide. In this passage the idea of forking time is used to illustrate a suicide attempt that Van doesn't go through with. But is that all? The idea of changing to a different time track, in which Van is holding a comb rather than a gun, could just be a colorful way of saying that Van putting down the gun. But given the resonances of madness that have build up in the course of this chapter -- and Van's enduring interest in the nature of time -- this could well be more literal than that. One interpretation is that the rest of the book from hereon out is fantasy, and the novel is an elaborate suicide note.

"There are other possible forkings and continuations that occur to the dream-mind, but these will do." (446) -- elaboration of the earlier moment of instability, and a return of the "dream" motif that taunts the reader throughout Ada. On one level, this could be a simple statement that Van is ready to end the chapter (and Part 2) rather than ramble about further in an effectively inexhaustible trove of relevant memories. If we want to adopt something like the "suicide note" theory, this is instead a statement that other alternative futures -- in which Van does not commit suicide -- can be imagined, but the one he has started to sketch here (in which he blinds Kim, is reunited with Ada, etc.) "will do" -- and indeed it forms the basis of the remainder of the novel.

Time has moved more quickly in each successive section of Ada. Part 1 covers four years and takes up half the book. Part 2 does five years in half that length. Now Part 3 Ch. 1 fast-forwards through seven years of Van's life in a few pages. As a reader, it's easy to forget just how much time is elapsing here, and it can be illuminating to remind oneself of it. For instance, the meeting with Greg and Cordula in Ch. 2 seems like a relatively minor scene, not too different from many of the earlier scenes involving secondary characters -- but it is only the second event (after Marina's death) in seven years that Van has deemed worthy of relating in any detail! The most obvious explanation for this is that Greg and Cordula are people he remembers from his Ardis days, and so they are important to him -- and to the central story of this book -- in a way that many of the events of this period were not. (Moreover, it is Greg who tells Van that Lucette is in town, and thus precipitates his much more significant meeting with her.) I also wonder, though, whether Van's feelings for Cordula aren't deeper than he has let on (which would explain that defensive [?] "Cordula was not dull" earlier).

"Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited." (450) -- another suggestion that Van and/or Ada are destined to end up on Terra ("You’ll live to reach Terra, and come back a wiser and merrier man" [241]).

"She rode it twice. Their brisk nub and its repetition lasted fifteen minutes in all, not five." (457) -- as before with Cordula, the language here is blunt and unromantic.

"Invitation to a Climax" (459) -- this parody of the title of another VN novel invites one to think about "beheading" as a metaphor for male orgasm.

"For a minute he stood behind her, sideways to remembrance and reader (as she, too, was in regard to us and the bar), the crook of his silk-swathed cane lifted in profile almost up to his mouth. . . . a natural masterpiece incomparably finer and younger than the portrait of the similarily [sic] postured lousy jade with her Parisian gueule de guenon on the vile poster painted by that wreck of an artist for Ovenman" (460-1) -- this description of Van standing behind Lucette is meant to remind us of a famous Toulouse-Lautrec poster.

" ' . . I’m like Dolores—when she says she’s "only a picture painted on air." ' 'Never could finish that novel -- much too pretentious.' " (464) -- a joke about Lolita, of course. The phrase "only a picture painted on air" doesn't get any Google hits that aren't related to Ada, incidentally.

"It’s safer and faster by plane" (465) -- as far as I can tell, this is the first mention of planes on Antiterra. (Flight of some sort has always been possible there, however, by means of the "jikkers.") Planes appeared earlier in Aqua's visions of Terra: "she saw giant flying sharks with lateral eyes taking barely one night to carry pilgrims through black ether across an entire continent from dark to shining sea" (21), so this is one indication that (because of the temporal discrepancy between the two worlds) Terran visions can actually foretell what will happen on Antiterra. Several details in this chapter and the next seem to indicate that electricity has recently been unbanned (another noted feature of Terra was that electricity was used freely).

"I have an important, important telephone call to make, but I don’t want you to listen" (466) -- "telephone," not "dorophone," since they're using electricity now.

" 'That’s rich,' said Lucette, 'you’ve gone far enough with me on several occasions, even when I was a kid; your refusing to go further is a mere quibble on your part; and besides, besides you’ve been unfaithful to her with a thousand girls, you dirty cheat!' " (467) -- this all seems pretty undeniable . . . indeed, as I said above, Van's refusal to become involved with Lucette has grown to seem almost perverse given the rest of his personality.

"What was he? Who was he? Why was he? He thought of his slackness, clumsiness, dereliction of spirit." (471) -- both the introspection and the self-criticism in this chapter are utterly atypical of Van, though it wasn't until I encountered them here that I realized just how absent they've been from the preceding 470 pages.

"In his sadder moments, as now, he attributed at least part of his 'success' to his rank, to his wealth, to the numerous donations, which (in a kind of extension of his overtipping the haggard beggars who cleaned rooms, manned lifts, smiled in hotel corridors) he kept showering upon worthwhile institutions and students." (471-2) -- this, for instance, is startling. Until this point, money has very rarely entered Van's thinking (except when e.g. he tells Demon that he isn't financially dependent on him because of his inheritance from Aqua), and his judgments of value have tended to align frictionlessly with the striations of aristocratic rank (e.g. Cordula, whom he doesn't much respect, is "quite a notch below our set" [330], to say nothing of the way he treats various servants, maids, etc). It's hard to imagine the entitled, amoral Van we know agonizing over whether he really deserves his success (if that is indeed what is happening here).

10. Rolling in the Deep (Part 3, Chapters 5-8)

GENERAL REMARKS (Part 3, Chs. 5-8)

Interviewer: There seem to be similarities in the rhythm and tone of Speak, Memory and Ada, and in the way you and Van retrieve the past in images. Do you both work along similar lines?

Nabokov: The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind. It is a familiar embarrassment that I face with very faint qualms, particularly since I am not really aware of any special similarities -- just as one is not aware of sharing mannerisms with a detestable kinsman. I loathe Van Veen.

(Source: 1969 interview with Time magazine)

Things are starting to become clear -- at least in a sense.

Lucette's death in Part 3 Ch. 5 is arguably the central scene of the book, and it rearranges our conception of everything around it. Lucette begins to seem more important than she had originally seemed (in this book entitled "Ada" -- not "The Veens," which was one of Nabokov's working titles). There is a reality to her plight and Van's shame in that chapter that is lacking in many of the Ada scenes, particularly in the unconvincing and artificial reunion with Ada that follows in Part 3 Ch. 8. Moreover, much of the book's thematic skeleton seems to have radiated outward from Lucette's death rather than from anything having to do with Ada.

Consider, for instance, the influence of Lucette's watery death on Part 1 Chapter 3, in which Van first begins to explicitly lay out the nature of Antiterra. Van's putative mother, really his aunt (just as Lucette is merely a half-sister), named Aqua, encounters a series of comedically negligent psychologists and kills herself by taking an overdose of pills. In Aqua's vision of Terra, people freely use electricity, but on Antiterra electricity is banned, and the only consequence that is mentioned with any frequency over the course of the book is the banning of telephones -- such as the electric telephone on which Van has his shameful conversation with Lucette just before her death. (They have been replaced with devices that use water.) The chapter opens with the sentence:

"The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of 'Terra,' are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans -- and not to grave men or gravemen." (17)

Electricity is banned (which pretty much means "telephones are banned") because of "the L disaster" -- and now we can be pretty sure what that "L" really stands for! The book is addressed to "lemans" (lovers) rather than "gravemen": Van is saying that he plans to write about the love between him and Ada, not the grave matter of Lucette's death. But as we know, Van can't seem to keep either death or Lucette from intruding into his chronicle. By Part 3 the original plan seems to have derailed, and in Part 3 Ch. 5 the book reaches its climax in, yes, a "treatment at length" of "the details of the L disaster."

"Gravemen" brings Hamlet to mind, which in turn brings to mind Van's comparison of Lucette to Ophelia. Van's refusal to sleep with Lucette is indeed kind of Hamlet-like. Van explains his behavior not as assumed madness but as a supposed concern for Lucette's own well-being. But this concern clashes with the amoral and sexually uninhibited nature of the Van Veen we have known so far, and ends up seeming as strange as Hamlet's behavior. One could say that Van's interactions with Ada are over-analyzed, and his interactions with Lucette are under-analyzed. My hunch is that the latter are more true to life, and that Van's relentless "concern" for Lucette makes more sense in some real context which he does not deign to give us, instead turning away from Lucette again and again to focus on Ada.

Compared to the intensity and reality of the Tobakoff chapter, the scenes with Ada that close out Part 3 are thin, dull, and artificial. The sense of unreality is heightened by the mentions of "life forking" and Van's fake death. Even by the rather unreal standards set up in earlier V&A scenes, these interactions feel out-of-character: Ada is saddled with some very un-Ada-esque lines ("The poor, poor little man! How dare you sneer?" [530]), while Van's lines are jarringly corny ("Castle True, Castle Bright! Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!" [ibid]). Plausibility -- even plausibility of Van Veen's peculiar sort -- is fraying at the seams; Van's heart just doesn't seem to be in this anymore. The book is almost over, and we know that Van and Ada will (at last!) be reunited by the end . . . but with so little of the book left, there is no hope that this reunion will be a romantic triumph rather than a shambling, perfunctory stumble across the finish line.

Given the significance of telephones in Ada, I'm inclined to think that Van's phone conversation with Lucette might be the very center of the book:

"I'm not alone" -- the lie that is at the root of all of Van's shame? It's this kind of thinking that leads me to my favorite theory of Ada: that Van only had one sister, who was basically Lucette. Ada Veen, Van's perfect double, is an invention made to justify statements like that "I'm not alone," when in reality Van is alone with only his shame over Lucette's death as company. ("Lucette" comes from "Lucile," the name of Chateaubriand's beloved sister. "Ada" is a palindrome, a mathematical contrivance, a mere mirror-flipping of the Vs in "Van Veen" -- and born from Van's torment ["of hell"].)

NOTES

"Professor Counterstone" (474) -- play on "Antiterra" (stone/earth).

"His gaze, traveling on, tripped over Dr. Ivan Veen and pulled up at the next name. What constricted his heart? Why did he pass his tongue over his thick lips? Empty formulas befitting the solemn novelists of former days who thought they could explain everything." (475) -- an interesting twist on the "old novels" motif. Ada as a whole presents itself as a man's self-conscious attempt to cram his life story into the conventions of "old novels," and now here is a detail that he feels he can't fit into the mold.

"Van interrupted Lucette’s nervous patter by asking her if her bath taps bore the same inscriptions as his: Hot Domestic, Cold Salt. Yes, she cried, Old Salt, Old Salzman, Ardent Chambermaid, Comatose Captain!" (477) -- huh?

"To most of the Tobakoff’s first-class passengers the afternoon of June 4, 1901, in the Atlantic, on the meridian of Iceland and the latitude of Ardis, seemed little conducive to open-air frolics: the fervor of its cobalt sky kept being cut by glacial gusts" (477) -- could be a reflection of the Antiterran climate getting colder at the latitude of Ardis. Then again, it could just be a cold day.

"Spring in Fialta and a torrid May on Minataor, the famous artificial island, had given a nectarine hue to her limbs" (477) -- "Spring in Fialta" is the title of a famous Nabokov story. Note also "Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up" (477).

"Van peeled off his jersey and stayed on for a while, brooding, fingering the little green-gemmed case with five Rosepetal cigarettes, trying to enjoy the heat of the platinum sun in its aura of “film-color” but only managing to fan, with every shiver and heave of the ship, the fire of evil temptation." (482) -- temptation here is "evil" . . . strange how normally dissolute Van hews to something like a moral principle in this one case, with no clear motivation and with disastrous consequences. Why?

"He discovered an insidious omission in his galleys where an entire line was wanting, with the vitiated paragraph looking, however, quite plausible -- to an automatic reader -- since the truncated end of one sentence, and the lower-case beginning of the other, now adjacent, fitted to form a syntactically correct passage" (484) -- since the book we are reading is an incompletely edited manuscript, the suggestion seems to be that this sort of insidious error might also be present in it. Maddening!

"had he not recollected (a recollection confirmed by his typescript) that at this point should have come a rather apt, all things considered, quotation: Insiste, anime meus, et adtende fortiter (courage, my soul and press on strongly)." (484) -- from Augustine's Confessions. Seems to underscore how out-of-character Van's stoicism is, since Van and Augustine are normally polar opposites in many respects (e.g. self-esteem).

"It’s crowded and gay down there, with a masturbating jazzband." (484) -- amusing nod to the origins of the word "jazz."

"As he gloomily looked at her thin bare shoulders, so mobile and tensile that one wondered if she could not cross them in front of her like stylized angel wings" (485) -- interesting parallel to Demon's wings. Remember that Lucette, unlike Van and Ada, doesn't have "demon blood."

"He could describe her dress only as struthious (if there existed copper-curled ostriches)" (486) -- struthious: "of or relating to the ostriches and related birds." You learn something new every day.

"Dolores, a dancing girl (lifted from Osberg’s novella, as was to be proved in the ensuing lawsuit)" (488) -- recall that on Antiterra, Osberg (anagram of Borges) is the author of a book that resembles Lolita.

One can probably a lot of interpretive mileage out of "Don Juan's Last Fling," the movie that Van and Lucette watch. Low-hanging fruit: is Van (rhymes with Don) himself sort of a combination of Don Juan and Don Quixote, like the protagonist of DJLF?

"In a series of sixty-year-old actions which now I can grind into extinction only by working on a succession of words until the rhythm is right, I, Van, retired to my bathroom, shut the door (it swung open at once, but then closed of its own accord)and using a temporary expedient less far-fetched than that hit upon by Father Sergius (who chops off the wrong member in Count Tolstoy’s famous anecdote), vigorously got rid of the prurient pressure as he had done the last time seventeen years ago." (490) -- both first and third person appear here in the same sentence, perhaps a sign of Van's state of agitation while writing this passage. I'm not sure what "succession of words" he's referring to. Is there a rhyme in this sentence or somewhere in the surrounding passages?

"He welcomed the thought which suddenly seemed so absolutely true, and new, and as lividly real as the slowly widening gap of the sitting room’s doorway, namely, that on the morrow (which was at least, and at best, seventy years away) he would explain to Lucette, as a philosopher and another girl’s brother, that he knew how agonizing and how absurd it was to put all one’s spiritual fortune on one physical fancy and that his plight closely resembled hers, but that he managed, after all, to live, to work, and not pine away because he refused to wreck her life with a brief affair and because Ada was still a child." (491) -- the similarity of Van and Lucette's situations is interesting. As an excuse for not becoming involved with Lucette, this is pretty transparently feeble, since Van is still so clearly invested in getting back together with Ada.

"At that point the surface of logic began to be affected by a ripple of sleep, but he sprang back into full consciousness at the sound of the telephone." (491) -- if Van invented Antiterra, then it's possible that stye presence of telephones (not dorophones!) at several important moments late in the book, such as this one, gave Van the idea that telephones should be banned in the earlier parts of the story. (Remember that telephones were banned on account of something called "the L disaster." It's now becoming quite clear what that "L" probably stands for.)

"No doubt he was morally right in using the first pretext at hand to keep her away from his bed; but he also knew, as a gentleman and an artist, that the lump of words he brought up was trite and cruel, and it was only because she could not accept him as being either, that she believed him: 'Mozhno pridti teper’ (can I come now)?' asked Lucette. 'Ya ne odin (I’m not alone),' answered Van." (491) -- seems like a crucial moment, perhaps the seed of the many earlier descriptions of Van and Ada's unique similarity, symmetry, etc. This shameful statement can perhaps be vindicated if Van is somehow always not alone, because of the very existence of his double/twin/soul mate.

"Dimanche. Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Tout le monde pue. Ma belle-mère avale son râtelier. Sa petite chienne" (493) -- Darkbloom: "Sunday. Lunch on thé grass. Everybody sticks. My mother-in-law swallows her dentures. Her little bitch, etc. After which, etc. (see p. 375, a painter's diary Lucette has been reading)" [my copy says 375, which by our pagination here should be around 479-80, but I'm not sure if that's right?]

"Although Lucette had never died before—no, dived before, Violet" (493) -- "Violet" appears to be Van's typist. Their interactions have been typed verbatim in this passage -- why?

"As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes—telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression—that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude." (494) -- good sentence; cf. Van's "I'm not alone." Interesting and unnerving that Van has made up the experiences related here, since he can't possibly know Lucette's actual final thoughts.

"She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an unanalyzable brook" (494) -- reference to the brook scene in Part 1 Ch. 23. Of course the doll swept away by the current foreshadows the means of Lucette's death. Boyd, who seems to have taken that "unanalyzable" as a challenge, devotes much of The Place of Consciousness to the doll scene and its echoes.

"As a psychologist, I know the unsoundness of speculations as to whether Ophelia would not have drowned herself after all, without the help of a treacherous sliver, even if she had married her Voltemand." (497) -- the replacement of Hamlet by Voltemand (an ambassador and very minor character in Hamlet) is a reference to Van's use of Voltemand as a pseudonym.

"In other more deeply moral worlds than this pellet of muck, there might exist restraints, principles, transcendental consolations, and even a certain pride in making happy someone one does not really love; but on this planet Lucettes are doomed." (498) -- important for the Terra/Antiterra divide.

"Cher ami [etc.]" (499) -- the Darkbloom notes translate Cordula's entire letter (which is in French -- why?): "Dear friend, my husband and I, were deeply upset by the frightful news. It was to me - and this I'll always remember - that practically on the eve of her death the poor girl addressed herself to arrange things on the Tobakoff, which is always crowded and which from now on I'll never take again, slightly out of superstition and very much out of sympathy for gentle, tender Lucette. I had been so happy to do all I could, as somebody had told me that you would be there too. Actually, she said so herself; she seemed so joyful to spend a few days on the upper deck with her dear cousin! The psychology of suicide is a mystery that no scientist can explain. I have never shed so many tears, it almost makes me drop my pen. We return to Malbrook around mid-August. Yours ever." There is a very Nabokovian twist to the statement "the psychology of suicide is a mystery that no scientist can explain" -- it sounds like a banal commonplace at first, but in fact Van's inability to foresee Lucette's suicide is a major source of shame.

"[This letter] would not have been written at all if your last line, your cry of unhappiness, were not my cry of triumph." (500) -- the "last line" in question is "I cannot express, dear Van, how unhappy I am, the more so as we never learned in the arbors of Ardis that such unhappiness could exist." Why is this a "triumph" for Van? Simply because it is a restatement of the supposed Edenic innocence of Ardis?

"Artistically, and ardisiacally, the best moment is one of the last" (500) -- cf. the much more opaque "esthetically, ecstatically, Estotially speaking" (30).

"And o’er the summits of the Tacit / He, banned from Paradise, flew on: / Beneath him, like a brilliant’s facet, / Mount Peck with snows eternal shone." (502) -- Darkbloom: "parody of four lines in Lermontov's The Demon."

No clue what to make of the strange "Andrey Vaynlender" letter.

"Mont Roux" (508) -- a version of Montreux, the region of Switzerland where Nabokov lived while writing this novel. "Roux" means red, so this might be a Lucette reference?

"Vrubel’s wonderful picture of Father, those demented diamonds staring at me, painted into me." (509) -- refers to Vrubel's paintings of the titular figure from Lermontov's poem "Demon." (See e.g. "Demon Seated in a Garden.".) "Demented" resonates with the early identification of "Demon" as "a form of Demian or Dementius" (4).

"and on the opposite shore of Leman, Leman meaning Lover, loomed the crest of Sex (Scex) Noir, Black Rock." (509) -- cf. the first sentence of Part 1 Ch. 3: "The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of 'Terra,' are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans -- and not to grave men or gravemen." (17)

"A dead and dry hummingbird moth lay on the window ledge of the lavatory. Thank goodness, symbols did not exist either in dreams or in the life in between." (510) -- cf. "You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!" (530)

"His reply was inept, and the whole episode had a faint paramnesic tang—and next instant Van was shot dead from behind (such things happen, some tourists are very unbalanced) and stepped into his next phase of existence." (510) -- what the fuck? Perhaps Van is simply contending, in jest, that another meeting with Ada could not happen except in heaven and thus that he must be dead. But this is also another intimation of unreality, or potential reality, like the mention of "life forking" at the end of Part 2 and at the end of this chapter.

"cygneous" (511) -- "curved like the neck of a swan." Cf. Lucette's "struthious" dress.

"As Andrey’s crumpled forlorn face came closer, one could distinguish various wartlets and lumps, none of them, however, placed in the one-sided jaunty position of his kid sister’s naric codicil." (513) -- "naric": "of or relating to the nares [the pair of openings of the nose or nasal cavity]." So a "naric codicil" would be a sort of "supplement" to the nasal openings.

"During that dismal dinner (enlivened only by the sharlott and five bottles of Moët, out of which Van consumed more than three) he avoided looking at that part of Ada which is called “the face”—a vivid, divine, mysteriously shocking part, which, in that essential form, is rarely met with among human beings (pasty and warty marks do not count)." (516) -- good sentence.

"(A pause.)" (517) -- Darkbloom: "This and the whole conversation parody Chekhov's mannerisms."

"in my works, I try not to ‘explain’ anything, I merely describe." (519) -- perhaps applicable to Ada itself, Van's final "work."

"and then he pounced upon her new, young, divine, Japanese neck which he had been coveting like a veritable Jupiter Olorinus throughout the evening." (520) -- Darkbloom: "Olorinus: from Lat. olor, swan (Leda's lover)."

"Somebody said, wheeling a table nearby: “It’s one of the Vane sisters,” and he awoke murmuring with professional appreciation the oneiric word-play combining his name and surname" (521) -- reference to "The Vane Sisters," a famous Nabokov story in which the first letters of the words in the final paragraph carry an acrostic message from the beyond.

"Rufomonticulus" (522) -- presumably the Latin name of Mont Roux.

"Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon." (523) -- cool sentence.

" 'Ne ricane pas!' exclaimed Ada. 'The poor, poor little man! How dare you sneer?' " (530) -- this whole exchange, though presented as a kind of tragic culmination of Van-Ada exchanges (e.g. with the recapitulation of the "Qui me rendra" stuff), seems oddly out-of-character: Van's lines are self-parodically Romantic while Ada's are unusually simple and banal.

"As had been peculiar to his nature even in the days of his youth, Van was apt to relieve a passion of anger and disappointment by means of bombastic and arcane utterances which hurt like a jagged fingernail caught in satin, the lining of Hell." (530) -- good sentence!

" 'Castle True, Castle Bright!' he now cried, 'Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!' " (531) -- the Tree might be the Shattal Tree, or perhaps the tree that Ada stands with her back to in Part 1 Ch. 39 (p. 272), and which later forms an integral part of the agonizing image of her that Van carries away with him when he leaves Ardis in 1888. The Moth could be one of the various moths Ada enthuses about at Ardis in 1884, or the dead moth mentioned earlier in this chapter?

"Ardis the First, Ardis the Second, Tanned Man in a Hat, and now Mount Russet" (530) -- V&A's two summers in Ardis (1884 and 1888), their time in Manhattan, and now their rendezvous in Mont Roux.

"Ach, perestagne!" (530) -- intentionally or not, this provides a new variant: "Ach, perestagne" replaces "Et ma montagne" (138).

"Life forked and reforked." (531) -- this again.

11. And Much, Much More (Part 4 to Part 5, Chapter 6)

GENERAL REMARKS (Part 4 to Part 5, Ch. 6)

If Van Veen were to record a hip-hop album -- under the name "Mascodegama," of course -- it would be titled "The Texture of Rhyme." Possible subject matter: being the youngest Venutian, blinding Kim Beauharnais, the important difference between his own sick flow and the non-passage of Pure Time . . .

So now we've come to the end. There is all kinds of weird stuff going on Part 4 and Part 5. First we have Van's philosophical treatise (which espouses views very close to Nabokov's own and seems to have been intended as an attempt at serious philosophical writing, however silly much of it may strike me and various other readers). Then we have Part 6: a bizarre, at times rapturous but just as often petty and underwhelming account of Van and Ada's last years together.

What should we make of the fact that, faced with decades of romantic satisfaction to describe, Van tells us about the bodily annoyances of old age and the charms of his cute typist (and the "gipsy girl" next door)? Is he simply asserting that his and Ada's connection is ineffable, mystical, impossible to explain to non-Vaniadans? (Whereof Van cannot speak, thereof he must be silent? Ada's final line in Part 4 supports this interpretation, if we take the entirety of Part 5 to be the completion of her sentence "It is like -- ": Vaniadan experience is as ineffable as Time.) Or is Van giving up, pencilling in the very crudest sketch of a "happily ever after" ending that he knows is totally unconvincing? His suggestion that he has regained the earliest days of Ardis -- "Their life together responded antiphonally to their first summer in 1884" (574) -- is belied by the formal design of the novel, as Part 5 is the shortest of the Parts, the most sparing with detail. Time's arrow remains undefeated. How can he be so vague when describing recent months when he was so fantastically precise about stuff that happened when he was 14? Is this how memory really works? Surely not.

We are adrift. What on (anti-)earth did we just read? The hilarious ending, in which Van (?) imagines a blurb that sells Ada as a work of grand entertainment, simply underscores how far we are from anything resembling an ordinary novel. The text seems to be Van's attempt to squeeze his life story into the novel format (specifically, into the form of a big, dramatic Russian classic like Anna Karenina). There are numerous indications that he is willing to go to great lengths of invention. It is pretty much impossible to take the story straight; it continually pokes and prods the reader with its own implausibility, instability, inconsistency ("Abraham Milton / Milton Abraham / Lincoln"). In some tricky novels there is a clear "standard model" from which one can defiantly deviate (e.g., in Pale Fire, the various "Shade invented Kinbote or vice versa" theories are replacements for the basic interpretation of the book that any ordinary reader comes to, in which S and K are real, distinct people). Ada, by contrast, has no stable top layer -- and perhaps no bottom. As readers we have to figure out what in Van's story is real and what is invented. But to do so, we must speculate about the psychology of the "real Van" -- and that psychology will depend on our opinions about what is real and what is invented!

An ideal start for someone contemplating these problems is David Auerbach's blog post "Kinbote Triumphant in Hell: The Riddle of Nabokov’s Ada." It's where I've gotten a lot of my own ideas about the book, like the significance of Lucette's last call. I'll just quote a few paragraphs here:

I won’t attempt to figure out precisely what is real and what is not in the book because I don’t think I stand much of a chance, but I will make some broad guesses. I am inclined to be extremely skeptical of the mostly unchronicled decades of happiness with Ada, as well as of the success of Van’s book. The happier the events, the more dubious I am. The tragic events–Lucette’s death being the central one–most likely hold greater reality. Ada’s intrusions throughout, but especially at the end of the book, seem more likely to be a voice within Van, not an actual person. I think it highly unlikely that Van and Ada are ever happily reunited. Nabokov did not intend to redeem Van Veen through suffering, but particularly in the later novels, Nabokov’s rotten characters do tend to be spared any real happiness. I strongly suspect that to be the case here. The idyllic, hermetic, and very long Part 1 is a pastiche or a parody of the 19th century Russian novel. Inverting Tolstoy’s maxim turns it into a joke. Hence from the beginning Van is protecting himself and not being straight, and the offputting nature of the whole text is a reflection of Van’s solipsism. He is building a sealed coffin for himself that he intends no one to penetrate. He will avoid unpleasantness as much as possible, even at the cost of making himself unpleasant. With each subsequent section things get more miserable, the length gets shorter, and different strategies of avoidance are invoked. The late years of happiness with Ada are more likely years of self-torture, any success in love or life a delusion on Van’s part. By Part 4, he has abandoned plot in favor of mere allusions to wish-fulfillment and philosophical self-indulgence. At his supposed happiest he is least able to describe anything that happened to him.

(Auerbach ends up speculating that the text might actually have been written by Andrey Vinelander, which strikes me as almost uniquely unlikely . . . )

Ada is my favorite Nabokov novel, and probably tied for my favorite novel overall. In the end, it's one of the darkest and creepiest novels I've ever read, precisely because of the bottomlessness of its potential horror. Other books tell us about nasty characters and nasty situations; this one merely shows us a bunch of fanciful wishful thinking and leaves us to guess the real situation from which it is as escape (with plenty of suggestive references to hell, in case we need some general pointers). It is a closed system, standing securely upon its own head, self-contained, self-referential, self-possessed. There is a risk in this. The book is purely itself, and Van is purely himself, from the first page to the last. It does not provide a convenient ledge on which the author and reader can congregate and snicker at the far-off characters. It's written in third person (because that's how Van wrote it); there is no voice there untouched by Van's, no world untainted by Antiterra. As Auerbach puts it:

. . . we don’t see anything pushing back against Van Veen. All opposing forces tend to dissolve away sooner or later. The marshaling of fantasy to defy reality becomes a structuring principle of the book even to the point of alienating readers from it, lest they crack open Van’s coffin and discover his secrets. Where there is little reality, there is little sympathy to be had, hence the uninvolving nature of so many of the characters, not least Van himself. While Van puts up a good front to a point, ultimately he knows he’s not fooling anyone with his “happy family chronicle.” What starts off in Part 5 as the joyous introduction ends with solipsistic torment in a self-fashioned hell. And what better analogy for a solipsistic world than incest?

Or, as Martin Amis puts it, under the impression that he is criticizing the book rather than pointing out one of its design features:

And then, too, with Ada, there is something altogether alien – a sense of monstrous entitlement, of unbridled, head-in-air seigneurism. Morally, this is the world for which the twisted Humbert thirsts: a world where "nothing matters", and "everything is allowed".

But I love the closed system of Ada because it feels real, in the sense that it feels psychologically authentic. People really do create great systems of private associations like this; people really do neurotically rearrange and sanitize their memories like this. We all have it within us to fetishize the past like this, to take a few key moments and make of them an Ardis that exerts a grotesque influence on our lives -- one which ends up having less and less to do with real arbors or Adas. And when we do this it is not simple or straightforward; it is not pleasant to read about; it is the kind of convoluted, obsessive, opaque, obscure personal mythology that Auerbach calls "uninviting" and that we find all throughout Ada.

And of course the book is gorgeously written -- in a way that is often obscure but never feels obscurantist. I remember one reviewer saying that they enjoyed every sentence in Ada, even the ones they didn't understand; this seems to apply more generally to every aspect of the book. Even when I have no clue what he's doing, I never feel like Nabokov is just trying to fuck with me. Every element of the closed system is authentic, on the unique terms of that system.

The final words of the book are a characteristically brilliant flourish: Nabokov finishes off his hilarious parody of ad copy by repurposing an advertising cliche -- "and much, much more" -- so as to lend it a new meaning that is stunning, moving, and even terrifying in a sort of Lovecraft way. How many strange and unsettling details this book contains! How many the reader must undoubtedly have missed! (The blurb encourages the reader to go back and re-read.) This book teems. "And much, much more" -- too much! Too much!

To remind us that there's always (much, much) more to discover, I'll let the master have the final word -- and in the process claim "loathed" Van Veen as one of his "favorites" (?):

I wonder if there is really so much doom and "frustration" in my fiction? Humbert is frustrated, that’s obvious; some of my other villains are frustrated; police states are horribly frustrated in my novels and stories; but my favorite creatures, my resplendent characters -- in The Gift, in Invitation to a Beheading, in Ada, in Glory, et cetera– are victors in the long run. In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel -- and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.

(Nabokov, interviewed for Bayerischer Rundfunk, 1971)

(Okay, okay. One last thing from me. The book opens with the following note: "With the exception of Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Oranger, a few incidental figures, and some non-American citizens, all the persons mentioned by name in this book are dead. [Ed.]" Who are these "non-American citizens"? The phrasing seems to imply that they are not "incidental figures," yet I can't think of any characters of any importance, besides the Orangers, who might have outlived the Veens.)

NOTES

"novo-sapiens" (536) -- seems like it should be "novus-sapiens," but I guess Nabokov/Van wanted the similarity in sound.

"Man, in that sense, will never die, because there may never be a taxonomical point in his evolutionary progress that could be determined as the last stage of man in the cline turning him into Neohomo, or some horrible, throbbing slime." (536) -- reminiscent of the speculations about quasi-mystical future forms of mankind that were popular in science fiction at the time (e.g. in Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End").

"One can be a lover of Space and its possibilities: take, for example, speed, the smoothness and sword-swish of speed; the aquiline glory of ruling velocity; the joy cry of the curve; and one can be an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration. I delight sensually in Time, in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum." (537) -- nice passage.

"Aurelius Augustinus" (537) -- Saint Augustine, whose discussions of the conscious experience of time are similar to Van's.

"The direction of Time, the ardis of Time, one-way Time, here is something that looks useful to me one moment, but dwindles the next to the level of an illusion obscurely related to the mysteries of growth and gravitation." (538) -- and yet the directionality of time has been one of the main themes of the whole book. Van gives up the game when he uses the word "ardis." Maybe he doesn't intend irreversibility to fall within the scope of this treatise, but when that treatise is written as an account of his journey toward his final and lasting reunion with Ada, surely irreversibility can't be truly irrelevant . . . ?

"The irreversibility of Time (which is not heading anywhere in the first place) is a very parochial affair: had our organs and orgitrons not been asymmetrical, our view of Time might have been amphitheatric and altogether grand, like ragged night and jagged mountains around a small, twinkling, satisfied hamlet." (538-9) -- or, in cross-section, something like a "V" shape.

"But beware, anime meus, of the marcel wave of fashionable art; avoid the Proustian bed and the assassin pun (itself a suicide -- as those who know their Verlaine will note)." (540) -- a flurry of spurious references (Augustine, Proust, Procrustes, Verlaine) that seems intended to warn by example: puns and allusions will get you nowhere in this business, no matter how fun they are. Darkbloom: "assassin pun: a pun on pointe assassine (from a poem by Verlaine)."

"We, poor Spatians, are better adapted, in our three-dimensional Lacrimaval" (541) -- for "Lacrimaval" Google only turns up full text versions of Ada. Presumably it's a version of "Vale of Tears."

" 'Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in the ears,' says John Shade, a modern poet, as quoted by an invented philosopher ('Martin Gardiner') in The Ambidextrous Universe, page 165." (542) -- an Antiterran reversal of the real fact that, on Terra, Martin Gardner (not "Gardiner" as in the text) quoted John Shade in his book The Ambidextrous Universe. The appearance of John Shade (invented poet from Pale Fire) as a real person in Antiterra is Nabokovian fan service along the same lines as Professor Pnin's cameo appearance at at the university in Pale Fire.

"Minkowski" (542) -- mathematician who contributed to special relativity and first introduced the modern/relativistic version of four-dimensional space-time.

"At this point, I suspect, I should say something about my attitude to 'Relativity.' It is not sympathetic. What many cosmogonists tend to accept as an objective truth is really the flaw inherent in mathematics which parades as truth." (543) -- astonishingly, Nabokov himself actually believed this. ("While not having much physics, I reject Einstein's slick formulae; but then one need not know theology to be an atheist." [1968 BBC interview]) Since he loved mimicry and other trickery in biology, it's surprising that he didn't see the same appeal in the way that the strangeness of relativistic space-time hides behind a nicely intuitive Newtonian veil until one gets close to light speed.

"Alice in the Camera Obscura" (547) -- seems to be a mixture of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Camera Obscura," the original title of the Nabokov novel usually called "Laughter in the Dark." Also an allusion to Kim taking pictures of Ada? Another example of shifting Antiterran names, since on p. 53 the Antiterran equivalent of Carroll's book was "Palace in Wonderland." (See also "Ada in Wonderland" [127], "Ada's Adventures in Adaland" [568] -- which leads us to conclude that Van is working from something like the actual earthly title, since where else could he have gotten that "Adventures" from?)

"Dr. Froid of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu" (549) -- compare to this from Ch. 3: "A Dr Froid, one of the administerial centaurs, who may have been an émigré brother with a passport-changed name of the Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu in the Ardennes" (27).

"Now blows the wind of the Present at the top of the Past -- at the top of the passes I have been proud to reach in my life, the Umbrail, the Fluela, the Furka, of my clearest consciousness!" (549) -- as one might expect from context, these are all passes in Switzerland.

"Here they are, the two rocky ruin-crowned hills that I have retained for seventeen years in my mind with decalcomaniac romantic vividness" (551) -- "Decalcomania, from the French décalcomanie, is a decorative technique by which engravings and prints may be transferred to pottery or other materials. Today the shortened version is 'Decal'. " (Wikipedia)

"He transmitted by the new 'instantogram,' flashed to the Geneva airport, a message ending in the last word of her 1905 cable" (552) -- unless I'm missing something, the word is "rainbows"? (508)

"Now it so happened that she had never -- never, at least, in adult life -- spoken to him by phone; hence the phone had preserved the very essence, the bright vibration, of her vocal cords, the little 'leap' in her larynx, the laugh clinging to the contour of the phrase, as if afraid in girlish glee to slip off the quick words it rode." (555) -- another significant telephone call, and another possible source for the banning of telephones -- although this one isn't connected with the "L disaster" in any way I can discern, and the psychological motivation for inventing a ban on telephones would be less clear here.

"lucubratiuncula" (559) -- "The act of working by night; lucubration, nocturnal study, night work." (Wiktionary). Apparently it's a diminutive of another Latin word meaning the same thing? "A little night work"?

" 'To be' means to know one 'has been.' 'Not to be' implies the only 'new' kind of (sham) time: the future. I dismiss it. Life, love, libraries, have no future." (559) -- more Hamlet. Also, I wonder what Van's denial of the existence of the future (expressed here and earlier) has to do with the themes of the novel? Perhaps nothing: at various points in Parts 4 (like the irreversibility comments mentioned above), Van dismisses as irrelevant certain issues that are very relevant to the novel's story, as though Nabokov is trying to tell us that we're supposed to read this as an actual, serious philosophical treatise rather than a thinly veiled expression of personal anxieties. But then it's hard not to deem it significant that these thoughts about the future come right after Ada's departure . . .

"But the future remains aloof from our fancies and feelings. At every moment it is an infinity of branching possibilities." (560-1) -- more of the "forking" motif, though it's not clear to me what this claim has to do with Van's deadpan (though presumably? non-literal) descriptions of branching possibilities earlier in the book.

" 'I told him to turn,' she said, 'somewhere near Morzhey ('morses' or 'walruses,' a Russian pun on 'Morges' -- maybe a mermaid’s message). And you slept, you could sleep!' " (562) -- Darkbloom, uncharacteristically, points out something that should already be clear: "mermaid: allusion to Lucette." Boyd, in The Place of Consciousness, goes wild with this idea and claims that Lucette, acting from beyond the grave, actually told Ada to turn back. He would later espouse an analogous theory of Pale Fire. Yes, according to Brian Boyd that is the secret of both these books: when women commit suicide they come back as ghosts who send the protagonists helpful messages. I'm sorry, but I don't exactly find this kind of thing adds much to the books . . .

"My aim was to compose a kind of novella in the form of a treatise on the Texture of Time, an investigation of its veily substance, with illustrative metaphors gradually increasing, very gradually building up a logical love story, going from past to present, blossoming as a concrete story, and just as gradually reversing analogies and disintegrating again into bland abstraction." (563) -- I might be reckoning this wrong, but my impression is that Part 4 begins the process of "disintegrating again into bland abstraction" after Ada leaves, and the only thing that prevents Van's original plan from running to completion is the eucatastrophic final reunion.

"I wonder if the attempt to discover those things is worth the stained glass. We can know the time, we can know a time. We can never know Time. Our senses are simply not meant to perceive it. It is like -- " (563) -- what is the significance of this? Is Ada completing the "reversal of analogies" by supplying her own analogy, hence completing Van's original plan after all (and thus reconfirming the fundamental unity between Van and Ada)? Is Nabokov inviting us to consider the whole of the following Part 5 as an account of something unknowable? ("It is like [Part 5]"? Or perhaps "it is like [the many years skipped between Parts 4 and 5]"?) IIRC, Look At The Harlequins! ends, with a dash, in the middle of a sentence of dialogue; I wonder if the same is true of some of the Nabokov novels or stories I haven't read.

"This Part Five is not meant as an epilogue; it is the true introduction of my ninety-seven percent true, and three percent likely, Ada or Ardor, a family chronicle." (567) -- interesting choice of proportions. Note how the notion of Part 5 as the "true introduction" works as an instance of the time-reversal motif, and also as a nod to Nabokov's idea that books can only be truly appreciated upon re-reading. Having reached the final Part of Ada or Ardor, the reader is finally ready to be "introduced" to it.

" 'matches the highest forms of human thought—pure mathematics & decipherment' (unpublished ad)." (567) -- though diminished by that "(unpublished ad)," this is an uncharacteristically -- and pleasingly -- positive reference to the pleasures of mathematics, about which Nabokov otherwise had little good to say.

"a spoonful of sodium bicarbonate dissolved in water that was sure to release three or four belches as big as the speech balloons in the “funnies” of his boyhood" (570) -- perhaps meant to recall "the Sunday supplement of a newspaper that had just begun to feature on its funnies page the now long defunct Goodnight Kids, Nicky and Pimpernella (sweet siblings who shared a narrow bed)" (5-6). There are a number of references in Part 5 to the very early sections of the book. The beginning and the end are one: the tips of the "V" or "A."

"the bedside light (a gurgling new surrogate -- real lammer having been forbidden again by 1930)" (572) -- another callback to the beginning: " the extremely elaborate and still very expensive hydrodynamic telephones and miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach'im (Russian 'to the devil') with the banning of an unmentionable "lammer." (There Darkbloom glosses "lammer" as "allusion to electricity.") The re-banning of electricity is produces an A-D-A. (And now that the two significant telephones calls had passed, what purpose could it serve on Antiterra / in Van's story?)

"Their life together responded antiphonally to their first summer in 1884" (574) -- confirms what had been implicitly made clear.

"An overwhelming tenderness impelled him to kneel suddenly at her feet in dramatic yet utterly sincere attitudes, puzzling to anyone who might enter with a vacuum cleaner." (574) -- another instance of overly romantic corniness. These seem to cluster near the end of the book; it's hard to imagine young Van doing anything like this, even in his imagination.

"She was (and still is -- ten years later) an enchanting English blonde with doll eyes, a velvet carnation and a tweed-cupped little rump […..]" (576) -- it's not clear to me whether the editor has omitted something or is merely expressing, through indicated silence, his offense at this comment about his wife.

"she had supported for ten years her mother’s children from two marriages, besides laying aside [something]" (576) -- but apparently Ronald Oranger doesn't want us to know what. (What does this mean? Am I just being dense?)

"this strange, friendless, rather repulsive nonagenarian (cries of “no, no!” in lectorial, sororial, editorial brackets)." (577) -- strange: who did write this? And hasn't it been quite a long time since we saw a note from Ada? (If I'm not mistaken it was back in Part 2 Ch. 2, p. 338, about Letters From Terra: "I disagree, it’s a nice, nice little book! Ada’s note.")

"one of his last papers (1959) entitled The Farce of Group Therapy in Sexual Maladjustment" (577) -- a joke about the threesome scene.

"Ada, who amused herself by translating . . . John Shade into Russian and French" (577) -- John Shade on Antiterra again.

"E, p, i -- why 'y,' my dear?" (578) -- Darkbloom explains that this is Violet trying to spell the word "epistemic," which occurs earlier on this page.

"That work [The Texture of Time], she said, always reminded her, in some odd, delicate way, of the sun-and-shade games she used to play as a child in the secluded avenues of Ardis Park." (579) -- another callback to the beginning. Suggests that a certain appreciation for the subtle "texture" of conscious experience is a key part of V&A's connection to one another. (Remember Ada's towers/bridges system?)

"They found the historical background absurdly farfetched and considered starting legal proceedings against Vitry—not for having stolen the L.F.T. idea, but for having distorted Terrestrial politics as obtained by Van with such diligence and skill from extrasensorial sources and manic dreams." (581) -- and yet the account of earth history given here is much more accurate than the one that Van gives in LFT (described in Part 2 Ch. 2).

"in a flashback to a revolution in former France, an unfortunate extra, who played one of the under-executioners, got accidentally decapitated while pulling the comedian Steller, who played a reluctant king, into a guillotinable position" (581) -- this death, along with the scope of the project ("some said more than a million, others, half a million men and as many mirrors") link the LFT film with the real-life film Ben Hur.

"From the tremendous correspondence that piled up on Van’s desk during a few years of world fame, one gathered that thousands of more or less unbalanced people believed (so striking was the visual impact of the Vitry-Veen film) in the secret Government-concealed identity of Terra and Antiterra. Demonian reality dwindled to a casual illusion. Actually, we had passed through all that. Politicians, dubbed Old Felt and Uncle Joe in forgotten comics, had really existed. Tropical countries meant, not only Wild Nature Reserves but famine, and death, and ignorance, and shamans, and agents from distant Atomsk. Our world was, in fact, mid-twentieth-century. Terra convalesced after enduring the rack and the stake, the bullies and beasts that Germany inevitably generates when fulfilling her dreams of glory. Russian peasants and poets had not been transported to Estotiland, and the Barren Grounds, ages ago -- they were dying, at this very moment, in the slave camps of Tartary. Even the governor of France was not Charlie Chose, the suave nephew of Lord Goal, but a bad-tempered French general." (582) -- I'm sure CML would take me to task if I didn't point out that this is reminiscent of the Borges story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." It's also a huge moment of instability, and perhaps the most frustrating instance of the ambiguity between literal and figurative in Van's style (e.g. Demon's wings, forking time). Is Van merely saying that the dreams of Terra were surprisingly prophetic, and that Antiterra as of the 1960s is surprisingly similar to the Terra envisioned by patients in the late 19th century? Or is he simply giving up the whole game and declaring, with infuriating insouciance, that the whole story took place in the real world after all? (Incidentally, the period on Terra corresponding to V&A's last years on Antiterra would be . . . the 2010s, i.e., now. To channel C again: "Far out, man, far fuckin' out.")

"Recorded and replayed in their joint memory was their early preoccupation with the strange idea of death. . . . The strange mirage-shimmer standing in for death should not appear too soon in the chronicle and yet it should permeate the first amorous scenes. Hard but not insurmountable (I can do anything, I can tango and tap-dance on my fantastic hands)." (583-4) -- the presence of the concept of death even in the earliest parts of the book is here confirmed. (Compare to Van's attempt to disclaim this side of the story: "a book addressed to young laymen and lemans -- and not to grave men or gravemen" [17]).

" 'As lovers and siblings,' she cried, 'we have a double chance of being together in eternity, in terrarity' " (583) -- cf. this from p. 158: "I shall never love anybody in my life as I adore you, never and nowhere, neither in eternity, nor in terrenity, neither in Ladore, nor on Terra, where they say our souls go." "Terrenity" (unlike "terrarity") is a real word, meaning "Earthiness; worldliness."

"And I knew a girl called Adora, little thing in my last floramor. What makes me see that bit as the purest sanglot in the book?" (584) -- perhaps the fact that that scene was the first one Nabokov came up with for the book, as he revealed in an interview.

"And finally, there is the featureless pseudo-future, blank and black, an everlasting nonlastingness, the crowning paradox of our boxed brain’s eschatologies!" (585) -- good sentence!

"And if you land then on Terra Caelestis" (585) -- "caelestis" means "heavenly" or "celestial" in Latin. May be a reference to "Harmonia Caelestis" ("a cycle of 55 sacred cantatas attributed to the Hungarian composer Paul I, 1st Prince Esterházy of Galántha (1635–1713)" [Wikipedia])?

"She insisted that if there were no future, then one had the right of making up a future, and in that case one’s very own future did exist, insofar as one existed oneself. Eighty years quickly passed—a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern." (585) -- seems like a strong suggestion that Van's happy life with Ada is invented? (But of course Ada is saying this as a 12-year-old, and the "eighty years" here are the whole rest of the story.)

The lines given on p. 585 are indeed lines 569-572 of the poem "Pale Fire" (from the novel Pale Fire). I don't know what non-metrical significance the omission of the "boths" could have (claimed by imagined Freudians on p. 586).

"Oh, Van, oh Van, we did not love her enough. That’s whom you should have married, the one sitting feet up, in ballerina black, on the stone balustrade, and then everything would have been all right -- I would have stayed with you both in Ardis Hall, and instead of that happiness, handed out gratis, instead of all that we teased her to death!" (586) -- what should we make of this acknowledgement? If V&A acknowledge their responsibility in Lucette's death, then why hasn't it had more of a footprint in the book? (Of course, it probably has, just covertly.)

"whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America -- for are not our childhood memories comparable to Vineland-born caravelles, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams?" (588) -- a possible justification for the invention of Antiterra. Note the double meaning of "principle part" (also a grammatical term) -- part of a motif about how textual/verbal the Ada world is ("old novels," etc).

"Nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy’s reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the 'Ardis' part of the book." (588) -- the reminiscences in question are presumably Tolstoy's "Childhood, Boyhood, Youth." Also, "innocence" is (at least in one sense) a hilarious word to use for the randy Veens.

"That the relationship is not simply dangerous cousinage, but possesses an aspect prohibited by law, is hinted in the very first pages." (588) -- I love the awkward, ugly language here: "possesses an aspect prohibited by law."

"Her tragic destiny constitutes one of the highlights of this delightful book." (588) -- the cloying cliche "tragic fate" seems to mock the intuitively appealing interpretation that Lucette's death is supposed to be the emotional climax of the book. This sentence itself parodies the awkwardness of trying to hawk fictional tragedy as an appealing experience -- "tragic" clashes with "highlights" and "delightful."

"It is interrupted by her marriage to an Arizonian cattle-breeder whose fabulous ancestor discovered our country." (588) -- more hilariously awkward/platitudinous language.

"They spend their old age traveling together and dwelling in the various villas, one lovelier than another, that Van has erected all over the Western Hemisphere." (588) -- the word "villa" and the innuendo in "erected" remind us of a different set of villas, the Villa Venus club.

"Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail" (589) -- you can say that again.

"a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook" (589) -- Lucette's doll lost in the brook again ("the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an unanalyzable brook" [494]).

"and much, much more" (589) -- see above (in every sense!).

#ada or ardor #vladimir nabokov

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clegfly · 3 months ago

Text

Woo, it’s about time I made one of these… *cracks knuckles*

MORE ABOUT ME!!!!

HIIII!!!! My name is clegfly, or just cleg!!!! I’m an artist/ writer / professional paint drying critic/j. I’m just a silly person doing silly things, don’t mind me. I use they/them pronouns and I am aroace!!!

LIKES

BULLET POINTS BULLET POINTS BULLET POI

Pancakes. All day. All the time. Everywhere, anywhere. Pancakes

That goes for bacon too

JELLYYYYYYYYYY!!!!1!1!1!

Why are these all foods what else do I like uhhhh

Warm. And cosy bed. And fire. And all that stuff

OLD COMPUTER AESTHETIC!!!!!! N64!!! WINDOWS XP!!!! ALL THAT SHIT

Bugs in theory

PLANTS

MUSICAL THEATRE

Graphic novels

Video games… ough my beloveds

Books

Okay now this is too long

Oops

Sorry

JELLYFISH JELLYFISH JELLYFISH

The ocean full stop actually

In theory

CHINCHILLAS

Yapping

Analysis

DISLIKES

anything on my DNI >:((((

Bugs in practice

Sport

Exercise

I’m literally hero omori

Commitment

Stress

Internet drama

Anyone who gatekeeps like. Anything.

INTERESTS???

All day every day, baby.

MAINS

OMORI- main interest as apparent by one peek at my blog… The brainrot is immeasurable and everlasting. Send help. It’s been almost four years. I love this game, its characters, story, EVERYTHING so fucking much. I’m like a billion pounds in debt to it also. I will be homeless but at least I will have my big ass heromari collection.

PMMM/ Madoka Magica- my favourite show! Consisting purely of sparkles and sunshine!!!! Why are you crying??? I’m sure not!!!!

DDLC/ Doki Doki Literature Club- another favourite of mine!!! I see a well-written cast of characters I deeply relate to go through extreme horrific horror beyond any of their comprehensions and I’m SOLD!!!

Coraline- the horrors are all consuming, but at least it’s both a visual and extremely well-written treat!!!!

TADC/ the amazing digital circus- won’t lie, watched this show when the pilot dropped and LOVED it, but forgot about it after a while as it didn’t stick with me. Then episode three came out and I’m now reduced to a blubbering mess whose brain is now significantly comprised of two fictional chess pieces. What happened? I don’t know. Send even more help.

LITTLE GUYS THAT HURT MY BRAIN SOMETIMES

Petscop

Fnaf

BATIM/ bendy and the ink machine

BSD

Deltarune

Undertale

Hawaii: Part II

SUBJECT TO CHANGE BECAUSE IM PROBABLY FORGETTING LIKE 20 AND ALSO HAVE LIKE 20 STILL TO DISCOVER

HOBBIES?!2!2!

Ya!!!! :D

Art

The main thing I do on my silly little page!!

…in which the art is mostly unfinished doodles… but that’s okay!!!! We ball anyway

YOU CAN SEND THE CLEG REQUESTS!!!!! ALL DAY ANY DAY UNLESS I SAY OTHERWISE!!!! Do not expect premium quality though lmao. (And also nothing related to DNI. Shouldn’t have to say this but. Uh. Yeah)

You cannot yet commission the cleg :(

Writing

Currently on a writing hiatus and have been for a little while (5 MONRHS WHAT) but… i do!!!! That!!!! Aka I write fan fiction AGH

Mostly. Heromari stuff. Actually all heromari stuff. I think I have one fic that isn’t heromari and it’s one I co-authored I love them your honour…

Yeah

DNI

Bit of a bummer, but I gotta set my boundaries to keep the weirdos out!! That being said, do NOT interact with my blog whatsoever if you:

Are a shotacon, lolicon, proshipper, pedo, etc etc etc. (yucky. Yuck yuck yuck. Fuck off)

Are homophobic

Are transphobic

Are aphobic/ arophobic (why. Why are you even still here)

Queerphobic in general actually get OUT!!!!

Actively shit on any of my main interests. Like ACTIVELY go out of your way to tell me how bad it is (what. What is the point. Just go)

NSFW is on thin ice but I will likely just block the tag if you post about it... however PLEASE keep it away from me I am very sex repulsed and WILL block you ON SIGHT!!!

Are racist/ xenophobic

There is likely LOTS more I’m forgetting so I will update this later… also just saying I reserve the right to block ANYONE no matter if you fit into this criteria or not. If I don’t vibe with you I will politely block you and look the other way!!! No theatrics required

Anyway with all the negative stuff out of the way… I really hope you enjoy my blog!!! I’m just here to have fun honestly and express my ideas and passions and work on a little page of the internet so!!!! Hope you have fun too!!!! :D

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serpentface · 7 months ago

Note

Given what you've said about braids and their relation to traditional feminity in the Wardi Empire how does it impact Couya as an odonii priestess and as an upperclass women very involved in politics. How is Couya wearing a men's cloak viewed? What are gender expectations for odonii priestesses?

Partially elaborated in another post, but I can expand. It's complicated because Odonii experience reduced pressure to conform to expected women's roles, and a degree of 'masculinity' is accepted and normalized.

This is most prominent in that they do not marry and are expected to remain celibate (marriage and childbearing is otherwise basically a given for women, especially in the upper classes in which marriages are almost invariably arranged and a means of brokering alliances between families). This both frees them from very practical social restrictions and costs, but also of perceived spiritual pollution otherwise considered inevitable to women via pregnancy and as receiving sexual partners.

Their involvement in the military sphere (otherwise considered wholly the realm of men under normal circumstances) also by proxy frees them of certain dress standards. A lot of their base clothing would be considered 'masculine' in other contexts, being less physically restrictive and more practical for free movement. (This style of clothing would also be associated with poverty- ie women who have to perform hard labor, but this association is offset via expensive blue dyes and other visual signifiers).

They occupy a unique, somewhat nonbinary space in the cultural gender framework- they are considered women but without flaws and weaknesses considered otherwise innate or inevitable to women (and in a material sense they are afforded legal rights and privileges otherwise only accessible to men). So a degree of 'masculinity' can be not only accepted but deemed highly positive, reflective of their superior qualities. But this is only the types of 'masculinity' already implied by their roles and function (ie physical strength, practical dress, an assertive and commanding personality, etc).

This doesn't mean they are entirely freed of gender presentation norms. Couya wearing a men's style cloak is in the 'acceptable' range (would be clocked as pretty masc, but acceptably so for her station- masc dress=freedom of movement and a display of strength, appropriate for someone who serves as a physical embodiment of military might). Frequently wearing hair loose and unbraided is Not similarly appropriate. It's not just that she's diverging from an expected women's beauty standard, but that it also culturally indicates laziness, looseness, and inappropriate masculinity. It (combined with everything else) crosses the line from appropriately de-feminized to inappropriately masculinized, and will receive some scrutiny and judgment. But the very, very powerful social status of Odonii means that most of the consequences are immaterial.

So Couya more or less gets away with it, but this has contributed to her being generally unliked and a frequent subject of gossip and jokes (tends to be of the 'good thing no one has to marry THAT' and 'she swore virginhood because no one was gonna fuck her anyway' ilk, including from other priestesses). And more of this social scrutiny means her other unfavorable traits become more apparent (social awkwardness, inappropriate bluntness, etc).

Just in general she was not set up for success. She is technically an illegitimate child- her father had an affair after his wife's second son was born fatally premature. She was claimed and given the family name to avoid the associated shame on her father and legal mother above anything else.

From a young age she was considered slow, antisocial, strange, devastatingly unconcerned with presentation, and annoying (she's autistic and does not exist in a context where that is like, understood and going to be readily supported), which only further disincentivized her parents putting any real efforts into developing her into a suitable female heir. They were kind of just running through the bare minimum motions of raising her. She grew up with the (TREMENDOUS) benefits of a very wealthy family, but had no chance at receiving a good inheritance and would have been married off at the first profitable chance. She and Janeys both experienced some pretty horrific parental abuse after Faiza was selected as an Odonii (chosen by the Odomache herself, a Big Fucking Deal) and removed from the household, and this four year period kind of shaped everything she is now.

Faiza was the only member of Couya's immediate family who actually liked her, and was motivated enough to get her out of there to persuade a senior priestess to select Couya as an Odonii. Their parents readily encouraged this once the possibility became clear (becoming a high-status priestess would be of greater benefit to the family than anything Couya could have provided via marriage, and it was a little concerning that they were losing out on another chance of producing legitimate heirs, but it would be alright since they had a legitimate son who was Totally going to do that). Couya performed very well in this context and was inducted and sworn, which pretty much saved her from a life of privileged misery.

She takes her role very seriously, and on a more personal level her unconventional presentation is a matter of pride. She's kind of flaunting her status by consistently presenting this way and experiencing few consequences worse than mockery. She gets to behave and present in ways that she was punished for throughout her childhood, and there's nothing anyone can really do about it. There's definitely a "FUCK YOU MOM" undercurrent to it, but it also pleases her on its own terms. (On a less profound level, she just prefers this style of clothing, likes having a masculine presentation, and doesn't like how braided hair feels).

So like all that being said, her status as an Odonii is a powerful protection against things that would otherwise be RUINOUS for a woman of her stature, and she is Not a good case study for how her presentation would affect a woman of her political standing. She gets away with a lot and faces mainly petty social consequences.

#couya haidamane #Kind of elaborated on character stuff that was not asked for but whatever. I'm just typing shit #She would also definitely be considered transmasc in Contemporary Real Life LGBT+ terms btw. Probably nonbinary.#She and Palo are the two trans people in the main cast and everyone except Tigran and Faiza is gay/bi. But these identities #do not exist conceptually or do not have 1:1 analogues with LGBT+ identity so much of it is going to come off as ambiguous in-text #(ESPECIALLY the trans characters and for Faiza who is probably aroace. I do kinda have to Word Of God some of it)#Or may be misleading (ie Tigran has willingly had sex with men and occupies a 3rd gender space in this cultural framework but #these things are social convention for eunuchs in his specific context. He would be cishet in the contemporary context)

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bi-bard · 1 year ago

Text

If I Could Leave, I Would've Already Left - Luca Imagine [The Bear]

Title: If I Could Leave, I Would've Already Left

Pairing: Luca X Reader

Based On: Paul Revere

Word Count: 1,413 words

Warning(s): mention of breakdown/mental health issues

Summary: When Luca left for Copenhagen, he didn't mean to leave (Y/n) completely on their own. After years of not talking, he finally finds that nerve to reconnect with them, deciding to invite them out to visit. At first, all seems well, but something is clearly off... Luca just has to get (Y/n) to admit that.

Author's Note: I changed who this story was going to be about so I could give y'all this. Don't say that I don't do anything for you.

NOAH KAHAN - STICK SEASON [WE'LL ALL BE HERE FOREVER] WRITING CHALLENGE MASTERLIST

---------------------

I felt a pit in my stomach as I walked to the door of the restaurant.

This wasn't even my place of employment. I had no obligations or expectations here, but I still had raging anxiety sitting in my chest.

Maybe it was the association I had with early rising and restaurant doors. Maybe it was the memories of yelling and pressure and intensity. Maybe it wasn't related to any of that. Maybe it was all just fear over seeing someone that I hadn't seen in a while that meant the world to me.

I shook my head, trying to calm myself down. It wasn't successful.

Once I accepted that I couldn't just dismiss my anxiety, I picked up my hand and knocked on the door.

I stepped backward, taking a few more deep breaths.

The front door opened suddenly. I felt a need to collapse to the ground when I saw Luca in the doorway. I fought that need.

"Hey," I said awkwardly, messing around with the strap of my duffel bag.

"You made it," he replied happily, stepping forward to hug me tightly. I closed my eyes as I hugged him back. "I told you to call me when you were on your way. I would have made plans to get you settled."

"I know, I know," I muttered as I stepped back.

"I'll call someone in, so I can get you set up in the guest room-"

"No, no," I shook my head. "I came here to see where you're working. That was your offer."

He chuckled. "Well, come on in then."

I followed him into the restaurant. I looked around at the sparkling location. Shining counters, organized inventory, the blue sign just under the clock that read 'Every Second Counts'.

"What do you think," he asked.

"It's beautiful," I mumbled, still looking around the entire building.

"Oh, believe me, this is nothing," he waved it off. I looked back at him. "Well, nothing when compared to the quality of the food."

I chuckled. "Impress me."

"I always do."

He tapped a part of the steel tabletop so I could stand across from him. He continued working while I put my bag down next to me.

It felt weird to watch someone else cook. I had grown so accustomed to running around the kitchen and getting as much work done as physically possible. But now, I was standing there, twiddling my thumbs. It just felt... wrong.

"Do you... Do you need help with anything," I asked.

"No, no," he shook his head. "I am making something for you. You are on a trip."

I held my hands up. "Alright, alright."

The silence after that was nice.

It was the first time since getting on the flight that I didn't find myself fixated on the work that I was missing. I was finally letting myself breathe. I couldn't relax fully. I don't think that I had the ability to. It was still momentary bliss.

"How've you been," Luca said after a while.

"Good, good," I replied, playing it as polite. Like I would speak with my relatives at big family dinners and shit like that.

"You're still working in Chicago?"

"I haven't worked there in a while," I explained. "I moved to New York. Carmen Berzatto apparently mentioned my name a while ago."

"He did?"

I nodded.

"I don't remember him ever being that kind... did he have a change of heart?"

"Honestly, I think it was an accident."

Luca laughed, having to stop what he was doing for a few moments. "That sounds more like him."

I chuckled with him.

"But New York is good?"

"Yeah, yeah. It's the dream, right? The big-time restaurant and the fancy guests."

"I guess so."

His eyes moved to me. I saw them trace me, looking for a sign of... something. I shifted a bit in my spot, grinning at him. I wanted to know what he was looking for. I wanted to know what he was thinking of me.

"How are you doing," he said.

"You asked that already."

"I know but you told me that everything is good yet you're sitting in front of me on a very sudden trip to a different country."

"You invited me out to visit-"

"Yet you didn't tell me when you were on your way."

I froze. He was right.

"What's going on?"

I took a deep breath. "I... I took a leave of absence."

"What," he asked. "Can I ask why?"

"I... I broke," I confessed.

Admitting it felt like some kind of betrayal to myself. I was already dealing with enough guilt from running away from work, but now there was even more guilt because it wasn't just because of my own weakness.

"I was in the kitchen, in the middle of dinner rush, and then everything felt like it froze," I continued. "And I... I couldn't move or talk. I was just... gone. And then, it all hit me at once. I couldn't breathe. Nothing made sense. Everything was going too fast. It just... it wouldn't go back to normal.

"If it had just been that once, then I could have explained it away as nothing. But it just kept happening over and over.

"I could hide it for a while but then, I just kind of snapped. I ran out of the kitchen; I hid in the alley out back and just sobbed. I just remember thinking that I had to get out. So, I decided to take the leave of absence and try to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me."

"I'm sorry," Luca said. "That sounds terrifying."

I just kind of shrugged.

"Are you... Are you seeing a therapist at all?"

"I have an appointment set for when I get home. I just... I needed something- someone familiar."

Luca stepped out from behind the counter so he could drag me into another tight hug. I closed my eyes, hiding my face in his shoulder. That was the most detail I had told anyone about how I had been feeling.

"Can I ask you something," he asked after a little while. I hummed. "Why don't you just leave entirely?"

I scoffed as I stepped back. "And go where?"

"I don't know... here?"

I shook my head.

"I could put in a good word-"

"I can't do that," I stopped him. "I can't just run away."

"Why not?"

"Do you have any idea how hard I have worked for this?" I snapped. "How much of my life has been dedicated to this?"

"That doesn't mean that you have to end up hurting yourself!"

"You don't get it!" I stepped even farther away. "I don't just do this for me. New York is the best place for me to make everyone happy. It's for my family whether it be supporting them or giving my mom a chance to see her dream that she didn't get to pursue or for my dad to get the chance to be proud of me. All of this goes so far beyond me! It's not that I don't want to leave! I can't!"

Luca didn't reply.

"I... I look at my parents and all I can think of is how disappointed they'd be if I didn't keep going, keep pushing myself."

"I'm... I'm sorry."

I looked away before stubbornly wiping away any tears that found their way to my eyes. "I'll... I'll leave it all one day. I'll leave all of it behind and find something that doesn't terrify me as much, but I just... I can't yet. I can't."

"I shouldn't have pushed so hard," he replied. "I... I'm so sorry."

"It's okay," I mumbled, running my hands over my face. "Can we just... Can we focus on literally anything else?"

He nodded, going to step around the counter again. "I've thought about you a lot over the last few years."

"Really," I asked.

"Yeah. I... I always felt... wrong for leaving the way that I did. I felt like I had abandoned you."

"If it helps, I never thought that. I just hoped that you were happy."

He offered a grin in response.

He started working again.

As silence surrounded us, the air seemed to shift. The weight wasn't gone. I don't think it ever would be. But it was lighter. As if I wasn't holding it on my own anymore.

And maybe that extra pair of hands was all I needed for now.

---------------------

Navigation Guide

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#imagine #x reader #fanfiction #the bear imagine #the bear fanfiction #the bear x reader #luca the bear imagine #luca the bear fanfiction #luca the bear x reader #luca imagine #luca fanfiction #luca x reader #will poulter x reader #will poulter imagine #will poulter fanfiction

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theimportantnone · 7 months ago

Note

Prompt: Aliens discover goodie bags.

Story one

Xek had been invited to a human birthday party. He did not understand the hubbub around coming closer to death but to promote unity between the crew he accepted the invitation. Coming from a frugal race it had been hard to adjust to the abundance of quantity **and** quality prevelent in human culture as he would be described as a "lick the plate clean" kinda person. But he found solace in that meals where prepared for a number of people in mind and made accordingly large. What he did not expect was careless quantity as he saw them, so called goodie bags. A whole table was layed out of small plastic bags full of sweets and meal cubes, what a horrid waste. He knew that even if everyone invited took one there would still be dozens left to waste. This would not do, perhaps more people had been invited that he first though, friends and family on the next planet they where stopping on, as he was just helping with party prep. Once they landed he found he was wrong. Xek panicked, a primal urge to consume even to his own detriment so nothing would be wasted. He counted out every bag and every guest, and took what remained. Once the party started he heard complaints about a lack of goodie bags that apperently were promised by the hosts. Xeks stomach nearly inverted (something that only happens when his kind went into labor, it's very painful.) Apparently, the bags where not for just eating right away, but where also for giving from host to guest to guests relatives. No wonder there where sweets instead of just meal cubes, they where gifts back to the community! A thanks for being with the one who aged. Xek admitted that he ate the rest of the bags (plastic and all, he knew this was "abnormal" but his stomach was built for heavy duty eating and no waste meant no waste,) but much to his relief he was forgiven, as even more gift bags were prepared, "just cause."

Story two

Iizikiel (pronounced Ezekiel) was tasked with observing human traditions for first contact prep. "These humans are such a young species," it thought, floating above its spy console, theyre small pod invisible to all but the most advanced eyes (which thankfully on this planet belonged to a specific crustacean living far away from iizikiel's ship.)

"I must give them merit for their rapid technological development but it is clear their socio-political development is far behind, if I could choose if bar these bipeds from the union until they could find us first."

"Negative, Iizi (pronounced easy) , the councle feels their spirit would bring a wondrous boost of productivity to the union," booped his bio-mechanical companion, 2hr+d. "Shut it," replied Iizi with a frustrated belch. Being a floating jellyfish like blob wasn't always great compared to a half mech half anthropomorphic beetleish creature, but at least Iizi had electrosis and could shut up (tw-hr-pl-d, or twerpd) for real if it wanted.

Today Iizi was witnessed two humans promise monogamy for each other under their home government, known as "marriage." a large ensemble of people gathered in rows in front of the couple, as a religious figured blessed their union. "So odd that they feel the need for a higher power to allow for a union, feels very-" "insecure?" clicked twerpd. "I was going to say, superfluous, " retorted Iizi.

But then something caught Iizi's eye, little bundles of edibles, being handed out to leaving attendees. Up until now he had only witnessed eating immediately after food was presented to its recipients, extras being taken only after an initial digging in. This was something entirely different, as some people where eating the contents right away while others stuffed them in their pockets or vehicles. He would have understood that behavior if their had been a feat prior but no, it seemed these seemingly needy eaters where intentionally waiting to eat.

"What do you make of this Twerpd?"

"Iizi, this is only our 4th local rotation in tandem with this continent, maybe they we've only ever seen them hunger, perhaps they don't always need to eat when presented with food."

"But if that's true, why do so many eat to unhealthy levels, and why is food such a large industry when it's clear that knowledge of self sufficient food production is commonly available? The likely conclusion is that humans are unable to not eat when presented with food and only stop when full, normally saving leftovers or making sure no one else gets said left overs by tossing them into trash recepticals. It also explains why roundness is common place, at least on this continent. "

"we still have more to learn, as evidence also suggests that there are a multitude of cultures present here and beyond, Iizi, save your rambling conclusions for our first revolution of their home star."

Authors note

To be so honest I was three paragraphs deep into a five part story but I forgot to save and lost all of it, so I thought up these two, more hastily written stories as a replacement. Who know gift bags would be a struggle to write about.

#humans are weird #humans are space fae #humans are space orcs

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kalims · 2 years ago

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⊹ SPEAK NOW | malleus draconia

premise. malleus has been planning something for a while now, first he decided quality was foremost. wouldn't you appreciate the things he love about you? well that failed. now he just has to settle with quality, the most grandest suprise of a confession just for you.

it's just a battle of will if his impatience clouds over the voices that won't even let him profess to you!

content. gender neutral reader, fluff, crack

wc. 4.2k words, I know it's a hassle to read long posts but give me a chance :')

note. thank you to paru who generously commissioned me again! <3 i hope you enjoy it and everyone else as well <3

written a total of 8k+ words for mal in the span of two works now whew wow

not even malleus' future coronation would hold the amount of planning as this.

"my, I'm very impressed." sat upon a velvet chair lilia chuckles with a clear look of amusement present on his face. "I did not expect you to learn how to create a powerpoint presentation."

he watches malleus' lips curve into a small smile—no doubt feeling a sense of accomplishment by the former's words. he was always like this wasn't he? looking for praise when he was a child. fufu.. lilia muses, but his boy is all grown up now. malleus is no longer a child despite lilia having to say something about it.

no longer a child as in now a grown man attempting to get his 'approval' of his apparent chosen beloved.

when malleus stretched out an invitation to him for a serious talk (well. malleus didn't mention the serious part but the look on his face, is something lilia can easily discern.) he didn't think much of it. perhaps the boy just wanted to open up about something.

he's not sure if malleus already sensed his presence but lilia is sure that even though he's getting pretty old blending in with the shadows is a skill he hasn't slacked off upon.

lilia chose not to announce his presence and step out instead, who knows? maybe malleus will finally emit that startled face he's been looking for. though he seems used to the sight of lilia popping out of nowhere.. in everywhere to the point that it just doesn't bother him as much.

unsurprisingly malleus didn't bat an eye and just ushered him to sit down and that he did.

lilia merely watches in amused silence when malleus attempts to open the laptop, failing to click the right button for a few times before the black screen brightens up in light. before he knew it he could spot the microsoft powerpoint icon below the bar.

being curious was an understatement.

though he's certainly proud that the device; valid enough to call frail did not break under malleus' power. or, maybe he should just be proud that the boy did not lose his cool.

by the time lilia finished pondering about it, malleus had finally figured out how to fullscreen it. "are you ready?" politely questioned by the horned man, at least he still attained the manners taught by lilia.

the latter flashes him a fanged grin. "whenever you are."

the first screen is just an introduction. it looked familiar and lilia is fairly sure malleus just looked up a tutorial and copy-pasted it. 'why you should be my lover.' it read, and he already knew that this isn't meant for him. but meant to get his opinion.

not for me but for you. he muses. how adorable!

'1.) I am very influential. I will be king soon and I will get you whatever you ask.' true but he should get your opinion on that, whether you care about his status or not.

'2.) you told me you like my horns, so I shall banish everyone else who has it if it could deter you from loving me.' ah. that one is a bit extreme.. lilia has no doubts that the boy will actually do it.

malleus' face though, shifts into something serious when he spots the second slide. yep, he's not joking.

'3.) I find you very endearing and would like to wed you as soon as possible.' eh.. this one showcases his clear love for you but since humans and fae have varied degrees of love it might be a little too fast for you.

'4.) ramshackle has its charms but my castle is a much more comfortable living condition. if you'd be mine it will all be yours' romantic.

'5.) I will be with you forever. if there is ever a time when the world is against you, it will be us against it together. rest assured, you will not be alone because I will face it with you'

"how swe—oh." lilia blinks when malleus accidentally exits and with his keen eyes, was able to spot the amount of slides there are. goodness me. there are over a hundred. lilia chuckles.

lilia loves malleus. very much so, that boy is practically his son that he raised with his sweat and tears. there are no lengths he's not willing to cross for his beloved family but wow.. for once lilia is speechless once he realizes.

a bit much.. isn't it? though not mentioned, malleus took his sweet time going over each slide and pausing to further elaborate on the contents of the smile. and if there really are over a 100 slides it isn't gonna finish anytime soon.

plus cater invited lilia for another night out. isn't that nice? he can't simply bail on his.. young friend like that.

"I can see how much you see the prefect dear." lilia starts, watching malleus' face soften into something genuine. "if you want my honest opinion. a human will not receive much love in the valley." he says simply.

just like that his face crumbles into something heartbroken. like the truth was just slapped to his face and left there. lilia's heart clenches at the look so he continues, "but my opinion as your caretaker, love knows no bounds. if you truly love them then you should do so freely."

just like that malleus looks up at him, peering and all. looking hopeful.

slowly but surely the light that had drained from his face gradually came back and lilia is taken back to the past once he compares his current expression to one when he was a kid receiving his first gift that's something other than an object made entirely out of riches.

a gift so priceless.

malleus smiles, the one where his eyes would crinkle and obscure his vision, and his pointy ears would twitch in joy. if he had a tail it would certainly be wagging right now. "thank you. shall I deliver it to them now?"

"you mean to send, honey?"

he blinks. "ah, yes."

in an equally concerning and interesting way. lately, sebek has been... more lenient? which is strange to a degree because he would never let you get away without scolding your ear off for literally referring to malleus as 'tsunotaro'.

well. he did pause to give you a look but you get the point! the sebek does not only spare a look when it comes to the expense of malleus.

ace chatters away beside you, once again attempting to start an argument against deuce who's very intent on being a pacifist for some reason.

and grim? well. grim's probably robbing someone's lunch right now.

for once all you four have collectively set your eyes on something. you narrow your eyes. "he's acting weird." your hand flicks to a certain green-haired male while the other three nod in agreement.

"why don't we ask him right now?" ace suggests with a cheeky smile. before deuce could object and clamp his mouth shut he was already shouting; "sebek! why are you acting weird?"

said boy immediately hears. fae heritage you suppose. you can tell from the furrow of his brows but for an odd reason, you’re not sure of yourself his face shifts into something.. proud? sebek looks at the student he was conversing with before walking over.

and with a triumphant grin he says; “malleus-sama has finally taken notice of my devotion!” you raise your brows and share a look with the other three cause, seriously? that man can’t notice sebek if it meant his life.

though you can't deny the rush of curiosity flowing into your head. sure, it seemed wholly impossible and weird overall but it didn’t mean that you wouldn’t wanna find out.

it seemed like deuce wanted to know as well. “uh.. how exactly?”

“ha! are you planning to do the same?” huffed sebek.

deuce looked like a mixture of offended and concerned. “let’s go with that?”

“well, lilia-sama sent me a presentation and said it was from the master. It was about appreciating my one-of-a-kind existence!”

you look flabbergasted. “oh… wow, i didn’t know malleus was so caring about his.. subjects.”

sebek nods in agreement. to think about it, at the mention of lilia and the message in the same sentence flashes a series of memories back into your mind. earlier this day, didn't lilia send a heads up? something about malleus and.. message.

but that's just crazy right? there's no way it would be connected to this. you nod your head at sebek slowly, "good for you dude." his face scrunches up at your casual nickname but in favor of your genuine comment, he'll let it slide.

blinking, you ask; "where is malleus anyways?" at your question sebek's back straightens as he stands up straight and sort of, glowers at you.

a part of sebek knows that the most logical action to do right now was, of course, to withdraw that kind of information from you cause really, who are you? in comparison to the young master, not even the most noblest of nobles are being told his locations.

for a security measure sebek approves of.

but sebek has witnessed and watched malleus' glory himself. next to you, it's as though you’re blind to it which is immensely insulting—but, as he's on his way to run his mouth off at you he sees something in the young master's eyes.

something new and warm.

maybe that's what he needs. someone who will be blind to the glory accompanying him and just see the person behind it. that must be it! malleus feels like a person behind your eyes.

though most do not think so, you're good for him. and even as much as sebek would rather strangle himself to admit it, it's true.

so he makes up his mind and just tells you, sparing the other three (who are very interested in the conversation apparently.) a glance before leaning towards you so they won't hear. "I heard the young master was visiting the botanical garden."

huh. that's new.

before you could open your mouth to ask why he just shoves the face of his palm to your face. "and do not even think about sharing this to anyone!" he shouts. alerting everyone that you do have something to say.

seriously?

sebek just marches away, most probably going to haul silver out of his peaceful nap.

"what did he say?" asked ace.

you make a blank face. for the sake of your dignity, and probably his own you'll keep the promise sebek bestowed upon you. "absolutely nothing."

you ignore ace's grumbles and complaints, out of anticipation you suppose. there's nothing juicier than whatever he witnessed and since sebek practically announced it he wants to know whatever he told you.

again. you give the other two a farewell before walking off without another word to ace.

clearly, there's something freaky going on inside the garden. you wince, picking your leg out of an awfully strong grip of a plant that's very much alive. well, you knew they weren't dead but they didn't always try to just rip off your limbs.

also, it was literally raining in here, how is it raining?! the sun was literally out like a second ago before you entered.

if that wasn't supernatural then you don't know what is.

which makes you curious. whose ass would professor crewel and crowley alike hand back to them? something as strange as this wouldn't pass without notice.

you flinch. also, does no one see the lightning flashing from outside?!

okay so you know that malleus would definitely survive under this weather but your real question is; where the hell is he anyways? from the amount of time you crossed through the botanical garden gave you a vague understanding of the layout.

but that didn't mean you'd really enjoy spending a good amount of time wandering in search of a green man.

with horns.

he's pretty tall..

you blank. "malleus?" you try.

surprisingly unsurprising the man literally materializes next to you in the form of.. some kind of sparkle. and he displays a cool attitude even at the sight of you frowning at him out of confusion, probably also recovering from the jumpscare.

"oh.. you actually came." you deadpan. was it that easy all along?

a smile plays on his lips. "you called."

"is someone bothering you, child of man?" he asked seriously. stepping forward and you notice that he hesitates in taking your arms and checking them over but instead lets them hover over it uselessly.

you raise your brows but make no move to point him out. "uh.. no? but something is bothering me though."

maybe saying that was a mistake cause you suspect that malleus' fondness for you (if not too big of an assumption) surpasses all kinds of basic logic sometimes.

by sometimes you mean.. a long of times.

in a flash his concerned look shifts into something hilariously serious. "hm? there are.. what is it then? a cursed artifact?" your brows furrow and in a way you actually don't know what to say.

"what." you deadpan. "no?"

"perhaps lilia's guitar with electricity is bothering you?" tried again by malleus.

uh oh. now you gotta deny that one or else he'll actually destroy that and lilia is gonna be really cold when he does that. "heavens no!"

now he just looks confused. "what is it then? tell me. I will rid it for you."

you sweatdrop. "no I mean.. I heard you were supposed to be giving me a message or something from lilia. but you weren't anywhere so I asked where you were." you explained. gesturing wildly as malleus listens intently.

finally, after a good solid 10 seconds of silence, a look of understanding washes over his face and you exhale a sigh of relief. "ah. that is correct."

"so where is it?"

"please, give me a second."

right in front of your eyes he just flat-out disappeared in the same particles he appeared with. so you just stand there awkwardly in silence, only realizing that the very stormy weather had disappeared and faded into something normal.

you shrug. weird things are normal here you guess.

before then malleus had already returned with a.. chest of.. crystals and he looks oddly bashful and shy when he just holds it out to you. (also proud? but you get the point!) "uh." you start, unsure.

"what's this?" you gesture to the bundle that would cost you a whole literal mansion to get.

he smiles at you. "I realized that perhaps the message from the electronic device would not match up the meaning I'd like to convey so I figured I'd do this instead." also you didn't even reply to him. of course you wouldn't! he'd feel insulted too if that's all he'd do to express his love and gratitude.

malleus takes advantage of your confusion and carefully places the box in your arms. you nearly fall over from the weight cause what the hell are these things made of?

expensive minerals you suppose.

"these are traditional gifts in briar valley." he explained. but like, what? you mean over a thousand gems and whatnot in a box is a gift? all of a sudden you feel bad gifting him a rock as a joke because you didn't have anything on you.

I should really step up. you think grimly.

malleus seems to be thinking. "and.. a gift for cour—"

"malleus." seethed an eerily cold voice. both of you just freeze and malleus shuts up completely. is he actually looking tense and scared?!

you look at lilia with wide eyes, unblinking in fear that if you do blink he's just gonna teleport right at your face and next thing you know everything's black.

although malleus definitely looks less horrified than you, he looks way too scared for you to think that way.

hesitantly, malleus replies quietly. "lilia." he places his arms behind his back like he's speaking to a war general or something but that's impossible haha..

"care to explain why my instrument suddenly caught on fire after it got struck by electricity?" lilia raises a brow. casting you a kind glance for a second before returning his sharp look at malleus.

the latter tips his head in shame and you feel like you should not be witnessing this.

but wait. malleus actually did that? you thought he was literally joking.

you did not see malleus after that.

to word it better he was not allowed to see you.

lilia had said, and you quote. 'he simply won't learn if I don't punish him' with a shrug so casual that you doubted if it was the same malleus he grounded that you were thinking about.

the 'top 10 in ranking in terms of power' kind of malleus you were thinking.

if malleus actually listened to lilia then you doubt that he doesn't have some kind of comparable power.

while for some time you did think that lilia sent malleus to solitary confinement, unlikely but with him apparently not having met with anyone it's definitely possible.

well that theory was quickly thrown out the window when you find a letter right at the mat of your front door. signed in an eccentric manner by; m.d which could only belong to one person.

long story short, he wanted to meet you at the school cafeteria which was strange in itself cause you're almost sure that the students avoid malleus like the plague and if he's there surely it'd be wiped out right now.

which.. you're not exactly opposed to if it meant not having a huge line to the menu!

though you suppose the environment had made you used to it.

when you come close the doors magically open, and they were not given the privilege to close seeing as they still sensed you near.

well the reason why you won't let the doors just close is for the very fact that the tables of the cafeteria are absolutely gone. replaced with many eccentric tables filled with food, and drinks alike.

also, there's a literal disco ball so something was definitely going on. was there some kind of secret prom that no one told you about? if so then you're about to bolt out knowing full well you're in your regular uniform.

many people who you presume as students are all littered across the room with varying fancy degrees of clothing. either devouring the tables or just dancing.

overall it was very fancy and clearly you aren't even meant to be here.

you pause a little longer to take in the surroundings in hopes of satisfying your curiosity. unfortunately, all you had was a party you accidentally trespassed on (again. not your fault, no one told you!) so you just turned on your heel, and the doors literally shut in your face.

"???" you blink.

"apologies but if I let you leave malleus will be more upset." giggled a familiar voice, far less colder than you remember from your previous meeting. you snap your head to lilia who looks like he's resolved whatever with malleus.

you furrow your brows. "wait, this is his doing?" you cross your arms over your chest. unlike this very colorful room, in comparison to appealing dark malleus it was completely a contrast. a weird one.

lilia nods with a cheeky smile. he knows more than he tells you. "yes."

"but why exactly?"

"hm. you really don't know? shall I tell you?" he places a finger over his chin and looks up. "I shouldn't!"

is he really doing this right now?

at your frowning face lilia chuckles away. "I'm merely jesting, dear. you see malleus hasn't gotten time to properly convey his message to you."

well, that is true. you blank. even a few days ago since the adeuce duo was always following you around it was only in due time that their tongues would betray them when malleus asked to talk to you alone.

"you didn't even send the message that you said he had for me." you narrow your eyes at lilia who pauses. "oh, did I?"

"yes, you did."

he shrugs. "well that was an accident."

"like the time at the botanical garden?"

this time he looks more sheepish at your constant picking but quickly laughs it off. lilia appears behind you and guides you down the main area with a push. for such a small body he's doing it quite easily, no?

not that you'd ever say that out loud.

"I shouldn't keep my boy's special guest, off you go." he whisks you away to the crowd and pushes you there.

next thing you know you're face to face with a very happy malleus who obviously perks up at your presence and waves a finger.

suddenly there's some kind of big light shining down at you, in response you raise an arm over your eyes and think; what in the hell is going on?! why is everything going so fast?

you could hear everyone silence out and feel the embarrassment grow tenfold. why did you even come here again? "my child of man." malleus starts and by the volume of his voice you can tell that he's using a microphone.

you freeze up. "what." you reply slowly.

"before I've met you my world was encased in grey and white."

is he like proposing or something?

"everyone was afraid of me, even those deemed as strong. so it made me wonder, why you? a powerless, ordinary human were not?" way to hurt a 'powerless, ordinary human's' feelings malleus

"perhaps I am a fool but I realized the reason why everything was so colorless. when I stared into your eyes for the first time I realized that everything was warm—colorful. the rest isn't my world, because it's—"

you were about to think that you were equally flattered and embarrassed but before he could finish his little speech the mic just gets straight up cut off.

everyone looks behind malleus and you want to bolt out when you realize that those three are your friends. you facepalm. "oh for the love of.."

malleus reaches out to you. "wait—"

"hmph. I should have known this would have attracted trouble." vil.

"child of man?"

"how improper! draconia was speaking.. when I get my hands on them it's off with their head!" riddle.

"I apologize for the inconvenience i—"

"if you'd like them to have a suitable punishment I know just the thing." azul.

"stop speaking right now." seethed malleus.

"everyone keep talking." said leona smoothly.

"oh my.. this will end in disaster." lilia.

"ace I told you to not go here!"

"shut up deuce!"

"you—"

a myriad of voices all start bypassing each other and it's honestly hard to hear who's speaking save from a few familiar voices.

you glance at everyone with a mixture of concern and irritation before your gaze lands over malleus, then down his hand which held a microphone who was long broken before.

somehow lightning strikes inside the cafeteria, just centimeters away from the trio who huddled together and shook in a group hug.

"ENOUGH." everyone does just that.

"as I was saying, you are my world (name) and I'd very much like it if I can be yours." malleus says quickly, looking away shyly before smiling at you like he didn’t just snap.

everyone's jaw drops, including yours but that's not the only thing that did because well. you did too! figuratively and literally.

if the silence wasn't already prominent before then it certainly is because everyone just watched you on the floor after the thump, clearly unconscious and comically steaming from the ears.

then it's just a very panicky-chaotic scenario, a lot of screaming that just made more people start screaming too.

in a flash, malleus is hovering over your body. simultaneously looking you over for possible injuries that might have caused this and about to stare down anyone that actually dared to come in closer.

except lilia it seems.

the last person that tried to approach was grim and he got the searing glare from malleus.

malleus softens his look once he spares a glance at you and quickly leans over to lilia. "what's happened? have they been poisoned? cursed?"

lilia chuckles. "not at all. I'm afraid your confession had not only given everyone a shock but them as well."

"so I've done this?" malleus looks immensely saddened. lilia explains once again like he's done it over a hundred times. "it's not your fault my dear."

"you bring them to the infirmary, stay by their side. I'm sure they will be happy to see you there one they wake up." lilia said, malleus already being one step ahead and sliding you in his arms.

he's dreamt of doing this but definitely not this way!

"meanwhile I will deal with this mess of a party." lilia shakes his head. "go now."

an hour later you wake up disoriented and so confused as to why malleus is so suddenly affectionate with you. the bigger question is, why is everyone staring at you?!

"so you'll help me right, azul?"

the former laughs nervously at you and tips his hat in an apologetic motion. "I'm afraid I can't.. someone like me surely is not worth your time." he continues laughing, sneaking a gaze behind you and dipping it quickly once he sees the flash of green.

you just stare at him confused. why won't anyone talk with you normally?

note. OMG I just realized the title i picked is literally perfect!! if you know the song then you'll know the line 'horrified looks from everyone in the room' IT MATCHES RIGHT HELP

commision me!

#twst x reader #twisted wonderland x reader #malleus draconia x reader #malleus draconia #malleus x reader #twst #twisted wonderland #twst fluff #twst scenarios #twst headcanons #twst imagines #x gn reader #malleus x you #twstnexus

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bromcommie · 9 months ago

Text

moving like a river of trouble crossing

Rating: M | Word count: 10,260 | Tags: Set in the lead up to and right at the end of CATWS, Character Study, PTSD, Grief/Mourning, Dissociation, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug (And A Friend), Wait No Not That One, Going Down Memory Lane, SHIELD Has Shitty Therapists, Horrible People Still Acting Like People, Captain America Politics, Natasha's Love Language Is Surveillance, Folks Trained For Violence Engaging In You Guessed It: Violence | Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanoff, implied Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers/Brock Rumlow (non-explicit, but still reasonably fucked up by virtue of Rumlow being Rumlow)

(belated) fic for @catws-anniversary, day 2. Thank you so much for putting it together, guys! | march 27th theme: steve rogers | prompts: guilt, "it kind of feels personal" | on AO3 here

and because I apparently can't help myself with the music-fic thing, playlist for this here

Good morning Captain Rogers. It is 05:15 AM, EST. Up 'n' at 'em. Good morning, Captain Rogers. It is 04:41 AM, EST. Would you like me to set the blinds to a lower density? Don't you nuh-uh at me, sunshine - get your lazy ass out of bed. You're gonna be late. Good morning, Captain Rogers. I understand you are under some duress right now, but please do not be alarmed. It is 2:32 am, EST. The year is 2012. You are in New York City. You are safe. Please try to take a breath. Would you like me to call anyone?

Good morning, Steve. Good morning. You're gonna be late. You awake? You awake yet?

Sure. Sure, he's awake.

That afternoon he packs his bag, the single duffle that fits all of his earthly possessions. He tries to ignore the vaguely smug tone of Fury's voice when he tells him they already have an apartment set up for him in DC: ten minutes from HQ, real convenient, and has he ever been to see Lincoln Memorial? He'll love it, it's a nice spot for a walk, especially in the summers, or so Fury's been told.

Steve's been to DC, but he's never beeen to the memorial, never seen much of the city outside the confines of the hotel the USO booked for them. He thinks he can count the grand total of places he's gotten to see up close on his right hand, and half of them were in the European Theatre. The other half he's running from now.

He's sure it'll be grand, he tells Fury. Beats the smell of moldy brick in the heat and a patchwork city manifesting ghosts out the corner of his eye, he doesn't say. ii.

They get him a therapist as a part of his onboarding at SHIELD. It’s due diligence, they say, in the aftermath of New York – someone to help him transition into his new role. But it’s been almost nine months now, and Steve’s learning their language, the words that get caught up in between all the red tape: saying assistance when they mean overwatch.

“This is supposed to be a safe space, not an interrogation,” the woman says at the start of her first evaluation, meeting all of his unease with a reassuring smile, and something about the misplaced quality of it puts him on a knife’s edge.

He only pieces it together the second time he’s called in to meet with her, when he's a bit more clear-headed and a whole lot more impatient than during their initial encounter. It only takes a few perfunctory exchanges before he starts registering the image as a whole: the painstakingly nonthreatening, gentle demeanor, the conservative clothes she’s wearing; the pale complexion and the sharp features and the unmistakable lilt to her voice, soft and rolling and decidedly more old country than east coast.

It would feel almost perverse, he thinks from a distance, if it wasn’t already painfully transparent and tactically inept to boot: this attempt at the same trick that didn’t work in their favor the first time around. He supposes he can’t blame them for trying to fill in the gaps between what they could scrounge up from paper and old photographs with something predictable and comforting, something expected of his background and what is now probably regarded as an antiquated time period.

He also knows that going off of little information when dealing with a potential threat is dangerous. What’s even more so, he thinks as he nods politely along to the lady's explanation of their work together, is believing you know more than you do, and that’s the easiest mistake to exploit.

Here's a fact probably still recorded somewhere on a faded death certificate: Sarah Rogers never lived long enough to get gray in her hair like that.

Here’s another, probably only still recorded in his memory and nowhere else: his mother had been fiercely caring, yes, and compassionate to a fault, but her kindness had never translated to docility, and it sure as hell had never translated to softspoken dishonesty.

So when the shrink bearing a near-painful resemblance to her starts asking incisive questions enshrouded in unoffensive words and indulgent tones, Steve packs his entire reality into a series of half-truths without batting an eye and doesn’t feel an ounce of guilt.

Yes, he’s eating. Yes, he’s sleeping well. No, he’s not on edge – sure, it gets hard, sometimes, but exercise helps, meditation, music. Going out into the world, meeting new people. Trying new things. Yes, he’s ready to be back in the field. No, not so much so that he’s itching for it. Yes ma’am, he’s doing fine, just fine, thank you for asking. iii.

“I heard Hannah’s single,” Romanoff's saying, and it’s not the first time his brain is latching onto the fact that she’s keeping pace with him without losing too much breath, without any discomfort in the cool air that's just starting to roll in as fall bleeds into the city, painting it in darkening evenings and dimming colors. “You know, from forensics? Glasses, leggy, science-y type. Blonde – you like blondes, right?”

“I’m starting to think you only have one thing on your mind,” Steve pants, pushes harder ahead until his calves start burning, just to see if she'll allow herself to follow. Keep moving, keep moving. You awake yet? “Gotta admit, it’s making it kinda hard to enjoy all this quality time we spend together.”

“What, you’re going to stop inviting me on runs? Aw, Rogers. Break a girl’s heart, why don’t you.”

“It’s not really an invitation if you just show up without me letting you know where I’m going, you know.”

She shrugs. “I needed to burn some energy, and you’re not exactly the most unpredictable person in this city.” Her ponytail whips over his shoulder as she follows his sharp right turn around the War Memorial and passes him towards Constitution Gardens, too close and competitive. “Brunette, then? There’s a girl in operations, real tough, good with a gun – at least your propensity for that type has been well documented, but I guess you didn't really have enough time to enjoy it, y'know, all the way –”

Steve knows she’s talking about Peggy, he does. It doesn’t help the hard-wired alarm bells going off in the back of his head any. He digs his heels in, skids to a stuttering halt over the wet pavement, and somewhere in the back of his consciousness he’s quietly pleased that it catches Romanoff off guard a little.

“What, too far?” she jokes, but her eyes are quick over his face; cataloguing the boundaries, the places she can still push.

He's sure it's well-meaning, as much as a blatant handler can get. But some habits are just harder to shake than others. That, he's intimately familiar with.

“If I say yes, will you stop? Or at least stop tailing me?”

“I don’t tail you. That’s below my paygrade,” she says, mouth quirking up at the corner like that’s all the punchline she needs as she types something into her smartphone. “I’ll text you her number. She likes spicy food and old movies.”

“Sure, fine. Great.”

“It is. You'll see.” The phone disappears back into one of the many hidden pockets of her skin-tight leggings. The marvels of modern technology, Steve thinks. Natasha quirks a challenging brow. “Now can we start the actual run finally or have you reached your limit, grandpa?”

He's all but ready to chicken out of the date all week, fighting the urge to cancel at the last minute, but he figures the girl doesn't deserve his bad manners just because he feels like spiting Romanoff when she tries to play his puppetmaster.

In the end it goes...surprisingly well. As Romanoff described, Lina’s beautiful and sharp and a little closed off, tough as nails and maybe even more rigid in her approach than him, but once they get over the initial hurdle of awkwardness and expectations the conversation flows with relative ease. They swap the basics, they talk interests and habits and what moving to DC's like, fun little stories from growing up; he tells her about the butcher on his block when he was a kid that kept a rooster in the backyard, and she tells him about the kid on her floor at community college that set the dorm on fire trying to boil an egg. They talk SHIELD and her work training the new recruits and there’s a spark in her eye as she dives into giving him a breakdown of what he should look into, BJJ and MMA and gyms around town that would be discreet enough to take him in.

“SHIELD’s got plenty of hand-to-hand experts,” she says in a pensive tone over the dessert, “but it can get a little…”

Steve chuckles around his spoonful of the sticky rice, the sweetness of the mango across the back of his palate soothing the previous burn of the spice. Turns out he likes Thai food, too. Who would’ve thought. “Intense?”

“Testosterone-riddled, I was gonna say,” Lina grins, conspiratory. “And paranoid. Not the best scene if you just want to learn,” and he nods along because it’s true, and because it’s a relief to have someone else say it for him.

So it’s nice, and sweet, and ultimately entirely impersonal. He walks her to her door and she gives him a kiss on the cheek, and when she explains how she’s not really looking for anything right now her dark eyes are warm and honest but not overly apologetic. It’s a gesture he’s grateful for.

“Besides, not to be blunt, but you don’t seem all that…” She trails off, waving her hand.

He winces. “Interested? I am, really, but...” And that’s just it, isn’t it. He’s interested; she’s wonderful, just his type, seems to like him well enough. But.

“Look, I get it. We’ve all been there. Can’t really avoid it in this business.” She shrugs as if to say what can you do, smiles up at him knowingly. “Wrong place, wrong time, right?”

And Steve thinks, yeah. Yeah, something like that. iv.

“–piece of shit, every time, sand all up in the fuckin’ thing. Goddamn Kandahar all over again,” Rumlow’s muttering, agitated and half to himself, and Steve doesn’t ask about the last part, just dumps his own gear on the rack and drops down onto the bench. They might be friendly, but they’re not friends – Rumlow doesn’t owe him his history. “I get sent to the fuckin’ desert in this weather one more time, I’m gonna start missing New York winters.”

The jet’s engines hum at his back, adrenaline leaving his body in slow pulls as he watches Rumlow work, notes the intermittent scarring over his hands as they strip the jammed gun down like it’s muscle memory, quick and capable. There's not a spot on him that seems unmarred, really - the scars are a continous, scattered motif up to his face, moving faint in the dim light of the jet.

Loved being in the ring, he'd said once, as far back as I can remember. Might've gotten the shit kicked out of me more than was strictly necessary, though. Accounts for me ending up here, in any case.

He’s drawn this exact scene, it occurs to Steve before he can push it away; down to the boxer's shoulders, down to the complaining, and more than once.

“You from the city?” he offers, an easy distraction that Rumlow seems grateful for.

“Yeah. Yeah, born and raised right off of Arthur Ave.”

“No shit?”

“Yep. Good old Belmont.” He looks up, gaze turning sharp at whatever he catches on Steve’s face before he can look away. “Wouldn’t think you’d know where that is. You ever even been past Central Park?”

Steve gets a flash of washed-out color and brilliant light, of Art and Charlie and the rest of them from the Y dragging him up to Harlem; thinks of the queens with their elaborate glamour and loud, unapologetic laughter and that last wet spring before the cops started shutting everything down, of stumbling tipsy towards the A down 155th Street with empty pockets and Jeanie giggling into his shoulder about some honey-eyed daddy that gave her a sweet kiss goodnight. A well-insulated secret, a fleeting memory of feeling like he could swallow the world whole.

It’s not what Rumlow’s talking about, he knows. He nods anyway.

“Loved that neighborhood. My folks moved us out to Staten when I was in high school, though,” and Steve must make an involuntary face at that because Rumlow chuckles and says, “Alright, tough guy. Not all of us had the privilege of living within two blocks of Prospect Park.”

“Neither did I, but it sure beat Staten," Steve snorts. "And it wasn’t even as much of a privilege, back then.”

“Yeah, I think you’ll notice a lot of things’ve changed.” He tilts his head, scratches contemplative at his stubbled chin. Steve wonders if he’s projecting the bitterness in Rumlow’s voice. “A lotta things’ve gone to shit in that place. Food’s still way better than fuckin’ DC, though. Not nearly enough Italians over here.”

“Yeah. All that white marble and not a single decent, roach-infested deli. Real shithole,” Steve says after a moment, testing the waters more than anything. “Should put that on the tourist brochures.”

It gets another laugh out of Rumlow, low and maybe a little surprised. The sound settles like molten lead in Steve’s stomach, grounding.

One morning in November he gets a phone call from a Washington Post journalist asking for his statement on the newly planned Captain America exhibit, and then in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it feat of persuasion it’s three days later and he’s somehow been roped into a grand opening ceremony, a speech and a press conference at the Smithsonian.

It lasts for-fucking-ever.

By the time he's back in his neighborhood his ears are ringing with leftover noise and applause, his cheeks sore from a constant smile that'd felt more like a slashed tire than a friendly gesture even as he was forcing it. He'd reverted back to the Best Foot Forward, Always mentality of the bonds circuit quick enough - but at least back then it felt like it had a marginal purpose, no matter how flimsy or false. Back then it didn't drain him this much, he doesn't think.

Best Foot Forward these days feels more like sleepwalking his way off a cliff than anything else.

The second he's through the door he shrugs out of the tie and starched shirt chafing at his neck, tries not to think about how he still would've preferred all the commotion and the pretense to the unfamiliar silence of the otherwise big apartment building. Tries to give the feeling resurfacing in him now that he's got attention enough for it a name other than unbearable.

Here's the thing: pain, Steve knows on an intimate level, is something you get used to. It's not to say you forget it exists completely: you just subsume it, you learn to expect it. It’s less about it becoming a habit and more that it becomes a part of you when you’re not looking: fills up all the empty crevices it can find and creates a mold, and that’s the shape you start to take if you live with it long enough. The problem with that is that the longer it goes on, the less space in you there is for other things.

He was five the first time he got really sick. It'd started simple enough – the winter of ’23 came early and sudden, and New Year’s Eve found him in bed with a fever that earned the dreaded prefix scarlet soon enough when the spread of dotted red started taking up more and more space on his body. He'd spent two weeks feeling like someone's dangling him off the edge of the unknown, and much longer than that after with his mother's watchful eyes following him from the window whenever he left the house, like she couldn't force herself to look away.

But he made it. Despite all indications, little Stevie Rogers didn't die, and it was a miracle with a capital M. All he had to do is make peace with having a somewhat faulty heart as a keepsake of all that survival and maybe never playing for the Dodgers, which is not to say it stopped him from trying.

But then next year it was the whooping cough so bad it cracked a rib, then his left ear giving out on him after a prolonged sinus infection, then the asthma he barely even noticed amidst everything else until it layed him out flat midway through a game of stickball bad enough it landed him in the hospital. The minor league dreams dissolved fairly quickly after that.

In ’25 he missed more school than he attended. The kids from down the block came round to call on him less and less, and it wasn't too long before they forgot completely and it was just him and a handful of toy soldiers left, with names like Joe and Jack and occasionally if he allowed himself, Steve. Their neighbors started smiling at him more. The grocer started handing him a fistful of candy under the counter every time they came in, looking at his mother in a way that said sorry for your loss and that Steve hated with a passion, least of all because he couldn't even enjoy the pity because hello, here comes diabetes. Then it was the pernicious goddamn anemia and months and months of the liver-fucking-everything diet followed closely by its sworn enemy the ulcers, and then the growing pains, and then the bad back, and then the bum joints – And then, and then, and then.

Here’s the thing about pain: the longer you carry it, the more you forget you’re doing it in the first place. You ignore it because it’s the only way to survive it, because what the hell else are you supposed to do? And that’s when you start thinking you have it under control. You start to think you’ll be ready when it comes for you again.

Here’s the other thing about pain: you’re never ready. It comes as a surprise each time. He wasn’t ready in ‘30 when the neighborhood suddenly started reeking of despair and death and he wasn’t ready in ’36 when his ma went and he wasn’t ready in ’44 when he got shot in the neck and thought oh, so it can still hurt like this. I can still bleed.

Then '45 rolled around and a new thought followed, a miserable dot at the end of a sentence: maybe bleeding out would've hurt less. At least it would've made us even.

None of that experience and understanding stops him feeling it now, again, still, like an uninterrupted line from that first fever chill to here, standing in the middle of his living room with a glossy brochure full of dead faces in his hand and an exhaustion so deep it roots him to the spot.

And then there’s the anger, of course: equally familiar but much more muted, less expressive than it used to be, dancing around the edges of everything else. He looks back down at the crumpled pamphlet, to where the folded-unfolded-refolded creases cut through the title:

Captain America’s team: the top tier of the World War II effort and a leading example of integration!

As if they were somehow Captain America's or even the US army’s to begin with; as if it was encouraged and Steve didn’t have to stand around in moldy tents arguing his brand-new, star-spangled ass off with Major Whatshisname and Colonel Whoever-the-fuck for days on end just to keep them eating in the same mess hall and sleeping in the same barracks. Nothing about any of the ugly parts, about the blood and the bureaucracy and the bullshit. Nothing about any of them, either - no mention of Dernier's politics or Gabe's professorship or Morita's writing. Not a single inch of space left for their families or their own stories except as a footnote in Steve's own, a way to make it picture perfect.

Nothing about Bucky other than the barebone facts: he was Steve's friend, he was a good soldier, he died. The meat and blood and soul of the person, left out; the fact of whose fault it ultimately was, conveniently gone.

And that name – the Howling fucking Commandos. The bunch of them would’ve busted a rib laughing at it, laid out all grandiose like that. For one, it’s still as ridiculous as it was back then – sounds more action novel than historical account and distinctly less bureaucratic and arbitrary than the Specialized 107th, which is what they were strictly called in the paperwork. Personally, Steve always thought that out of the variety of nicknames they’ve been awarded, the Invaders was by far the most fitting. Truer to wartime, to what it was they really did, and far more threatening if it ever reached the other side of the line. Then again, from what he’s gathered so far, it seems like America’s done far more than its fair share of invading since. It definitely accounts for the 180 degree change in branding.

Turns out it’s still all about selling comic books and war bonds. And Steve, too caught up in his own sorry wallowing, is just going along with it.

Jesus, he thinks, the tone of it coated in a wry, familiar voice nestled in the back of his brain but much harsher than it ever was in reality, drop the philosophy for one goddamn minute. Anybody ever tell you idle hands are the Devil's playthings? Get moving, Rogers. Trade the speeches in for something useful.

So he does: chucks the paper into the empty white fruit bowl collecting dust on the countertop, turns the TV on to a random channel to break the silence. He doesn’t recognize the title of the movie playing but it’s soothing, the background awash with static and the accents just familiar enough to make for pleasant white noise. He heats up his leftovers, sprawls out on the couch and gets to reading the reports Fury had unloaded on him, tuning in every so often to the witty back-and-forth dialogue. It’s maybe half an hour of squinting at indecipherable bureaucratic jargon before he finally gives up, lifts his head to rub the sleep from his eyes.

One of the men on screen – Nick, Steve thinks, or maybe that one’s Mikey, he hasn’t been following along all that well, to the work or the film – is trying to dissuade the other from visiting his mother’s grave in the dead of night. Comedic, he thinks, for all its grim setup.

It’s 1 in the morning.

That makes it nicer.

It doesn’t make it anything, Nick. A grave is a grave. There’s not a religion in the world that says a person’s soul is buried with them in their grave, the man argues, and it’s like whiplash pulling him out of the serene lull; the unasked for memory of a name over a plot in Greenwood he’d never gone to visit, and he thinks, a little disoriented – of course there’d be no soul in that patch of land. The grave itself is empty.

They’d given him reports in the beginning, too: a neat stack of papers, most of them stamped DECEASED in glaring red letters, and the single mocking MISSING IN ACTION. At the very end there’d been a laughably short list of contacts, among them a phone number and address for one Rebecca Barnes-Proctor.

God help us all, he can imagine the voice of George Barnes saying even now, jokingly abject, our Becca’s married a Proddie.

But there had been briefings, then, and the shitshow over Manhattan, and in between all of that the days where he couldn’t even find the will to leave his apartment block, let alone go to Brooklyn. Over and over, he’d given himself the same excuses as with Peggy – it would be too much, too soon, too selfish to usurp her life like that.

Of course, the truth of it all was much simpler. All too cowardly, too, in a way that has the guilt blooming with a vengence somewhere in the pit of his stomach: he didn’t have the guts to look Bucky’s baby sister in the eye, no matter her age, and say, I’m sorry you didn’t get a body to bury. I’m sorry the one time he needed it I didn’t do the job he spent his whole life doing for me. I’m sorry I left him behind when it should have been me down there in the first place.

He watches the two men stumble around in the muddy dark of the graveyard and yell and bicker in a way that strikes Steve as bitterly melancholy all of a sudden, the familiarity of it unmooring.

Mike, y’know what? Now that I’m here, I don’t know what to do, Nick finally admits at the foot of the tombstone, wild-eyed and devolving into a rambling laugh, and ain’t that a kicker. Welcome to the club.

It’s very hard to talk to a dead person, we have nothing in common. Hi, ma.

Nick, you’re making me forget the kaddish, Mike chides with mounting frustration as Nick keeps giggling and it’s not funny, it’s really not, the whole premise of it deeply morbid, but Steve finds himself laughing right along with Nick’s hysterical hiccups, his childlike plea of I don��t wanna die, ma.

You don’t get a choice in the matter, his own mother had told him when he was maybe 8 or 9, faced with a more concrete concept of death for the first time, if that’s the way the chips fall, then that’s God’s will. But what matters is the middle, what you choose to do with it. Do you understand?

He didn’t, really, not back then, and ten years later when they’d lowered her into the ground all he could think was: what is the point of it, anyway, of all those right choices, if all that happens is you end up dying alone?

Steve hadn’t been, of course. For all of the isolation he’d felt during those last few months of his mother’s illness, he’d never been really alone. There’d been the Barnes’ and the old ladies from church and even some of the folks Sarah had helped treat at the hospital coming by and Bucky, Jesus Christ; Bucky crying at the funeral and saying kaddish for months like Sarah was his own and letting Steve rage and lash out until all the fight had drained out of him, his arms like a vice around Steve’s shaky frame.

And there’s the actual goddamned truth, he thinks, bone-weary. The only truth that matters, the one that’ll never get written on any museum walls: Steve was only ever as strong as the people propping him up.

I think that’s the reason we’re such good friends, Nick is saying to Mike when he tunes back in, and Steve’s not laughing anymore, hasn’t been ever since his throat had gone tight a long few minutes ago, because we remember each other from when we were kids. Things that happened when we were kids that no one else knows about but us. It’s in our heads. That’s how we know they really happened.

What are you talking about? I know what really happened when I was a kid.

Yeah, but no one else does, Nick says, painfully earnest. I mean, everyone we knew as kids is dead.

He shuts the TV off with a soft click, waits a long while before the heartbeat pounding in his ears has settled. Thinks about what it really means, then, to embody the final resting place of all your ghosts.

Maudlin, Bucky’s voice echoes in his head again, fills out the crevices of the silent apartment like a slow bleed. Always gotta be so maudlin, Rogers, like you’re Scarlett O-fucking-Hara. Just get up. Get up, Steve.

“Yeah,” Steve sniffs, wipes a rough hand over his eyes; laughs again because it’s a damn joke, all of it, and he can afford to lose the plot in the privacy of his own home. “Yeah, fuck you too, asshole. Go haunt somebody else.”

vi.

"Heard you had an eventful weekend," Rumlow comments when they all pile into the locker room the following week, a little roughed up and beat and stinking of iron and sweat but otherwise in decent spirits. "Seemed like a good time, all those pretty girls throwing themselves at you to shake their babies and kiss their hands or whatever."

"Shows how much you know. The pretty ladies were all balding men over the age of 50," Steve says, only half-joking, shrugging into his civvies with a wince. There's a cut on his side where he fell a little too close to a protruding piece of rebar that's already reopened twice by the time they've gotten off the jet, but despite the sharp sting of it he's feeling better than he did just a mere twelve hours ago.

Idle hands, after all, turns out to be true enough. Wryly he thinks he might owe sending an apology up to Sister Andrea, although he figures anyone that enjoyed using a ruler on little kids that much wouldn't have ended up in Heaven, anyway.

"But sure, it was alright. A little too much attention all at once, if I'm being honest."

"Oh?" Rumlow huffs. "Big talk coming from someone who dresses like you do. I hope you didn't show up there wearing that."

Steve frowns down at the faded jeans, the fitted grey shirt – one of many pairs that came with the closet in his apartment. It rubbed him the wrong way, at first, but it's easier in the end; not having all that wide array of choice dumped over his head all the time. "What's wrong with my clothes?"

"Nothing. I just get worried they're gonna start cutting off blood flow at some point, y'know," Rumlow grins, his teeth very white in the bright fluorescent lights. "God forbid we finally get to a bar one of these days, I'd have to mind every creep from here to Dupont tryna get a peek down your shirt."

"Fuck off," Steve huffs, feeling heat flush down into his neck despite himself. Yeah, blood flow really isn't the problem. He gestures at Rumlow's own undershirt, all slick black and skin-tight, motion packed in. "Look who's talkin'."

"Yeah, but I don't dress like this out there. This is all for you guys," he yawns with a stretch, all exaggerated bravado. "I got one of those, y'know - work-life balances. Out there I clean up nice. You, I figure you sleep in that shit. Or is it a ‘full-gear’ kind of situation?"

Steve snorts, turning back to his pack and the blank reprieve of the dull metal wall of lockers. "You'll be happy to know I clean up just fine. Got the one tux and everything."

"Is that right? They get you decked out in some bespoke threads for the parade, Cap?" He chuckles at the face Steve makes when the word bespoke fully registers. "See if I believe that without any evidence."

Steve digs out his phone reluctantly. He does have pictures, is the thing, woke up the next morning feeling like a sack of potatoes tossed from a great height just to see his phone light up with an email from SHIELD's HR with an attachment sent over for approval - like he was a celebrity ending up in a tabloid, he thinks again with distate, like he should care much either way what he looked like. He thumbs through his email to the one labeled FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION, and shoves it over at Rumlow before he can think twice, drops onto the bench to sort out the rest of his pack.

"Looking good, you weren't kidding. And the mural's all heroic," Rumlow comments lightly as he scrolls through with lingering scrutiny. "Wait, don't tell me - the little mustachioed, scruffy looking one is the frogeater, yeah?"

Steve laugh comes easier this time. "The little mustachioed, scruffy looking one would've kicked your ass six ways from Sunday if he'd heard you call him that. Yeah, that's Dernier. Gabe, next to him," he lists, trying not to think about how it comes across that he's memorized the order, "Dum Dum - he didn't like that nickname, either - Bucky, Monty, and Morita."

"Sure were big on callin' each other everything other than your names, huh?" The joke is followed by a stretch of quiet, and when Steve looks back up Rumlow's frowning at the phone a little, a flicker of uncertainty over his face that Steve doesn't get to figure out before it's gone. His face smoothes out into a mostly flat expression, an undercurrent of something unnerved and rippling, and Steve can't help himself.

"What?"

Rumlow passes him the phone back with a shrug. "Nothing, just - haven't seen those pictures since I was in high school," he says, a little distant like the memory's faded to oblivion since, and hell if Steve'll ever stop finding it strange that all of them ended up in dusty old school books, obsolete. "Long time ago, now. Guess I just remembered all of you being much older, is all."

He leans back against the wall of lockers, pensive, watches Steve fumble with the zipper of his hoodie where it keeps sticking for a minute. "You must miss it, though. The good old days. Your people."

"Yeah, well.” Steve clears his throat against the uneasy heat of the room, yanks at the cheap piece of plastic again. The fit and cut, he might've gotten used to - but he'll never get over the waste; just how quickly everything falls right apart in the future. “Like you said, it was a long time ago."

"It was, wasn't it. Longer for some than others, though," he says cryptically, and Steve really has nothing to say to that that won't land him right back where he was two days ago. He doesn't have to, in the end, because Rumlow throws a curt nod at his front, and it takes a second too long for him to interpret what his zeroed-in expression means, to register the dotting of blood through the thin fabric of his shirt. "You're bleeding all over the place again."

"It's fine. Don't feel it much," Steve says. Something's different. What's different? Wake up.

"Sure. Never do, do you," he says, gesturing to the hoodie with a thoughtful look that's inching away from the easy banter. "That shit's gonna stain, though."

"I was gonna throw it out anyway."

It should be enough, and in any other situation it would be. Any other situation he'd shrug it off with more conviction, Rumlow'd call him a tough guy with just the right amount of mockery, and the tension would pass. Except that Rumlow had to lead them into uncharted territory and Steve hadn't been quick enough to notice before he was flailing, too exposed.

Except that instead of a quip what he gets is Rumlow's stepping into his space, the casual slouch of his shoulders replaced with something more deliberate when he reaches for where Steve's hand is still holding onto where the teeth of the zipper have gotten all gnarled. In a heartbeat Steve's back to square one: keenly aware of the proximity and every inch of his body in the cramped space; back to that first day in the elevator with Rumlow's dark eyes turned on him with a questioning look and a twist to his mouth that said it's a pleasure, Cap but meant I've been here long enough - you don't impress me any more than any other kid I've seen this place chew up and spit back out.

It'd been enough to get his spine straightening of its own accord back then, too; the sheer challenge of it, pushing at the boundaries of hierarchy. It makes him want to pull away now, want to put the usual distance between them, to get the hell out of this stuffy locker room. Makes him want to push forward until he meets something immovable and solid.

Want, want, want - too much and for things that were unreachable. That's always been his problem, hasn't it?

The sound of the zipper is too loud in the mostly empty space when it gets yanked loose, pulled up and over the slow spread of the stain, and Steve realizes with a start that he didn't notice the chatter die down as the few stragglers left the room. Realizes that he hasn't moved a muscle in a good minute, like a butterfly with its wing pinned.

Rumlow's touch lingers, just the barest pressure under his Adam's apple, and Steve's breath catches. Rumlow makes a considering noise.

He snapped a guy's neck with those hands not two hours ago: a thoughtless, instinctive thing in the middle of the ambush that was waiting for them. It's not that Steve's forgotten it; Steve's aware of it to the point of failure. It's just that it got bound up with everything else, the easy reliance and the ribbing bordering on rough and the adrenaline under his skin like a necessity.

Wake up.

Rumlow's eyes on him are sharp, a little curious. Less surprised than they ought to be.

Wake up, get moving, get out of sight. We've been here before.

Steve swallows. "Thanks."

"Sure." Rumlow steps back to hoist his bag over his shoulder and the moment breaks as quick as it came on, the whole uninterruped line of him lax and easy again, surface friendly. "Now you won't scare the guys at the front desk."

And then he's off down the hallway, leaving Steve to lean on the cool metal of the wall and do everything but think about the sudden feeling of being off balance, a little too tight in his skin in a way that only half has to do with the too-quick beat of his blood, the lingering smell of Rumlow's cologne.

vii.

Funnily enough, the Christmas gala almost slips his mind – an extraordinary accomplishment, considering that he spends most of December thinking up viable excuses not to go, dodging Romanoff’s questions and sideways looks with the agility of a man running for his life.

“We can hang out with the civilians. Break the record of how many weapons contractors you can piss off in one night,” she says one brisk and sunny afternoon when she manages to drag him out to a coffee shop barely across from SHIELD, the steam from her tea swirling up in billows to fog her opaque sunglasses. “It’ll be fun.”

“I don’t know any civilians,” he says, deliberately obtuse. It’s a joke; he can’t help that it’s also mostly true.

“What about Kate?”

It’s not a surprise anymore, really, that she knows everything about his life, that she has no problem making that clear to him when she wants to. He’s fine with it, he has to keep reminding himself. Maybe it’s a control thing, like when she acts like she’s not holding back when they spar, a holdover from some other life. Maybe this is the closest they get to trust, and it doesn’t matter. Much like the tails that he pretends not to clock, the check-ins and evaluations and this whole neatly preordained life someone else's drawn up for him – it comes with the package, and what difference does it make, anyway? It’s simpler like this. He can do his job, and if thinking that he’s a situation she has a handle on makes Romanoff feel better, then that’s fine, too.

“What about her?”

“You talk to her yet?”

“I talk to her all the time,” he points out. Natasha cocks her head, the rest of her expression as obscure as her shaded eyes.

“It’s for a charity. The gala.” She keeps switching lanes. Trying to get him to stumble, he thinks.

“Yeah, Ms. Potts said.” Two can play at that game. “You want a date so bad, why don't you pester Barton this much about it?”

“Clint doesn’t need pestering. It’d be good publicity if you showed, you know.”

He scoffs; there it is. “For what, the charity or Stark Industries?”

“So it is about Stark, then.”

He takes a sip of his coffee, over-sweetened and dark. 100% pure Colombian arabica, apparently, and with the price tag to reflect it. The acidic taste sticks at the roof of his mouth. “I don’t have a problem with Tony.”

He doesn’t. Stark’s a good man, he thinks, despite having inherited all of Howard’s arrogance and none of his approachability. Whatever tension was there in the beginning had dissipated, though, the second Tony plummeted thousands of feet from the sky after having, for all intents and purposes, blown himself up to save all their sorry necks. They’d broken bread, shaken hands, parted ways.

For the best, probably. Good man or not, Tony has a singular way of getting under his skin.

And then there’s also the fact that being in Manhattan just doesn’t feel right, not with the destruction still settling over everything like a cloud of noxious dust, the fenced off craters and leftover vigils scattered every few blocks like an improvised graveyard. Good morning, Captain Rogers. It is 4:47 AM EST. It is a new day. Do you see it? Do you see it yet? Are you awake?

It’s not new, this sense of loss: looking at the city and feeling grief, compounded.

“Not what I said.”

“What are you saying, then?”

“I’m saying SHIELD throws shitty office parties.” Natasha frowns and chugs half the scalding cup in one go before pushing up from the table, checking her phone. “I have to go,” she says, gives him a long look that he can’t really decipher, unusually lingering and far too serious by Natasha's standard. “Come to New York, Steve. Or at least think about it.”

viii.

He goes to see Peggy again, because of course he does. She greets him at the door with her most pleasant, polite smile this time, the kind reserved for strangers – Time for my medicine again, is it, darling? – but it’s alright, he understands. They’ve explained it to him, the good and bad days, how there’s rarely any constant. He’s grateful, anyway: just so grateful to have her around, as much as he can. Which is why he doesn’t flinch when she cries, when she calls for him like it’s been another seventy years, why he holds her brittle hand in his until she gets hazy around the eyes again and he feels a nurse’s gentle tap on his shoulder, hears her suggest that he come another time.

He takes the Harley out on the highway and drives aimlessly for the rest of the evening and well into the night, down and out and then back again until the traffic has thinned out to semis and the rare leftover commuter. He watches the speedometer kick up to 80, 90, a 100, the bike struggling, feels the rumble of the engine all the way up his spine when it skids unbalanced over the odd ice patch and thinks, grateful, grateful, grateful.

ix.

“You’re up late.”

“Hey.” Most of the building’s emptied out by now – he’d thought he’d find some privacy in the abandoned atmosphere of the holidays, and instead here Rumlow is when he was meant to be three states over, strolling through his periphery looking like he’s got nothing but time on his hands. “Thought you left with everybody else.”

“Nah. Had some business to take care of.” He settles against the wall opposite Steve, watches him shake out a one-two-three pattern that has the chain of the bag groaning. “Thought you’d be at Stark’s fancy party and putting that suit to good, promotional use.”

He never gets a chance to think about it, it turns out, getting called in two days before Christmas and ending up sending Ms. Potts – Pepper, please, call me Pepper – an overly apologetic, last-minute message excusing himself from the night. It’s a good call, in the end. The last thing he needs tonight is to be stuck in a room full of obscenely drunk, obscenely rich people expecting him to gush over the hors d’oeuvres and play at appearances.

He feels as though what he’s doing right now isn’t much different, though. It takes a whole lot of effort and posturing to dredge up a wry smile for Rumlow, anyway. “Well, it’s been busy here. Couldn’t fit it into my packed schedule.”

Rumlow snorts. He gets that expression on his face, sometimes, that same brand of amusement that makes Steve second-guess whether he’s actually in on the joke or just the punchline of it, that gets him hot under the collar in all the wrong ways. Maybe it’s just that his particular brand of humor is by a degree off from familiar; a degree too cynical, like so much seems to be nowadays. Maybe it’s just that for better or for worse, Steve has never exactly excelled at letting himself be just one of the guys, for all that entails.

That chip on your shoulder’s big enough I swear you could knock it off a mile away, sometimes.

The punching bag chooses this moment to finally release its desperate grip on the physical realm, flying off the chain with one last pitiful creak and sending sand spraying across the floor. Rumlow’s eyes track the movement with unabashed fascination.

He walks over to the neat row of bags Steve’s lined up and picks one up with relative ease, a casual show of strength. “So you gonna talk about it,” he pipes back up, handing Steve the replacement with steady hands, “or do I have to keep standing around here until you’ve run the rest of ‘em into the ground?”

“Talk about what?”

“Whatever’s got you shredding through these poor fuckin’ things at 11 pm on Christmas Eve.”

He wants to point out that he could be asking the same question – that there really is no reason for Rumlow to be here this late when he’s still technically on medical, to be in his usual tac clothes and looking as wired as Steve’s feeling. You ever take a day off? he considers asking, but that’d be prodding. What’s worse, it’d be hypocritical.

Steve shrugs, lining his shoulders back up to the unsteady sway of the bag. “Nothing, you know how it is – mission ran long. Had some leftover energy.”

“Yeah, Rollins mentioned you guys ran into some kinks.”

It’s not exactly the word Steve would use to describe the shitshow of that morning, utter failure avoided by a narrow margin because it was an old school lab, Christ, still had extracurriculars on the weekends and everything, and they just charged in half-blind.

It’s rigged, naturally. The room blows as he’s getting the janitor out, tears the face of the building open towards the sharp drop below, and all Steve can think is what a stupid, avoidable way to die. The electrical fire smell lingers for a long time after the explosion, the patter of the wet snow through the blown roof nowhere near enough to put the flames out.

They’re told to avoid detailing the collateral in the report, after: SHIELD had no way of knowing the complete situation beforehand, they say, short and brooking no argument, and Steve’s getting real damn tired of hearing that. By the time they wrap up cleanup he’s shivery and exhausted and when he finally dozes off on the long flight back with his ear to the monotonous drone of the engine, it’s to vague, uneasy bursts of the taste of ash in the mouth and many small, cold hands dragging him deep into the frozen ground.

Absurdly, the first thing he thinks of when he startles awake is Dugan’s thick mustache chained solid with frost, lips blue with the cold and grumbling under his breath.

"Gee, you're looking awful familiar there, Dum," Gabe'd say, biting off the ends of his sentences with the chatter of his own teeth. "Made this snowman that looked just like you when I was a kid - all white and lumpy with a great big bush over his lip. 'Cept his carrot nose was half as long and he never ran his fuckin' mouth this much."

And despite the cold and the misery, Dugan would elbow him and Gabe'd elbow back, obstinate. And Bucky'd laugh, Bucky'd call them all a bunch of fucking morons, and do they really want their last to be the Germans hearing them squabbling like two bitter old biddies out on the steps of the church for the whole neighborhood to see? Think of the image of our troops, golly gee. God forbid.

He strips out of his wet suit at the compound by rote and doesn’t think about the numbing cold of December among towering trees, of snow burning his fingers raw, clinging to his lashes. He runs until his lungs burn and it’s nothing like that thin, strangling air of the mountain range, nothing like warm skin sticking to icy metal, muscles all locked up and tears hot like bile in the back of his throat and the wind screaming in his ears, and –

Winters are warmer now, somebody’d told him at some point. Something about northern lights and the ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere.

“Kinks, right.”

He smooths out the edges of the tape that’s come loose over his knuckles, tries to tuck it in where he’s spotted red through the fabric. Suddenly he’s all too aware of the seconds lumbering on in silence, the eerie, empty quiet of the building; Rumlow looking at him with a single-minded intensity that makes the back of his neck prickle with heat, gets him on edge in a way he doesn't want to parse, doesn't have the energy to hide from.

It'd be no use, anyway; sometimes he thinks Rumlow can smell it on him, blood in the water.

“Alright, then.”

He aims a perfunctory jab at the bag and lets it swing back to catch it mid-air, brand-new vinyl creaking under his fingers. He considers cutting it off there. Despite the best effort he’s not feeling generous with his words tonight, a feeling exacerbated by the lingering shadow out the corner of his eye. He’d consider asking Rumlow what the hell he’s here for, or telling him he’s got someplace else to be, except for how there’s a voice in the back of his head telling him not to budge at all cost.

Except for how there’s a quieter one echoing: Where would you go, anyway?

“Alright what?”

When he turns back around Rumlow’s ditching his holstered gun on the bench. Steve didn't even notice he was armed. “You said you got some energy to burn – so let’s go a few rounds.”

“I’m good, thanks.”

“Come on,” and it’s his voice in the end, if he’s being honest with himself, that makes Steve fold; the cajoling tone and those long, tightly rolled vowels that curl and hook into the sheltered space behind his ribs. “C’mon, man, it’s been a while. I could stand to let off some steam, too.”

Come on, do it for me, Bucky had said in dozens of different iterations over the years and then only once after when it had meant something, only once when he was really asking, back up against the hard bark of the tree with his hands dangling between his legs like a man who had no more use for them. You gotta promise me, Steve, he’d tried, low and worn thin, and Steve didn’t, couldn’t find the words to that wouldn’t be a complete lie and a betrayal. Instead he’d leaned harder into his side, hand at the back of his neck, and wanted and wanted and wished like hell, not for the first time, that he could drain the misery and exhaustion out of Bucky’s body at every point of contact.

Come on, Rumlow says, and Steve goes, Pavlovian.

He rewraps his hands in silence, waits for the other man to tape up before he steps into the ring.

“Y’know, it could’ve been worse,” he says, circling Steve, tone casual, “No casualties is better than what we get most days. So you might as well stop with all this self-flagellation bullshit, Cap. It’s no good.”

“You wanna keep talking,” Steve goads him because it’s worked in the past, because it really has been a long day, “or do you wanna fight?”

They start off slow, Rumlow testing the waters and Steve pulling his punches by habit by now. He manages to land a few hits that don’t really scratch the surface, doesn’t pull back in time to avoid Rumlow’s hook. His blood rushes at the first, second, third collision, zings up his spine and sharpens everything out, bright Technicolor; it’s good, doesn’t even hurt, he’d almost forgotten –

It gets real brutal real quick, after that.

“C’mon. What, you gettin’ bored already?” Rumlow says the third time he gets past his guard, an edge of something mean and frustrated in it. He strikes out again just to skirt off Steve’s belated block, more provocation than actual intent. “Jesus, you fallin' asleep on me? Fight the fuck back, old man.”

“Look who’s talkin’,” Steve gets out, putting distance between them. “Ain’t you supposed to be passed out drunk on eggnog in Staten Island right now?”

“You ever stop running your mouth? No wonder you were the neighborhood punching bag, kid.”

“I weighed a 100 pounds soaking wet, I had to compensate. What’s your excuse?”

He’s slow this time, too. Rumlow’s not someone who signals. The kick to the plexus sends Steve stumbling back and something pops, loud. He coughs once, twice; shakes it off.

“Aw, there he is. You’re alright,” Rumlow says, deceptively sweet, dismissive. “You’re just fine. Come on, Cap. You gonna quit being a pussy or what?"

Here’s the thing: he’s not sure he likes Rumlow all that much, really, can’t read him all the way to be able to say for sure; isn't sure that he wants to. They don’t know each other, not in a way that counts – it’s only been a handful of times that they’ve even worked on the same team in the time Steve’s been in DC, even less they've gotten to have anything that counts as a real conversation outside the single locker room incident, but he’s been leading men long enough that he can pick up on the patterns. He can see the way Rumlow commands respect among STRIKE, knows the type, besides: collected and confident and purposeful, committed to the cause to the point of failure. Violent, too, sure, shooting for the head when Steve’d still be asking questions; a little too rough around the edges, sometimes, yes, but so what – Steve’s seen his fair share of that. Steve’s lived it, felt it on his own skin, inside and out, been in it for long enough. So what. He’s not about to run away screaming.

It isn’t even the first time they’ve done this, beaten the shit out of each other after hours in the deserted facility. It’s not the first time he’s seeing Rumlow in this light, eyes dark and focused; liking it a little too much, maybe, liking riling Steve up and drawing blood. A natural progression to all the things about him Steve maybe didn't want to notice and all the things that had his full attention since the second they met.

It’s fine – Steve figures, this body can take it. It’s what it was made for, anyway. Steve figures better here than out there, and out there Rumlow’s all brutal efficiency and casual competence and Steve trusts him to have his back, get the job done, which is the only part that matters. Steve trusts him, is the thing, and that carries more weight than likeability ever could.

Rumlow’s fist connects with his jaw and he feels it rattle up into his teeth, the dull pain like a live current through his body, whiting everything else out: you awake, Steve? You awake yet? Is it enough, to still be able to bleed?

So sure, maybe it’s the violence that gets him. Maybe it’s that Rumlow fights just dirty enough and doesn’t pull his punches with Steve, grins at him sharp when he spits blood from his busted lip and squares back up. Maybe it’s just that he’s not afraid to touch him or look at him wrong. Everyone else seems to be.

He blinks sweat out of his eyes and creeps in close, lands a few swings in quick succession that have Rumlow easing off, his head snapping to the side.

“Yeah. That’s it, there you go. C’mon,” he laughs, pushes damp hair out of his face in a well-worn afterthought of a move, and Steve –

Steve has to remind himself, is the thing. Every goddamn day of the week he has to keep reminding himself of where he is. Eventually, he thinks, it might stick – but God, he’s sick and tired of it.

They don’t even look alike. For one, Rumlow’s much older than Bucky ever got to be. Has the scars and the experience and the too-mean edge to his voice to prove it.

But in the end, when he's got Steve face down on the floor, breath hot down his neck, it turns out it doesn't really matter all that much.

He bucks anyway, if for no other reason just to prove a point to himself, just to feel his bones grind together. You're still moving, you're still just going forward. Hart pumping like it's gonna burst with it. It's all there is, all that's left.

Rumlow twists his arm further up his back, grip iron tight. “I said stay down.”

“Yeah, fuck you,” Steve pants into the mat. “Pretty sure this ain’t within kickboxing rules.”

“Pretty sure there was no talk of rules in the first place. I keep tellin’ you, don’t I, you gotta get that or else people’ll think you’ve gone soft. Someone might take advantage.”

“You ever quit talkin’ shit?” Steve throws back at him.

“Nah.” Rumlow shifts, the weight of him heavy and hot, too close. Steve can’t catch his breath. Rumlow’s knee is still pressing into his back and he can already feel a bruise spreading at the bottom of his ribs that’ll be gone in the morning. He doesn’t even feel it all that much. He never even – “See, I don’t think you’d want that.”

Steve could break the hold with ease. He could throw Rumlow off and still walk away with most of his dignity intact. Steve could do a lot of things.

He’s fucking tired, is the thing. He’s in his body and buzzing hard out of his head and it hurts, Christ, it hurts so bad, has for such a long time now, and it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter one bit.

Keep moving, keep moving. Maybe he doesn't want to. Maybe it's alright if it's not him, anyway; a river of trouble, cross currents, carrying him along.

It’s just easier, in the end, to trust someone on his team. That’s all there is to it. It's easier, it is, it's getting there at least, Steve keeps telling himself as he lets Rumlow take him apart in more ways than one.

Eventually, he thinks, he might even believe it.

He meets Sam Wilson on a humid day in late May when the sun's barely made its way up, the sky an overripe color and all of his bruises already healing or healed or tucked neatly all the way back under the surface. Like many things with him these days, it starts off as muscle memory; then a shot in the dark, then relief when it works.

It still takes all of his willpower not to physically retreat when he's hit with the familiar, tired refrain:

You must miss the good old days, huh?

But then Sam cuts straight through the middle of it: Sam calls his bluff, quick as hell but with kind, serious eyes and an outstreched hand, and by the time the sleek black car rolls up to the curb with a roar Steve's got another title in his little book of the future and a chest that feels slightly lighter than it did when he jolted awake at 3 in the morning.

Romanoff pulls them back out onto the street without a word, and he doesn't even mind the knowing look she casts his way all that much. Just looks out the open window, the spring air whipping past as the speedometer ticks up 40, 50, 60, and thinks about whether the farmer's market will be open when they get back in: having some fruit in that goddamned fruit bowl might be nice for a change.

(epilogue)

When all is said and done, he thinks he really should have seen it coming. There was no talk of rules, and it's Steve's own damn fault for not listening. When the dust settles and the Potomac still reeks of a gasoline fire, when Steve's switched back onto battlefield efficiency despite the nightmares creeping into his subconscious with a vengance, it really shouldn't feel personal.

Except for the memory of Rumlow's slick grin in the too-bright, too-close space of the elevator, except for the phantom feeling that he can still sometimes smell scorched skin on his stomach; except for the way Bucky's horrified expression is burnt into the backs of Steve's eyelids like a brand, like a scar that won't heal fully.

Except that it's nothing but personal, in all the ways that matter.

Sam looks at him in question when he pauses in the middle of breakfast, eyes glued to the closest thing that passes for a modern TV in a roadside diner in Bumfuck, Iowa. Hospital breakout, the breaking news states, three dead, seven injured, dangerous fugitive on the loose. Be advised. Do not engage. Do not engage.

Yeah. Too fucking late for that now, isn't it.

"You alright?"

That's a loaded question, he thinks. I'm not sure what that really means and I don't know if I have for a while, he thinks.

You awake, Steve? You awake? You see it yet?

"Fine," he says, and digs back into the cold, gummy pancakes. "You think they got any blueberries in this place?"

Sam's face cracks into a smile, dubious and slow and then all at once. Sure, if you say so. Sure, I see what you're doing, but I'll trust your lead. Prop me up, I've got you right back. "Man, I don't think they even have hot water, but. Gimme five minutes and a Captain America name drop, I'm sure we can figure something out."

#this got very long jesus christ #I overthought it so now I'm just hoping it fits the event and the prompts??? anyway #so unbeta'd. my apologies and also enjoy! I hope!#catws10 #catws anniversary #steve rogers #brock rumlow #natasha romanoff #don't wanna tag sam because he only shows up for a blink of an eye but. he shows up and also I love him<3 #idk if it’s actually an M rating but. just to be safe #gaslighting #by sheer virtue of the bastard involved #stevebucky #steve rogers/brock rumlow #I don't know the tag for that and I kind of don't want to know #my fic

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eddieredmayneargentinablog · 2 months ago

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The Day Of The Jackal Series Has Eddie Redmayne As An Assassin In A Story Of ‘Analogue Spycraft’

It’s been over 50 years since The Day Of The Jackal became a classic of the political thriller genre – a gripping cat-and-mouse pulse-raiser about a master assassin, known simply as ‘The Jackal’, and the officer intent on taking him down. Now, all these years later (and a few decades on, too, from 1997’s Bruce Willis-starring The Jackal), the story returns in series form with a stellar duo in those predator-and-prey roles: Eddie Redmayne as the seemingly shape-shifting sniper, and Lashana Lynch as his law-abiding nemesis. The chase is back on.

As Redmayne tells Empire in the Mickey 17 issue, the series both updates the story, now set in the present day, while keeping the old-school nature at the heart of it. “What I love about [the show] is this thrilling, very contemporary quality,” he explains, “but it has that analogue spycraft.” And in series form, the audience really has time to get under the Jackal’s skin. “What Edward Fox does so stunningly [in the ’73 film] is create a deeply magnetic and charismatic enigma,” says Redmayne. “But because [the film is] two-and-a-half hours long, you don’t learn anything about him. Now, over ten hours, you learn a lot. He starts in that place, and gradually cracks begin to open.”

As for Lynch, she thought she was done with screen spycraft. “After I shot No Time To Die, I said I’d never enter MI6 again,” she says. “And then this freaking script just came [along].” Expect the same determination – and flaws – she displayed as 007 to come to the surface here. “The fragmented energy of the cat-and-mouse narrative is very apparent,” she explains. “Especially for Bianca. She’s at a time in her life where she’s really reckoning with the years she’s put into MI6, and the mental energy it takes to stay determined when chasing someone who’s seemingly better than her.” Ready, aim, fire.

Read Empire’s full story on The Day Of The Jackal in the Mickey 17 issue – on sale Thursday 24 October. The Day Of The Jackal comes to Sky and NOW from 7 November.

#eddie redmayne #eddieredmayne #redmayne #the day of the jackal #the jackal #new series #empire magazine

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somedaylazysomeday · 1 year ago

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Good Intentions Part Eighteen

A mysterious invitation to an Undercity gala leaves you feeling off-balance...

Silco x fem!reader

Rating: Mature and explicit. Minors DNI!

Word Count: 6.5k

Warnings: threats, conspiracy, overeager lackies, mentions of alcohol consumption, semi-public piv sex, creampie, and plugging

Previous | Next | Masterlist

---

“Here you go, boss,” Rowan said, handing you an envelope.

It was unmarked - fairly normal for the Undercity, but the envelope itself was odd. It was a heavier weight than most of the low-quality paper that was cheap enough to be used by Piltover’s Undercity. This felt expensive. Your guard was immediately up, but you were the head of the Haven. Opening unmarked mail was one of the less objectionable duties you were responsible for carrying out.

You slid your finger under the lip of the envelope, opening it so you could peer inside with suspicion. What exactly you were looking for was a mystery even to you - an odd smell? Some kind of powder? A venomous bug?

Regardless, you didn’t find any of that.

Instead, the envelope held only a card. You couldn’t read it without pulling it free, but you could see that it was marked with elegant script and gilded embossing. Despite your confusion, it seemed harmless enough, and you pulled the card from the envelope.

Your half-observation had been correct: the cardstock was thick and heavy, clearly high-quality. The embossed design traced the edges of the card as well as snaking a delicate design around the script on the card.

It appeared to be an invitation. You managed to see that much before you were distracted by thoughts of who would have possibly invited you to a gala.

The gala was meant to celebrate the Undercity’s improving economy. That was the only reason you didn’t immediately throw it in the garbage: Jazper had confided to you that the local economy was improving. He hadn’t named a specific cause and you didn’t expect him to. It was unlikely that any one thing had jump-started the economy, especially when there were so many programs all working toward freeing the Undercity from the extreme poverty that wracked so many of its citizens.

But Jazper wasn’t the one who had sent the envelope. You knew that name of his business, and it wasn’t listed anywhere on the card. The gala was apparently being hosted by an organization called Undercity Improvement, Ltd. You had never heard of it.

If you were being truly honest, that made you feel a little miffed. Between the Haven and your work with Jazper, you should have at least been aware of an organization that was presumably focused on the improvement of Piltover’s Undercity. But that was small and petty, so you tried to move past it.

The better question was why an organization you weren’t familiar with - and really should have been - was sending you an invitation to a gala. You were active in the community, but you were well known for being hard-working to the point that you rarely attended outside activities.

You went out fund-raising, of course. You attended meetings with potential donors and tried to stay involved in local politics, but there were people who needed you at the Haven. It didn’t make sense to leave them alone so you could go to events that seemed designed to make you feel nice and complacent about the things you had done for the community.

Of course, you had meetings with Silco twice a month. You managed to keep the frequency of those meetings a secret, but you had been seen at The Last Drop and other places around the Undercity more and more often lately…

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t so suspicious that you had been invited to an event. But something about it gave you a strange and suspicious feeling, and you had learned to listen to those instincts. Even when they seemed small and petty.

A knock on your office door pulled you out of your thoughts before they could spiral further. “Yes?”

“Another message,” Rowan announced, popping in just far enough to hand you the envelope. “You’re popular today.”

“Lucky me,” you said, voice dry. Rowan chuckled before disappearing again.

You didn’t need to perform any examination of the second envelope. It was from Silco - you could recognize that much from sight alone. You were a lot less wary as you pulled the note free. As usual, there was only a single line of neat script on the page:

Our next meeting will be at the gala. - S

That left you with more questions than answers, but one thing was clear: skipping the gala wasn’t going to be an option. It didn’t matter how good your excuses were.

The day of the gala found you navigating carefully up the stairs to the makeshift event hall in the Undercity - a building known only as the Court. As far as anyone knew, it had originally been intended as a city hall or a courthouse. The Undercity had ended up being far less governmentally-oriented than anyone had expected, and the Court mostly sat empty.

The hall was an imposing building, constructed of dark stone made darker by decades of soot stains and grime. The architecture itself was elegant and spacious, with the type of facade you could picture ivy snaking over if such things grew in the Undercity. The narrow windows were plentiful, and you would bet that they only remained intact because of the iron that divided the panes. It would be far too much work to cut through those strips and enter the Court.

There were signs of the gala: artistic lights pointed upward along strips of fabric, projecting the light further than would have been possible otherwise. Strips of the same fabric fluttered from the upper levels of the Court, and a short carpet extended slightly outside of the building’s entrance.

Guards stood on either side of the heavy doors. They were clearly there to dissuade any uninvited guests, but you had to admit that their heavy-duty outfits - entirely black from head to toe - made them look like an intimidating part of the Court itself.

You were wearing a dress and heeled shoes that felt utterly impractical in the depths of the Undercity. You fervently hoped they would feel more in place when you got into the gala itself, but you wouldn’t bet on it. It was simply too far outside of your normal attire.

The dress was a blue that felt like a particular rich shade of teal. You had opted for straps that laced together and up over your shoulders in an artistic netting style. There would be enough to focus on that night without worrying about a dress slipping down. The flowy hem reached just above your knees, almost demure if not for the fact that the fabric tended to flare out as you moved, offering glimpses of your thighs.

You were careful as you climbed the stairs, doing your best to avoid an unfortunate spill on the cold stone of the stairs. When you approached the guards, you dipped fingertips into your pockets - custom-added to the dress and worth every bit of effort - to retrieve your invitation to the gala.

The guards opened the doors without seeing the paper, let alone reading your name written across the invitation. More concerning was the fact that, after you had offered your uncertain thanks, the guards nodded and greeted you by name. With the distinct sensation of a deepening mystery, you stepped inside of the Court.

The inside of the building was just as imposing as the outside had been, but was far more welcoming. Generous lighting kept the dark stone from looking gloomy and small tables were scattered across the room. Each one boasted its own subtle lamp, giving more than one couple a place to settle in for quiet, semi-private conversation. The dance floor had better lighting, tucked unobtrusively in one corner next to a small group of musicians on string instruments.

Wait staff circulated around the room, offering drinks and hors d'oeuvres to chatting groups. As you entered, one man immediately offered you a tray of glasses. Clearly noting your quizzical look, the man explained, “Champagne. There is a bar at the edge of the room where I can get any other beverage you would like, or you can browse their selection yourself.”

“I think…” you trailed, overwhelmed. “This will be fine, thank you.”

The man nodded, giving you a quick smile as he maneuvered his tray to the next group. You took a sip of the champagne as you meandered through the room. Somehow, you weren’t surprised that the alcohol was notably high-quality.

You recognized several figures scattered around the room. Some of them were people you knew from their efforts to improve the Undercity. If you had given it much thought, you would have fully expected them to be here. Others were donors from Piltover and more exotic places. Of those ones, you recognized enough to see that outreach was one of the goals of this particular gala.

Eventually, you spotted Jazper and made your winding way to him. He was absorbed in a conversation with several people. You recognized some of them, but only vaguely. There was no one in the group you knew personally, but they all nodded or smiled as you approached. You may not have known them, but they seemed to be familiar with you.

“Jazper,” you said, smiling around the group, but holding eye contact with the man himself. “I’m glad to see a friendly face.”

Jazper chuckled, the warmth and familiarity of the sound putting you at ease. You had spent long hours together, working late into the night on various projects and details. He was a friend, at least in your book.

“You would know more people if you ever left your Haven,” he teased. You rolled your eyes playfully. It was a long-running argument, but you were starting to wonder if he might have a point. “Here, let me introduce you.”

“No need,” one woman interrupted, turning to smile and shake your hand. “Everyone knows about the Haven and its mysterious leader.”

“Is that so?” you asked, trying to make the words bland, or even challenging, instead of nervous. You missed the days when you didn’t have secrets to worry about someone discovering.

“Of course!” another well-dressed conversationalist said. You couldn’t begin to tell their gender identity, beyond that they were simply stunning. “You’ve been quite the topic of conversation since you arrived here. Especially when you started putting such a dent in the Shimmer sales in the area.”

You frowned, already opening your mouth to ask how everyone seemed to know confidential crime statistics, but you were cut off as someone else leaned in, treating you to a view of the best groomed mustache you had ever seen.

“But we should leave you to your conversation,” he countered. “I’m sure we’ll all get the chance to speak with you at another time.”

And then they were leaving, retreating across the room in a single mass of extravagant clothing and perfumed smiles. You watched them warily, noting that more than one glanced back at you.

“Is everything okay?” Jazper asked. “You seem stressed.”

“This gala is strange,” you explained, still watching the group. “Haven’t you noticed anything going on? Who were those people you were speaking with?”

“A mixture of donors and business owners, all interested in helping the Undercity emerge from Piltover’s shadow.” Jazper gave you a searching look. “Maybe you should leave the Haven more often. You really didn’t recognize any of them?”

“No, I didn’t,” you murmured, feeling an uncomfortable twinge between your shoulder blades.

“Strange,” Jazper remarked. “They seemed to be familiar with you. With the Haven, anyway. But I don’t think there is anything sinister happening.”

“Sinister?” you echoed, forcing a laugh as if you found the idea to be ridiculous. Privately, you thought the word summed up your feelings quite nicely. “No, of course not. I was only going to ask you who was hosting the gala.”

“Undercity Improvement, Ltd.” Jazper’s answer was prompt and helpful, but you shook your head.

“I’ve never heard of that organization, either. Had you? Before all of this?”

Jazper slowly shook his head. “I can’t say that I had. I thought it might be one of the Haven’s sponsors, if I’m being honest.”

“It isn’t,” you confirmed, then frowned. “But you already knew that, didn’t you? How?”

“I thought it was before,” Jazper explained. “But then I started receiving an anonymous series of letters. They were from someone… unexpected. Let’s just say that I doubt Undercity Improvement, Ltd. has much to do with any charitable organization that operates in the Undercity itself.”

The pit of your stomach dropped so suddenly and sharply that you were dizzy with it. If Jazper was saying what you thought he was saying…

“You may want to move to another room,” Jazper suggested quietly, taking your arm and turning you toward a nearby doorway. A mirror - spotted dark with age - showed Silco behind you, watching your retreat with irritation subtly written across his face.

“The apartments are nearly ready,” Jazper was saying, when you lost sight of Silco and could focus once more. “We should schedule a meeting to get ready for the next steps of improvements. You still have some suggestions for people to live in my complexes, don’t you?”

“Of course,” you agreed, mostly on instinct. Then you remembered the importance of the topic and nodded fervently. “Of course! I have a few promising candidates, both individuals and families. We’ll have your complex full in no time.”

Jazper smiled, turning to face you as he released your arm. “Wonderful! I can never thank you enough for all of your help with this. As I said, we must schedule a meeting sometime this week. Call my office with the times you’re available!”

He leaned in to kiss your cheek, a very Piltover affectation, and then he was gone, disappearing back into the room where he had been.

You found yourself nearly alone beyond the doorway, though you took a moment to look around curiously. It should have been another room, just as expansive as the last. Instead, it was a hallway, segmented with sections of a rough wall running along one half of i

When you looked a little closer, you found a tastefully understated sign, proclaiming that this was a small part of an exhibit promoting architectural styles in Piltover and the Undercity over time, focusing on their similarities and differences throughout different eras of the cities’ shared history. Pieces of original building exteriors had been formed into a series of halls in the room.

It was rather stunning, you reflected, to wander through a maze of facades and exteriors illuminated by dramatic lighting. They were marked with subtle description signage, explaining the materials, builders, and influences that had helped create each one. They were interesting when you read them, but you found yourself lost in the idea itself, of walking among the faces of buildings that were long gone.

You had been lost among the history for quite some time when you realized you weren’t alone in the labyrinth. Footsteps were trailing yours - almost in step, but not quite. You ducked behind a section of decorative cornice and crouched, watching down the hall to catch a glimpse of your would-be stalker.

To your confusion, it was a man you didn’t recognize.

It would be a lie if you said you hadn’t expected Silco to follow you. You could read between the lines of Jazper’s vague explanation - Silco had something to do with Undercity Improvement, Ltd. If he wasn’t officially in charge of it, he was certainly somewhere deep in the management of whatever the company did.

But you had bigger problems at the moment: the man following you was wearing a dark coat, longer than you typically saw and definitely too misshapen to fit in at a gala. It hung strangely from his thin form, and you had the distinct and uncomfortable idea that his pockets were filled with weapons.

The man was creeping slowly toward you, checking every nook and corner that he passed. It was only a matter of time until he found you, but there was no way for you to continue on from your hiding spot without him seeing you. When he did reach the cornice where you were hiding, you would only have a moment to act before his surprise ended and he did whatever he had followed you here to do.

You could hear his footsteps… but, to your relief, you could hear a second set - one that you recognized easily.

“What are you doing here, Mikel?”

The tension drained from you at the slippery threat of Silco’s voice. Mikel apparently did not share your reaction, since you heard a soft curse, then a stammered, “I’m- I was going to… I have a surprise for you.”

There was a beat of silence. You almost snickered despite yourself, imagining the expression that surely must be on Silco’s face. “Is that so.”

“Yes, sir, yes,” Mikel quickly agreed. “I found that lady you hate. The one who runs the Haven. She’s here. Alone. I was gonna kill her for you. As a tribute. Show you how loyal I am. I still will.”

Another silence, this one heavier than the last. “And this was to pay tribute to me?”

“Of course,” Mikel’s voice was growing more confident, clearly convinced he had won Silco’s admiration.

“And tell me,” Silco purred. “What, exactly, is the nature of my relationship with the proprietor of the Haven?”

“I… I don’t know,” the other man confessed. “I just know ya hate her.”

“You don’t know,” Silco repeated, ignoring the second half of Mikel’s statement. “So your plan was to follow someone into a historical exhibit and publicly kill her on my behalf, yet you have no idea how I truly feel about her.”

“Feel?” Mikel stammered. You couldn’t blame him for it: you were feeling a little breathless yourself.

“She is a wonderful enemy,” Silco told him. “Do you have any idea how rare those are? I have not encountered one since… Not for a very long time. If you want to pay tribute to me, you will tell all of your business associates - and anyone who may be possessed of a similarly asinine idea - that I deal with my enemies personally. And I do so with pleasure. As far as you are concerned, she is under my protection.”

“Of course, Silco.” Mikel’s acquiescence was shaky and you could hear him already starting to retreat. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have-”

“No, you shouldn’t have,” Silco agreed, voice cold. “And if you had managed to achieve your goal, ‘sorry’ would have been the most pleasant thing you became. Do not let me see you here again.”

Muttered apologies, agreements, and thanks poured from Mikel. Judging from the footsteps you heard, Silco had already started walking away, moving purposefully down the hallway toward you.

When he drew closer, you pulled yourself further against the wall. Silco was just in view around the edge of a cornice when he paused, half-turning to watch as Mikel scurried back out of the exhibit.

You truly expected Silco to turn to you and make a casual remark, or tell you that you owed him an extra session for saving your life, but he did neither. Instead, he turned and kept walking down the hall, idly studying the walls and decorative stone outcroppings around him. Apparently, he hadn’t seen you at all.

Your back twinged as you straightened up. You hadn’t been crouched for a very long time, but the situation had made you tense. As your muscles slowly unclenched, you glanced down the hallway where Silco had gone. He hadn’t seen you. You could leave, go back to the gala and focus on networking with potential investors. You could find Jazper again, continue your conversation about his apartments and save yourself an appointment later in the week. You could leave, retreat to the Haven as you tried to ignore the very real chance that you could have died that night.

But those possibilities were discarded almost as soon as they floated through your mind. Instead, you walked briskly after Silco.

When you caught up with him, Silco was looking at a section of wall from the original hospital that had treated Undercity residents. You had seen him a few times that evening, but you took an extra moment to admire the figure he cut in his gala outfit.

He was dressed, as always, in red and black. They were his signature colors, after all, but he had put a different twist on them for the gala. The outer pieces of his suit were black, the stretches of inky fabric disrupted here and there with piping in a deep red. The touches of red at his pockets and lapels drew attention to both his trim waist and his broad shoulders. His vest was black as well, contrasting sharply against the rich deep red of his shirt.

The effect was striking, utterly intimidating when combined with his severe stance and the way he had been prowling through the gala, then the display. But the thing that made your breath catch was the orange silk of his pocket square. It didn’t match the red of his outfit’s theme, not in the slightest. But it clashed so obviously that it was, in itself, a statement. And the statement was far from subtle; the pocket square and its placement perfectly emphasized the glowing orange of his eye.

“There you are,” he commented without turning around. “I was beginning to wonder where you had gone.”

“I thought some idiot was following me, so I ducked off around a corner,” you explained with a shrug. The motion was pointless, since he still wasn’t looking at you, but you couldn’t help it.

“Some idiot was following you,” Silco said darkly.

“Don’t be so harsh,” you chided. “You’re not an idiot.”

Silco wheeled around, shock across his face. When he saw your broad smile, a little grin slipped into his expression and he gave a surprised bark of laughter. “You never quite know when you should be afraid, do you?”

“No,” you agreed easily. “But I stopped being afraid of you a while ago.”

“Is that so?” he asked. Something in you eased at the realization that he wasn’t going to push the idea of being scared, to threaten you. Maybe you were being foolish, but you liked to think that the two of you were past that by now. “Seems a wonderful way for a poor, lost lamb to be eaten up by a wandering wolf.”

“In this scenario, are you the lamb or the wolf?” you mused, tapping your chin like the question could possibly have any real merit.

“I will show you precisely which you are,” Silco threatened, stalking toward you. He grabbed you around the waist and dropped his mouth to your neck, nipping at you with chipped teeth as you laughed loudly. “Shrieking with terror already, pet?”

“You’re ridiculous, Silco,” you chided, nose crinkling as you tried to look stern.

He pulled back slightly, eyebrows lifting with disbelief. “I have been called many uncomplimentary things, but I cannot say that has ever been among them.”

“There is a first time for everything,” you reminded with a smile.

“Yes,” Silco said slowly, something unfamiliar growing in his eyes as you watched. “And on the subject of firsts, you look utterly ravishing tonight. I do not believe I have ever seen you dressed this extravagantly.”

“And?” you asked, pulling away so you could turn in a circle for him. “What do you think?”

“You are always lovely, but I must admit that I am partial to this color on you.” Then you recognized the look on his face: admiration. “And this shape is quite flattering.”

As Silco studied you, his touch skimmed across the line of your bodice. The very tip of his fingers trailed over the flesh of your breast and your breath audibly caught in your throat.

“I can’t say any of this is new for you,” you countered, running your fingers from Silco’s collar down the front of his vest. “But the combination is… eye-catching.”

Silco preened. “Only to catch one pair of eyes, though it seems I was successful. Perhaps to your detriment.”

"Is that so?" you asked, delighting in the way his eyes darkened.

"Indeed," he agreed. "In fact, I may not be able to control myself long enough to take you somewhere more secluded."

His hands stroked down your arms, giving you ample opportunity to pull away.

Instead, you gave him a sly look from under your lashes. "This looks plenty secluded to me."

Silco's chuckle was dark and smooth. His other hand moved to your jaw, holding you in place as he kissed you fiercely. You hadn’t shared many kisses, and this one was nearly as much of a shock as the first had been. His lips were firm against yours, his tongue assuming dominance without giving the chance for anything else. Those fingers on your jaw held you at the perfect angle for him, and you couldn't have moved if you wanted to.

But you didn't want to.

Normally, his dominance would irk you, make you fight to remind him that he wasn't actually in charge of you. But things were different. In this unfamiliar place, wearing these unfamiliar clothes, you felt a little unfamiliar yourself.

Instead, you melted into the kiss, hands fisting in the jacket of his suit. You accepted his kiss and the warm slickness between your legs intensified until you were worried it would be visible even through your dress.

So when Silco backed you against a convenient corner in the display, you eagerly followed his lead. His fingers were under your dress the instant your back met cool stone. They traced maddeningly over the front panel of your underwear, teasing you through the thin barrier.

You moaned against his mouth, then pouted when his lips curved into a smile. "Careful, pet. This area is secluded, but there is nothing to stop another party from viewing the exhibit. Our careful subterfuge will be meaningless if we are caught together this way."

You nodded, trying to collect yourself. He didn't make it easy, mouthing along your neck and pressing his lips against the slivers of skin exposed between the interlaced straps of your dress.

Your shiver did nothing to push him away, and the process of cooling down seemed to slow even further. Silco moved to the neckline of your dress, though the anchoring bases of those straps stopped him from sucking marks into your skin. You decided that you would simply have to be aware of how noisy you were being. The alternative was stopping, and you weren’t willing to do that.

“Silco, please,” you murmured. He had lifted his attention in a moment and sealed his lips to yours in another drowning deep kiss. The stone wall of the display you were pressed against was warm against the exposed skin of your back by the time he reached under your dress once more.

You made a low sound of surprise when he snapped the thin fabric of your underwear over one hip, then the other, letting the garment flutter to a useless puddle between your feet. With the cool air of the Court playing over your most private parts, you realized just how wet you were. It seemed excessive for a few kisses and some barely-there touching, but Silco had always known how to wring a response from your body.

He used that particular skill to his advantage as he grasped your leg behind the knee, pulling it up and over his hip until it could wrap around his waist. The bulge of him pressed directly against your core and you barely managed to muffle the cry of mingled relief and desperation that tried to fight free.

“So good for me,” Silco praised roughly, releasing your leg to work at the buttons holding his pants closed. You tried to keep yourself from grinding against him, knowing you would only be in the way, but the sensations were so tantalizing that they were almost impossible to ignore. “Just a moment, pet, and I promise you’ll have what you need.”

You weren’t clinging to him for balance as much as you were desperately gripping his shoulders to help you keep control of yourself. But Silco was true to his word, at least in this - the moment his length was free, he positioned it against your entrance. He speared slowly inside of you, forcing your core to stretch and spread around the intrusion of him.

That stretch burned slightly, but it was nothing compared to the tide of eagerness that rose in you at the idea of your needs being fulfilled. Something about Silco in that outfit…

When he was seated fully inside of you, something tipped toward you and your gaze sprang upward, lifting out of whatever half-trance you had put yourself into. It was Silco, moving to press his forehead against yours. “Do you need additional preparation?”

You let out a shuddering breath. “No. I need you to move, Silco, please…”

“My little philanthropist…” Silco murmured, lips curving. “Did I not promise to give you what you need?”

He withdrew from you slowly. Your mouth opened to complain that this wasn’t what you needed, but your intended complaint was cut off when he slammed back inside of you. From there, he set a merciless pace.

If you thought you had been clinging to Silco’s shoulders before, that had been nothing compared to the tight grip you were using to keep up with him now. Your back arched to let him in deeper, hips moving to increase the impact of those thrusts. You had been wet for him, body tight with eagerness, but everything only intensified when he was inside of you. The sounds of him burying himself in your heat were loud in the quiet exhibit and your muscles squeezed his length at every possible moment.

Your leg was slipping from the narrow perch of his hip, and you gathered yourself enough to shift position. You rucked yourself up further, squeezing your lower leg around the flexing muscles of his back and hips. Something about the position put pressure against that place inside of you and your body locked down entirely.

Silco growled, hands catching at your hips to hold you in place as his pace increased even further. “So tight…”

He pounded into you, holding himself in as deep as possible and grinding into you just a fraction further as you squirmed and whined for him. That whine was met with an unintelligible rasp from Silco before he dropped a punishing kiss on your lips. You returned it feverishly, trying to get close enough that there was no space at all between you and bemoaning the way your dress’s fabric made that impossible.

“Shh…” Silco urged. Your mouth closed, and it was only then that you became aware that you had been making any noise at all. “I hear something.”

Despite the way you were both straining to listen, Silco didn’t stop moving. The only concession he made was to sink deep inside of you and shorten his thrusts to quick pulses into and out of you. You were getting close - deliciously close - to the edge, but you heard what he had been talking about: footsteps.

“Sil-” you started, cutting yourself off with a gasp when he delivered a particularly brutal thrust. “Someone’s coming.”

“Not before both of us do,” he growled. His fingers rubbed at your clit, and your head kicked back so violently that you hit your head on the rough stone of the wall.

In the next instant, you were clenching around him, fingers scrabbling against the fabric of his jacket as you tried to anchor yourself against the overwhelming pleasure. Your legs grew weak and Silco was the only thing keeping you in place - holding your leg up around his hip while he pinned you against the wall so you didn’t collapse entirely.

He kept thrusting in and out of you, drawing out your pleasure as he chased his own. With a grunt and a hissed curse, he buried himself as deep as possible inside of you. The rush of heat came almost immediately and you frowned.

Silco was nuzzling your neck as he recovered, but you pushed his head away, dropping your still-lifted leg and moving back. Doing so dragged him out of you and you grimaced at the sensation.

Silco caught the changed mood immediately. His posture stiffened and he watched you warily, the dregs of pleasure disappearing from his face. “Is something wrong?”

“I just got here,” you reminded him, trying to dampen the stab of irritation you felt. “I’m not looking forward to dripping cum for the rest of the night.”

Silco nodded, expression clearing. You wondered momentarily what he had been worried about, but that train of thought disappeared entirely as he dropped to his knees in front of you. You stared at him in front of you, wondering if he was planning to use his mouth on you. Silco was far from shy about bodily fluids, but this would be new even for him.

You felt a little less off-kilter as he retrieved your torn underwear and used it to gently wipe the wetness that was already starting to spill from your core.

When he set the ruined fabric aside, you said softly, “Thank you.”

“That will help, but it did not take care of everything,” Silco warned. “But I have an alternative, if you’re interested…”

When you didn’t answer one way or another, Silco reached into a pocket inside his jacket and withdrew a small plug.

You fought off the wild urge to laugh long enough to ask, “Do you always carry plugs around?”

“They are useful more often than you would expect,” he said dryly. “But tonight, I knew that I would see you and hoped we would be together. I had every intention of pulling free before I made a mess, but you can be far too bewitching for even my self-control.”

Flattery was rare from Silco, but it was never idle when it came. You sighed, allowing your eyes to drift closed before you said, “Fine. Give me the plug.”

“Oh, I will, pet,” Silco purred, lifting your foot and guiding it to rest on his shoulder. His frank admiration of you as he stared between your legs was flattering even as it made your face heat.

“Silco,” you hissed down. “Have you forgotten that someone’s coming?”

“No, they are not.” He stroked teasing fingertips up the inside of your thigh. “There have been no footsteps for nearly five minutes. We have all the time in the world.”

Silco’s teasing was mercifully short, pushing the plug into you with only the slightest stretch. It was small compared to some of the others the two of you had experimented with during your time together, but it stayed firmly in place. You could only trust that it would hold the mess of your time together inside of you until you were somewhere you could deal with it more thoroughly.

He rose to his feet, holding out a hand to you. When you took it, he tugged you gently toward him and began leading you back toward the main room of the gala. At the last possible place where you were shielded from view of other guests, he urged you onward.

“Go. I will follow in a few moments,” he instructed. “But stay close.”

The firm set of his jaw warned you that he wouldn’t offer any further explanation, so you did as he said - though you gave an exaggerated eye roll first. You made your way into the main room, getting a drink directly from the bar to stay close to the doorway.

Only minutes later, Silco walked in. He was casually adjusting his red-jeweled cufflinks, scowling around the room. He strode over to the bar beside you, tersely ordering a drink. He wasn’t looking at you, so you followed his lead, pretending to ignore him while you waited for him to make some kind of move.

When Silco was holding a glass in his hands, he glanced sidelong at you. You looked back, trying to look surprised when he sidled in your direction. “Ah, the lovely owner of the Haven. You have been avoiding me, I presume.”

“Your presumption is incorrect,” you retorted, lifting your chin. People were already watching you, so you needed to put on a good show. “I have no reason to avoid anyone. Somehow, I get the feeling that we travel in different social circles.”

One corner of his mouth lifted as he set his glass down on the surface of the bar. “Then you will not object to sharing this dance with me? We have much to discuss, and there are far too many ears listening.”

You had to bite the inside of your lip to keep from laughing at the way your observers’ eyes dropped at that. “Fine.”

Silco offered his hand, which you pointedly stepped around. That turned out to be the perfect move, since he upped the stakes by placing a hand at the small of your back and guiding you toward the dance floor.

“What is all of this about?” you asked, when you were safely dancing and away from anyone not having their own conversations. “I thought the point was to be low-key and not draw attention.”

“This is a message,” Silco told you, hand sliding a little lower on the curve of your waist. “I am telling my people that you are mine, and not to be approached. I only regret that I did not think to do this earlier.”

“Ah,” you agreed mildly, letting your gaze fall to the vivid orange of his pocket square. His reasoning made sense, but you found yourself inexplicably disappointed anyway.

“And,” he added, grip tightening until you looked up at him, “I cannot foresee many opportunities to dance with you this way.”

“Silco!” you admonished, trying not to look like you were enjoying yourself too much.

“Can you fault me for it?” Silco’s mouth twisted into a smirk. “I believe I have already demonstrated that I cannot keep my hands off of you. You are lovely.”

“And if someone asks what we were discussing?” you asked, though you were beginning not to care.

“Simply tell them that you cannot say,” he offered with a shrug. “With the alcohol consumption in this room, I do not believe any are tracking our conversation too closely.”

A dozen other arguments rose to your lips and you let them fade without being voiced. It wasn’t smart to be so close with Silco in such a public place, but you found that you didn’t mind. For now, you were going to let yourself enjoy being in his arms.

---

Author's Note - I meant to get this chapter out a while ago, honestly. But it ended up so much longer than I expected that it took extra time to write and edit!

Here's the bad news: I'm going to step away from this story for a few months while I focus on writing my last set of Fanfic February fics. I still have about half of them to write and I need time to do that. You'll start seeing me publish works every day in February. The next chapter of Good Intentions will be posted in early March.

Thank you for your continued patience, and for reading this story!

You can find other works on my masterlist.

#good intentions #good intentions fic #arcane netflix #arcane 2021 #arcane silco #silco #silco x reader #silco x reader fic #silco x you #reader insert #reader insert fanfiction #reader insert fic #lemon #spicy #minors dni #not suitable for minors

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