#but this time lata fully took over

[sabraeal]

Remedial Lessons, Chapter 2

[Read on AO3]

Written for @kaedix's birthday!! Last year Kimber requested what become the first chapter of this fic, back when there were only a handful of people in the fandom who had even watched Soul Eater. But last summer the discord ended up watching Soul Eater as its summer shonen, so I was all too happy to continue it when she asked for a continuation this year!

This is hardly the first sepulcher that Shirayuki has been lead into since she started her time at Shibusen, but she’ll grant the professor this: it is the nicest.

“So what?” Obi huffs, parka hunched up around his ears as he takes in the bank of computers stretched along the walls. His breath mists in the air as he speaks, like swallowing souls in reverse. “You get like, four? Five G in here? Or did you just like…roll some fiber out here? You know a guy? There’s some people who could really use this kind of set up—”

“Etiquette demands that a host graciously welcome his guests into his residence, whether that be a professional office or personal home,” Lata informs then with all the enthusiasm of a wet blanket. “However, since it seems that you are determined to wear it out as fast as humanly as possible, I think we’ll skip over all that.”

Obi presses a hand to his chest; his parka lets out a soft pffft under the pressure. “I’m just showing interest, sir. Showering you with compliments. Really—”

“Asking for proprietary information.” The professor glances over his shoulder, glowering at where she lingers in the doorway. “Come here already. We don’t have all day.”

‘Here’ happens to be a marble slab; one large and smooth enough to accommodate Mitsuhide from head to ankle, the way most beds do. There’s quite a few of them in the room, most serving as flat surfaces for Lata’s equipment, but this one has clearly been left free, sterile as an exam table, though with the way it fits into that carved bier beneath it, Shirayuki suspects—

“Is that a coffin?” Obi coughs, circling it like a cat around a bath. “Just what are you gonna do with her on that, doc? Hoist it up to the ceiling? Let lightning hit her? Hate to break it to you, but she’s already alive.”

“Obi.” If there’s one thing Shirayuki has learned about Shibusen faculty, it’s that you don’t go around giving them ideas.

“What? I just want to get the scope of the work or whatever.” His hands slide into his pockets, slowing his stride to a casual creep. “If we’re going to have to run, I’d like to start now rather than after he’s got your all hooked up to his Doom Canon.”

“Oh, really. I’m not about to perform surgery on her. Or mad science,” The professor grouses, rummaging around in a drawer. “This place is hardly sterile. But you can’t possibly think I’m so naive as to take your word about her bloodline, do you?”

Shirayuki wrinkles her brow. “Why would I lie about that?”

“Why does anyone lie, girl? To get what you want.” Lata straightens, the honed edge of his body angling toward the stone. “Now take off your coat. This won’t take long.”

She glances down at the cold marble and suppresses a shiver. “But you haven’t taken your coat off.”

“Of course not. It’s freezing in here.” Clouds steam from his sigh as he turns to her, strung tight with impatience. “And I hardly need to take blood samples from myself.”

The tag of her zipper digs bloodless gouges across the fleshier bits of her knuckles. Two year ago this would have all come as a shock, but after a few semesters at Shibusen, she’s only thankful it isn’t a weirder bodily fluid. “Blood? Couldn’t you just—?”

Obi steps right between them, shoulders not squared to shield but hunched, potential energy all coined in his spine like a spring. “Uh uh, no way, doc. We said we’d let you poke around, not actually put a needle through her. Just because she’s a weapon doesn’t mean you get to treat her like an ob—”

“I wasn’t asking you,” Lata informs him, bored. “Now are you going to take off your coat, Miss…?”

“Shirayuki.” Obi angles a look over his shoulder, half are you kidding and half don’t feed the animals. As if she were some child sticking her hand through bars at the zoo, daring a tiger to chomp them off at the wrist.

To be fair, it’s earned. But this particular tiger is their best best for surmounting this resonating problem, and Shirayuki’s willing to risk far more than a nibble to keep from collecting another ninety-nine souls. Twice is more than enough. “And yes, I will.”

The professor doesn’t quite smile, but there’s a shift in his eyes as she bares the skin at her elbow; a deepening of the crinkles at their corners, a widening of his pupils. There’s a part of him that likes this, that looks at her twining path of veins and sees something beyond flesh. That devours this stretch of skin the same way she might a grimoire’s pages, reading fell knowledge in every drop of her blood.

“Good.” She’s barely set herself on top of the sarcophagus, wincing at the chill that seeps through her jeans, when Lata strides right around Obi and grips her wrist. Klaxons ring between her ears, telling her to dig in her heels and twist, but there’s only air beneath them now, an awkward angle between her and the nearest flat surface, and—

Just a pinch, a squeeze, and he’s stepped away, glass slide gripped between his fingers.

“Wha….huh?” she murmurs, watching as blood wells up from the prick. It lasts hardly more than a blink— Obi hands her a tissue, and by the time she’s wiped the bead away, it’s like her skin was never broken at all. A perk of the lineage, Lord Death had always told her. “You just needed a drop?”

“As much as I would love to sequence the entirety of your genome, I would prefer not to wait for the results— or waste the resources.” He hums, much more chipper now that he’s placed that slide into one of his machines. “Not when a specimen sample is much quicker and negligibly less accurate.”

The reasoning is solid, but still— “Then why did you have me take off my coat?”

"To see if at least one of you could obey an order.” The professor jerks his chin toward Obi. “Or if you were as much of a lost cause as that one.”

“Hey! I can sit and roll over as good as anyone,” Obi sniffs, dropping his coat over her shoulders. “If I wanna.”

They’ve hardly known each other a quarter of an hour, but already Lata is sending her long-suffering looks. “That’s the entire—”

His machine beeps, once, twice, like it’s impatient, eager to have eyes on the data flying across its screen. Attention Lata’s quick to give, scrolling through faster than even she could possibly parse, turning familiar words into flipped-bit gibberish. The professor, however, hums.

“Well, you are from Carnwennan’s lineage, it seems.” Shirayuki can’t help but notice that he doesn’t say daughter. Like somehow a hidden bloodline was probable, but direct progeny a stretch. “You’ll forgive me for doubting you. I’ve met Excalibur” —he grimaces— “and there’s not much resemblance. In either of your forms.”

Obi cocks a hip against the sarcophagus, making himself one long, lean line. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Lata fixes him with the same sort of look a stern kindergarten teacher might give their most difficult charge. “Carnwennan was a dagger. And from what I’ve seen of Miss Shirayuki’s shape, she is most certainly not.”

One of these thing, his look says, is not like the other. “I suppose your father had his own lineage? Or should I assume he was a meister rather than a weapon?”

Her mouth opens, then shuts. Opens again, only to say, “I don’t know.”

There’s the vaguest twitch of that stern brow, the softest hum of intrigue. “Interesting. It was always said that Carnwennan was particular with her meisters, one must assume she would be even more so with a romantic partner. So who is he?”

“A deadbeat.” Obi says it like punctuation, the period at the end of a sentence gone on too long. He shifts too, crossing his arms and angling his shoulders, breaking line of sight between her and the professor. It’s effort she appreciates, even if it’s unnecessary.

“My mother is the legendary weapon,” she asks, each word weighed and measured, the perfect split between firm and fair. “Is my father really pertinent to your research?”

“Look around, Miss Shirayuki. Do you see a water cooler anywhere? A break room, perhaps? Coworkers?” The look he levels at her is downright withering. “Do I really look like the sort of man who would make small talk?”

Obi's smirk glints the way her blade does before it cuts. “He’s got us there, kid.”

There’s an inertia to overcome when it comes to her father; it’d been so much easier to not talk about it, to let everyone believe she thought he was dead. But now that he’s dredged himself up out of her memories and into reality, becoming more than just a character from the childhood she can’t remember, it’s…hard. Separating what she knows from what she feels is a job Shirayuki’s pretty sure she’s under qualified to handle.

“I don’t know much about him,” she admits, because that’s true. Maybe he raised her for four years, but she’s lived another thirteen without him, and that doesn’t make him any better than a stranger in her book. “He left me with my grandparents when I was little. I barely even remember his face.”

Also not a lie, even if it earns her some side-eye from Obi’s direction. She’d seen him for a day nearly a year ago; not enough to commit more than broad strokes to her memory. It’d be a miracle if she could even pick him out on the street.

Not that she’d tell the professor that. She’s already in danger of clucking tongues and piteous looks; something about parental abandonment bloodies even the hardest of hearts. There’s quite a bit Shirayuki’s ready to weather for this training, but if she has to endure yet another ethically dubious mentor trying to empathize with her, well—

“Hm.” Lata’s fingers clack across the keys, not even sparing her a cursory glance. “Interesting.”

“So.” Obi wraps his mouth around the sound, stretching it as long as the look he sends her. “That’s it, right, doc? You’re gonna help us?”

“I didn’t say that.” Lata steps back from his screen, one rigid line from the heels of boots to the whorl of his cowlick. “I study legendary weapons. As intriguing as it might be to study one of their progeny— however direct— Miss Shirayuki is not her mother. There’s no guarantee that her biometric data will provide any meaningful contribution toward my—”

“So you have other half-mythical weapons lining up to be a part of your experiment?” Obi perches on the sarcophagus like a particularly mischievous gargoyle. “Is Caliburn’s great-grandson going to walk through here? Excalibur’s ex-roommate? Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to find a guy who knows a guy who saw Kusanagi-no-tsurugi buying cabbages once.”

Lata’s mouth pulls thin. “Caliburn is—”

“—the same sword as Excalibur,” Shirayuki finishes, hurriedly.

“What?” Obi squawks, nearly toppling from his perch. “But wasn’t that the one in the stone, and then that lady in the lake or whatever gave that guy another one…?”

“That was a translation error,” she murmurs, flushing as Lata lifts his brows. “From when the troubadours in France began singing Arthur’s lays. Exacalibur was the sword in the stone. He just, er…broke. And the Nimue” — ah, she’s starting to sound like her uncle— “never mind. It’s a common mistake. He was still sleeping when it happened.”

“A better time.” Lata glares as if they were the ones who woke him.

“Huh.” Obi shakes a hand, like that might clear the air. “The point is, does how many legendary weapons is doc gonna meeting hanging around in some dusty ass old ruins? You’ve gotta need us as much as we need you. Maybe even more.”

If the professor was glaring before, he’s glowering now.

“You make a compelling point,” he admits, begrudging them every word. “Fine. I supposed it would be beneficial for my work if I helped you both with your resonance issue. But you’ll have to help me with my research,” he warns, as if that soured rather than sweetened the deal. “And not just your own contributions to my data— I need legendary weapons if I’m going to get anywhere, not just their…relations.”

“Well,” Shirayuki hums, struggling to keep her voice so even, so innocent. “I could always ask my uncle, if you really needed—”

“We can start with your training first,” Lata grits through his grimace. “I’m hardly that desperate.”

“Sounds like you’ve got yourself a deal, doc.” Obi sprawls himself across the top of the coffin, tapping at the marble slab. “Now which one of these are ours? You got a couple lined with Egyptian cotton or something? Maybe some memory foam? I don’t need a lot but I’ve got to be able to snooze in full Nosferatu.”

His eyes close, arms cutting up to cross over his chest— full Nosferatu, indeed— but Lata only grunts, “None of them.”

One eye peels open, skeptical. “What, the Cryptkeeper’s got guest rooms down here? A Best Western? It takes three hours to get here one way, there’s no way we can hike out and back every day.”

“Of course you can’t,” Lata scoffs. “I’m coming back with you.”

*

“Just like that, huh?” Obi’s no longer playing vampire, but he’s still sitting on the sarcophagus,  shoulders stacked beside hers. “You’re not even going to ask us what the problem is first? What if it’s just a five-minute fix, and—?”

“If it were really some ‘five-minute fix’ then that idiot Shidan would have been able to handle it,” Lata grouses, already sifting through books to take with him. “And there’s certainly no point in asking your opinions on the problem. If you neither of you have managed to devise a solution by now, then I doubt that you have any meaningful insight to provide me.”

Shirayuki would have protested— if the professor didn’t have a point. Locating a reclusive academic was hardly the sort of option a reasonable person took as their first step. But after two years of reaching for resonance and having it slip through their fingers, Shirayuki was willing to try anything. Short of braving one of her uncle’s lectures, of course.  “That’s not very nice.”

Obi tucks his chin, keeping his grimace between the two of them. “He’s not wrong.”

“Still,” she sighs, “he doesn’t need to say it.”

“Hey, what did he mean anyway?” She cocks her head, questioning, and Obi clarifies, “About how you don’t look like your family.”

“My uncle…” It’s her turn to grimace now. “Well, my mother doesn’t take after him, that’s all.”

“That gives me at least one answer about your father,” Lata grunts, heaving a trunk up onto his back.

"Really?" Obi drawls, rubbing at his shoulder. "I feel like I didn't get anything from that at all."

"I'm sure," the professors hums dryly, "that you're used to it. Now, are you two ready to go? We have quite a ways back, and thought I am experienced at traveling in the snow, I'd prefer not to do it in the dark.”

Obi heaves sigh, shoving his hands in his pockets. "Get a load of this guy, kid. Spends all this time packing up everything that isn't nailed down, then ask us to hurry up and--"

"Today, if you would." The words echo down the hallway, ghostly in the empty room.

"Yeah, yeah. We're coming." He rolls his shoulders, shifting his weight like a fighter right before a match. "Welp, you heard him, kid. One-way trip to Lilias, leaving now. You ready?"

Shirayuki doesn't spare a glance for the sepulcher behind her-- but she does pause for a shiver. Really, she'd thought she'd left these sorts of trips behind at Shibusen. "More than."

"Love to hear it." He holds out a hand as she starts up the rise. "Let's get out of here. Ladies first."

There's no hesitation as she takes it, hand fitting in to his like her haft snugs into his palm. "Let's."

[lettuce-seize-the-day]

Found ch. 5

AO3 link

Summary:  Jack Kelly is a 17 year old kid who has been in the foster system for more of his life than not. By now he's given up on finding his forever family and is counting down the days until he turns 18. Four months before the deadline, Miss Medda Larkin decides she is going to adopt him.

Chapter summary: The boys and Medda have dinner together. Medda reminds each of them that she is there for them. They do not hear her. Jack and Race are not okay.

TW: self harm and eating disorder stuff

That evening, they all sat down to dinner together. “How was the first day?” Medda asked the table.

Race shrugged. “Same old, same old. Nice to see David and Katherine again, though.”

“You oughta invite them over for dinner some night soon! It’s been too long,” said Medda.

“Yeah, fuh-sure,” said Race. “Maybe lata this week?”

“Absolutely. I’d love that,” said Medda. “What about you, Jack?” she asked.

“What about me?”

“How do you like the school?”

Jack took a bite of pasta. “Same as all th’others I been ta, I s’pose. S’fine.” He was mostly focused on watching Race, and trying not to seem like he was watching Race. Race was watching him watch him. “Race ‘n I got chemistry class togedda.”

“Oh, ain’t that somethin’!” said Medda. “It’ll be nice for you two to get to spend some time together in school.”

“We’s sit togedda at lunch, too,” said Race, taking a huge bite of food and making sure Jack saw. “So’s Crutchie.”

“Yeah, it’s fun,” said Crutchie. What he didn’t say, and what no one else did, was that he wouldn’t have anyone else to sit with if Race hadn’t invited him to his table. He’d only had one friend in his grade, who he had sat with at lunch every day since he had started going to school, and she moved away over the summer. As sweet and funny as Crutchie was, he had pretty severe social anxiety, which made making friends difficult. He just didn’t know how to initiate conversations, and with his crutch, people were slow to do it for him.

“He’s thinkin’a tryin’ out for theatre,” Race said proudly. “I think he’d be great at it.”

“I dunno, it was just a thought I had,” Crutchie said shyly. “Youz all just seem so close and so happy when ya get ta perform togedda. I dunno if they’d even let me in, though, on account’a my leg.”

“Well, you boys already know how I feel about the theatre,” said Medda. That was for sure. She was the owner of an off-Broadway theater. She was a very passionate advocate of the arts, and did all she could to make that abundantly clear. “Ain’t no better place to escape trouble. And there’s something for everyone.”

“That’s exactly what Katherine said,” said Race. “I dunno when auditions are, but ya betta believe I’ll letcha know when I do.”

“Jack, do you think you’d audition?” asked Medda.

Jack took a final bite from his plate. “Nah, prolly not,” he said as he stood up. “Thanks fer dinner, Medda. It was great.” He set his plate in the sink and went down the hall back to his room.

Medda looked a bit distraught. “Somethin’ I said?” she asked Race and Crutchie.

Race shook his head. “Nah, he jus’ needs some space. He don’t wanna get involved wid anythin’ here or get too close to anyone.”

“How do you know that?” she asked him.

Race looked at her and gave a small, sad smile. “‘Cuz that’s how I was, when I got here this time last year.”

Crutchie took his dishes to the sink. He cleared his throat and gave Medda a kiss on the top of her head. “Thank you for dinner, Medda. I gotta go get some homework done.”

“Alright, hon. I’m just down the hall if you need me, got it?”

“Yes ma’am,” he said as he walked himself out of the kitchen.

For a minute, they continued eating in silence. Then, Medda said, “Race, can I ask ya somethin’?”

Race looked up from his mostly-finished plate, a bit nervous. “Sure, Medda. What’s up?”

“I was just curious, what made you… stop feeling that way? What made you feel like you belonged?”

He tried not to look too relieved. “Uh… I dunno, I’d hafta think about it.” He took a slow, painful bite, even though he already felt full. He was trying to finish his food so what happened with Jack would never happen again. “I guess when I got ta start takin’ dance classes. Ya know, doin’ what I cared about. Helped me find my place, and wanna find a place.” What he didn't tell her was that he really never stopped feeling that way, not fully, and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it.

“So you think if I could help Jack find what he cares about, he might feel more welcome here?”

Race gave a shrug. “Ain’t no two fellas gonna work exactly the same way, but it sure seems worth a shot, don’t it?”

“I suppose it does,” said Medda. “I know he likes art… Maybe I could do somethin’ with that. Find him a club, or somethin’. They got any kinda art club at school?”

“Not sure. I’m sure there’s gotta be somethin, though. If anyone’ll figure it out, s’you. Ya gotta gift for helpin’ people.”

She gave him a look, then smiled as she ruffled his hair. “When did you get so smart?”

“I gotta good teacha,” he said, playfully pushing her off.

“You got that right. You finished?” she asked, gesturing to his mostly-empty plate.

“Yes I am, thank you, Medda,” he said, handing it to her. “I’m gonna go practice for dance class tomorra, alright?”

“Alright sweetie. You let me know if you need anything.”

“You got it,” he said, trying not to seem like he was rushing off. But he was. He did need to practice, that was true. But after he stood up, he was overwhelmed by how incredibly bloated and weighed down he felt from how much he had eaten. He started to panic, feeling suffocated by his own body. It was too much. It was too much. And he had to get rid of it.

____________________________________________________________

Jack did not feel good. Having people to sit with at lunch was nice, but also overwhelming. It had never happened before. Not like that. Up until now, he only ever sat with people at lunch when he was going to a school where sitting alone was against the rules and a group of do-gooders felt enough pity for him to let him sit with them. Now that he had had some time to himself, he couldn’t stop thinking about how weird he acted today. They must have pitied him, too. But he didn’t care what people thought. Except... that he did. He knew he could never make friends, but here were the kind of people he had been wishing to know for his entire life. And he didn’t know how, but he knew it was a trap. It had to be.

He was worried about Race. But what Race did or didn’t do was none of Jack’s business. He didn’t want him to cross a line he couldn’t come back from, but he also worried that he had crossed a line by asking him about it. He knew how much he hated it when people asked about his scars. At the same time, he worried that he didn’t do enough. How could one person be simultaneously too much and not enough? God, all he did was fuck up.

He needed to get out of his head. He grabbed his art supply bag and fumbled through it, looking for his special pencil sharpener which he knew was there. He pulled out the loose blade and held it in his hand. It had been awhile. But not terribly long. He hadn’t done it once since being here. This would be the first time. It was like seeing an old friend. He felt so many things at once; disappointment and disgust with himself for still doing this, relief at having something he had control over and knowing some things never change, sadness about letting Medda down, loneliness and despair because all he could do was let people down and it didn’t even matter because he’d be out of here soon enough. It was too much. It was all too much. The walls were closing in and he couldn’t breathe, there was no oxygen because the world around him was shrinking, squeezing the life out of him. He closed his eyes and did the only familiar thing. And then, he felt nothing at all. Just a sharp, familiar sting. He breathed a sigh of relief and kept going until the world came back into focus and his arm was covered in blood.

__________________________________________________________

Race sat hunched over the toilet bowl trying to catch his breath, the shower running to cover up the sound. His heart was pounding. Tears had forced their way out of his eyes. He cleared his throat, then slowly stood up on shaking legs, holding onto the counter for support. He closed the toilet lid and flushed. After taking a deep breath, he looked up into the mirror. His cheeks were red. His eyes were bloodshot. He didn’t look at the rest of his body- he couldn’t, not right now. He quickly brushed his teeth and shut the shower off. He splashed his face with cold water to bring the puffiness down.

He didn’t ever do this. He really didn’t. Only when his anxiety got the better of him. Usually, he just skipped meals here and there, and that was enough. But he didn’t like when people asked him about what he was eating. Or what he wasn’t. And he couldn’t risk Jack finding out. No one had, and he had to keep it that way. If anyone found out, he could lose dance. So he ate dinner. But it was too much. Too, too much. He had it under control and it wasn’t a big deal, but today was too much. It wouldn’t happen again. He promised himself it wouldn’t happen again, and did his best not to remember how he made that same promise to himself more often than he’d like to admit.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to focus on the positives. No one else suspected, and he’d be sure to keep Jack off his trail from now on. Besides, he wasn’t even underweight. Especially not for a dancer. There were people at his studio that he swore were just walking skeletons. He always watched them in awe and admiration, wondering how they didn’t shatter every time they landed a jump. He didn’t necessarily want to look quite like that, but he did notice that they tended to be more successful in the field.

Plus, there was Spot to think about. He knew it was naive, but he just couldn’t shake the thought that if he just had a nicer body, he would notice him.

He shook his head to clear his thoughts. None of that mattered. He just needed to go practice. Everything always felt better when he was dancing. He washed his hands again, cupped some water in his hands and drank it, then looked in the mirror one last time. He looked normal, like nothing had happened at all.

[1899-newsboy-strike]

I love your writing! Can you please do a 34 with Finch? Thank you!

34 - I’m scared what if someone finds out about us

Secret Affairs - Finch Cortes Imagine

Warnings: small freak out, slight argument

Summary: Ever since the end of the Strike Y/N and Finch have been secretly seeing each other in order to keep Y/N’s brother Spot from finding out. After a close call Y/N expresses her fears about getting caught.

——————————————–

“Finch put me down.” You giggled as Finch had you lifted so he could kiss you easily. He set you down and you were pinned against the wall of the alley you were in as he went in for another kiss. You wrapped your arms around his neck as his arms made their way around your waist. You heard footsteps near the alley and you quickly pushed him away as you panted and stood up straighter rubbing your thumb over lip as you distanced yourself from Finch. “Hey Y/N didn’t know you’s was visitin’.” You heard Race’s voice echo through the alley.

“Yeah, just wanted ta get away from Brooklyn, and I ran inta Finch.” You explained as you gestured to your boyfriend as you both awkwardly stood away from each other. “Well we’s playin games at da lodgin house lata if ya wanna come.” He explained and you nodded as he walked away. “That was close.” You sighed as your head rested against the wall. “Yeah, Race can’t keep a secret eitha.” Finch said as he rested his forehead on yours and held you. “I’s scared Finch… what if someone finds out about us. Then they’s gonna tell Spot and I’s not gonna be able ta see you.” You explained resting your hand on his cheek.

-“We’s don’t gotta worry about Spot Y/N, he’s ya brotha he can’t stop ya from bein’ happy.” Finch explained and you shook your head. “We’s not supposed ta be datin’ outside da borough. Spot doesn’t want a turf war. He can’t just make an exception cause I’s his sista. It sucks, da borough is family ya know? How’s ya supposed ta date family?” You explained running your fingers through your hair making Finch grab your hat as it started to fall. “Hey, it’s gonna be okay. He’s gonna see dat you’s happy and dat he can’t tell ya who ya can and can’t date.” Finch explained kissing you softly. You grabbed his hat and ran in the direction of the Manhattan lodging house.

“Y/N!” Finch called after you making you run faster. As you got close to the door you felt arms wrap around you as you got pulled back. “I’s think I’ll take my hat back now.” Finch whispered in your ear and you looked around not seeing any newsie and you pulled Finch into a kiss placing his hat back onto his head. You pulled away as you both walked in and you were greeted with some of the newsies pulling you into a hug. 

“So what are ya guys playin’ today?” You asked as you hopped onto Race’s back since he was in front of you. “Just some poker.” Race responded making you roll your eyes. “Ya guys need betta games ta play.” You told him as you sat next to Finch. Even though no one knew about yours and Finch’s relationship, everyone thought the both of you were best friends, which didn’t cause any questions when you’d stay in Manhattan and sleep in Finch’s bed. 

You watched silently as the boys played, Race winning most of the games. “I’ll play next round.” You said making some of them look at you. “If you’s gonna play next round, I’s out.” Albert held up his hands making you roll your eyes. “You’s just scared a losin’.” You explained and saw a smirk on Race’s face as he won the game that was currently going on. “Get ready ta lose Colon.” Race taunted you and you scoffed. “In ya dreams Higgins.” You teased and heard many of the newsies grumble about not playing anymore.

You had to admit that you were a tiny bit competitive when it came to playing poker with anyone. You’d even gotten in some fights with some of the newsies in Brooklyn because of some games. Eventually it was just you and Race playing, because the other boys had seen you fight another newsie before when they had gone to Brooklyn. Finch stared at you the whole time you played, and  smiled as he saw your face concentrate on your cards and then you had began to glare at Race. As your glare turned into a smile Finch melted as he admired you and laughed when you threw your cards down and Race threw his across the room since he thought he’d win.

“I told ya.” You laughed as Race just glared at you for winning. “Aww, is Race upset cause he got beat by a goil.” You teased and Race rolled his eyes before throwing the whole pack of cards at you. “Y/N you’s gonna have ta stay tonight. Spot would kill me if I let ya walk home when it was this dark.” You heard Jack interrupt you and Race as you both had began to play wrestle. “Kelly I ain’t scared a my brotha.” You told him as you stood up. “Then why don’t ya tell him about you and Finch?” You heard Race ask behind you making you freeze and your eyes quickly looked at Finch who looked just as shocked as you.

“What are ya talkin’ about Race?” You asked as you turned around and looked at him. “You’s both all ova each otha all da time, we’s know you’s togetha, and I know’s Spot don’t know about da both of ya.” Race explained making you glare at him. “Just cause we’s close don’t mean we’s togetha.” You stood your ground but Race was more determined. “Didn’t know two people who was close made out in alleys.” He explained shrugging his shoulders and you felt someone behind you and you glanced quickly seeing Finch standing there. “I saw da both of ya earlier, and when I told da boys they said dat they see ya makin’ out all da time.” Race explained making you sigh. “Well maybe ya can keep ya mouth shut about it like the rest then yeah?” You told him and Race shrugged.

“Heard somethin’ ‘bout Brooklyn, you’s can’t date anyone outside da borough. Just cause ya won’t tell Spot don’t mean ya gotta hide it from us.” Race explained making you shake your head. “Now that you’s talking about it Spot will hear ‘bout it and then there’s gonna be problems. That’s why I gotta hide it from everyone.” You explained as all your thoughts started to jumble and you stormed out and ignored Finch calling after you. As you got outside your frustration turned to anger and you rested your forehead on the wall before punching it repeatedly. “Y/N, hey it’s gonna be okay.” Finch whispered behind you as he grabbed you slowly and pulled you against his chest. “He’s gonna find out about us, then he ain’t gonna let me see ya, I can’t stand not seein’ ya.” You shook your head as Finch tried to calm you down. 

“I’s gotta go, I gotta tell him right now before he hears from someone else and then gets madda than he’s gonna be already.” You explained as you looked up at Finch. “Ya can’t go now, it’s too late for ya ta go alone.” He told you and you shook your head not listening as you made a run for Brooklyn. Finch wanted to go after you, but you had both been together for a while now, and he knew he wouldn’t have been able to stop you.

“Spot! Spot!” You called out as you shook him and he opened his eyes and shoved you. “What do ya want? What time is it?” He asked and you took a shaky breath as you took a seat on his bed. “I’s gotta tell ya somethin’. It’s important.” You told him and as he heard the worry in your voice he was finally fully awake and looked at you. “What’s da matta?” He asked and you bit your lip “I’s datin’ somebody… in ‘hattan.” You told him and he immediately got a frown on his face. “You’s not supposed ta be datin’ anyone outside da borough Y/N ya know that.” He explained making your blood boil as you began to get frustrated. “Dat’s not fair Spot! We’s like family ova here. If I dated one a da boys here it would be like datin’ you!” You exclaimed and Spot rubbed his face. “I don’t care if I gotta leave Brooklyn… I’s not gonna stop seein’ Finch.” You explained and Spot’s eyes almost popped out of his head.

“Finch? I wouldn’t have eva thought.” Spot laughed to himself as he looked deep in thought. “Okay.” He nodded and you furrowed your brows. “Okay?” You asked and he continued to nod. “Okay you can see him, I’ll tell da rest a da borough about changin’ da rule about datin’.” Spot explained making you jump on him and hug him tightly. “Thank you. I wouldn’t tell them about me though, they’s gonna think ya changed it just for me.” You told him and he nodded. You climbed up onto the top bunk and stared up at the ceiling smiling as you thought about being able to openly be with Finch around all the newsies and didn’t have to fail at hiding it any longer.

[viralhai]

The Way We Were: Lata and the Dawn of the Playback Era - Art and Culture | ViralHai News [ad_1]

This theme is music, background score, soundtrack of our lives. The Hindi film song has been a part of our existence, seemingly forever. But you can actually put a date for it: 85 years ago, in 1935, the first playback song for Nitin Bose was recorded Curse six, By music directors RC Boral and Pankaj Mullick.

Previously, actors sang their own songs on the set, and musicians also played on the set - often hidden behind trees and other props! But not every star could sing, and in his book, Behind the Scenes: Making Music in the Film Studio of Mumbai, Gregory D. Booth, Auckland University Professor of Ethnomucology, quoted a letter to a film magazine in 1940, urging Ashok Kumar to "stop singing in pictures".

It took time to settle into playback singing, but 1947 was a turning point. India's best-known singing star KL Sehgal died earlier that year, and female singer of the reigning star Nur Jahan moved to newly-carved Pakistan, leaving behind a huge void. That void was filled by two singers who became playback legend: Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi.

But it would be another two years before playback singers achieved independent fame and fantasy. In film lore that things have changed Palace in1949. Lata was not mentioned as a singer Will come, On the music record for that film; The film was credited to the standout song instead of the character Kamini played by Madhubala. Fans were attached to the name of the actual singer and the 'mistake' was corrected in the next batch of records. Subsequently, giving credit to playback singers became the norm.

In his 2015 book by American music professor Jason Beister-Jones, Bollywood Sounds: The Cosmopolitan Meditations of Hindi Film SongStates that the presence of playback singers' names on the recording was "the turning point when playback singing was fully accepted by Indian audiences".

In these years the foundation of lateral singing was laid; Born in the late '40s and early' 50s in the '50s, it is generally considered the golden age of Hindi film music. Shankar Iyer, a musician at Team Rewind, a group of corporate professionals who strive to showcase films as art, agrees that the '50s was the defining decade. But he adds, "The overall song composition evolved over the next two decades, as singers matured more in their styles, but also thanks to the beautiful orchestral arrangements that embellished the original melodies of the songs."

Along with Lata and Rafi, other revered singers have come into their own over the years: Mukesh, Talat Mahmood, Geeta Dutt. (Kishore Kumar and Asha Bhosle later gained their huge stardom.) And the lyrics were of exceptional poets like Shakeel Badayuni and Shailendra.

Playback singing meant that the songs were recorded in different locations, usually in advance, and released before the film, to promote it - a practice that continues to this day. Booth points to that lateral technology, as it separated the production of music from films, giving the Hindi film song an independent existence (often cited for the absence of a non-film musical culture in India).

The professional recording space cropped up in Bombay and music composers and what Iyer mentioned earlier became the film orchestra, perhaps the biggest pillar of Hindi film music. Goans and Parsis (both had a strong grounding in Western music, classical and popular) became the backbone of the film orchestra, even bringing their expertise in sitar, tabla and other Indian musical instruments.

Not like the nostalgic roll calls of these sparkling years: cellist Alfonso Albuquerque, guitarist Peter Sequeira, trumpet player chic chocolate, violinist Joaquim Menezes, jazz drummer Cavas Lord, Contestantist Gudi Cervei and many more.

These were busy years for musicians, as they stayed from recording to recording. Creators such as Naushad, SD Burman, C Ramachandra and Shankar-Jaikissen established their own orchestras, a system that would continue for decades, right up until the dawn of digital music in the 1990s. The classical, folk and western sounds merged into a spectacular blend, setting a pattern for years to come.

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that in the early years of nation-building, playback singing created a heart-warming landscape where everyone - not to mention singers, musicians, songwriters, orchestral musicians, directors and actors - worked together. Done, irrespective of region and religion. If it calls for a song, what could be more appropriate than the 1955 Mukesh number Shree 420: 'My jute is Japanese / Tu Pagla Inglitani / Sir Pe Lali Topi Rusi / Fer Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani. '

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. [ad_2] https://tinyurl.com/yxpqm48r #art #behindthescenes #bollywood #culture #dawn #era #hindifilmmusic #hindimoviesong #lata #latamangeshkar #makingmusicinafilmstudioinmumbai #music #news #playback #playbacksinger #viralhai

[skia-oura]

Orange Lilies, 4/?

A/N: seVEN MONTHS LATER WE’RE still gearing up. It’s okay. I’m thinking maybe a chapter or two until big thing one happens. But who knows!! Things can change.  This chapter, we meet an Acacia reincarnation!!

 Prologue // Previous // Next

Ao3 ff.net

Chapter Three: Tommy Hangar is a Boss

           Dipper, when he takes Lata to Australia, fully intends on keeping them close to hand. Safe activities only! No petting dangerous animals. No jumping from rock outcropping to rock outcropping. No toddling close to that creek over there with the increasingly loud bunyip. Dipper looked up from the oddly-energized rock he was holding as Lata approached the child-eating creature.

           “Lata!” He yelled, standing and brushing his human hands off on his knees. “Lata, no, no, come back, that’s not safe!”

           Lata turned around, put their hands on their hips. “Why? He doesn’t look so bad!”

           Dipper observed at the monstrous, oddly-jointed creature. It looked like it was made of cobbled-together animal parts. He could smell it, just a little, and the moistness of the scent had him thinking of the Everglades in summer. Its single, bulging eye was fixed hungrily on Lata, or rather on Henry’s antlers.

If it weren’t for that last, unsettling bit (the bunyip had no right), he might be inclined to agree with his charge. He stepped forward and held a hand out to Lata. “No. Come.”

           “We haven’t even seen any kangaroos,” Lata whined. They stomped their foot. The bunyip inched forward on its odd forearms, half-out of the creek. It bellowed. “You promised me kangaroos!”

           Dipper glared at the bunyip. It didn’t pay him any attention. He bristled; yes, Henry’s antlers were fascinating, but they were his and were from him and also he held far more power than a pair of measly antlers, so the slight was unforgiveable. “Yes, I did, and yes, we’ll find them. Lata, step away from the nightmarish child-eating monster.”

           The bunyip bellowed again, louder and longer, and Lata looked back at it. They paused, brought up one hand to rub at the base of one of their antlers. Good, Dipper thought. Somebody here was finally rightfully worried about the situation. He supposed it couldn’t be helped; the bunyip seemed too stupid to figure out that there was a bigger fish on this dry land.

           But Lata didn’t move. The bunyip wriggled a foot closer. Dipper readied himself to bare his teeth in a nasty snarl.

           “Fuckin’ hell! You cunt, what’re you pissfarting around here with that ankle biter?”

           Dipper turned around. He blinked at the newcomer, and then grinned, the issue of the bunyip momentarily set aside at the wonder in front of him. “Hello!”

           The woman in front of him, in typical park-ranger tans, stared at him like he’d grown three more heads and was still only in possession of about five collective brain cells. Her hair was dark, pulled back into a short ponytail, and there was a bit of stubble on her chin. Dipper was glad it wasn’t red, or curly, but he also wished Acacia’s reincarnation looked just a little more like her.

           Acacia’s reincarnation looked over his shoulder, cursed, and pushed him out of the way. Dipper stepped back, dry grass splintering under his shoes, and watched her unholster a long-distance stunning baton.

           “Kiddiwink,” she said, holding a hand out to Lata, “come stand behind me, sweetheart.”

           Lata looked back at the bunyip, which had crept closer in the time Dipper was lost staring at his old niece. His new nibling—old brother, or whatever, keeping things straight was so hard—made a noise in the back of their throat, and finally tried to shuffle away from the bunyip. The monster’s eyelid drew back even more, its pupil dilated, and then it was rushing forward faster than anything with four joints in its back legs and none in its front should be allowed to.

           Lata’s shrill shriek rose above the bunyip’s warbling roar. Dipper felt a quick flash of fear, and then a stronger thrum of anger for being afraid of such an insignificant creature. But even as he made to drop his human guise he remembered Acacia, before him, and how demons with children were never good combinations to human beings. He hesitated.

           In that moment of hesitation, Acacia whipped the stun baton forward. Runes flared up along its side in solid oranges, and then Dipper felt the energy flung at the charging bunyip. It collided with the creature, invisible except for the clear effects it had on the monster. The bunyip screeched, like stone on stone, and scrambled back towards the safety of the water. It didn’t retreat further though, its eye glaring at them from above the surface.

           Lata clutched at Acacia’s pants, shaking, in tears.

           “Piss off, fuckstain,” Acacia pulled a charmed stone out of her pocket and threw it at the bunyip. The moment the stone plinked into the water, the bunyip let out a hiss like radio static and disappeared under the surface. Dipper watched it swim away. Pride and dissatisfaction warred in him before they were summarily cast aside in favor of bemusement when Acacia stuck one finger right between his eyes.

           “You!” she barked. “What the pissfuck were you thinking, you rabid-dog footracer?”

            “I…” Dipper stared cross-eyed at the finger in front of him. The image didn’t double, and neither did the aura, bright orange with fury. Instead, he could see the individual ridges in the skin, the regressing cuticle and a small nick  at the edge of Acacia’s fingernail. “They wanted to see the kangaroos. So. I brought them. To see the kangaroos. Where are they, anyways? Don’t you have kangaroos here?”

           “You dimwit, have you been living belly-down, head-to-arse in a cave?” Acacia jabbed the finger between his eyes. Dipper had to try very, very hard to not cross his eyes further, because he had been informed that it was Very Creepy and Not Human and he would like Lata to remain in his custody until they saw some kangaroos and blipped out, thank you very much.

           “No,” Lata said. Then, after a pause, they asked, “What’s an arse? Is it an animal? A really small one?”

           “No,” Dipper said. “It means your butt.”

           “Oooh.” Lata shifted their weight and looked up at Acacia. They reached out and held their hand over Acacia’s butt. “Arse.”

           Acacia picked Lata up. Maybe it was to dissuade any more butt-talk. “Now that that’s out of the way, what the fuck are you doing here with a minor and without an arse-minder?”

           “Again, we wanted to see kangaroos?” Dipper eyed Acacia’s grip on Lata and wondered how easy it would be to get his nibling-brother-friend back from his other nibling. “They were supposed to be here?”

           “No they fucken’re not,” Acacia said. She shifted Lata in her arms. “Because there’s been a cupgriffin-coupling load of nasties popping up here! They took out a quarter of our herd sizes before we got all the nonviolents out. It’s not like it’s news fresh in the fuckin pot!”

           “We don’t live here.”

Acacia lifted one eyebrow. “And what about TV?”

Dipper had not been paying attention to the news. When did he need to? If anybody thought it’d be important, they’d tell him. And maybe he would listen. Possibly even remember. “I don’t get TV,” he said.

           “We do!” Lata said. Dipper squinted his eyes at them in a signal to shut up, but they didn’t. “I watch Magical Mumblemuffin every Friday, and Plastisaurus’s Featherfriends on Tuesdays. And then there’s Sailor Sun: Daylight Knight-maidens on Saturdays, and sometimes Daddy lets me watch his police show with him. My favorite’s the Wardress. She kicks butt.” Lata paused, and tilted her head. “She kicks arse?”

           Acacia opened her mouth to ask a question, but a rustle in the tall grass several feet away stopped her. She moved her suspicious gaze from Dipper to the grass, and Dipper took the moment to widen his eyes meaningfully at Lata, seeing as squinting hadn’t worked. Lata looked back at him, completely unaware of the brainwaves he was trying to send them. Dipper wished that Lata had telepathic abilities, like that reincarnation a few lives before he had to eat his brother’s soul. He didn’t remember much of then, coming off the razor edge of ferality, but he did remember many mental conversations. Maybe tinged with panic. Or something. Probably. He hadn’t been in a super great place, then. At least Bentley hadn’t been—well, if Dipper was honest with himself (which he didn’t really want to be), that Henry’s situation had only been marginally better than Bentley’s, not worse. The Mizar Misunderstanding kind of tipped the scales there. Fucking Twin Souls.

           “Let’s have this convo in a better fuckin pit than this infested portapotty dump.” Acacia shifted Lata to her back. “I don’t usually flap like a thimble-warbler fairy when the sun gets shaded, but I’m real fucken interested in why a dude who can’t be trusted to wipe his own ass got this anklebiter and don’t even live in the same house.”

           Dipper almost groaned out loud. The only thing stopping him was the thought of having to explain to Lata’s parents why they had gone to Australia. Or why somebody had reported Alcor the Dreambender snatching a kid out of their arms and vanishing. “I’m their uncle,” he said.

           “Really,” Acacia drawled. Lurid shades of blue and Nk’leka swirled through her aura. Dipper wanted to label them amusement, but he really wasn’t sure.

As they cut through a slightly overgrown patch of vegetation, Acacia absentmindedly kicked a particularly nasty looking two-headed mole-like creature out of the way. It tumbled into the underbrush, spraying acid potent enough to melt through wood and leaf. Dipper hummed in interest, but didn’t root out the others he could feel just meters away to see if they all did the funny acid thing.

           “Yeah!” Lata said, their chubby arms locked neatly around Acacia’s neck. Acacia, like a boss, didn’t blink an eye at nearly getting her windpipes crushed. Dipper rubbed at his throat subconsciously as Acacia stepped around him. “He’s my uncle! He’s fun. Can you really touch your arse with your head, Uncle Dipper?”

           Yes. “No,” he said, because he was a Good and Responsible Human Being with a Spine that wasn’t made of rubber. “Humans can’t do that.”

           “Contortionists can,” Acacia said, and fuck Dipper had forgotten about them, goddammit he was blowing his human cover, he just knew it. Dipper eyed Acacia’s back and wondered how fast he’d need to be to get the jump on her. Anything that could withstand toddler windpipe grip was a foe to be wary of. Not that he wanted Acacia to be his foe.

           “Oh, right,” he said, with an awkward laugh. “But. I can’t do that.” Definitely could. “Most humans can’t?”

            “You’d be surprised,” Acacia muttered. They stepped down from the short hillside to the path carved into the side of it. Dipper followed, careful to make sure his footsteps were just heavy enough to leave prints in the dusty earth.

           “I want to be a contortionist,” Lata said. “I want to touch my arse with my head.”

           Acacia patted Lata’s shin. Dipper hurried up to walk side by side with them both. “Sweetheart, you go for it. I hope that’s the only way you pull that star down to you.”

           “What’s your name, anyways?” Dipper asked, because Bentley was no more like Mabel than Lata was like Henry. And, well, maybe changing the subject would be better. He tilted his head towards Acacia.

           “Tommy Hangar,” She said without missing a beat. “Yours?”

           “Tyrone Pines,” Dipper said.

           Acacia—Tommy—narrowed her eyes at him, and didn’t flinch when Lata started tugging on her ear. Her aura, which had been lightening to pale pinks and lime-fruit green even with the amusement???blues, started to deepen into bright orange again. “I thought your name was Uncle Dipper.”

           “Well, yes,” he drawled. “Haven’t you heard of ni—I mean, it’s my nickname. I’m—an astrologist,” he said, only knowing about astrology in that dim, suppressed way he knew everything.

           “Stars, huh,” Tommy said. Her aura cleared up and began dancing with those amusement colors. Dipper knew they were amusement because he caught just a hint of a grin on her face. “I guess it explains why a fuckwit like you don’t know anything about shit going on down here. Your head is in the clouds, like Filara’s.”

           “Above,” Dipper said, unable to stop himself. “Stars are above the clouds, not in them.”

           Tommy snorted and looked back at him with a raised eyebrow. She went down the short set of rough stairs at the same time. Dipper could swear that was a no-go in the Parenting Book. A parenting book. Something.

“Stars in clouds would look so cool!” Lata said, pausing in their attempt to elongate Tommy’s earlobes. “Why aren’t there stars in clouds? And who’s Filara?”

           Dipper was distracted by trying to go down the set of steps in a manner that was Very Human, and didn’t answer right away. Instead, Tommy beat him to it.

           “Because stars are very far away, and if they weren’t, they would be too hot and too big to be in the clouds. Filara’s my wife. And she would agree with you, even if she knows the science is impossible.”

“What about you?” Lata asked.

“Me?” Tommy laughed. A light breeze caught Lata’s hair and blew it into Tommy’s face. “Cute idea, but I’m glad they’re so fuckin far away. One sun is hot efuckingnough.”

           Dipper was only barely able to stop himself from tripping, caught up in the feeling of heat against his front, his side, slowly baking alive and unable to move from the hospital bed because his spine was broken and they hadn’t fixed it yet, had to work around the other breaks over the years from wrangling with nasty supernaturals. He was sixty-three, except. Except. Except he wasn’t him, he was her, she was Tommy and she ached and ached because Filara was expecting her home, they were supposed to go out and—

           “Dipshit, you okay back there?”

           He nearly flinched. Suddenly, he just wanted to be gone. He didn’t want to reconnect with somebody who didn’t know him, who would hate him, who he knew would go up in literal flames. He knew, he knew, he knew.

           Dipper opened his eyes, and met Lata’s gaze. Lips pressed, like their mother’s. Eyes wide, unsure. In the breeze, the leaves on their tiny, underdeveloped antlers bobbed. Up, down, up, down. Dipper remembered so many leaves on so many antlers. He could only place a few to their respective Henry’s faces.

           Dipper closed his eyes. Took a breath, let it out and pushed fire and pain as far down as he could. “I’m fine. Just a muscle spasm.”

           He smiled, not too wide and not too sharp, and did not meet Acacia’s eyes the rest of the way to the Kangaroos. As soon as he had politely refused her offer for homemade lunch and information for ‘dipsitting numbskulls with kids like you,’ and as soon as Lata had their eyeful of Kangaroos, he blipped them fifteen hours back. Then he waited until Lata’s parents got home, and vanished.

           Dipper didn’t think he was going back to Australia any time soon.

           Dipper didn’t think he was going back anywhere any time soon.

_

           Bentley thumbed the clock display on his desk and watched it pop up. He was not young enough to fold his arms on his desk and put his head down, but he really, really wanted to. Three more mind-numbing hours of reviewing theory and re-structuring the plan the Thinktank department wanted him to implement was not exactly how Bentley wanted to spend his time.

           “Is…is it right now?”

           He leaned back in his chair and stared up at the poor intern the idiots up at Thinktank had playing courier. Ever since Mahnji left the department, Thinktank had been sending him worse and worse schematics, as evidenced by the fact this was the sixth time the intern had visited him that week. It was Tuesday.

           “No,” he said. He told himself not to take it out on the intern. Poor Sally didn’t deserve his ire; zhe had been perfectly polite and apologetic the entire time. “No, it isn’t, but I couldn’t tell you exactly where or why without looking it up myself.”

           “I’m so sorry,” zhe said, fidgeting with the bottom of zhir jacket with six-fingered hands. “I can take it back?”

           “No, it’s all right,” Bentley said. He ignored the fact that there were two half-finished in-depth projects currently waiting on his work pad. “I’ll fix it up and send it back. When do you get off work?”

           “Um,” Sally said. “I’m supposed to get off at six.”

           “Then if you could come around five, I should have it done by then,” he said. He hated the words even as they left his mouth, but figured that staying an extra hour wouldn’t hurt with how busy Torako had been lately, with how absent Dipper had been. “I’m out the door after that, though, so their input can wait until tomorrow.” Tomorrow, after he’d spent the night drawing up rough schematics that actually worked, instead of the scattered-fishbone scratchmarks they dared call a working proof.

           “Okay,” Sally said. Zhe rubbed zhir long thumbs over zhir knuckles. “I’ll…go now?”

           “Of course,” Bentley said. “Thank you for bringing these to me, and for your patience.”

           Sally let out a weak laugh and waved. Zhir four feet made hardly a sound on the floor as zhe left. Bentley waited until the door had shut before he slowly got to his feet and touched the tips of his fingers to the window. With a slow, downwards swipe, the window opacity lowered until he could just see the city outside.

           Having his own office was nice. It meant that when he really needed to, he could curl up under the desk and breathe a little. Being good at his job—being one of the best thinkers in the industry, actually—had won him his own space, but it also meant that the stress and responsibility was much higher. Bentley wasn’t even thirty yet, but he kept finding white hairs growing in at the sides of his head. Bentley reached up a hand and touched his own hair, watched what he could see of his reflection in the window.

           His father’s face stared back at him.

There were subtle differences, of course—Bentley had a rounder face, his nose was wider, his eyes bigger and his ears had detached lobes—but Bentley really knew it was him because of the hair: two-toned, shaggy and starting to grow over his eyes. It wasn’t short, not like Philip’s. Bentley didn’t know if that was a blessing or a curse.

Bentley closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to the glass. Sigil formulas danced behind his eyelids, shifting and changing shape. What Thinktank wanted was something that could work in tandem with concealment wards. Easier said than done; sigils didn’t really like playing with other magics. Sigilists had to beat around the bush in order to bend the sigils to a purpose like working with wards. When Ben remembered the schematics Thinktank had sent him, he had to admit—if only to himself—that they had made a good attempt at it. It was fairly creative, actually. But all the same, Bentley knew deep in his gut that their current schematics were likelier to tear vicious, angry holes in the wards than support foreign magic.

Knowing it would fail was one thing. Figuring out the fix was another entirely.

His phone chimed on the desk. It wasn’t Torako’s muted guitar riff unfortunately, but it also wasn’t his coworker dove-croon tone, which made it twice as safe a distraction to look at. Bentley opened his eyes and went to check the handheld.

Meung-soo’s name stared up at him. Bentley smiled a little to himself as he swiped to access the message.

Bentley, it said. He sat down, sigil schematics out of mind for the moment. As you know, I enjoyed lunch with you this past Saturday, and I was hoping you might be available for dinner tonight. Perhaps with your partners, if they have the time? I was told there was an excellent Italian place near my hotel. Maybe around 6?

Bentley hummed, and turned his chair in a circle. He wanted to, but wasn’t about to leave Torako high and dry for dinner unless she was alright without company that night. There wasn’t much by the way of leftovers in the fridge, after all, and it had gotten a bit lonely without Dipper in the apartment—he wasn’t about to subject Torako to that, not after he’d volunteered to make dinner.

So, instead of replying to his Aunt—he was at work, he could say he didn’t see the message immediately—he tapped the right corner of the phone twice to call Torako. She picked up on the second-to-last ring.

“Ben? What’s wrong?”

“Hey Tora, Meung-soo texted with an offer to go to dinner around 6, if you’re free then?”

Torako let out a deep breath. The static dissolved in the space between the speaker and his ear so that all he heard was its fuzzy echoes, softened and quiet. “Stars, Ben, I’d love that, but I don’t think I’ll get out of here any time soon.”

Ben frowned. He pushed the pads to the side of his desk and leaned on the clearest surface. “Tora? You sound really tired.”

“Haha,” she said. Her tone became lighter, and if Ben hadn’t known her for almost half his life, he wouldn’t have become suspicious. “Yeah, it’s pretty tense around here. Really busy. I’ll be okay though! You should go and spend time with your aunt.”

“Tora, it’s okay, I can spend time with her later. What do you want for dinner? I’ll go out and pick stuff up if I need to.”

“Ben.” There was a thump on Tora’s end. “Ben. Darling. Friendo. Buddy. What did we talk about last week?”

Bentley honestly couldn’t remember. “I don’t know?”

“Family. You reconnecting with them. And you were so happy after your lunch with her, so I don’t see why you should skip out on dinner. She’s only here for what, a few more days?”

“End of the week,” Bentley said. “She leaves Saturday.”

“Exactly,” Torako said. “A few more days. Go have dinner! If you’re really worried, you can bring me back a serving of whatever you have. Where are you going, anyways?”

“Italian, near her hotel,” Bentley said. “I think it’s a place on West side?”

“Oooh, that place! Yeah, bring me back whatever, whenever. If you’re not back by the time I am—which, hah, unlikely—I’ll just stuff my face with vegetables or something. Maybe some crackers.” There was a suspicious pause. “Or something.”

“…you have Moffios in the house, don’t you.”

“Something!” Torako said. “Not Moffios!”

Bentley sighed. “Well, I suppose that if you went out and got them, like the adult you are, I can’t stop you from eating them. Even if I want to. You sure you don’t want me to come back and cook?”

“No! And well, maybe Moffios will be involved,” Torako said. Bentley knew it. If he were younger and had less control over his pettier characteristics, he would absolutely find and destroy them. With prejudice. “But, point is: I will feed myself if you come home later. If you come home earlier, you will bring me food. Okay?”

“You’re sure?” Bentley traced a note between the forcefields of his desk. “Positive?”

“Yes, Ben. Go. Talk with your aunt. Eat good food. Bring me good food. I will eat it eventually, if not tonight. Besides, won’t you be lonely waiting around for me? Dip’s not been back in a couple days.”

“I mean. I guess I would be.” Bentley made a mental note to summon Dip back if he was gone beyond Friday. He could be in trouble, or sad, or something; even powerful forces of the supernatural like Dipper weren’t without their weaknesses. “But like. Moffios. Do I really want to leave you with just those in the house to eat.”

“Only maybe Moffios!” Torako said. “Not definitely Moffios! And even if, hypothetically, there were Moffios, I am an Adult and will eat Something Healthy with my Delicious Breakfast Cereals.”

“You can’t call Moffios cereal,” Bentley said. “They tarnish the good name of cereal if you do.”

“You tarnish the good name of cereal,” Torako muttered. Then, louder, she said, “Okay, so you go out to dinner, I’ll suffer here at my intern job which is going to pay me overtime if it’s the last thing I accomplish, and we’ll meet up tonight even if it’s me crawling into bed and shoving my elbow in your face.”

Bentley was intimately familiar with Torako’s elbows. It’s part of why he liked being little spoon. “Okay, if you’re alright with that, then I’m good. Good luck at work.”

“You too. And have fun with your Aunt! I’m really happy you’re getting to know her, and that she’s not awful.”

Bentley laughed. “What, that’s as high as you’ll go for her? She’s not nice? Good? Decent?”

“I haven’t even met her!” Torako whined. “It’s called reserving judgment. Now, I really have to go, so—”

“Alright, love you lots. Don’t stick around too long.”

“Love you too, dork. Later!” Torako hung up. Bentley closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and tried to hold onto the echoes of her voice for as long as he could.

But, eventually, he couldn’t ignore the text or his work any longer. So he sent a reply to his Aunt—Unfortunately neither of my partners can come, but I can meet you at six, if that’s alright with you!—and pulled the most recent datapad toward him. He imported the document into his note-taking software, and began to tear Thinktank’s proposition apart.

_

           “—and really, when you put sigils with other forms of magic,” Bentley found himself saying over dinner, “you avoid nature sigils as much as possible. Especially elemental ones, like fire, or water. That’s a pretty basic and steadfast rule! There are a few exceptions, but Thinktank should know better than to try to anchor their protection formulas with ‘earth,’ because all that’s going to happen is chaos and a lawsuit. Or our building going down when my team tests the sigils.”

           Meung-soo chuckled, and propped her chin on her palm. A single silver hoop slid down from her wrist with the motion until it rest halfway down the soft swell of her forearm. It had some kind of ward embossed into the metal, but Bentley hadn’t yet asked what its purpose was. Maybe it was to subtly alter the appearance of her arms and disguise liver spots. Perhaps it was to detect foods she was allergic to and warn her in advance. Maybe she had a poor constitution and the bracelet supported her compromised immune system. He hadn’t noticed wards on the bracelets she wore last time, but he wasn’t paying attention either. Wards weren’t really his thing, though he was learning.

           There was so much he didn’t know about his aunt. There was so much, he was realizing, that he was excited to learn about her.

           “Earth seems pretty stable to me, though,” she said. “Shielding wards often invoke earth-related words. Why can’t sigils?”

“Because natural sigils are too raw,” Bentley said. “They’re not refined enough. That kind of power, paired with sigils’ tendency to attack other magics they’re put with, is a bad combination. Sigils are like—um, this isn’t perfect, but they’re like white cells.”

Meung-soo’s eyebrows rose. “So other magics are sicknesses? Viruses?”

“Agh, no,” Bentley said. He pushed his plate of half-eaten lasagna out of the way. “Maybe it would be better to say that sigils see themselves as white cells, in that everything else is there to get in their way or get on top.”

“Are sigils sentient?”

Bentley opened his mouth to answer no, then closed it and leaned back in his chair. He looked up at their slowly spinning table-light, warm-toned but somewhat dim. “I mean, there’s not been a lot of research. And people don’t go into sigils as much because they’re hard, and frustrating to work with in an age where combining magics is preferable to sticking to one, and they’re inconvenient because of needing sentient energy. But because of the SE, maybe some of the intent lingers in the sigils? Maybe they become a little sentient? I don’t know, it’s not really my area.”

Meung-soo nodded and took a bite of her shrimp fettuccini. Bentley saw her tapping her fork and waits for her to finish.

“So sigils might have some level of sentience, but nobody knows. And they don’t play will with other magics. So how does your phone work?”

Bentley blinked. “My phone?”

“You said it was warded,” Meung-soo said. “But I saw sigils on the outside rim, so that must mean they’re working together?”

“Ah, no, sorry,” Bentley said. “I meant warded as in protected. It’s all sigilwork. More complicated than the stuff I had at school, but it’s been a decade and this is for heavier duty work.” Bentley shifted the phone just a bit further away from his plate. Sigil-warded it may be, but it was not impervious to food or water.

“Oh, I see,” Meung-soo said. She smiled. “There’s some overlap with other magics, then, even if sigils hates them?”

Bentley frowned, trying to figure out where she’d come to that conclusion. “I mean, there’s overlap between all magics, but why do you say that?”

“The use of warded, even if just as a word,” Meung-soo said, holding up a hand and beginning to pull down fingers in count. “Then you said that the sigil for fire is the same as the alchemical symbol, which is a different branch of magic. And some of the sigils I was able to see on your phone looked a lot like words, like wards use.”

“Yeah, you’re right. That’s really observant of you,” Bentley said. He relaxed into a bit of a slouch and smiled back. “You’re really smart. Dad said my mom was really smart too; is it just a family thing?”

Meung-soo’s smile dimmed a little, turned a tiny bit bitter and soft with sorrow. There was a burst of laughter from the group two tables down, harsh in the sudden silence between Bentley and his aunt. A server passed behind Meung-soo, their elbow clipping the back of her chair, but she didn’t move even when the server apologized quickly.

“I’m sorry,” Bentley hurried to say. “You don’t have to answer that. We can change the subject.”

“No, it’s fine. I’m sure that…that you’d like to know more about Soo-jan. Susan.” Meung-soo pushed some of her noodles around. “Yes, she was smart. So smart. More smart with her body, smart in doing, than she was book-smart, but she was a bit of that, too.”

           Bentley remained silent. He watched Meung-soo’s eyes, which suddenly looked so tired, watched the way her left hand trembled. He wanted to tell her it was okay not to continue, but it wouldn’t come out. The air around them was suddenly so heavy.

           “I was the book-smart one, but she was the one who practiced until she remembered like it was second nature. When I was ten, she could outclimb me and beat me in karuta matches because she remembered the best spots to put her weight, and she remembered the words to the poems better than I did. When we were older, she always took the lead on vacations and dragged me along to see new things. You’re not her, but…you remind me of her, sometimes. You remind me of Philip, too, but Soo-jan was far more adventurous.”

           If there wasn’t that quiet tension in the air, Bentley would have laughed self-depreciatingly. “Adventurous?”

           Meung-soo finally looked him in the eye. Her mouth quirked up in a smile. “You went to school and then to work in another country with only one other friend. You decided to enter a field that wasn’t very viable at the time, and are at the top of your field. Didn’t your work send you abroad several times already? It said so on the website.”

           “Uh,” Bentley said, because that really wasn’t so special. Honestly. And then he registered what she heard, and asked, “Website? You looked me up?”

           Meung-soo flushed. “I. Um. I was. Yes.”

           “You…stalked me online?” Bentley had a hard time wrapping his head around this. He was barely present on social media. He had forgotten that the company had a website. He hadn’t even known they featured articles about their employees, though the fact rubbed him as somewhat familiar.

           She went darker and started to fiddle with the napkin. “I. Yes. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude, I just wanted to know—”

           “No, no, it’s fine!” Bentley said, holding up his hands. “You’re fine, I just wasn’t expecting it. I’m not really online much?”

           Meung-soo laughed, a little awkwardly. “I suppose that’s true, yes. I’m not really either. Again, Soo-jan was more adventurous. Outgoing.”

           Bentley had never been outgoing in his life. Well, maybe when he was a very young child, but aside from that, outgoing had been firmly in Torako’s playing field. He wondered if Meung-soo seeing her sister in him was just wishful thinking.

           His thoughts must have shown on his face, because Meung-soo softened from stiff embarrassment. “I’m not trying to say you are Soo-jan. Or your father—I remember him being rather vivacious. You’re just familiar, sometimes. It’s okay to be your own person, though.”

           “Okay.” Bentley dropped his hands into his lap, then set them up above the table surface as manners demanded. “I. Um. I don’t think much can top Mom’s job, anyways.”

           Meung-soo laughs, all signs of embarrassment gone. “Oh, Soo-jan’s job. Our parents were so mad at her! Ma wanted her to go into something safer, Mama wanted her to marry and stay at home, and Anjan said that anything was fine except for that. Even being a self-employed cult-hunter was better than going to Dip in California, of all places!”

           Bentley supposed he understood the aversion. Out west, the storms were unpredictable—both natural and magical. The oceans were still dangerous, even two millennia after Alcor tore the coast into pieces, cutting a new plate into the Earth’s crust. It was just starting to breach the surface of the ocean in volcanic islands. Magically, supernaturally-charged islands, that nobody even wanted to touch yet.

           “She did do a lot of exploring in what time she had, though,” Bentley said. “And Dad said she stopped when she found out she was pregnant with me.”

           “At four months,” Meung-soo said. “She barely showed, even after that. That made our parents mad at her too.”

           Bentley knew his maternal grandparents hadn’t liked him while they were alive, but this made it seem like they didn’t like his mother either. He frowned, and took the last bite of his pasta to stop himself from asking if they ended up hating his mother.

           “But I remember her sending pictures of you when you were born,” Meung-soo said. She had an absent smile on her face, and was looking out the window beside them. It was showing the Italian Alps, in real time. “I can’t have children, and never wanted to, but in that moment I almost wished I could.” She looked at him, and that smile was back on her face, both soft with memory and sharp with bitterness. There was another burst of laughter from the table two groups down. “You were absolutely precious.”

           Bentley had finished chewing his food. It was all gone, even the complimentary bread in the basket between himself and his aunt, so he didn’t have anything to occupy his mouth when he said, “Why didn’t you ever visit, or send messages?”

           Meung-soo blinked. The bittersweet expression washed off her face, like dirt on the streets and houses after a magical torrent of rain. “What?”

           “Nevermind,” Bentley said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to ask that.”

           Meung-soo stared at him like she was seeing him for the first time. She frowned, and looked away. “No, it’s. I. I didn’t. I’m sorry, it’s complicated.”

           Bentley watched her, and waited for the rest of the answer. She took a long, long time to give it, and in that time Bentley found himself wishing that the laughing table would shut up.

           “After your mother died,” Meung-soo said, “your father and I got in a big fight. We…didn’t see eye to eye on where Soo-jan’s memorial should be. Didn’t see eye-to-eye on where you should be raised. Didn’t see eye-to-eye on his job. And they were stupid, petty fights all wrapped up into one, and I was wrong about many things, but it stopped us from reconciling. We said awful things to one another.”

           Bentley opened his mouth and asked another awful question. “Did you want him to die?”

           Meung-soo looked up at him, eyes wide and startled. “No!” She said. “No, I never did. I was shocked when I heard he died. Why would you think…”

           Bentley shrugged. “My father wasn’t well known, or highly-regarded. I had one person come to the funeral that hated him, and wouldn’t even pretend at being sorry.” He swallowed the grief and anger down, and didn’t look at Meung-soo. “They brought me orange lilies at my father’s funeral, and made me accept them.”

           Meung-soo didn’t speak for a while. Bentley was finding it harder and harder to keep the tears at bay, staring at the sauce on his plate, the oil glinting in the light overhead.

           “I’m sorry,” she said. “I…I didn’t know that. I’m so, so sorry.”

           They were both quiet again, Philip’s death, Soo-jan’s death hanging over them. Bentley closed his eyes and wished he could call Torako, or summon Dipper, and have them come at once to hold him.

           Meung-soo broke the silence. “Hey. Do you—sometimes, when I think of Soo-jan and it hurts too much, I eat something chocolate and remember how much it made her smile. Dessert sound good?”

           Bentley took a deep breath and looked up at Meung-soo. She looked just as tired as he felt. He wondered, then, if he would be that way about his father two decades in the future. He hoped he wasn’t. He hoped he was, too. He didn’t know what he hoped.

           “Sure,” he managed. “Dad liked berries.”

           They ordered dessert.

_

           Torako should have expected it. She’d been up early and out of work late. The day had been all about running around town, contacting apartment managers in person to ask them to keep an eye out for tenants who hadn’t left their apartments. It had been a lot of deskwork, looking through odd cases from the hospitals with the other two interns in hopes that the summoned demon has finally claimed a victim. There should have been a victim. Alû worked fast, there should have been something, and there was this low undercurrent of ‘currently freaking the hell out’ at the station that had everybody tense and easy to offend. Mellie, who Tora got along with fairly well usually, burst into tears when Torako snapped about working faster, even though Torako knew Mellie found numbers easier to read than letters and that Mellie was going as fast as she could. Torako still felt like a jerk, even though she’d immediately apologized and taken Mellie to the break room to calm down.

           But nothing had happened. Nothing was happening. And Torako felt the pressure of being a demonologist, especially that of being a demonologist intern; everybody expected her to magically find the symptoms that connected the patient to the crime. It just wasn’t happening yet. Which meant everybody kept staring at her more and more expectantly, and Torako was going absolutely insane. She should have taken off to have dinner with Bentley and Meung-soo, just to unwind a bit. Instead, though, she’d stayed at the office, taking every call about every new admitted patient with coma-like or paralysis-like symptoms that ultimately ended in nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Not even the delicious spaghetti dinner Bentley brought back had helped with the frustration and exhaustion.

           So when Torako half woke up in the middle of the night, and she heard Momma Mai in the doorway asking her where she put the butter, where the butter was put, because Momma Mai needed to make pancakes with the butter so Torako, just tell her where the butter is—Torako thought Oh fuck, not this again, and tried to move.

           As expected, she couldn’t. Her hands were dead weight on the blankets, her arm lead over her side, her eyes stuck shut under a force. Opening them felt like she was playing at Atlas lifting the world, except she’s not Atlas—thank fuck, because she’s not keen on getting her stomach pecked out. Or whatever the legend says.

           Torako breathed, and focused on breathing harsher, and harsher, until she was letting out little whines. She was scared, a little, but she’s been having sleep paralysis since she went demon-hunting slash cult-bashing that one year between undergrad and grad. So honestly, it’s more frustrating now that she knew what was happening. There was a twinge of unease at the empty space at her back where Dipper usually was, though. He wasn’t behind her to laugh, then offer to eat the paralysis even though it apparently tastes awful. Like feet bathed in vinegar and then mixed with the cloves the dentist stuffs in your mouth when you get dry socket.  

           Bentley stirred in front of her. Thank the world, Torako thought. Then he woke up, turned around, and must have seen her still and almost hyperventilating because she felt the bed shake with the force of him sitting up. “Torako?!”

           She didn’t know why he was so panicked. She wished she could see his face. He touched it, held her cheeks in his hands, but she couldn’t move. Not a finger, not even her mouth—just her breath, faster and harsher in the pursuit of waking up.

           “Fuck, Torako, did—fuck, what was the name of that demon? Oh my god, I’m calling Dipper, it can’t have you it can’t have you!”

           Torako was confused for approximately two and three-quarters of a second. Then she remembered her case, and how she’d warned Bentley that comas and paralysis might not be just comas and paralysis, and she panics.

           In a burst of sheer will, she wrenched her eyes open and let out a shuddering, uncontrollable sob that’s less emotion and more physical response.

           Bentley stared at her, wide-eyed and with tears just starting to form. For a long moment, she stared into the whites of his eyes in the dark, and then Bentley clapped twice to turn the nightlight on. He pulled her up into his arms and started to cry into her neck.

           Wordlessly, she folded her arms around him and rubbed up and down his back. He blubbered things about how scared he was, how she was never allowed to scare him like that again, how he would hunt down that demon himself even though he’d never been too active about the whole Cult-Smashing-Mizar schtick before. She hummed and nodded and focused on being alive and present for Bentley.

           Maybe it should have been the other way around. Maybe he should have been the one comforting her. But he had, so many times in the past, and she knew from her end that she would be okay—he didn’t. He didn’t. And if Torako had woken up to Bentley, whining in bed and not moving a single muscle, her heart would have been in her throat within miliseconds.

           “Do you want to call Dipper?” She asked at length, when Bentley had calmed down a little and was breathing steadier. Bentley pressed his face further into her neck.

           “I don’t think so,” he murmured, fingers looser in the folds of her sleep shirt. It’s that old Sugar Daddy one, from college. Torako wonders if she should make them all new ones. Maybe some cool sunglasses to go with them. “He—he might be busy. I wanted to call him on Friday, if he hadn’t been back home by then.”

           “Fair enough,” Torako whispered. “But if it happens again, could you? It’s so much easier when he eats them.”

           Bentley didn’t ask what she’d give him, or what he’d give Dipper on her behalf. Dipper loves Moffios almost as much as Torako does. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

           They held each other for another five, ten minutes, before exhaustion pulled them under again. Torako fought the oncoming fits of paralysis, brought about by overexhaustion, until she wasn’t thinking or fighting anymore.

           Neither of them were awake when Alcor the Dreambender blipped into the room, summoned by Bentley’s spike of fear. He looked at them for a long time, and then plucked a thin, rapidly growing sprout of paralysis from the space just above Torako’s ear. He ate it.

           His impassive features twisted into a open-mouthed look of revulsion. “God that’s gross,” he whispered out loud. “Gross gross gross gross gross. Ew. No. Blech. Where’s my candy.”

           He pet at his tongue. Underneath him, Bentley and Torako slept, tense, exhausted, and worried. Alcor looked at them one last time, looked at the space behind Torako’s back, and wanted. Then he thought about Acacia burning, about elderly Bentley holding elderly Torako’s hand in the face of a magical hurricane and being swept away by the torrential floods, about young Bentley wasting away in a bright white space, about middle-aged Torako with her throat slit in the center of a circle she had almost broken up, about their graves in a thousand different forms in a hundred different places, and he couldn’t.

           Dipper closed his eyes, and blipped away.

[meingenious]

Asha Bhosle Birthday Explicit: 10 Timeless Primary Bollywood Songs That We Love As Millennials

http://www.digitalmarketingbyrohit.com/?p=2805 Asha Bhosle Birthday Explicit: 10 Timeless Primary Bollywood Songs That We Love As Millennials - http://www.digitalmarketingbyrohit.com/?p=2805 Every time one listens to Asha Bhosle, one can’t help nevertheless be enchanted. For a millennial, like me, who pines over primary Hindi songs from the yesteryears, it’s like travelling to a whole new world filled with novelty and old-world attraction. The rockstar diva that she is, Asha Bhosle has an unprecedentedly gifted voice. The way in which by which that the exuberant singer can combine into assorted genres and moods seamlessly is just distinctive. Proudly holding a mind-boggling entry throughout the Guinness Book Of World Knowledge for recording a whopping 11,000 songs in 20 fully completely different languages, Asha Bhosle has given the Hindi film enterprise a repertoire of peppy numbers. And whereas most singers in the meanwhile have bracketed themselves in a safe zone and tend to tread solely in that path, Asha Bhosle is a trailblazer. Whenever you ask me if there is a voice throughout the youthful know-how that resonates collectively together with her, I’d say, “Are you mad?” On account of, personally I don’t assume that anyone throughout the crop has managed to appreciate the rhythmic flexibility and adaptability that Asha Bhosle revels in. Bollywood may very well be so colourless with out her! As a result of the evergreen star turns a 12 months ‘youthful,’ in the meanwhile, now now we have catalogued ten of her legendary pop songs that had been meant to be a seamless in every millennial playlist! Piya Tu Ab Toh Aaja Movie: Caravan (1971) | Music: R.D. Burman Critically, can any karaoke get collectively be often called over with out not lower than as quickly as making an attempt this monitor? Bollywood hasn’t had a further seductive and dramatic monitor than this one ever since. Explicit level out to R.D. Burman who fuels life into this monitor alongside along with his rugged chants “Monica, Oh my darling!” Dum Maaro Dum Movie: Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971) | Music: Rahul Dev Burman In a time when refined lovey-dovey songs had been in, ‘Dum Maaro Dum’ emerged as a full-blown explosion! Thus, it turned the anthem of the budding Indian hipsters. And the lyrics are so relatable even in the meanwhile, they merely hit dwelling every time I be all ears to this monitor! Chura Lia Hai Tumne Movie: Yaadon Ki Baaraat (1973) | Music: R.D. Burman If there could also be one monitor that I hum every single day of my life, it is this one. The endearing enchantment that it has merely can’t be put into phrases. And gosh, these opening guitar notes are soul-touching! ‘Chura Lia Hai Tumne’ might be essentially the most romantic monitor of the century, interval! Jawaani Jaaneman Movie: Namak Halaal (1982) | Music: Bappi Lahiri Being an ardent Asha Bhosle fan, her filmography tells me that she excels throughout the disco model. She has obtained the correct cadence and glamour that she is going to vocalize just so fully! Moreover, Bappi Lahiri and Asha Bhosle make a deadly combo! ‘Tis grooviest retro monitor ever! Raat Akeli Hai Movie: Jewel Thief (1967) | Music: Sachin Dev Burman The gradual, refined seduction and drunkenness throughout the singer’s voice throughout the monitor’s hook always get me! Moreover, the wondrous saxophone and harmonica musical notes set the mood of the monitor good. It’s as if the singer has lived the lyrics, and he or she is enacting them in her singing talents. ‘Raat Akeli Hai’ is legit ear candy! Hungama Ho Gaya Movie: Anhonee (1973) | Music: Laxmikant-Pyarelal I obtained’t be incorrect if I acknowledged that this monitor stays to be the fad in the meanwhile! No marvel the makers of 2014’s Queen picked it up and remixed it. Even so, nothing can ever match as a lot as playfulness and candour that Asha Bhosle has been blessed with! Undoubtedly the correct membership monitor ever, genuine or remix! Ye Mera Dil Movie: Don (1978) | Music: Kalyanji Anandji Whenever you didn’t already know, ‘Ye Mera Dil’ has been utilized by The Black Eyed Peas for his or her hit monitor, ‘Don’t Phunk With My Coronary coronary heart’ (2015) and as well as coated by Sunidhi Chauhan throughout the 2006 Shah Rukh Khan-starrer 2006 Don. Info aside, Asha Bhosle was always a crooning glory of Helen’s dances, akin to on this one. O Meri Jaan Maine Kaha Movie: The Put together (1970) | Music: R.D. Burman Solely Asha Bhosle could have dropped at quite a bit glitz and sizzle proper right into a monitor. The jerky twists and turns and high-pitched notes that the singer pulls off on this merchandise amount add as a lot as the final wacky actually really feel. ‘O Meri Jaan Maine Kaha’ could be considerably necessary on account of it was the first monitor that Asha Bhosle and R.D. Burman recorded collectively, and boy, they made the proper duets! Le Gayi Le Gayi Movie: Dil Toh Pagal Hai (1997) | Music: Preeti Uttam Singh I can’t begin to elucidate how quite a bit I’ve danced to this monitor! ‘Le Gayi Le Gayi’ was my full childhood! Have you learnt that this very catchy monitor was to be sung by Lata Mangeshkar nevertheless ultimately, went to Asha Bhosle! It went on to be a smash that 12 months and I can’t agree further! Raat Shabnami Album: Jaanam Samjha Karo (1997) | Label: Frequent Music India Pvt. Ltd. Most 90s kids have listened to ‘Raat Shabnami’ first-handedly on the TV. Indie albums once more then had been an element and music buffs took delight to be all ears to their favourite retro artists in a brand-new mild. I really feel this monitor is among the many first electro-pop experiences that the Indian viewers had. With developments throughout the music manufacturing know-how in that interval, the quintessential singer had her private magical contact in order so as to add to it! Rightly famed for her soprano voice, the Padma Vibhushan awardee singer celebrates her 86th birthday in the meanwhile, nonetheless its easy to miss the amount. In her career spanning six a few years, Asha Bhosle has given Bollywood quite a few memorable songs which have been etched in our hearts and minds eternally. Her voice has aged like good wine. And truly, how superior it may very well be to have her age backwards, on account of that will merely suggest many further years of primary, timeless music! 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[bollywoodpapa]

Chandrayaan 2: Amitabh Bachchan, Sonam Kapoor, Akshay Kumar and others praise ISRO for their efforts

New Post has been published on https://www.bollywoodpapa.com/chandrayaan-2/

Chandrayaan 2: Amitabh Bachchan, Sonam Kapoor, Akshay Kumar and others praise ISRO for their efforts

On Saturday night, Chandrayaan 2’s lander Vikram lost communication with ISRO headquarters in Bengaluru after reaching just a little over 2 kilometers from moon’s surface. Because of this setback, ISRO chairman K Sivan broke down and hugged PM Narendra Modi.

Despite the shortfall, everyone is extremely proud of ISRO’s achievement. A lot of bollywood celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, Shah Rukh Khan, Sonam Kapoor among others praise ISRO for their efforts.

Here are the tweets of celebs encouraging the scientists and appreciating their work:

T 3281 – Pride never did face defeat .. our pride , our victory .. Proud of you ISRO तू ना थके गा कभी , तू ना मुड़े गा कभी , तू ना थमे गा कभी कर शपथ कर शपथ कर शपथ अग्निपथ अग्निपथ अग्निपथ pic.twitter.com/oEs0C70LAP

— Amitabh Bachchan (@SrBachchan) September 7, 2019

There’s no science without experiment…sometimes we succeed, sometimes we learn. Salute to the brilliant minds of @isro, we are proud and confident #Chandrayaan2 will make way for #Chandrayaan3 soon. We will rise again.

— Akshay Kumar (@akshaykumar) September 7, 2019

Heartening .. ❤️🇮🇳🙏 https://t.co/ufjH5r5TDd

— Sonam K Ahuja (@sonamakapoor) September 7, 2019

Sometimes we don’t land or arrive at the destination we want to. The important thing is we took off and had the Hope and Belief we can. Our current situation is never and not our final destination. That always comes in time and belief! Proud of #ISRO

— Shah Rukh Khan (@iamsrk) September 7, 2019

Chandrayaan 2

Salute and applaud the incredible endeavours of @isro !!!! So proud of everything they continue to do….so proud to be part of a nation that has the most genius minds….

— Karan Johar (@karanjohar) September 7, 2019

most proud to be an Indian 🙏🏼♥️🇮🇳 https://t.co/oHDiRcOjGZ

— Athiya Shetty (@theathiyashetty) September 7, 2019

Lost Communication but not hope. We are proud of you ISRO..🙏 #Chandrayaan2

— Sunny Deol (@iamsunnydeol) September 7, 2019

Dear PM @narendramodi ji!! Your speech at @isro will remain one of the most inspirational speeches ever. Your affectionate and emotional hug to #Isro Chief K.Sivan is a visual that will be etched in every Indian’s memory for years. You make us feel protected. Thank you.🙏🙏🇮🇳 pic.twitter.com/XMf1f7Dyxs

— Anupam Kher (@AnupamPKher) September 7, 2019

Success and failure will come and go but the determination to succeed will forever remain constant. Proud of you @isro and deeply touched by this consolatory gesture from PM @narendramodi .. Jai Hind. https://t.co/OYSbUrluG1

— Farhan Akhtar (@FarOutAkhtar) September 7, 2019

The country stands together, proud and hopeful! Thank you @isro. #Chandrayaan2 🇮🇳

— Ajay Devgn (@ajaydevgn) September 7, 2019

What an incredible achievement for every toiling, brilliant mind at @isro for getting us this far. Incredibly proud and hugely inspired by the sheer audacity of the dream behind #Chandrayan2. We may have lost communication, not hope.

— Nimrat Kaur (@NimratOfficial) September 7, 2019

More than 90% of the experiment is on the ORBITER which, gods grace , is safely in the Lunar orbit. That is still fully functional and therefore The mission still very successful. #ISRO https://t.co/MoVrRUv2fL

— Ranganathan Madhavan (@ActorMadhavan) September 6, 2019

केवल सम्पर्क टूटा है,संकल्प नहीं,हौसले अब भी बुलंद है.मुझे विश्वास है की सफलता अवश्य मिलेगी.सारा देश @isro के साथ है .हमारे वैज्ञानिकों पे हमें गर्व है।बस आप आगे बढ़िए…

— Lata Mangeshkar (@mangeshkarlata) September 7, 2019

Lump in the throat, tear in the eye not coz of anything else but witnessing how beautifully you got the entire nation together in hope and spirit… it’s ok to take a few steps back when u know you are about to make your longest jump. You are our hero @isro ❤️

— taapsee pannu (@taapsee) September 7, 2019

Meanwhile, in his speech, PM Modi told “India is proud of our scientists! They’ve given their best and have always made India proud. These are moments to be courageous, and courageous we will be! Chairman @isro  gave updates on Chandrayaan-2. We remain hopeful and will continue working hard on our space programme.”

[lavieenprose]

Remembrance of a Loss by Ravneet Bawa

In Bangalore that summer, my life was taken over by many distractions. I was working hard to prove myself at work, struggling with my expectations from a long distance relationship I was in, failing to make sense of my family, and wondering if my loneliness in the bustling city was a blessing or a curse. Most days, when I thought I needed to see human beings, I would haul myself to Blossoms on Church Street and hide behind books. There were people in books. It was also the summer I read “A Suitable Boy”. The languid, vast landscape of that epic book seemed appropriate for a life that at the time, felt like it will stay the same for years on end, without end. In describing the small towns and in the life of Lata, I found resonance in the continuum of seeking. Life is what happened on the sidelines. Death was part of it.

And so it went. I may have cried at the time briefly, but loss, for me, has been a strange beast that I don’t yet fully understand. I have shed not a tear for people who were close to me, familial and that I have lost. I have bawled for hours in bathrooms, behind closed doors for people who were brief acquaintances, that I haven’t thought about since. Some grief is urgent. It needs to be addressed. Some grief is companionable. It stays with you without disrupting the tenor of your life. It is rekindled in memories that erupt in the margins of your everyday but does not consume you wholly for even minutes together. The loss of all of my grandparents, and my grandmother-in-law has been like that. People I cared deeply about, one way or the other, all passing in their own time, with full lives lived, if not always pleasant.

Remembrance is a funny thing. Selective, cob webbed, biased. We all look at the same people, the same stories, the same roads and the same houses and remember entirely different things. After two decades and more, I took a trip back to my grandparents house in Patiala where all the above stories were lived. We don’t own the house in our family anymore. And the house was locked, the people who own it now had renovated the place, and moved to the U.S recently. Even as I turned into the narrow lane in which the house stood, I was overwhelmed with how many lifetimes I have lived. So much has happened since, the world has changed, my life is nothing like the one I had or even imagined I would have. Yet in that turning of the rickshaw, into the narrowness of that lane, the ledge outside the house, the stagnant air between the houses on either side seemed stuck in a time warp. I could see across the vertical patch of blue sky over my head, the trajectory of a stone that had been thrown 25 years ago from our terrace, to the terrace of the house opposite ours. Wrapped in a love note from my younger cousin to the daughter of those neighbours, at least 3 years older than I. The stone that went right though the opening in the terrace to the verandah below where the father of the girl was sitting in a chair and reading the papers. The stone that meant the neighbours were standing at our door in the next hour and my grandparents were feebly apologising for their wayward grandson, even as the rest of us cousins giggled so hard, we cried.

That is the nature of memories. Of remembrances. Language is nice, but who you are, what you do and how you feel has got nothing to do with it. You will lose the words, the imprint will stay.

[shankerjaikishen-the-unbeatables]

“I am far from perfect - I have a fierce temper” - Lata Mangeshkar

Script by

V Maruthi Rao

@marutirao

Singing professionally from the age of 13, Lata Mangeshkar has lent her voice to four generations of heroines - an unparalleled and iconic phenomenon in Hindi cinema. Like Jaya Bachchan once said, "No heroine feels she has arrived until Lataji sings for her". And while Lataji remains inaccessible to most, and not out of any sense of assumed arrogance but a sheer wariness of social interaction, she continues to conduct herself with effortless grace. The country's favourite songstress agreed to do a really frank and fearless interview with Mirror on the eve of her 83rd birthday on September 28. 

Excerpts… 

Eighty three! You are kidding... 

(laughs) 83 it is. Fact is I've never felt myself growing older. Time has just flown. That's because you have never seen a downside in your singing career of 70 years. There was drive and determination in me. I was not born to lose. One has to be fully committed to one's career. Otherwise there's no point. What is your advice to up and coming artistes? Do you think they need or want my advice? The young today are far smarter than I ever used to be. 

Do you feel sorry for singers today? 

Not at all but if they'd sung for great composers, they'd have definitely benefitted. 

Have you stopped singing for films? 

Of course not! I will sing till I can. Maybe today's music directors can't connect with me. They probably think I'm too old and tired to sing. I am not bothered but I can't say yes to them until I hear the words and tunes. I fear not enjoying a song during the recording. 

Have you ever had such an experience in your career? 

Only once! I sang a song composed by Madan Mohan for the film Chacha Zindabad produced by Om Prakash, who was my raakhi brother. After the recording, I called Om Prakash aside and insisted he get the song sung by someone else. The situation in the song was about a classical singer who starts singing in a rambasamba style to attract her boyfriend. Initially, Om Prakashji protested but ultimately he relented to my wishes. 

But you've sung cabaret songs like Aa jaan-e-jaan in Inteqaam and Naam hai mera jameela in Night In London… 

Those required a lot of convincing from the composers Laxmikant-Pyarelal. They made sure the words weren't cheap and the tune was within my comfort zone. Besides, a graceful dancer like Helen performed on those songs. 

Did you leave the westernised numbers to your sister Asha Bhosleji?

Please don't make me sound like a martyr. I just couldn't connect with cabaret songs. What Asha can sing, I can tell you without any pretense of modesty, I can never sing. How’s your equation with her? We meet often. Though she doesn't stay next door any more, she has her morning tea with me whenever she's here. Whenever she has a show, she seeks my blessings. I've heard her lyric book has my picture in it. I don't have a troubled relationship with any of my siblings. Squabbles happen in every family… When people approach you, they stand at a distance like one does in a temple… Their love and respect is my biggest reward. It's God's grace. However, I am far from perfect. I have a fierce temper. I've mastered it over the years but when I'm angry, no one can force me to do anything I don't want to. Can you give an example? Mohd Rafi Saab and I fought over royalty rights. At a meeting attended by prominent singers and musicians, he stood up and said, "Main aaj se Lata ke saath nahin gaoonga." I retorted, "Rafi Saab, ek minute. Aap nahin gaayenge mere saath yeh galat baat hai. Main aapke saath nahin gaoongee." I stormed out and called all my composers there and then and informed them to rope in another singer if it was a duet with Rafi Saab. But there was a patch-up with Rafi Saab? Composer Jaikishan took the initiative. I asked him to get a written apology from Rafi Saab. I got the letter and ended the cold war. But whenever I'd see him, the hurt would return. Why were you angry with Sachin Dev Burman? He was quoted in an article saying, "Who made Lata's career? We did. We gave her the songs." I don't know if he was misquoted but we didn't talk for three to four years. Till his son Pancham (R D Burman) mediated. When Burman Sr called, I was still very angry and spoke to him very curtly. Then he said, "Lata, tu aaja, tujhe gana hai" and my anger evaporated. We broke the ice with the song Mora gora ang layee le in Bandini. Who was your favourite cosinger? (laughs) I really liked Kishore Kumar. He had a virile man's voice, and he was truly versatile. My first duet with Kishoreda was in the Dev Anand-starrer Ziddi. We were both great fans of K L Saigal Saab. Who are your favourite composers? Each composer was unique. However, Sajjad Hussain Saab, who did very few films, impressed me deeply although I sang only seven to eight songs for him. And, my brother Hridaynath Mangeshkar impressed me. Do you regret not getting married? Not the least. I believe an individual's birth, marriage and death are pre-ordained. What is your message to your fans? For those in the world of music, please spare time to understand Indian classical music. Too much attention is given to clothes and accessories. For everyone else, we need more genuine love for the country. The privileged classes today are bothered about petrol and diesel prices while the poor can't afford two meals a day. I am a very small person but I want us to think beyond personal and regional interests. That's my birthday wish… –As told to Subhash K Jha

LATA'S ARTICLE IN MUMBAI MIRROR DTD 25/09/12