#but tysm again for asking/letting me flail a bit about them! 🥰

[thee-morrigan]

Caught up with Adam and Nate and ahhh!!! Katie!! Can I beg for a sneaky late wip-wednesday, or just ask you to chat about the story more for a bit? So very invested.

Bunny, you are WONDERFUL, thank you for asking about them/this story!! <333333 hmmm, okay, things to say about the story that don't totally reveal the mystery...what about a grab bag of lore about the upcoming chapter and things that have inspired different aspects of the whole piece?

the next chapter involves literary riddles (which will make this the second third fic in which I will have sent Nate on a bookish scavenger hunt lmao. at this point i might be indistinguishable from a bridge troll with my riddles three...or the library equivalent of one)

the term the ~mysterious voice~ called them in ch3 (Nachzehrer) will (probably) pop back up again next chapter

some things I've been (re)reading specifically for Story Reasons:

a book of love letters between Rainier Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé (there are some lines in that book that are so deeply N-coded that they make me a little crazy)

a lot, a lot of Adrienne Rich (and specifically this poem, especially the first 1-2 stanzas of section II...the "what is not simple: to wake from drowning/...these two selves who walked half a lifetime untouching" destroys me, in general, but particularly in the context of N + A...!!)

I do ALSO have a snippet from the scene I was working on earlier today — dropping it below a cut with the caveats that:

1) it's not from the next chapter (and *probably* won't appear for at least another couple of chapters) and 2) it's somewhat spoilery as it's from a more...emotionally intimate section 😌 BUT it doesn't have any spoilers that pertain to the plot/overall mystery! (and like, it's not exactly a spoiler that they love each other ahaha)

“Did you mean it? What you said back…there?” For a long while, Adam was silent, his face inscrutable. Long enough that Nate wondered if he ought not to have brought it up, to have prompted a revisit of that particular conversation.  That particular confession. But Nate had never been good at pretending not to feel as he did. Had never had Adam’s gift for locking his emotions away, unexamined and ignored.  Still, after another long moment, another glance at his oldest friend’s face, another attempt to see whatever thoughts and emotions churned beneath that impassive facade, he offered, “We can leave it there — in that...place — if that is what you wish. Only tell me, please, if you meant it. What you said, before. Just…please.” Nate could not quite bring himself to say it more plainly, to let that bright kernel of emotion fill his mind — fill his heart —  just yet. “Only this once, please: tell me, and then we need never speak of it again, if that is what you would prefer.”