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liketolaugh-writes · 5 years ago

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Skeletons Rattle in the Dark

Author: liketolaugh Summary: The doll was stained in blood both red and blue; decades of wear had faded much of the color from its surface. To anyone else, it was unsettling, even scary, cursed or haunted. But Connor, falling apart under the weight of sins both his and not, couldn’t bring himself to put it down for more than a few minutes at a time.

After Markus made his speech to the crowd of newly-freed androids, Connor slipped away into a corner where he can hide until night fell.

It wasn’t the final straw, what Amanda had done. In some ways it had felt like karma, or catharsis, like a horror he had earned and deserved even as he fought it so desperately – so it didn’t hurt as much as Connor felt it should have (though it hurt quite a lot.) Actually, Connor would be hard-pressed to say what had been the final straw, the event that pushed him past the point of tolerance into a keening void of black emotion.

Was it when Lieutenant Anderson had held a gun to his head and asked him if he was afraid to die, and Connor had said no because that was the answer Amanda would have wanted?

Was it the third death, when the task of crawling across the floor had seemed insurmountable and he just closed his eyes to wait?

Was it when Elijah Kamski had pushed a gun into his hands and whispered for him to destroy the machine in front of him, and he had obeyed despite the ringing emptiness of death that echoed behind his eyes?

Was it when he looked Markus in the eyes and finally allowed himself to understand that everything he’d worked so hard for was wrong?

The answer was out of Connor’s reach, and in the end it didn’t matter at all – by the time he opened his eyes on the stage again and put the gun in his pocket, he was drowning and he knew he couldn’t stay. The few hours left of the day passed in a blur, and people passed his hiding place by without a second glance. It wasn’t until long after darkness fell that Connor dared come out, wandering the abandoned streets in numb search of a place to go.

He couldn’t stay here.

Connor walked, and it wasn’t fast enough so he jogged, and then he was running, taking turns at random as if to lose himself in the streets despite the GPS in his HUD that kept careful track of every step he took.

It was close to one edge of the city that he slowed from a run to a jog to a slow, listless walk, feeling no better than when he’d started. His mood got darker with every step, a tired and raw anxiety wrapping around his shoulders. He didn’t trip only because the motion protocols were mindless, calculated in a distant part of his mind, but his walk got slower and slower until he stopped, overwhelmed by the prospect of going a single step further.

He looked down. A few feet in front of him, there was a little doll, clearly old and used – rain-soaked, stained, worn from the years. One of the printed-on eyes had had most of the color rubbed away. A little bottle patterned with flowers sat about six inches away.

It was stained with thirium, like much of the street nearby. If there was a body – a YK model, maybe – that the doll had belonged to, it had been cleared away. Connor let his legs fold to kneel down beside it, hands pressing flat to the ground, and his choking misery threatened to swallow him up again. His body heaved and shivered, his shoulders bent under a nonexistent weight, and for a while he stared silently at the doll. There were brown stains peeking out from the back of it – blood, more likely than not, and very old blood at that.

[2005 Kinder Garden Babies doll, violet]

What was he going to do? Where could he go? Lieutenant Anderson, who looked at him with such disgust, wouldn’t look twice at him – the police department, eying him warily, certainly wouldn’t either. Jericho, which he’d harmed so horribly, would be quite right to cast him out, and the names just piled up – the Tracis, the Chloe, Ralph and Rupert and the HK400 who hadn’t had a name at all-

And now Amanda among them, and Connor was alone.

Before he could think twice about it, his hands scooped up the doll, smaller than a true infant and just big enough to comfortably hold in two hands, and he squeezed it to his chest. His next breath came in a gasp, and he choked on the one after. The third came close to a wheeze.

The fourth wrenched itself up in a sob, and tears, saline cleaning solution, started to spill down his cheeks, with no rain to mask them, only the soft dark of a city night. He clung to the abandoned doll like he’d forgotten how to let go, like if he did he’d lose himself and fall, and it didn’t matter if it was true because he wasn’t letting go. He stayed in place and rocked himself and cried, wept and sobbed and surrendered to the tempest that had dragged at him for days.

Connor stayed there until the light of dawn started to lighten the sky above, and while the tears had stopped by then the shaking hadn’t, nor had he loosened from his tightly curled posture, wrapped around the doll in search of comfort he didn’t deserve and no one else would provide.

But with the dawn would come the first stirrings of civilization, calmed down for only a night by the terror of the revolution, and Connor couldn’t stay.

He took the doll with him. Tucked her bottle into his pocket and her body against his chest, and walked away, hurried but not frantic, not desperate. The one to whom she had previously belonged had no need of her anymore (YK500 #548 901 257, designation: Sadie) and he couldn’t bring himself to put her down. It was silly, it was irrational, but he felt so lost and having something to hold, to stroke and neaten, helped ground him.

Connor held on only long enough to make his way into a condemned parking garage, to find an alcove to tuck himself into and set the doll in his lap, and he pushed himself into stasis because he suddenly found he couldn’t stand to be awake for one moment longer.

He dreamed of falling, not from a fifty story building but into an abyss that never ended, knowing that he wouldn’t be alive to feel himself hit the ground.

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“I know that my memory ends before I truly die,” Connor murmured to the doll, to Venus in her little stained purple outfit emblazoned with a brand name that had long become too worn to read. “But I cannot help but feel like the silence between upload and reactivation is too… dense. There is no life after death, Venus, at least not for androids. There’s nothing but emptiness waiting for us.”

He had shifted locations three times in the last week, not wanting to stay in one place more than a few days. No one would look for him, except perhaps to kill him in vengeance, but he did not want to invoke curiosity by becoming a staple anywhere either. He had taken Venus with him every time, her bottle in the crook of her arm or in his pocket, and her face tucked against his chest.

She appeared to have no mechanical parts, but despite this hindrance she often moved in the night and sometimes when he simply turned around for a few moments. Connor found he didn’t mind. That was, apparently, just Venus’ nature.

Connor exhaled, letting his forehead fall against that of the little doll and his eyes close. “Is that what I sentenced Chloe to, Venus? Did I sentence her to a null eternity?” He huffed softly. “I suppose that’s a contradiction, of sorts, but I can’t bring myself to abandon the thought. Or did Kamski reupload her? Perhaps she dreams of the emptiness too.”

The blood staining her clothing had been rubbed and worn beyond crunching under his touch like a near-fresh stain, and testing had not revealed any known DNA profile. Likely she was too old for that. Her ‘model’ was, after all, thirty-three years old. The bloodstains probably predated androids as a people, let along Connor himself.

There are no dreams, Connor. There is only… the imprint of your own memories.

Venus’ voice came in a whisper, barely on the edge of even Connor’s exceptional hearing, and he found that this didn’t bother him either. Not only was it not the first time he’d heard a voice attributable to Venus, but he simply… didn’t have the energy to mind.

Venus was the only one he’d spoken to in the last week, and the only one he planned to speak to for a very long time yet.

“I know,” he whispered against her forehead. “I know.”

Shh. It’s okay to cry. I won’t tell.

Connor did, not the wracking sobs of the first night but silent and trailing tears.

“Lieutenant Anderson wanted to send me there,” he breathed through the static rasp of his vocal module. “I can’t help but think that he knew. I deserve it now, and I deserved it even more then, but it still feels… Lieutenant Anderson and I are not friends, but I still can’t bring myself to reconcile that night with his behavior at large.” Pause. “Perhaps he thinks of it as a relief. He wants so badly to go there himself.”

A few moments of silence, and Connor breathed, deep and shuddering, leaning on the concrete wall blocking off the roof’s edge, under the cover of the witching hour.

Eventually, he lifted his head, and released Venus with one hand to wipe the tears away from his face. His Cyberlife jacket was long gone, replaced by a hoodie he’d scrounged up from somewhere, too big and unmarked. His LED blinked miserable yellow, in plain sight.

Some people do, Venus whispered. Coleen did. Now I make other people want to, like her family made her.

“I suppose I couldn’t hurt anybody there,” Connor murmured, unfocused eyes gazing down at Venus’, which stared back up at him, blank and worn pale, lips pursed in the faintest of innocent smiles. “That would be a relief all on its own. I would never hurt anybody ever again.” He hesitated, but this was Venus, and if he didn’t speak the thought would swallow him. “And nobody could hurt me.”

Not you, Venus said, breathy and soft. You’re not like them. You’re a cursed doll, like me.

“Oh,” Connor breathed, and he pulled Venus to his chest, cradled careful and kind. “That’s alright then.”

His tired gaze stared out over the city from the parking garage rooftop where he stood. He found he wasn’t as frightened of heights as he had been once.

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Connor washed Venus eventually, as gentle as his well-calibrated hands could manage, soap and water in a public bathroom. The very oldest stains, the old blood soaked into her back, didn’t wash away, but years of dirt and dust turned the water grey and swirled down the drain. It didn’t brighten her outfit to a new color, but it was a faded pastel lavender that Connor had learned to find more comforting than almost anything else in the world.

He patted her dry with the paper towels, ignored the humans that edged around him, and sighed softly when not all of the moisture came up so easily.

“I could set you in the sun for a while,” Connor murmured, lifting her and setting her in the crook of his elbow, body half turned in to his. He set the bottle against her wrist and it did not fall, and then straightened her crooked cap. “That would likely dry away the last of the moisture before you mildewed; the sun is bright today.”

Venus did not reply, but Connor nodded anyway, stepping outside and slipping away from the slight crowds and into darker, more remote alleyways with all the haste he could manage.

He’d been on his own for months now; spring was in full swing, and much of the rain had petered off, along with almost all of the snow. That was much of why he had chosen to wash Venus today – the weather was near-optimal for helping her dry.

“I could have waited until summer, and this part would have been easier,” he said to her, quiet, “but then you would have been dirty for much longer, and I’m certain that can’t be pleasant.”

He’d found a decommissioned ship to stay in for that week, not too terribly far from where Jericho had been, but not so close that it seemed disrespectful either. Finding places to stay had become easier as the habit developed, and soon he would be able to reuse old locations without arousing fresh suspicion.

Connor still avoided people as much as he could – androids more than humans, but humans still as much as he feasibly could. He felt- anxious, unwelcome, wary around others.

Fortunately, others felt wary around him as well. Or more specifically, around Venus.

He found a sunny spot within the rusty ship and Venus down carefully. “There. That should do.”

Thank you, Venus breathed. I haven’t been clean in so long.

Connor smiled faintly, reaching out to brush his fingers over the violet cap. “Of course. It’s the very least I could do.” He tilted his head back, looking at the sky. “I’ve never seen a spring before. It’s… nice, to see the flowers bloom.” He swallowed. “Except the roses. I don’t know why, but the roses make me feel ill.” He glanced at Venus. “I’m an android. I don’t get ill.”

I have seen many springs, Venus whispered to him. They always bring a new year.

“I don’t need a new year,” Connor said before he could think better of it. “All I need is… is this. I’m okay if it stays like this forever.” The thought of before made his breath catch, and the thought of what may lay ahead made him shiver.

You’ll get one anyway, Venus said. But you can make it the same if you want.

“I do,” Connor said fervently. “I’d mess up anything else I tried. I always have.”

Venus did not reply, and Connor fell silent, hunched down on himself again, and watched the progress of evaporating moisture instead. He already wanted to pick up and hold Venus again, but he wanted to make sure she dried properly first.

He didn’t want her to wear down any more than he could prevent. He didn’t know what he’d do if she fell apart.

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Between his own capabilities and Venus’ own, Connor made it clear from November to June before encountering anyone he knew. But Markus, it turned out, was made of stronger stuff than that.

Connor woke up to rabbit heartbeat pounding in his chest, eyes already wide before he understood what was happening; a stranger had entered the condemned apartment complex where he’d spent the last week, and as he sat up, he met their eyes.

Markus stared back, rigid and understandably wary, but standing steady in his place with his hand clenched tight around the doorframe.

Connor pushed himself carefully back, just half a foot, without pausing to think about it. He couldn’t bring himself to speak. His hand found Venus, always within easy reach, and he pulled her tight against himself, internal ventilation kicking up a notch as if already threatening to overheat. He didn’t stand.

Markus’ eyes flicked briefly to the doll, and then settled on Connor again, noticeably dimmer, as if sad despite the tension that still wracked his frame.

“Connor,” Markus said, soft and gentle, the way one spoke to an injured animal. And then, impossibly, he smiled, more reassuring than happy but a surprise either way. Connor stared at him. “You’re a hard man to find.”

He slid in, slow and easy to follow with no sudden movements, but Connor scooted a little farther away anyway, eyes wide. Markus lowered himself to the ground, crouching but not sitting, and didn’t let his smile fall.

“Lieutenant Anderson has been asking after you,” Markus continued, quiet. “He seems to think you’ll show up in Jericho sooner or later. Whether or not you do is up to you, of course.”

Connor took a breath, short and sharp. The hand still on the ground came up to cradle the back of Venus’ head, holding her tighter against himself, and he knew it made him look a little deranged but he felt slightly deranged, so it was fine.

Markus’ voice became, impossibly, softer. “Your absence has been noted, I should say. Those you brought from Cyberlife Tower, in particular, have missed you. I’m sure they would welcome your company, and perhaps your guidance, should you offer.”

Perhaps involuntarily, Markus’ gaze flickered around the room – the worn walls, the recently rearranged furniture. It was a temporary dwelling, for Connor, and it showed. Markus frowned, and Connor’s rusty social routines said, worry.

“And I have been curious as well,” Markus added. “I know you weren’t yourself as a machine, Connor – no one is. It isn’t fair that you’re being blamed for the sins you couldn’t help.”

Connor shuddered quietly, and spoke for the first time. “It was never about what was fair.”

Markus paused, visibly surprised, and met Connor’s eyes.

“I suppose not,” Markus agreed after a moment. “Still, I’m sorry you had to suffer for it.”

Connor shrugged. Markus hardly knew the whole of it, anyway.

Markus smiled at him, small and strained. “Will you at least consider coming by, Connor? I’d consider it a personal favor – I’ve been worried, I must admit.”

His dual-toned eyes were too intense. He seemed sincere.

Connor hesitated, and then slowly moved to sit cross-legged, set Venus in his lap and looked at her because he couldn’t bear to look at Markus for a moment longer.

“I don’t know if I should,” he murmured to Venus, knowing Markus could hear him but unable to keep himself from speaking anyway. “I’m not welcome in Jericho, nor should I be – my sins as a machine can’t be wiped away by simple time, and they’ll be afraid and they won’t be wrong.” He paused. “But perhaps I can help, if I really try. If they want me to. Don’t I owe them that?”

Venus did not reply; she never did around others. Regardless, Connor knew what her response would be. This was Connor’s choice alone – Venus went where she was taken.

He picked Venus up again, tucked her against his chest behind crossed arms, and looked at Markus, who watched him expectantly, a faint furrow in his brow.

“Did Lieutenant Anderson really ask after me?”

#connor #markus #dbh #detroit: become human #venus the cursed doll #fanfiction #my writing #how in god's name did this get tagged with 'fic rec' and 'about my writing'#what the fuck @ past me

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kizunatsudoishi · 5 years ago

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Think of this from an outside perspective, have someone who’s never seen/ heard of or played those games. If you showed them that photo set they would have thought it was a model of a child. You know why? Because it does look like a child. If you have to explain “oh see... he’s actually an adult!! And I only think he looks attractive because it’s the character” they would only think you were trying to cover your ass for finding a child’s appearance sexy (which at this point you really are)

“Outside perspective”, my god I pity you nonny. You are really desperate for an argument, aren’t you?

Firstly, the internet has NO FILTER. Anyone surfing the internet is responsible for their own experience.

Secondly, I posted those pics ON TUMBLR. You know, the Tumblr that is infamous on the internet for weird, fandomy shitz. I specifically tagged them sefikura. For the Cloud only pics I tagged Cloud Strife, ffxiv, lalafell and that’s pretty much it. Have you ventured in the cloud strife tag? I have to tell you that my lalafell pic with like, 10 notes at best? is not even close to the most toxic shitz that tag has to suffer. I don’t even see my pics surfing that tag!!

“If you showed them your photos” my god nonny, do you honestly think that I’m showing those pics to my parents and neighbors and their dogs and cats?? I DAre you to find my lalafell!Cloud pic anywhere else that isn’t linked to Tumblr or my personal Facebook. Heck I don’t even caption anything on Facebook. At most you could find is like, 1 cover photo and 1 other avatar. My Facebook is also private btw, so good luck finding it. 🤷‍♀️

The “they” you’re so insisting about is really non-existent. Why would I care about non-existent “they” assuming me a pedo? Is this “they” you? Is this “they” somebody on the internet that knows nothing about me and likes to make assumptions since they felt entitled like that? Is this “they” the non-existent internet mob that coming after my 10 notes post about lalafell, sth comes from a fucking video game?

Oh my god I’m literally trembling and shaking right now.

Because I don’t care about you, or your invalid argument. Though, I find amusement from your pathetic asks so I still keep entertaining you, despite many good people tell me to shut you up and block you out. Seeing your futile attempt to condemn me with non-existent internet mob really makes me laugh.

I already said so much about that “looking like a child” point it’s getting redundant. I find Cloud attractive. I have thousands if not tens of thousands of post about Cloud. I have zero posts about children whatsoever. But wait, the valiant nonny from the bushes spotted me for daring to post about lalafell!Cloud, saying the word sexy, that word is taboo for even adult lalafells y’know, so that’s must be pedo!! I guess I must be stopped by anonymous asks!! 🙄 Oooh scary. The power of SJW really compels me y’all. I am subdued.

Y’know what, since lalafells are actually human babies, and last time those lala were plotting evil shitz while controlling Ul’dah’s economy and politics left and right, I guess real human babies are evil too! Somebody go back in time and kill baby Hitler now quick!!

You spotted somebody saying lala!WoL is sexy!! And ooooh, your brain started reeling, “sexy” for Lala is baaaad, so this must be your chance to take up that keyboard and type!! You are so compelled to lecture your ideal on other people!! Because your ideal must be absolutely aBsOlUtElY rIgHt. You don’t even bother to look at their reason, oh no. That would mean admitting defeat!! You can’t have that now. So you must bring in the power of the condemnation of the “they”. Who are “they”? Who knows. But that sounds like a lot of people, so that must be scary.

Sarcasm aside, it seems to me that your tiny closed minded sad excuse of a brain can’t comprehend that there exists people who CAN tell fiction from reality. I could let you feel free to attack me with your asks. I won’t even try to answer you or give reason, but I will write something like that snippet above. The story of a keyboard warrior of justice, who fends off the eeevil 10 notes post on the internet. Wow. Very impressive indeed. But, since I know that your silly little arguments won’t get anywhere better from here, I’d stop for my dear followers’ sake.

Between playing with you and maintain my blog relatively drama-free filling it with Cloud Strife and Sephiroth stuffs like I always do, I’d obviously pick the latter. If you keep sending asks though, I’d laugh at it because boohoo some internet cuck whining about that harmless 10 notes post, probably share it to some of my close friends to share the humor, and then bye bye into the trash can, your sad arguments forever lost in the void of Tumblr, never seen or remembered ever again. 💁‍♀️

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the-kit-scarlet · 6 years ago

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I Of The Storm | Flashback | Balthazar & Kit

Are you really gonna love me when I'm gone? I fear you won't I fear you don't

Set Pre War

It had happened far too quickly for Kit to truly comprehend. Oberon had proposed. Mab had shot him down. Oberon had arrived in a frenzy. “Pack your things, kitten. We’re going to war.”

Kit had laughed at him then. Oberon had only shot her a wry smile. “Do you think I am joking with you, kitten? I am risking all my advisor’s support to come to bring you with me. No one knows of this- husbands keep their secrets from their wives, children from their mothers- and I am coming to you on the eve of my rebellion to bring you with me.” Oberon took her head in his hands, his touch gentle despite the way he vibrated with energy. “Come with me, kitten. You will want for nothing.”

“What if I do not want to love a soldier? What if I am frightened of losing my lover to battle?” Kit placed her hands on the outside of his, turning her head gently to kiss his palms. She dared not to voice her true cause for hestitance- why would I abandon my home over something as silly as a rejected proposal?

“Would you love a King, kitten?”

“I will love you even after the breath leaves my body, Oberon. You know that. You know I have as little choice as a river does when it runs into the sea.” Kit sighed, knowing the truth of the words before they left her lips. She would follow him anywhere, no matter the cost. He must have known this too or else he would not have come to collect her.

Oberon kissed her so fiercely then she thought she would melt into his embrace.

“Pack your things. I will help you.”

“I have to tell-”

“No.” Oberon said, his blue eyes burning with a fire that frightened her. She withdrew and Oberon pressed on, grabbing Kit by the shoulders.

“You will tell no one. Did you hear me, kitten? I am risking my war before it has begun to bring you with me. You cannot tell anyone anything. It could ruin my reign before it begins.”

Kit withdrew as much as she could, but Oberon’s grip was relentless.

“You expect me to leave all my friends behind? What’s left of my family? Oberon, please. I’m all the family Balthazar has left. My girls here are closer than sisters. Ruby practically raised me after my mother passed. I cannot abandon them without a word. At least let me leave a letter. You can look it over, ensure nothing condemns you. But I cannot abandon them so callously.” Oberon’s eyes were a void and it terrified Kit. She kissed his hands again, pleading with him.

“You would choose a pack of whores and a disgraced son over your King? Over the father of your child?” Oberon’s voice was closer to a growl. He placed a hand on her stomach- still far too flat to reveal their secret- but his grip was more possessive than gentle. It is just the stress of it all. He is planning a rebellion. He does not mean it.

“ Consider it your first royal favor to your beloved. Your Grace, let me leave word so that after your war is won, I could be reunited with them.” Kit said, her voice soothing.

“And what if Balthazar declares for Queen Mab? Would you love a traitor?” Oberon’s voice chilled her to the bone.

“Then Balthazar is a fool, Your Grace, but he is a fool that your beloved considers closer than kin.” Kit said, planting kisses on each of his knuckles.

“I’ll have final approval,” Oberon said, his voice softening slightly. Kit threw her arms around him and then her legs as he spun her round the room.

“As you wish, Your Grace,” Kit said, whispering into his arms. He planted a kiss on her forehead before extracting himself from her. “Hurry.”

Kit grabbed a scroll and a quill while Oberon began to throw her things together. She thought to tell him he was likely to ruin all her dresses if he was so careless but held her tongue. She had a feeling she would only be granted one favor tonight.

Dear Balthazar,

I do not have much time so I trust you will pass my message along to my other sisters. I will be gone for a while, but fear not, I will not be unreachable. I do not mean to speak in riddles, but trust me when I say that if you desire to reach me I will not be hard to find.

I love you so, so dearly. I hate to be apart from you but I am left little choice. In the coming weeks, please remember how important family is to me.

I wanted to tell you in this in person, but it appears the Celestials have other plans.

You will be an Uncle. I would not deprive my child a father to ensure a relationship with his uncle, nor would I deprive my child an uncle for his father. You and I both know too well how broken families can damage children.

I love you. I will see you again before I even begin to show, this I am sure of.

Your beloved sister,

Kit

By the time she set down her quill, her things were already packed away and her room was empty except for the furniture. Oberon was behind her, arms wrapped tenderly around her. All of his sternness had disappeared. She looked up at him and he only nodded.

“Go to the carriage, kitten. I will take the horse. We cannot risk being seen together.”

Kit went to protest, but Oberon kissed her.

“Would you risk our child for your pride? Let me take care of you. Take the carriage. I will meet you within the hour.”

Kit merely nodded, taking in her empty room one last time before departing down the steps she had known since she was a sapling. The tears began to fall as soon as she was in the carriage and she stuffed her fist into her mouth to keep her cries silent. She needed to be strong now.

Oberon did not spare the letter a glance, tossing it into the lit fireplace over his shoulder before slamming the door. With any luck, the whole place would burn down and Kit would never be tempted to leave him again.

#i of the storm; balthazar #balthazar black #my lost brother

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butterfly--empress · 5 years ago

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VanQua Week Day III: Merge...

This is a small part from my VanQua Vampire/Fairy AU Story. Those in the Vanqua discord server already read this weeks ago. But I wanted to share this for VanQua week so I would have something to submit for the occasion. Happy reading!?...maybe...*throws long ass one-shot at tags and runs away!!

Story under cut!

“Can’t you find some idiot Fae to create an unbreakable bond with?”

The question caught her off guard, “An unbreakable bond?”

There was a sigh and she was sure, Vanitas rolled his eyes as he turned around to face her, “And you say I’m the uncouth one! An unbreakable bond, Duchess! Well I suppose you Fae call it something else? That ancient magic where two people merge their souls as one?”

Recognition lit up in her eyes, “The ribbon of fate?”

“Ugh, even your naming conventions are saccharine! Yea, that! No lucky sap to come to your rescue?”

If she had someone, she wouldn’t be in this mess, desperate for a way out of it that didn’t involve her taking Vanitas’ suggestion seriously, if only as wishful thinking, “That magic isn’t something a lot of people can do just willingly Vanitas. There’s a reason why that spell is forbidden, it has consequences. I can’t just magically wish all my problems away with a spell that’s not guaranteed to work!”

He smirked, amused by Aqua’s plight and he couldn’t help jabbing at it, “Ah, that’s the problem with you Seelie, you don’t know how to just take what you want. All this worry over complications of the heart, it’s pathetic.”

“It’s not pathetic!” She yelled this time, he shouldn’t grin, but he couldn’t help it. He struck a nerve and he felt some sort of sick glee getting Aqua all riled up. Something about the way her face made all those expressions, fascinates him. The spicy tinge to the scent of her sweet blood also made him feel heady with hunger.

“It’s not pathetic to want to be in love! To be married to someone who loves me, truly! Even if I did create that spell with someone willing to help me, all I would do is condemn myself to a fate worse than death! Only true love can cast that spell without bringing any harm to the casters.”

He didn’t know jack about love and joy, most of the time, he felt Aqua would be so much better without all her positive emotional baggage. What was the point of love if it was no different from hate or pain or sadness? Girl stuck to her principles, Vanitas guess that must count for something.

“That’s a Fae problem, if you knew any Vampires you wouldn’t have to worry about a thing,” and now he was helping her when he had no reasons to care. He had no reason to even sit and entertain her inserting herself into his life, and after a few months? He hasn’t tried to stop her yet.

“Vampires haven’t been around in ages, not after the wars,” he’s not surprised she doesn’t believe him. Her face is questioning him but there’s also hope? Some form of curiosity mixed with wishful thinking?

“And what is different about performing a ribbon of fate spell with a Vampire? Is that even possible?” Aqua was skeptical, what were the odds that she would meet a true Vampire? And what were the odds that Vampire would even deign to help her?

“Unbreakable bond and yea, it’s possible…if you don’t mind the consequences of course and unlike your weak true love bond you can always break the contract, no harm, no foul.”

“I suppose you know actual Vampires that lowered themselves to help a fairy in need?”

“I don’t know about all that, but I know things,” he got quiet after that. He glanced at her as she stared out in space before looking his way. Her energy had spiked, “Spit it out, I can almost smell that curiosity burning in your aura.”

“How does a ribbon of fate-”

“Unbreakable bond.”

She rolled her eyes, a little annoyed at being interrupted, “Whatever, how does it work between Vampires?”

“Between Vampires, it’s usually about forming temporary truces, not to invade another vamp’s territory. Sometimes clans are formed to strengthen the bloodline but there’s always an order of the masters and the servants, no different than you Fae’s silly attempts of playing at polite society.”

He continued, gold eyes looking up at the full moon, “As for anyone else? It depends on what you’re creating the bond for in the first place. Asking a vamp to sully a part of their soul usually requires an equal exchange, if the vamp in question even finds you worthy,” Vanitas moved close to Aqua, invading her personal space, he smirked, “That can be your submission, your blood…your life.”

“You’re just making that up!” She got up off the satin alcove seat, putting some distance between them and wondering why her face suddenly burned at his proximity.

He shrugged, “Fine, don’t believe me, I don’t really care, it’s not me who’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. I’m lucky, I don’t have to ever worry about following along to society’s strict obligations.”

She glared at him, “Are you making fun of me?” Vanitas could be callous, she knew that, and she learned to ignore it, most of the time but sometimes, she really wished he learned to tone it down.

“You are very entertaining; I’ll give you that.”

“This isn’t funny! I don’t!” The smirk left his face and he didn’t know why he was feeling shame. Aqua looked sad, like she was on the verge of crying, “I don’t want to be stuck in a loveless marriage…I love Terra, but I don’t want to marry someone in love with someone else and I don’t want to be given away to…to that man!”

Fury slowly crept into him at the mention of Aqua being with someone else. He was not in the mood to question his reactions to Aqua’s resistance to being tied to someone she didn’t love, “You know, the reverse works too.”

Why am I doing this? Why am I telling her this? I don’t even care about her problems! He had his own issues, none he was ever willing to share with Aqua. Making the excuse that he was hoping she’ll take his bait and be smart enough to figure out what he was, just so he could have free reign to her blood, wasn’t his only reason for doing this. He didn’t know the reasons, just that he felt this instinct, that wanted to have Aqua, “Hehe, if a vamp asked you to create the bond, they become subservient to your every command, but you have to offer something they would want to keep them in the contract.”

A smirk graced her face and something about that, made his heart stir, “What if I were to take what I wanted?”

“Hmm?” Oh, the Duchess had his apt attention now.

She sat back down next to him, looking him in the eyes, “You told me, us Seelie fairy don’t know how to just take what we wanted, well, what happens if I were to just take what I wanted from a Vampire? What then?”

“I dunno, other than they’ll be a loser for becoming subservient to a fairy without getting something in return.”

“What if I were to offer to give up a part of myself before that?”

“Well the possibilities are endless, you might actually chain your souls together and that sounds too much like your pathetic ribbon of fate magic, Fae.” Being eternally chained to someone didn’t sound like his idea of a fun time, being under dear old dad’s household was torture enough.

Didn’t stop the thump, thump of his heart wondering what would that be like, being merged with someone like Aqua, “Why? Know any losers you can chain down? Here I was, thinking you were wholesome and everything I hate about the light, I recall your plan was to form a temporary bond with some poor sap to get your pops off your back, and then voiding the contract while making a break for it far away from your controlling father.”

“Would it be uncanny of me to say, it sounds delightfully tempting?” It sounded too good to be true but Aqua wasn’t going to even fancy all she was told. She still didn’t believe anything Vanitas said but she appreciated his roundabout way to make her feel better.

“Would it be bizarre of me to say; I’m almost scared.”

She laughed, smiling at Vanitas with a soft expression, “Thank you Vanitas, you’re very sweet to make me feel better.”

His face got hot for a quick second, “Now hold on! Who said anything about making you feel better? I’m just telling you how it is,” what was up with her and her incessant need to think he was being, ‘nice’. Everything he said, carried a selfish motive, he didn’t know how to be nice, to be kind or any of that other junk if it didn’t serve him some gain in return.

“Of course you are.”

Silence reigned between them that night, a slight breeze blowing about as they sat together inside the balcony hidden from the rest of the world. As she watched the young man take a relaxed pose upon the old red satin alcove, she wondered not for the first time about what he actually was.

The thought of him being a real Vampire crossed her mind but that had to be unlikely. True those beings were still around but after the wars, they kept to themselves, opting that the best way to keep peace was to remain far away from cities dominated by Fae folk and those in league with the Fae. Many generations later and people talk about the Vampires like they never existed. Whole information about them, gone within the quiet of one night.

Vanitas wasn’t of the Fae, he didn’t carry the dark aura of a Spriggan, she was certain. But he was not of the Werewolves nor of Kitsune, neither a Serpent of some kind or an elemental. He didn’t fit the description of any known supernatural beings and that, made him quite dangerous. He did talk like he knew an awful lot about Vampires even if he was only doing it in jest.

I’m sure he was told that by someone or read some tale about it to try to ease my worries in his own odd way. There’s no way, a boy younger than me was able to find actual insight about Vampires. Especially when that information is rare to come by.

“You’re staring.”

“I’m thinking.”

“You’re always thinking, if you’re that worry, can’t you just tell your old man no?”

“I wish it were that simple.”

“Well, I guess you better start looking for a Vampire, Duchess or it’s your funeral…”

In the silence that stirred between them, Aqua’s eyes widened at a sudden epiphany. She had her suspicions for weeks now but there was nothing conclusive about Vanitas’ origins other than a sprinkle of hints that he was vastly different from other folks.

“Well, I guess you better start looking for a Vampire, Duchess or it’s your funeral.”

None of which had to do with his darkness. On the surface, the aura of his essence felt just as dark as any Sprig or other being of the dark arts.

Albeit carrying a more dangerous and volatile undertone, he hid from her. The boy was haughty and was not shy about showing off how strong he was whenever she teased or mocked his strength and power.

So, realizing this whole time, Vanitas was holding a lot of his true power back surprised her. She had to admit to herself, it did unnerve her. Beings of darkness naturally had that effect on creatures of light and every instinct in her body told her to run! To get away because she hated to admit she was at a lost to gauge how truly strong he was!

The not knowing part made her nervous and still, she remained, sitting here in this same deserted balcony hidden from the rest of the world, by his side as they take in the approaching twilight. Their own little sanctuary, the only thing that made coming to the balls held at Disney Castle fun.

Aqua wasn’t sure what was going on, but it seemed to her, the king and queen’s adopted son, was having his own rebellious stage of refusing to accept any marriage proposal his parents picked for him by accepting them all and throwing huge extravagant parties for every maiden that was chosen.

Crowned prince Sora was known to be a good child and never gave the king and queen any real worries. Aqua felt almost bad for king Mickey, Sora was working hard on turning that man’s ebony hair gray. She also wondered was their treasury safe from Sora’s wrath? Five, sometimes eight balls within a month or two was the norm, when trying to gain a prospect for marriage but twenty was excessive.

I’m rooting for your happiness Sora. While Aqua silently cheered on a mutual comrade in arms for the right to freely fall in love, Vanitas just thought the whole thing was hilarious.

“Who would’ve thought that goody two shoes had it in him?”

“Even the strongest willed have their limits.”

“All this noise over love, hmph.”

“I commend him, he’s never strayed away, always did what his parents asked of him and all he wants is to have just one thing and he’s fighting for it. I think it’s honorable.”

“I forgot, I’m speaking to the choir.”

She glared at him, not liking his sarcasm. She was already on edge since her unpleasant spat with her father, feeling hopeless about her situation. The last thing she needed was Vanitas telling her how foolish she was to still believe in love when everything about her predicament screamed the opposite, “What is your problem? You’re always talking down on people who feel and want love! You make it sound like I should feel ashamed of feeling love! Of wanting it!”

“My problem is I think love is weak!” he glared at her, love this and love that. What was so special about that feeling anyway? All he saw was how much Aqua was hurting from it, her love for her father, her love for Terra, what has it gotten her? “You talk about this love and how great it is but it’s also the thing holding you back! It’s also the thing hurting you.”

She would be better off just telling everyone to go to hell and doing what she pleased. But she wasn’t like that, Aqua didn’t know how to just say no to people and that’s why she was stressing herself near illness because she feels it’s her duty to please her father even if she didn’t want to be tied down with some stranger.

The thought of that just pisses him off and it truly was a testament of him, being around Aqua that he was learning how to hold back his anger. Strong feelings of resentment coiled down to his core, “I don’t get it, you Fae speak so highly about your love and all those positive feelings of light, but you live in a world of set rules and obligations that make you unhappy. If love is so great, then why are you so determined to allow yourself to be basically handed over as some noble’s plaything?!”

She held herself back from smacking him for being callous. Glaring at sunshine gold eyes that glared back, she took in his posture. He was almost snarling, shoulders hunched like a wild animal, like a cat, his palms balled into tight fists and she couldn’t mistake the slight glint of very sharp pointed fangs being bared at her. The bite of his words stung but it was almost like he was angry for her, though she could tell he was angry with her.

For some reason, Aqua couldn’t fathom, that made her feel suddenly ashamed and that shame wanted her to soothe away Vanitas’ anger. It wasn’t her fault she was being forced against her own wishes, into a political marriage and somehow, hearing those words from Vanitas…he was acting like it was a betrayal. She shook her head, noticing he started talking again.

“Is it because of your love for your father that you have to sacrifice what you want? Is that how it works Aqua?”

She could still feel the waves of anger, perhaps a bit of bitterness there as well but what would he be bitter about. He talked as if he knew it all, as if he knew her and her relationship with her father when in reality, he didn’t know anything at all, “Have you really never felt love before Vanitas?”

She couldn’t conceive the idea that no one had ever known of love and happiness, even Spriggan knew joy. An unreadable expression passed over his face before he cruelly smirked at her, turning his back towards her, “Hmph, there isn’t a memory in time that I ever felt this love. And if there was? I don’t want to remember because I don’t need it. I refuse to give up what I want or sacrifice my needs for others. I don’t want to feel weak and foolish.”

Their little area filled with tense silence and Aqua decided to sit across from Vanitas who seemed to be brooding. She exhaled, deciding to let it go and not let his words get to her. So what if she was foolish, so what if she sacrificed her wants to make someone else happy? It’s not for a lack of trying that she tried to beat her odds no matter how futile.

She was tired of fighting, tired of fighting with her father, tired of fighting with a boy who didn’t understand. Aqua balled the fabric of her blue silk dress in her hands. I don’t want this! I don’t want to marry that man or any man I don’t love!

Physically the fight left her, but mentally, Aqua was determined to find a way out.

“Well, I guess you better start looking for a Vampire, Duchess or it’s your funeral.”

At that thought, she looked over towards him, really taking him in as she remembered every conversation, every little spar, every little quirk that made Vanitas, Vanitas. And the wheels in her mind began turning, that sentence from their last meeting pulling her into a downward spiral of hopeless wishing and hopeless want…

Aqua had to bite back the grin on her face, it wasn’t everyday she saw Vanitas’ face look adorably innocent and she didn’t want to tell him that, having a feeling he’ll find it as an insult, but watching him sniff the air for a scent only he could smell and looking like a curious cat had her internally squealing.

He blinked before a smirk spread across his face, “This is a first.”

The statement had caught her off guard, “What?”

He bared his teeth at her, the innocent face, turning menacing while stirring fear and excitement in her, “You’re the first Fae whose blood I tolerate smelling…”

The last time she met the Earl when he came to her home.

“Ah the pretty little bluebird came to greet me, such a surprise.”

She returned his bow with a curtsey and a false smile. She already didn’t like the way, he came strutting in, like he owned the place. She didn’t like Braig at all, he always looked like he had ulterior motives. It was hard to believe sometimes that he was a Seelie and not of the Spriggan.

“Father always said to treat our guests with upmost respect, even if they don’t deserve it.”

He stepped closer to her and she took a step back, not liking him invading her personal space. He grinned, his stare, looking her over with interest, “Beautiful and a spitfire, your future husband is going to have a handful with you.”

Refusing to cower, Aqua met his eyes head on, straightening her back, “Well, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about, since it’s a problem for my husband in the far, far future.”

She was dismayed to know he wasn’t fazed, in fact his whole demeanor looked downright gleeful at her defiance, “Then I guess we’ll have to work on that now won’t we bluebird?”

Aqua quickly backed away from him at that confession. There was no way Eraqus agreed to this? He had to be playing with her. She knew her father had become like a madman, desperate to get her married but he had promised after the situation with Terra he would give her time.

Her back pressed into a wall in the corner near the steps leading upstairs and the Earl, stepped close enough to disrupt her personal space, he reached up with a white gloved hand, curling a wisp of her blue hair between his fingers, “Aww, don’t look so shocked, you’ll break my heart, your father thinks we could be a good match.”

At those words, Aqua pushed Braig away with enough force to make him stumble but not fall. She started running to her father’s office, trying to ignore the Lord’s mocking laughter at her plight.

“You made a match for me with him?!” Eraqus stood up, startled from Aqua bursting through his doors. Angry and hurt blue eyes stared up at him, wanting answers.

“Aqua, the Earl has a clean reputation, is a veteran war hero and is Lord Xehanort’s most trusted second in command. There’s no other man other than Terra that I trust to keep you safe.”

“You hardly know him!” Keep her safe? Keep her safe from what? She didn’t understand Eraqus’ sudden need to constantly insist on keeping her safe. He mentored her to be an exceptional warrior, she was on equal footing with Terra and can hold her own.

Eraqus himself deemed her better suited to take his place as Duchess when he retired and aside from small disturbances here and there, things were peaceful. No one heard any rumors of war and Lady Maleficent hadn’t made a peep for years since living under house arrest in Radiant Garden.

“But I do know my dear friend and I trust him.”

“You trust Lord Xehanort but not me? Do I even get a say in this?” She met the Duke sparingly, but she had no real impressions of him, other than she knew him as her father’s closet friend. He seemed to be a halfling, part Seelie, part Spriggan and looked like he had a lust for the darkness.

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this?” She lived with her father all her life and she never gave him any reasons to doubt her or find her distrustful. Aqua tried to search her mind for anything she’s ever done to upset Eraqus that he would push for this, “Why are you suddenly possessed with marrying me off? I knew that sooner or later you would push for a marriage for me, but I thought you would have given me time to get to know my betrothed.”

“I just will feel better if you were already married, I’m sure with time you would change your mind about Lord Braig.”

She didn’t want to marry him, she didn’t want to get to know him, that man made her queasy. She didn’t trust him at all, and she didn’t trust Lord Xehanort, but her father wouldn’t listen to her concerns about the Duke, “What have I done to upset you?”

“Aqua, please-”

“You’re not treating Terra or Ven this way, why me!” She would be lying if she said it didn’t irritate her at times, how the boys were able to get away with certain things, while Eraqus treated her almost with kid gloves, especially when she was the responsible one and had to keep Terra and Ventus out of trouble.

“Is it about the accident I had when I was twelve?” he had been more overprotective since that day, hardly ever letting her have room to breathe. If she wasn’t going on missions or being invited to keep the young princess of Radiant Garden company, Aqua was made to stay at home. In all that time, not once had she ever argued or rebelled against any of his wishes.

“You started to treat me different from before. I thought it was because you were just worried about me since my recovery took a long time but now…I don’t want to marry Lord Braig.”

“I let it go when you told me you did not want to marry Terra because he found someone else. I will not this time, you will marry him as I ordained it.”

“But-”

“That is the end of the discussion, please leave.”

Looking at her father as he closed and locked his doors, she glared, determination fueling her resolve.

“Well, I guess you better start looking for a Vampire, Duchess or it’s your funeral…”

After that, Aqua made a visit to Lady Belle, looking for a solution to a hopeless wish…

The odd fascination with her blood…

She grabbed Vanitas as he walked away from her and he quickly snatched her wrist in his hand. She could see he was struggling to keep it together, they had been talking like always and she thought she said something to offend him. Not wanting him to leave, she reached for him but now she didn’t know how to read him, he snarled at her, “If I were you, I’ll stay away.”

“Is that a threat?” This push and pull between her and Vanitas, this impulse she had that wanted to challenge him, see what he would do, scared her and made her blood pulse in her veins.

“Yes.”

“What? You’ll drain me dry of my blood?”

That ominous smirk returned before he schooled his face, staring at her so fiercely, “I just might if you keep teasing me, trying to be on my best behavior or is it that you want to tempt me to sate your curiosity?”

Her heart sped up because that is exactly what she wanted, to see if his talk of drinking blood was true or if he just loved putting on a façade of the demonic vampire.

His fingers caress her wrist and he brought her arm to rest on his warm cheek, pressing his ear to her wrist, “I can hear your life blood singing, calling to me Aqua, should I dine to take a taste?”

She was positive if she told him yes, she would be a goner…

His distaste for the sun even though his skin is naturally sun kissed and he has no problems walking under the sunshine. His body warm that it almost was hot to the touch, even though the presumption was Vampires were supposed to be cold, like touching death. The way he shies away from silver, the way his already eerie gold eyes seem to flash red at times. The merciless way she saw him kill a wayward spirit. There had been glee and a rush of anger and then a chilling, detached sense of emptiness, no remorse or guilt.

All these things scared her, but in these few months, Aqua got a little glimpse into Vanitas and how he worked. He was a familiar constant in her life and for all the cons and few of the pros she could easily list for why she shouldn’t be so near, why she should stay away from him, she stayed.

Aqua felt herself being naturally drawn to him, Vanitas was familiar and unchanging, even if he was hostile and crude most days, he hadn’t ever truly done anything to drive her away. He humored her by listening to her rants, her wants and wishes by pretending he cared and wanting to help. It was those little things he did that Aqua appreciated, he didn’t have to listen to her prattle. He was well within his right to leave her alone to deal with her own problems, but he didn’t. There was no mistaken, he did things for his own amusement, his own selfishness, but even in all of that; she wanted to believe there was more to him than what he showed the world.

“Vanitas?”

“And after staring at me for ten minutes she finally decides to ask me a question, would wonders never cease to amaze?” He had his eyes closed as he laid back and she had to wonder how he always knew when she was looking at him.

“Don’t be a wisecrack, I just have one question and I’ll leave you to continue sulking in your alcove.”

“I’m not sulking but ask away oh mighty empress.”

“Vampires, do you know how they make the unbreakable bond contract?”

He opened one gold eye, smirking at her, “Back to this are we? I thought you didn’t believe me?”

“Can you just humor me? Please?”

He sat up, turning to face her, “Alright, it can be done any number of ways but if you’re looking for the fastest and easiest way to undo the contract, you simply do a blood oath. Prick a finger, cut your hand, shake it on.”

“I see…”

She looked away from him, she was thinking and somehow that made him nervous, “What is it now?”

“Is there any reason other than maybe having access to someone’s blood that a Vampire would willingly enter into a contract?”

Silence, Vanitas looked at Aqua with a frown than looked away, shrugging.

“Well, I guess you better start looking for a Vampire, Duchess or it’s your funeral.”

Vanitas was familiar and at times he scared her, but she feared the Earl more. Vanitas didn’t try to butter her up or use fancy words to try to deceive her, he didn’t call her pet names and give her sly smirks that had underlining meanings.

What you saw is what you got. She walked over towards him, standing in front of him, watching him look up at her with unease but also questioning what she was going to do next.

“Do you still crave it? My blood?”

Vanitas glared, getting up to walk away from her, on reflex, Aqua grabbed his arm and he paused staring at her like a cornered animal. “What are you getting at?” he shoved her off, feeling his hackles rise.

A sane person would try their luck at running away. A sane person wouldn’t try to find a reason why a Vampire would divulge information that could trap them with someone, selfishly wanting to break free of their own prison.

“I grant you permission Vanitas to partake of my blood when you need it,” she stepped closer to him as he moved back, she could feel his darkness, feel his anxiety and his fear, feel rage and uncertainty.

A smirk and then that crazy laughter she only heard but once seeped out of him, “Bravo Duchess! I can’t believe you actually fell for that! You actually believed me about Vampires and now you think I’m one? Okay Aqua you got me good!”

Aqua wasn’t sane, she was desperate and determined and if she had to be confined into marrying someone she didn’t love, she would do it her way.

“Ah, that’s the problem with you Seelie, you don’t know how to just take what you want. All this worry over complications of the heart, it’s pathetic.”

He wasn’t good at masking his negative emotions at all, when he was in a state of true fear and she hated herself for what she was about to do.

“You can hate me for all time, and I wouldn’t resent you if you do but please, help me and for as long as I’m alive I won’t ask you of anything else!”

She had grabbed his face, the softness of her hands, stunning him before he felt her warms lips pressed hard to his. His eyes widened in shock, while hers were shut tight in a frowned grimace, tears cascading down her face. Trying to get a bearing on his senses, Vanitas moved to push Aqua away, but it was futile, the magic of that accursed bond had already began. A wave of so many negative emotions burst from him, suffocating him, all because of this foolish girl! It intermingled with her own aura of light, surrounding them both in a sphere of fluorescent colored lights that reminded him of the sky during the hours of dawn and twilight.

A grand magic circle glowed, pulsing like a heartbeat beneath them and chains made of gold ascended, wrapping around them, twisting and turning to form around their bodies until the chains eventually stopped to gather around their chest area where their hearts lay and while the chains had gathered and melded into Aqua’s left arm, they did the same in Vanitas’ right arm. A lock with no discernable keyhole manifested, keeping the chains that locked him with Aqua together.

When it was over, the chains disappeared, the magic circle vanished and Vanitas stood there in bubbling rage as he glared at Aqua who fell to her knees on the ground, head bowed in shame.

Tonight, was the first real night he had wanted to harm her. He had tolerated Aqua and all she was out of boredom and later on, out of genuine curiosity. There were times she pissed him off, like a lot but he was always surprised by how much his anger and annoyance with her, never had amounted to the point of wanting to physically hurt her. Yes, in the very beginning he thought of what it would be like to just drain her blood for her power, it wasn’t everyday he had an actual taste for a Fae’s blood. They smelled either too sour, salty or carried an unpleasant odor but Aqua? Just a sniff of her blood, had his fangs elongating for a bite.

She had sort of become a familiar fixture in his life in such a short time that after a while he didn’t care about if it was her tolerating him or him, tolerating her.

But tonight? He was beyond angry at what she done, and he couldn’t even lift a finger to carry out his impulse to maim her! Not because he was weak, not because she was his friend but because she had successfully done the impossible. She merged their souls together, they were bonded for the rest of their living lives and pain to Aqua, also meant he would feel that pain

Everything was just fucking great!

“Congratulations are in order! You’re the first Fae to outsmart a damn vamp! I hope you’re ecstatic!” Vanitas watched with no small feeling of victory as she continued to sit and sob. He just felt…sad, hopeless and annoyed.

“Tch, you really have no idea of what you’ve done do you?”

At that, Aqua quiet her crying, sapphire eyes looking up at him with guilt, “I can’t go back on my word, this bond I’ve created won’t allow me. Even though I know your subservient to me, I too am to you, I can’t take advantage of you so don’t worry Vanitas.”

Aqua finally lifted herself up off the cold marble floor, “But I don’t understand one thing?”

“And that is?”

“Why didn’t you stop me? You could have stopped me, and you didn’t have to tell me how to trap you. I think I never outsmarted you at all.”

He frowned, “I don’t know! I just know I’m very pissed off for letting it happen anyway!”

He could feel everything, not just his own emotions, her feelings as well were coming through loud and clear through their newly shared bond. And her aura, he couldn’t discern his own from hers anymore, her soul was literally chained to his and even if Aqua decided tomorrow or a week from now that she wanted out of this, she was shit out of luck unless she wanted death.

And because he’s a selfish bastard he wasn’t going to oblige her, if he had to deal with getting the short end of this merge, he was going to make her suffer too.

“I know…thank you will never be enough, and I apologize for involving you into my mess.”

“As long as I can have a taste of you whenever I want, we’re even.”

A slight blushed colored her face, she knows he meant her blood but still, why did he have to word it that way? Vanitas stared at her with an inquisitive look before looking away.

Embarrassment? I definitely felt that and something else? Man oh man, this feeling her feelings along with mines is going to give me a headache. He turned to Aqua with a smirk, walking by her to go back inside, “Well come on, no time like the present to give your old man a heart attack, I’m just itching to see the face he makes when he founds out his precious daughter sold her soul to the devil!”

Better to find humor in other’s suffering, that was the only way he was going to cope with what just happened. She sighed, hearing Vanitas’ manic laughter get further away. Fighting Eraqus was not going to be pleasant at all but at least now, he couldn’t make her marry that awful man. Aqua was nervous, worried and still feeling a little bit guilty. A prick of a finger or a small cut in the hand if she had just only asked might have sufficed but fear and the urge to do what she did, felt it was better this way. She sealed her fate to a hostile Vampire to get out of an arranged marriage. She smiled, the irony not lost on her that she just married herself to Vanitas and there was no love to be had between them at all.

As she walked to catch up with her little husband whose face seemed permanently set in a constant frown or menacing smirk, her heart felt lighter. She wouldn’t ask Vanitas of anything and she would never expect him to love her but in time, perhaps she could do things to show him how much she appreciates his sacrifice.

#vanqua #vanquaweek #vanquaweek2019 #hey #i'm sharing the thing #here fellow shippers #have part of a story #to an AU that NOBODY ASKED FOR #also all the cool kids are doing excellent in universe stories and fanart #so i have to dish out AUs

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anupamasdiggs · 6 years ago

Text

SV 1

Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is . . . without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.

Daniel Defoe, _The History of the Devil_

The Angel Gibreel

"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die. Hoji! Hoji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again . . ." Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky.

"I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you," and thusly and so beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry crossed the night, "To the devil with your tunes," the words hanging crystalline in the iced white night, "in the movies you only mimed to playback singers, so spare me these infernal noises now."

Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. "Ohé, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What-ho, old Chumch." At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater's face. "Hey, Spoono," Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, "Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those bastards down there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby. _Dharrraaammm!_ Wham, na? What an entrance, yaar. I swear: splat."

Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginning, a miniature echo of the birth of time . . . the jumbo jet _Bostan_, Flight AI-420, blew apart without any warning, high above the great, rotting, beautiful, snow-white, illuminated city, Mahagonny, Babylon, Alphaville. But Gibreel has already named it, I mustn't interfere: Proper London, capital of Vilayet, winked blinked nodded in the night. While at Himalayan height a brief and premature sun burst into the powdery January air, a blip vanished from radar screens, and the thin air was full of bodies, descending from the Everest of the catastrophe to the milky paleness of the sea.

Who am I?

Who else is there?

The aircraft cracked in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery. Two actors, prancing Gibreel and buttony, pursed Mr. Saladin Chamcha, fell like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar. Above, behind, below them in the void there hung reclining seats, stereophonic headsets, drinks trolleys, motion discomfort receptacles, disembarkation cards, duty-free video games, braided caps, paper cups, blankets, oxygen masks. Also -- for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands' genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its everreasonable doubts -- mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mothertongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, _land_, _belonging_, _home_. Knocked a little silly by the blast, Gibreel and Saladin plummeted like bundles dropped by some carelessly open-beaked stork, and because Chamcha was going down head first, in the recommended position for babies entering the birth canal, he commenced to feel a low irritation at the other's refusal to fall in plain fashion. Saladin nosedived while Farishta embraced air, hugging it with his arms and legs, a flailing, overwrought actor without techniques of restraint. Below, cloud-covered, awaiting their entrance, the slow congealed currents of the English Sleeve, the appointed zone of their watery reincarnation.

"O, my shoes are Japanese," Gibreel sang, translating the old song into English in semi-conscious deference to the uprushing host-nation, "These trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart's Indian for all that." The clouds were bubbling up towards them, and perhaps it was on account of that great mystification of cumulus and cumulo-nimbus, the mighty rolling thunderheads standing like hammers in the dawn, or perhaps it was the singing (the one busy performing, the other booing the performance), or their blast--delirium that spared them full foreknowledge of the imminent . . . but for whatever reason, the two men, Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha, condemned to this endless but also ending angelicdevilish fall, did not become aware of the moment at which the processes of their transmutation began.

Mutation?

Yessir, but not random. Up there in air-space, in that soft, imperceptible field which had been made possible by the century and which, thereafter, made the century possible, becoming one of its defining locations, the place of movement and of war, the planet-shrinker and power-vacuum, most insecure and transitory of zones, illusory, discontinuous, metamorphic, -- because when you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible -- wayupthere, at any rate, changes took place in delirious actors that would have gladdened the heart of old Mr. Lamarck: under extreme environmental pressure, characteristics were acquired.

What characteristics which? Slow down; you think Creation happens in a rush? So then, neither does revelation . . . take a look at the pair of them. Notice anything unusual? Just two brown men, falling hard, nothing so new about that, you may think; climbed too high, got above themselves, flew too close to the sun, is that it?

That's not it. Listen:

Mr. Saladin Chamcha, appalled by the noises emanating from Gibreel Farishta's mouth, fought back with verses of his own. What Farishta heard wafting across the improbable night sky was an old song, too, lyrics by Mr. James Thomson, seventeenhundred to seventeen-forty-eight. ". . . at Heaven's command," Chamcha carolled through lips turned jingoistically redwhiteblue by the cold, "arooooose from out the aaaazure main." Farishta, horrified, sang louder and louder of Japanese shoes, Russian hats, inviolately subcontinental hearts, but could not still Saladin's wild recital: "And guardian aaaaangels sung the strain."

Let's face it: it was impossible for them to have heard one another, much less conversed and also competed thus in song. Accelerating towards the planet, atmosphere roaring around them, how could they? But let's face this, too: they did.

Downdown they hurtled, and the winter cold frosting their eyelashes and threatening to freeze their hearts was on the point of waking them from their delirious daydream, they were about to become aware of the miracle of the singing, the rain of limbs and babies of which they were a part, and the terror of the destiny rushing at them from below, when they hit, were drenched and instantly iced by, the degree-zero boiling of the clouds.

They were in what appeared to be a long, vertical tunnel. Chamcha, prim, rigid, and still upside-down, saw Gibreel Farishta in his purple bush-shirt come swimming towards him across that cloud-walled funnel, and would have shouted, "Keep away, get away from me," except that something prevented him, the beginning of a little fluttery screamy thing in his intestines, so instead of uttering words of rejection he opened his arms and Farishta swam into them until they were embracing head-to-tail, and the force of their collision sent them tumbling end over end, performing their geminate cartwheels all the way down and along the hole that went to Wonderland; while pushing their way out of the white came a succession of cloudforms, ceaselessly metamorphosing, gods into bulls, women into spiders, men into wolves. Hybrid cloud-creatures pressed in upon them, gigantic flowers with human breasts dangling from fleshy stalks, winged cats, centaurs, and Chamcha in his semi-consciousness was seized by the notion that he, too, had acquired the quality of cloudiness, becoming metamorphic, hybrid, as if he were growing into the person whose head nestled now between his legs and whose legs were wrapped around his long, patrician neck.

This person had, however, no time for such "high falutions"; was, indeed, incapable of faluting at all; having just seen, emerging from the swirl of cloud, the figure of a glamorous woman of a certain age, wearing a brocade sari in green and gold, with a diamond in her nose and lacquer defending her high-coiled hair against the pressure of the wind at these altitudes, as she sat, equably, upon a flying carpet. "Rekha Merchant," Gibreel greeted her. "You couldn't find your way to heaven or what?" Insensitive words to speak to a dead woman! But his concussed, plummeting condition may be offered in mitigation

. . . Chamcha, clutching his legs, made an uncomprehending query: "What the hell?"

"You don't see her?" Gibreel shouted. "You don't see her goddamn Bokhara rug?"

No, no, Gibbo, her voice whispered in his ears, don't expect him to confirm. I am strictly for your eyes only, maybe you are going crazy, what do you think, you namaqool, you piece of pig excrement, my love. With death comes honesty, my beloved, so I can call you by your true names.

Cloudy Rekha murmured sour nothings, but Gibreel cried again to Chamcha: "Spoono? You see her or you don't?"

Saladin Chamcha saw nothing, heard nothing, said nothing. Gibreel faced her alone. "You shouldn't have done it," he admonished her. "No, sir. A sin. A suchmuch thing."

O, you can lecture me now, she laughed. You are the one with the high moral tone, that's a good one. It was you who left me, her voice reminded his ear, seeming to nibble at the lobe. It was you, O moon of my delight, who hid behind a cloud. And I in darkness, blinded, lost, for love.

He became afraid. "What do you want? No, don't tell, just go."

When you were sick I could not see you, in case of scandal, you knew I could not, that I stayed away for your sake, but afterwards you punished, you used it as your excuse to leave, your cloud to hide behind. That, and also her, the icewoman. Bastard. Now that I am dead I have forgotten how to forgive. I curse you, my Gibreel, may your life be hell. Hell, because that's where you sent me, damn you, where you came from, devil, where you're going, sucker, enjoy the bloody dip. Rekha's curse; and after that, verses in a language he did not understand, all harshnesses and sibilance, in which he thought he made out, but maybe not, the repeated name _Al-Lat_.

He clutched at Chamcha; they burst through the bottom of the clouds.

Speed, the sensation of speed, returned, whistling its fearful note. The roof of cloud fled upwards, the water-floor zoomed closer, their eyes opened. A scream, that same scream that had fluttered in his guts when Gibreel swam across the sky, burst from Chamcha's lips; a shaft of sunlight pierced his open mouth and set it free. But they had fallen through the transformations of the clouds, Chamcha and Farishta, and there was a fluidity, an indistinctness, at the edges of them, and as the sunlight hit Chamcha it released more than noise:

"Fly," Chamcha shrieked at Gibreel. "Start flying, now." And added, without knowing its source, the second command: "And sing."

How does newness come into the world? How is it born?

Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?

How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?

Is birth always a fall?

Do angels have wings? Can men fly?

When Mr. Saladin Chamcha fell out of the clouds over the English Channel he felt his heart being gripped by a force so implacable that he understood it was impossible for him to die. Afterwards, when his feet were once more firmly planted on the ground, he would begin to doubt this, to ascribe the implausibilities of his transit to the scrambling of his perceptions by the blast, and to attribute his survival, his and Gibreel's, to blind, dumb luck. But at the time he had no doubt; what had taken him over was the will to live, unadulterated, irresistible, pure, and the first thing it did was to inform him that it wanted nothing to do with his pathetic personality, that half-reconstructed affair of mimicry and voices, it intended to bypass all that, and he found himself surrendering to it, yes, go on, as if he were a bystander in his own mind, in his own body, because it began in the very centre of his body and spread outwards, turning his blood to iron, changing his flesh to steel, except that it also felt like a fist that enveloped him from outside, holding him in a way that was both unbearably tight and intolerably gentle; until finally it had conquered him totally and could work his mouth, his fingers, whatever it chose, and once it was sure of its dominion it spread outward from his body and grabbed Gibreel Farishta by the balls.

"Fly," it commanded Gibreel. "Sing."

Chamcha held on to Gibreel while the other began, slowly at first and then with increasing rapidity and force, to flap his arms. Harder and harder he flapped, and as he flapped a song burst out of him, and like the song of the spectre of Rekha Merchant it was sung in a language he did not know to a tune he had never heard. Gibreel never repudiated the miracle; unlike Chamcha, who tried to reason it out of existence, he never stopped saying that the gazal had been celestial, that without the song the flapping would have been for nothing, and without the flapping it was a sure thing that they would have hit the waves like rocks or what and simply burst into pieces on making contact with the taut drum of the sea. Whereas instead they began to slow down. The more emphatically Gibreel flapped and sang, sang and flapped, the more pronounced the deceleration, until finally the two of them were floating down to the Channel like scraps of paper in a breeze.

They were the only survivors of the wreck, the only ones who fell from _Bostan_ and lived. They were found washed up on a beach. The more voluble of the two, the one in the purple shirt, swore in his wild ramblings that they had walked upon the water, that the waves had borne them gently in to shore; but the other, to whose head a soggy bowler hat clung as if by magic, denied this. "God, we were lucky," he said. "How lucky can you get?"

I know the truth, obviously. I watched the whole thing. As to omnipresence and -potence, I'm making no claims at present, but I can manage this much, I hope. Chamcha willed it and Farishta did what was willed.

Which was the miracle worker?

Of what type -- angelic, satanic -- was Farishta's song?

Who am I?

Let's put it this way: who has the best tunes?

These were the first words Gibreel Farishta said when he awoke on the snowbound English beach with the improbability of a starfish by his ear: "Born again, Spoono, you and me. Happy birthday, mister; happy birthday to you."

Whereupon Saladin Chamcha coughed, spluttered, opened his eyes, and, as befitted a new-born babe, burst into foolish tears.

Reincarnation was always a big topic with Gibreel, for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies, even before he "miraculously" defeated the Phantom Bug that everyone had begun to believe would terminate his contracts. So maybe someone should have been able to forecast, only nobody did, that when he was up and about again he would sotospeak succeed where the germs had failed and walk out of his old life forever within a week of his fortieth birthday, vanishing, poof!, like a trick, _into thin air_.

The first people to notice his absence were the four members of his film-studio wheelchair-team. Long before his illness he had formed the habit of being transported from set to set on the great D. W. Rama lot by this group of speedy, trusted athletes, because a man who makes up to eleven movies "sy-multaneous" needs to conserve his energies. Guided by a complex coding system of slashes, circles and dots which Gibreel remembered from his childhood among the fabled lunch-runners of Bombay (of which more later), the chair-men zoomed him from role to role, delivering him as punctually and unerringly as once his father had delivered lunch. And after each take Gibreel would skip back into the chair and be navigated at high speed towards the next set, to be re-costumed, made up and handed his lines. "A career in the Bombay talkies," he told his loyal crew, "is more like a wheelchair race with one-two pit stops along the route."

After the illness, the Ghostly Germ, the Mystery Malaise, the Bug, he had returned to work, easing himself in, only seven pictures at a time . . . and then, justlikethat, he wasn't there. The wheelchair stood empty among the silenced sound-stages; his absence revealed the tawdry shamming of the sets. Wheelchairmen, one to four, made excuses for the missing star when movie executives descended upon them in wrath: Ji, he must be sick, he has always been famous for his punctual, no, why to criticize, maharaj, great artists must from time to time be permitted their temperament, na, and for their protestations they became the first casualties of Farishta's unexplained hey-presto, being fired, four three two one, ekdumjaldi, ejected from studio gates so that a wheelchair lay abandoned and gathering dust beneath the painted coco-palms around a sawdust beach.

Where was Gibreel? Movie producers, left in seven lurches, panicked expensively. See, there, at the Willingdon Club golf links -- only nine holes nowadays, skyscrapers having sprouted out of the other nine like giant weeds, or, let's say, like tombstones marking the sites where the torn corpse of the old city lay -- there, right there, upper-echelon executives, missing the simplest putts; and, look above, tufts of anguished hair, torn from senior heads, wafting down from high-level windows. The agitation of the producers was easy to understand, because in those days of declining audiences and the creation of historical soap operas and contemporary crusading housewives by the television network, there was but a single name which, when set above a picture's title, could still offer a sure-fire, cent-per-cent guarantee of an Ultrahit, a Smashation, and the owner of said name had departed, up, down or sideways, but certainly and unarguably vamoosed . . .

All over the city, after telephones, motorcyclists, cops, frogmen and trawlers dragging the harbour for his body had laboured mightily but to no avail, epitaphs began to be spoken in memory of the darkened star. On one of Rama Studios' seven impotent stages, Miss Pimple Billimoria, the latest chilli-and-spices bombshell -- _she's no flibberti-gibberti mamzel!, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite_ -- clad in temple--dancer veiled undress and positioned beneath writhing cardboard representations of copulating Tantric figures from the Chandela period, -- and perceiving that her major scene was not to be, her big break lay in pieces -- offered up a spiteful farewell before an audience of sound recordists and electricians smoking their cynical beedis. Attended by a dumbly distressed ayah, all elbows, Pimple attempted scorn. "God, what a stroke of luck, for Pete's sake," she cried. "I mean today it was the love scene, chhi chhi, I was just dying inside, thinking how to go near to that fatmouth with his breath of rotting cockroach dung." Bell-heavy anklets jingled as she stamped. "Damn good for him the movies don't smell, or he wouldn't get one job as a leper even." Here Pimple's soliloquy climaxed in such a torrent of obscenities that the beedi-smokers sat up for the first time and commenced animatedly to compare Pimple's vocabulary with that of the infamous bandit queen Phoolan Devi whose oaths could melt rifle barrels and turn journalists' pencils to rubber in a trice.

Exit Pimple, weeping, censored, a scrap on a cutting-room floor. Rhinestones fell from her navel as she went, mirroring her tears. . . in the matter of Farishta's halitosis she was not, however, altogether wrong; if anything, she had a little understated the case. Gibreel's exhalations, those ochre clouds of sulphur and brimstone, had always given him -- when taken together with his pronounced widow's peak and crowblack hair -- an air more saturnine than haloed, in spite of his archangelic name. It was said after he disappeared that he ought to have been easy to find, all it took was a halfway decent nose . . . and one week after he took off, an exit more tragic than Pimple Billimoria's did much to intensify the devilish odour that was beginning to attach itself to that forsolong sweet-smelling name. You could .say that he had stepped out of the screen into the world, and in life, unlike the cinema, people know it if you stink.

_We are creatures of air, Our roots in dreams And clouds, reborn In flight. Goodbye_. The enigmatic note discovered by the police in Gibreel Farishta's penthouse, located on the top floor of the Everest Vilas skyscraper on Malabar Hill, the highest home in the highest building on the highest ground in the city, one of those double-vista apartments from which you could look this way across the evening necklace of Marine Drive or that way out to Scandal Point and the sea, permitted the newspaper headlines to prolong their cacophonies. FARISHTA DIVES UNDERGROUND, opined _Blitz_ in somewhat macabre fashion, while Busybee in _The Daily_ preferred GIBREEL FLIES coop. Many photographs were published of that fabled residence in which French interior decorators bearing letters of commendation from Reza Pahlevi for the work they had done at Persepolis had spent a million dollars recreating at this exalted altitude the effect of a Bedouin tent. Another illusion unmade by his absence; GIBREEL STRIKES CAMP, the headlines yelled, but had he gone up or down or sideways? No one knew. In that metropolis of tongues and whispers, not even the sharpest ears heard anything reliable. But Mrs. Rekha Merchant, reading all the papers, listening to all the radio broadcasts, staying glued to the Doordarshan TV programmes, gleaned something from Farishta's message, heard a note that eluded everyone else, and took her two daughters and one son for a walk on the roof of her high-rise home. Its name was Everest Vilas.

His neighbour; as a matter of fact, from the apartment directly beneath his own. His neighbour and his friend; why should I say any more? Of course the scandal-pointed malice-magazines of the city filled their columns with hint innuendo and nudge, but that's no reason for sinking to their level. Why tarnish her reputation now?

Who was she? Rich, certainly, but then Everest Vilas was not exactly a tenement in Kurla, eh? Married, yessir, thirteen years, with a husband big in ball-bearings. Independent, her carpet and antique showrooms thriving at their prime Colaba sites. She called her carpets _klims_ and _kleens_ and the ancient artefacts were _anti-queues_. Yes, and she was beautiful, beautiful in the hard, glossy manner of those rarefied occupants of the city's sky-homes, her bones skin posture all bearing witness to her long divorce from the impoverished, heavy, pullulating earth. Everyone agreed she had a strong personality, drank _like a fish_ from Lalique crystal and hung her hat _shameless_ on a Chola Natraj and knew what she wanted and how to get it, fast. The husband was a mouse with money and a good squash wrist. Rekha Merchant read Gibreel Farishta's farewell note in the newspapers, wrote a letter of her own, gathered her children, summoned the elevator, and rose heavenward (one storey) to meet her chosen fate.

"Many years ago," her letter read, "I married out of cowardice. Now, finally, I'm doing something brave." She left a newspaper on her bed with Gibreel's message circled in red and heavily underscored -- three harsh lines, one of them ripping the page in fury. So naturally the bitch-journals went to town and it was all LOVELY"S LOVELORN LEAP, and BROKEN-HEARTED BEAUTY TAKES LAST DIVE. But:

Perhaps she, too, had the rebirth bug, and Gibreel, not understanding the terrible power of metaphor, had recommended flight. _To be born again,first you have to_ and she was a creature of the sky, she drank Lalique champagne, she lived on Everest, and one of her fellow-Olympians had flown; and if he could, then she, too, could be winged, and rooted in dreams.

She didn't make it. The lala who was employed as gatekeeper of the Everest Vilas compound offered the world his blunt testimony. "I was walking, here here, in the compound only, when there came a thud, _tharaap_. I turned. It was the body of the oldest daughter. Her skull was completely crushed. I looked up and saw the boy falling, and after him the younger girl. What to say, they almost hit me where I stood. I put my hand on my mouth and came to them. The young girl was whining softly. Then I looked up a further time and the Begum was coming. Her sari was floating out like a big balloon and all her hair was loose. I took my eyes away from her because she was fallIng and it was not respectful to look up inside her clothes."

Rekha and her children fell from Everest; no survivors. The whispers blamed Gibreel. Let's leave it at that for the moment.

Oh: don't forget: he saw her after she died. He saw her several times. It was a long time before people understood how sick the great man was. Gibreel, the star. Gibreel, who vanquished the Nameless Ailment. Gibreel, who feared sleep.

After he departed the ubiquitous images of his face began to rot. On the gigantic, luridly coloured hoardings from which he had watched over the populace, his lazy eyelids started flaking and crumbling, drooping further and further until his irises looked like two moons sliced by clouds, or by the soft knives of his long lashes. Finally the eyelids fell off, giving a wild, bulging look to his painted eyes. Outside the picture palaces of Bombay, mammoth cardboard effigies of Gibreel were seen to decay and list. Dangling limply on their sustaining scaffolds, they lost arms, withered, snapped at the neck. His portraits on the covers of movie magazines acquired the pallor of death, a nullity about the eye, a hollowness. At last his images simply faded off the printed page, so that the shiny covers of _Celebrity_ and _Society_ and _Illustrated Weekly_ went blank at the bookstalls and their publishers fired the printers and blamed the quality of the ink. Even on the silver screen itself, high above his worshippers in the dark, that supposedly immortal physiognomy began to putrefy, blister and bleach; projectors jammed unaccountably every time he passed through the gate, his films ground to a halt, and the lamp-heat of the malfunctioning projectors burned his celluloid memory away: a star gone supernova, with the consuming fire spreading outwards, as was fitting, from his lips.

It was the death of God. Or something very like it; for had not that outsize face, suspended over its devotees in the artificial cinematic night, shone like that of some supernal Entity that had its being at least halfway between the mortal and the divine? More than halfway, many would have argued, for Gibreel had spent the greater part of his unique career incarnating, with absolute conviction, the countless deities of the subcontinent in the popular genre movies known as "theologicals". It was part of the magic of his persona that he succeeded in crossing religious boundaries without giving offence. Blue-skinned as Krishna he danced, flute in hand, amongst the beauteous gopis and their udder-heavy cows; with upturned palms, serene, he meditated (as Gautama) upon humanity's suffering beneath a studio-rickety bodhi-tree. On those infrequent occasions when he descended from the heavens he never went too far, playing, for example, both the Grand Mughal and his famously wily minister in the classic _Akbar and Birbal_. For over a decade and a half he had represented, to hundreds of millions of believers in that country in which, to this day, the human population outnumbers the divine by less than three to one, the most acceptable, and instantly recognizable, face of the Supreme. For many of his fans, the boundary separating the performer and his roles had longago ceased to exist.

The fans, yes, and? How about Gibreel?

That face. In real life, reduced to life-size, set amongst ordinary mortals, it stood revealed as oddly un-starry. Those low-slung eyelids could give him an exhausted look. There was, too, something coarse about the nose, the mouth was too well fleshed to be strong, the ears were long-lobed like young, knurled jackfruit. The most profane of faces, the most sensual of faces. In which, of late, it had been possible to make out the seams mined by his recent, near-fatal illness. And yet, in spite of profanity and debilitation, this was a face inextricably mixed up with holiness, perfection, grace: God stuff. No accounting for tastes, that's all. At any rate, you'll agree that for such an actor (for any actor, maybe, even for Chamcha, but most of all for him) to have a bee in his bonnet about avatars, like much-metamorphosed Vishnu, was not so very surprising. Rebirth: that's God stuff, too.

Or, but, then again . . . not always. There are secular reincarnations, too. Gibreel Farishta had been born Ismail Najmuddin in Poona, British Poona at the empire's fag-end, long before the Pune of Rajneesh etc. (Pune, Vadodara, Mumbai; even towns can take stage names nowadays.) Ismail after the child involved in the sacrifice of Ibrahim, and Najmuddin, _star of the faith_; he'd given up quite a name when he took the angel's.

Afterwards, when the aircraft _Bostan_ was in the grip of the hijackers, and the passengers, fearing for their futures, were regressing into their pasts, Gibreel confided to Saladin Chamcha that his choice of pseudonym had been his way of making a homage to the memory of his dead mother, "my mummyji, Spoono, my one and only Mamo, because who else was it who started the whole angel business, her personal angel, she called me, _farishta_, because apparently I was too damn sweet, believe it or not, I was good as goddamn gold."

Poona couldn't hold him; he was taken in his infancy to the bitch-city, his first migration; his father got a job amongst the fleet-footed inspirers of future wheelchair quartets, the lunch-porters or dabbawallas of Bombay. And Ismail the farishta followed, at thirteen, in his father's footsteps.

Gibreel, captive aboard AI-420, sank into forgivable rhapsodies, fixing Chamcha with his glittering eye, explicating the mysteries of the runners' coding system, black swastika red circle yellow slash dot, running in his mind's eye the entire relay from home to office desk, that improbable system by which two thousand dabbawallas delivered, each day, over one hundred thousand lunch-pails, and on a bad day, Spoono, maybe fifteen got mislaid, we were illiterate, mostly, but the signs were our secret tongue.

_Bostan_ circled London, gunmen patrolling the gangways, and the lights in the passenger cabins had been switched off, but Gibreel's energy illuminated the gloom. On the grubby movie screen on which, earlier in the journey, the inflight inevitability of Walter Matthau had stumbled lugubriously into the aerial ubiquity of Goldie Hawn, there were shadows moving, projected by the nostalgia of the hostages, and the most sharply defined of them was this spindly adolescent, Ismail Najmuddin, mummy's angel in a Gandhi cap, running tiffins across the town. The young dabbawalla skipped nimbly through the shadow-crowd, because he was used to such conditions, think, Spoono, picture, thirty-forty tiffins in a long wooden tray on your head, and when the local train stops you have maybe one minute to push on or off, and then running in the streets, flat out, yaar, with the trucks buses scooters cycles and what-all, one-two, one-two, lunch, lunch, the dabbas must get through, and in the monsoon running down the railway line when the train broke down, or waist-deep in water in some flooded street, and there were gangs, Salad baba, truly, organized gangs of dabba-stealers, it's a hungry city, baby, what to tell you, but we could handle them, we were everywhere, knew everything, what thieves could escape our eyes and ears, we never went to any policia, we looked after our own.

At night father and son would return exhausted to their shack by the airport runway at Santacruz and when Ismail's mother saw him approaching, illuminated by the green red yellow of the departing jet-planes, she would say that simply to lay eyes on him made all her dreams come true, which was the first indication that there was something peculiar about Gibreel, because from the beginning, it seemed, he could fulfil people's most secret desires without having any idea of how he did it. His father Najmuddin Senior never seemed to mind that his wife had eyes only for her son, that the boy's feet received nightly pressings while the father's went unstroked. A son is a blessing and a blessing requires the gratitude of the blest.

Naima Najmuddin died. A bus hit her and that was that, Gibreel wasn't around to answer her prayers for life. Neither father nor son ever spoke of grief. Silently, as though it were customary and expected, they buried their sadness beneath extra work, engaging in an inarticulate contest, who could carry the most dabbas on his head, who could acquire the most new contracts per month, who could run faster, as though the greater labour would indicate the greater love. When he saw his father at night, the knotted veins bulging in his neck and at his temples, Ismail Najmuddin would understand how much the older man had resented him, and how important it was for the father to defeat the son and regain, thereby, his usurped primacy in the affections of his dead wife. Once he realized this, the youth eased off, but his father's zeal remained unrelenting, and pretty soon he was getting promotion, no longer a mere runner but one of the organizing muqaddams. When Gibreel was nineteen, Najmuddin Senior became a member of the lunch-runners' guild, the Bombay Tiffin Carriers' Association, and when Gibreel was twenty, his father was dead, stopped in his tracks by a stroke that almost blew him apart. "He just ran himself into the ground," said the guild's General Secretary, Babasaheb Mhatre himself. "That poor bastard, he just ran out of steam." But the orphan knew better. He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.

Babasaheb Mhatre sat in a blue office behind a green door above a labyrinthine bazaar, an awesome figure, buddha-fat, one of the great moving forces of the metropolis, possessing the occult gift of remaining absolutely still, never shifting from his room, and yet being everywhere important and meeting everyone who mattered in Bombay. The day after young Ismail's father ran across the border to see Naima, the Babasaheb summoned the young man into his presence. "So? Upset or what?" The reply, with downcast eyes: ji, thank you, Babaji, I am okay. "Shut your face," said Babasaheb Mhatre. "From today you live with me." Butbut, Babaji ... "But me no buts. Already I have informed my goodwife. I have spoken." Please excuse Babaji but how what why? "I have _spoken_."

Gibreel Farishta was never told why the Babasaheb had decided to take pity on him and pluck him from the futurelessness of the streets, but after a while he began to have an idea. Mrs. Mhatre was a thin woman, like a pencil beside the rubbery Babasaheb, but she was filled so full of mother-love that she should have been fat like a potato. When the Baba came home she put sweets into his mouth with her own hands, and at nights the newcomer to the household could hear the great General Secretary of the B T C A protesting, Let me go, wife, I can undress myself. At breakfast she spoon-fed Mhatre with large helpings of malt, and before he went to work she brushed his hair. They were a childless couple, and young Najmuddin understood that the Babasaheb wanted him to share the load. Oddly enough, however, the Begum did not treat the young man as a child. "You see, he is a grown fellow," she told her husband when poor Mhatre pleaded, "Give the boy the blasted spoon of malt." Yes, a grown fellow, "we must make a man of him, husband, no babying for him." "Then damn it to hell," the Babasaheb exploded, "why do you do it to me?" Mrs. Mhatre burst into tears. "But you are everything to me," she wept, "you are my father, my lover, my baby too. You are my lord and my suckling child. If I displease you then I have no life."

Babasaheb Mhatre, accepting defeat, swallowed the tablespoon of malt.

He was a kindly man, which he disguised with insults and noise. To console the orphaned youth he would speak to him, in the blue office, about the philosophy of rebirth, convincing him that his parents were already being scheduled for re-entry somewhere, unless of course their lives had been so holy that they had attained the final grace. So it was Mhatre who started Farishta off on the whole reincarnation business, and not just reincarnation. The Babasaheb was an amateur psychic, a tapper of table-legs and a bringer of spirits into glasses. "But I gave that up," he told his protégé, with many suitably melodramatic inflections, gestures, frowns, "after I got the fright of my bloody life."

Once (Mhatre recounted) the glass had been visited by the most co-operative of spirits, such a too-friendly fellow, see, so I thought to ask him some big questions. _Is there a God_, and that glass which had been running round like a mouse or so just stopped dead, middle of table, not a twitch, completely phutt, kaput. So, then, okay, I said, if you won't answer that try this one instead, and I came right out with it, _Is there a Devil_. After that the glass -- baprebap! -- began to shake -- catch your ears! -- slowslow at first, then faster--faster, like a jelly, until it jumped! -- ai-hai! -- up from the table, into the air, fell down on its side, and -- o-ho! -- into a thousand and one pieces, smashed. Believe don't believe, Babasaheb Mhatre told his charge, but thenandthere I learned my lesson: don't meddle, Mhatre, in what you do not comprehend.

This story had a profound effect on the consciousness of the young listener, because even before his mother's death he had become convinced of the existence of the supernatural world. Sometimes when he looked around him, especially in the afternoon heat when the air turned glutinous, the visible world, its features and inhabitants and things, seemed to be sticking up through the atmosphere like a profusion of hot icebergs, and he had the idea that everything continued down below the surface of the soupy air: people, motor-cars, dogs, movie billboards, trees, nine-tenths of their reality concealed from his eyes. He would blink, and the illusion would fade, but the sense of it never left him. He grew up believing in God, angels, demons, afreets, djinns, as matter-of-factly as if they were bullock-carts or lamp-posts, and it struck him as a failure in his own sight that he had never seen a ghost. He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of greentinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath.

From his mother Naima Najmuddin he heard a great many stories of the Prophet, and if inaccuracies had crept into her versions he wasn't interested in knowing what they were. "What a man!" he thought. "What angel would not wish to speak to him?" Sometimes, though, he caught himself in the act of forming blasphemous thoughts, for example when without meaning to, as he drifted off to sleep in his cot at the Mhatre residence, his somnolent fancy began to compare his own condition with that of the Prophet at the time when, having been orphaned and short of funds, he made a great success of his job as the business manager of the wealthy widow Khadija, and ended up marrying her as well. As he slipped into sleep he saw himself sitting on a rose-strewn dais, simpering shyly beneath the sari-pallu which he had placed demurely over his face, while his new husband, Babasaheb Mhatre, reached lovingly towards him to remove the fabric, and gaze at his features in a mirror placed in his lap. This dream of marrying the Babasaheb brought him awake, flushing hotly for shame, and after that he began to worry about the impurity in his make-up that could create such terrible visions.

Mostly, however, his religious faith was a low-key thing, a part of him that required no more special attention than any other. When Babasaheb Mhatre took him into his home it confirmed to the young man that he was not alone in the world, that something was taking care of him, so he was not entirely surprised when the Babasaheb called him into the blue office on the morning of his twenty-first birthday and sacked him without even being prepared to listen to an appeal.

"You're fired," Mhatre emphasized, beaming. "Cashiered, had your chips. Dis-_miss_."

"But, uncle,"

"Shut your face."

Then the Babasaheb gave the orphan the greatest present of his life, informing him that a meeting had been arranged for him at the studios of the legendary film magnate Mr. D. W. Rama; an audition. "It is for appearance only," the Babasaheb said. "Rama is my good friend and we have discussed. A small part to begin, then it is up to you. Now get out of my sight and stop pulling such humble faces, it does not suit."

"But, uncle,"

"Boy like you is too damn goodlooking to carry tiffins on his head all his life. Get gone now, go, be a homosexual movie actor. I fired you five minutes back."

"But, uncle,"

"I have spoken. Thank your lucky stars."

He became Gibreel Farishta, but for four years he did not become a star, serving his apprenticeship in a succession of minor knockabout comic parts. He remained calm, unhurried, as though he could see the future, and his apparent lack of ambition made him something of an outsider in that most self-seeking of industries. He was thought to be stupid or arrogant or both. And throughout the four wilderness years he failed to kiss a single woman on the mouth.

On-screen, he played the fall guy, the idiot who loves the beauty and can't see that she wouldn't go for him in a thousand years, the funny uncle, the poor relation, the village idiot, the servant, the incompetent crook, none of them the type of part that ever rates a love scene. Women kicked him, slapped him, teased him, laughed at him, but never, on celluloid, looked at him or sang to him or danced around him with cinematic love in their eyes. Off-screen, he lived alone in two empty rooms near the studios and tried to imagine what women looked like without clothes on. To get his mind off the subject of love and desire, he studied, becoming an omnivorous autodidact, devouring the metamorphic myths of Greece and Rome, the avatars of Jupiter, the boy who became a flower, the spider-woman, Circe, everything; and the theosophy of Annie Besant, and unified field theory, and the incident of the Satanic verses in the early career of the Prophet, and the politics of Muhammad's harem after his return to Mecca in triumph; and the surrealism of the newspapers, in which butterflies could fly into young girls' mouths, asking to be consumed, and children were born with no faces, and young boys dreamed in impossible detail of earlier incarnations, for instance in a golden fortress filled with precious stones. He filled himself up with God knows what, but he could not deny, in the small hours of his insomniac nights, that he was full of something that had never been used, that he did not know how to begin to use, that is, love. In his dreams he was tormented by women of unbearable sweetness and beauty, so he preferred to stay awake and force himself to rehearse some part of his general knowledge in order to blot out the tragic feeling of being endowed with a larger-than-usual capacity for love, without a single person on earth to offer it to.

His big break arrived with the coming of the theological movies. Once the formula of making films based on the puranas, and adding the usual mixture of songs, dances, funny uncles etc., had paid off, every god in the pantheon got his or her chance to be a star. When D. W. Rama scheduled a production based on the story of Ganesh, none of the leading box-office names of the time were willing to spend an entire movie concealed inside an elephant's head. Gibreel jumped at the chance. That was his first hit, _Ganpati Baba_, and suddenly he was a superstar, but only with the trunk and ears on. After six movies playing the elephantheaded god he was permitted to remove the thick, pendulous, grey mask and put on, instead, a long, hairy tail, in order to play Hanuman the monkey king in a sequence of adventure movies that owed more to a certain cheap television series emanating from Hong Kong than it did to the Ramayana. This series proved so popular that monkey-tails became de rigueur for the city's young bucks at the kind of parties frequented by convent girls known as "firecrackers" because of their readiness to go off with a bang.

After Hanuman there was no stopping Gibreel, and his phenomenal success deepened his belief in a guardian angel. But it also led to a more regrettable development.

(I see that I must, after all, spill poor Rekha's beans.)

Even before he replaced false head with fake tail he had become irresistibly attractive to women. The seductions of his fame had grown so great that several of these young ladies asked him if he would keep the Ganesh-mask on while they made love, but he refused out of respect for the dignity of the god. Owing to the innocence of his upbringing he could not at that time differentiate between quantity and quality and accordingly felt the need to make up for lost time. He had so many sexual partners that it was not uncommon for him to forget their names even before they had left his room. Not only did he become a philanderer of the worst type, but he also learned the arts of dissimulation, because a man who plays gods must be above reproach. So skilfully did he conceal his life of scandal and debauch that his old patron, Babasaheb Mhatre, lying on his deathbed a decade after he sent a young dabbawalla out into the world of illusion, black-money and lust, begged him to get married to prove he was a man. "God-sake, mister," the Babasaheb pleaded, "when I told you back then to go and be a homo I never thought you would take me seriously, there is a limit to respecting one's elders, after all." Gibreel threw up his hands and swore that he was no such disgraceful thing, and that when the right girl came along he would of course undergo nuptials with a will. "What you waiting? Some goddess from heaven? Greta Garbo, Gracekali, who?" cried the old man, coughing blood, but Gibreel left him with the enigma of a smile that allowed him to die without having his mind set entirely at rest.

The avalanche of sex in which Gibreel Farishta was trapped managed to bury his greatest talent so deep that it might easily have been lost forever, his talent, that is, for loving genuinely, deeply and without holding back, the rare and delicate gift which he had never been able to employ. By the time of his illness he had all but forgotten the anguish he used to experience owing to his longing for love, which had twisted and turned in him like a sorcerer's knife. Now, at the end of each gymnastic night, he slept easily and long, as if he had never been plagued by dream-women, as if he had never hoped to lose his heart.

"Your trouble," Rekha Merchant told him when she materialized out of the clouds, "is everybody always forgave you, God knows why, you always got let off, you got away with murder. Nobody ever held you responsible for what you did." He couldn't argue. "God's gift," she screamed at him, "God knows where you thought you were from, jumped-up type from the gutter, God knows what diseases you brought."

But that was what women did, he thought in those days, they were the vessels into which he could pour himself, and when he moved on, they would understand that it was his nature, and forgive. And it was true that nobody blamed him for leaving, for his thousand and one pieces of thoughtlessness, how many abortions, Rekha demanded in the cloud-hole, how many broken hearts. In all those years he was the beneficiary of the infinite generosity of women, but he was its victim, too, because their forgiveness made possible the deepest and sweetest corruption of all, namely the idea that he was doing nothing wrong.

Rekha: she entered his life when he bought the penthouse at Everest Vilas and she offered, as a neighbour and businesswoman, to show him her carpets and antiques. Her husband was at a world-wide congress of ball-bearings manufacturers in Gothenburg, Sweden, and in his absence she invited Gibreel into her apartment of stone lattices from Jaisalmer and carved wooden handrails from Kcralan palaces and a stone Mughal chhatri or cupola turned into a whirlpool bath; while she poured him French champagne she leaned against marbled walls and felt the cool veins of the stone against her back. When he sipped the champagne she teased him, surely gods should not partake of alcohol, and he answered with a line he had once read in an interview with the Aga Khan, O, you know, this champagne is only for outward show, the moment it touches my lips it turns to water. After that it didn't take long for her to touch his lips and deliquesce into his arms. By the time her children returned from school with the ayah she was immaculately dressed and coiffed, and sat with him in the drawing-room, revealing the secrets of the carpet business, confessing that art silk stood for artificial not artistic, telling him not to be fooled by her brochure in which a rug was seductively described as being made of wool plucked from the throats of baby lambs, which means, you see, only _low-grade wool_, advertising, what to do, this is how it is.

He did not love her, was not faithful to her, forgot her birthdays, failed to return her phone calls, turned up when it was most inconvenient owing to the presence in her home of dinner guests from the world of the ball-bearing, and like everyone else she forgave him. But her forgiveness was not the silent, mousy let-off he got from the others. Rekha complained like crazy, she gave him hell, she bawled him out and cursed him for a useless lafanga and haramzada and salah and even, in extremis, for being guilty of the impossible feat of fucking the sister he did not have. She spared him nothing, accusing him of being a creature of surfaces, like a movie screen, and then she went ahead and forgave him anyway and allowed him to unhook her blouse. Gibreel could not resist the operatic forgiveness of Rekha Merchant, which was all the more moving on account of the flaw in her own position, her infidelity to the ball-bearing king, which Gibreel forbore to mention, taking his verbal beatings like a man. So that whereas the pardons he got from the rest of his women left him cold and he forgot them the moment they were uttered, he kept coming back to Rekha, so that she could abuse him and then console him as only she knew how.

Then he almost died.

He was filming at Kanya Kumari, standing on the very tip of Asia, taking part in a fight scene set at the point on Cape Comorin where it seems that three oceans are truly smashing into one another. Three sets of waves rolled in from the west east south and collided in a mighty clapping of watery hands just as Gibreel took a punch on the jaw, perfect timing, and he passed out on the spot, falling backwards into tri-oceanic spume. He did not get up.

To begin with everybody blamed the giant English stunt-man Eustace Brown, who had delivered the punch. He protested vehemently. Was he not the same fellow who had performed opposite Chief Minister N. T. Rama Rao in his many theological movie roles? Had he not perfected the art of making the old man look good in combat without hurting him? Had he ever complained that NTR never pulled his punches, so that he, Eustace, invariably ended up black and blue, having been beaten stupid by a little old guy whom he could've eaten for breakfast, on _toast_, and had he ever, even once, lost his temper? Well, then? How could anyone think he would hurt the immortal Gibreel? -- They fired him anyway and the police put him in the lock-up, just in case.

But it was not the punch that had flattened Gibreel. After the star had been flown into Bombay's Breach Candy Hospital in an Air Force jet made available for the purpose; after exhaustive tests had come up with almost nothing; and while he lay unconscious, dying, with a blood-count that had fallen from his normal fifteen to a murderous four point two, a hospital spokesman faced the national press on Breach Candy's wide white steps. "It is a freak mystery," he gave out. "Call it, if you so please, an act of God."

Gibreel Farishta had begun to haemorrhage all over his insides for no apparent reason, and was quite simply bleeding to death inside his skin. At the worst moment the blood began to seep out through his rectum and penis, and it seemed that at any moment it might burst torrentially through his nose and ears and out of the corners of his eyes. For seven days he bled, and received transfusions, and every clotting agent known to medical science, including a concentrated form of rat poison, and although the treatment resulted in a marginal improvement the doctors gave him up for lost.

The whole of India was at Gibreel's bedside. His condition was the lead item on every radio bulletin, it was the subject of hourly news-flashes on the national television network, and the crowd that gathered in Warden Road was so large that the police had to disperse it with lathi-charges and tear-gas, which they used even though every one of the half-million mourners was already tearful and wailing. The Prime Minister cancelled her appointments and flew to visit him. Her son the airline pilot sat in Farishta's bedroom, holding the actor's hand. A mood of apprehension settled over the nation, because if God had unleashed such an act of retribution against his most celebrated incarnation, what did he have in store for the rest of the country? If Gibreel died, could India be far behind? In the mosques and temples of the nation, packed congregations prayed, not only for the life of the dying actor, but for the future, for themselves.

Who did not visit Gibreel in hospital? Who never wrote, made no telephone call, despatched no flowers, sent in no tiffins of delicious home cooking? While many lovers shamelessly sent him get-well cards and lamb pasandas, who, loving him most of all, kept herself to herself, unsuspected by her ball--bearing of a husband? Rekha Merchant placed iron around her heart, and went through the motions of her daily life, playing with her children, chit-chatting with her husband, acting as his hostess when required, and never, not once, revealed the bleak devastation of her soul.

He recovered.

The recovery was as mysterious as the illness, and as rapid. It, too, was called (by hospital, journalists, friends) an act of the Supreme. A national holiday was declared; fireworks were set off up and down the land. But when Gibreel regained his strength, it became clear that he had changed, and to a startling degree, because he had lost his faith.

On the day he was discharged from hospital he went under police escort through the immense crowd that had gathered to celebrate its own deliverance as well as his, climbed into his Mercedes and told the driver to give all the pursuing vehicles the slip, which took seven hours and fifty-one minutes, and by the end of the manoeuvre he had worked out what had to be done. He got out of the limousine at the Taj hotel and without looking left or right went directly into the great dining-room with its buffet table groaning under the weight of forbidden foods, and he loaded his plate with all of it, the pork sausages from Wiltshire and the cured York hams and the rashers of bacon from godknowswhere; with the gammon steaks of his unbelief and the pig's trotters of secularism; and then, standing there in the middle of the hall, while photographers popped up from nowhere, he began to eat as fast as possible, stuffing the dead pigs into his face so rapidly that bacon rashers hung out of the sides of his mouth.

During his illness he had spent every minute of consciousness calling upon God, every second of every minute. Ya Allah whose servant lies bleeding do not abandon me now after watching oven me so long. Ya Allah show me some sign, some small mark of your favour, that I may find in myself the strength to cure my ills. O God most beneficent most merciful, be with me in this my time of need, my most grievous need. Then it occurred to him that he was being punished, and for a time that made it possible to suffer the pain, but after a time he got angry. Enough, God, his unspoken words demanded, why must I die when I have not killed, are you vengeance or are you love? The anger with God carried him through another day, but then it faded, and in its place there came a terrible emptiness, an isolation, as he realized he was talking to _thin air_, that there was nobody there at all, and then he felt more foolish than ever in his life, and he began to plead into the emptiness, ya Allah, just be there, damn it, just be. But he felt nothing, nothing nothing, and then one day he found that he no longer needed there to be anything to feel. On that day of metamorphosis the illness changed and his recovery began. And to prove to himself the non-existence of God, he now stood in the dining-hall of the city's most famous hotel, with pigs falling out of his face.

He looked up from his plate to find a woman watching him. Her hair was so fair that it was almost white, and her skin possessed the colour and translucency of mountain ice. She laughed at him and turned away.

"Don't you get it?" he shouted after her, spewing sausage fragments from the corners of his mouth. "No thunderbolt. That's the point."

She came back to stand in front of him. "You're alive," she told him. "You got your life back. _That's_ the point."

He told Rekha: the moment she turned around and started walking back I fell in love with her. Alleluia Cone, climber of mountains, vanquisher of Everest, blonde yahudan, ice queen. Her challenge, _change your life, or did you get it back for nothing_, I couldn't resist.

"You and your reincarnation junk," Rekha cajoled him. "Such a nonsense head. You come out of hospital, back through death's door, and it goes to your head, crazy boy, at once you must have some escapade thing, and there she is, hey presto, the blonde mame. Don't think I don't know what you're like, Gibbo, so what now, you want me to forgive you or what?"

No need, he said. He left Rekha's apartment (its mistress wept, face-down, on the floor); and never entered it again.

Three days after he met her with his mouth full of unclean meat Allie got into an aeroplane and left. Three days out of time behind a do-not-disturb sign, but in the end they agreed that the world was real, what was possible was possible and what was impossible was im--, brief encounter, ships that pass, love in a transit lounge. After she left, Gibreel rested, tried to shut his ears to her challenge, resolved to get his life back to normal. Just because he'd lost his belief it didn't mean he couldn't do his job, and in spite of the scandal of the ham-eating photographs, the first scandal ever to attach itself to his name, he signed movie contracts and went back to work.

And then, one morning, a wheelchair stood empty and he had gone. A bearded passenger, one Ismail Najmuddin, boarded Flight AI-420 to London. The 747 was named after one of the gardens of Paradise, not Gulistan but _Bostan_. "To be born again," Gibrecl Farishta said to Saladin Chamcha much later, "first you have to die. Me, I only half-expired, but I did it on two occasions, hospital and plane, so it adds up, it counts. And now, Spoono my friend, here I stand before you in Proper London, Vilayet, regenerated, a new man with a new life. Spoono, is this not a bloody fine thing?"

Why did he leave?

Because of her, the challenge of her, the newness, the fierceness of the two of them together, the inexorability of an impossible thing that was insisting on its right to become.

And, or, maybe: because after he ate the pigs the retribution began, a nocturnal retribution, a punishment of dreams.

Once the flight to London had taken off, thanks to his magic trick of crossing two pairs of fingers on each hand and rotating his thumbs, the narrow, fortyish fellow who sat in a non-smoking window seat watching the city of his birth fall away from him like old snakeskin allowed a relieved expression to pass briefly across his face. This face was handsome in a somewhat sour, patrician fashion, with long, thick, downturned lips like those of a disgusted turbot, and thin eyebrows arching sharply over eyes that watched the world with a kind of alert contempt. Mr. Saladin Chamcha had constructed this face with care -- it had taken him several years to get it just right -- and for many more years now he had thought of it simply as _his own_ -- indeed, he had forgotten what he had looked like before it. Furthermore, he had shaped himself a voice to go with the face, a voice whose languid, almost lazy vowels contrasted disconcertingly with the sawn--off abruptness of the consonants. The combination of face and voice was a potent one; but, during his recent visit to his home town, his first such visit in fifteen years (the exact period, I should observe, of Gibreel Farishta's film stardom), there had been strange and worrying developments. It was unfortunately the case that his voice (the first to go) and, subsequently, his face itself, had begun to let him down.

It started -- Chamcha, allowing fingers and thumbs to relax and hoping, in some embarrassment, that his last remaining superstition had gone unobserved by his fellow-passengers, closed his eyes and remembered with a delicate shudder of horror -- on his flight east some weeks ago. He had fallen into a torpid sleep, high above the desert sands of the Persian Gulf, and been visited in a dream by a bizarre stranger, a man with a glass skin, who rapped his knuckles mournfully against the thin, brittle membrane covering his entire body and begged Saladin to help him, to release him from the prison of his skin. Chamcha picked up a stone and began to batter at the glass. At once a latticework of blood oozed up through the cracked surface of the stranger's body, and when Chamcha tried to pick off the broken shards the other began to scream, because chunks of his flesh were coming away with the glass. At this point an air stewardess bent over the sleeping Chamcha and demanded, with the pitiless hospitality of her tribe: _Something to drink, sir? A drink?_, and Saladin, emerging from the dream, found his speech unaccountably metamorphosed into the Bombay lilt he had so diligently (and so long ago!) unmade. "Achha, means what?" he mumbled. "Alcoholic beverage or what?" And, when the stewardess reassured him, whatever you wish, sir, all beverages are gratis, he heard, once again, his traitor voice: "So, okay, bibi, give one whiskysoda only."

What a nasty surprise! He had come awake with a jolt, and sat stiffly in his chair, ignoring alcohol and peanuts. How had the past bubbled up, in transmogrified vowels and vocab? What next? Would he take to putting coconut-oil in his hair? Would he take to squeezing his nostrils between thumb and forefinger, blowing noisily and drawing forth a glutinous silver arc of muck? Would he become a devotee of professional wrestling? What further, diabolic humiliations were in store? He should have known it was a mistake to _go home_, after so long, how could it be other than a regression; it was an unnatural journey; a denial of time; a revolt against history; the whole thing was bound to be a disaster.

_I'm not myself_, he thought as a faint fluttering feeling began in the vicinity of his heart. But what does that mean, anyway, he added bitterly. After all, "les acteurs ne sont pas des gens", as the great ham Frederick had explained in _Les Enfants du Paradis_. Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

The seatbelt light came on, the captain's voice warned of air turbulence, they dropped in and out of air pockets. The desert lurched about beneath them and the migrant labourer who had boarded at Qatar clutched at his giant transistor radio and began to retch. Chamcha noticed that the man had not fastened his belt, and pulled himself together, bringing his voice back to its haughtiest English pitch. "Look here, why don't you. . ." he indicated, but the sick man, between bursts of heaving into the paper bag which Saladin had handed him just in time, shook his head, shrugged, replied: "Sahib, for what? If Allah wishes me to die, I shall die. If he does not, I shall not. Then of what use is the safety?"

Damn you, India, Saladin Chamcha cursed silently, sinking back into his seat. To hell with you, I escaped your clutches long ago, you won't get your hooks into me again, you cannot drag me back.

Once upon a time -- _it was and it was not so_, as the old stories used to say, _it happened and it never did_ -- maybe, then, or maybe not, a ten-year-old boy from Scandal Point in Bombay found a wallet lying in the Street outside his home. He was on the way home from school, having just descended from the school bus on which he had been obliged to sit squashed between the adhesive sweatiness of boys in shorts and be deafened by their noise, and because even in those days he was a person who recoiled from raucousness, jostling and the perspiration of strangers he was feeling faintly nauseated by the long, bumpy ride home. However, when he saw the black leather billfold lying at his feet, the nausea vanished, and he bent down excitedly and grabbed, -- opened, -- and found, to his delight, that it was full of cash, -- and not merely rupees, but real money, negotiable on black markets and international exchanges, -- pounds! Pounds sterling, from Proper London in the fabled country of Vilayet across the black water and far away. Dazzled by the thick wad of foreign currency, the boy raised his eyes to make sure he had not been observed, and for a moment it seemed to him that a rainbow had arched down to him from the heavens, a rainbow like an angel's breath, like an answered prayer, coming to an end in the very spot on which he stood. His fingers trembled as they reached into the wallet, towards the fabulous hoard.

"Give it." It seemed to him in later life that his father had been spying on him throughout his childhood, and even though Changez Chamchawala was a big man, a giant even, to say nothing of his wealth and public standing, he still always had the lightness of foot and also the inclination to sneak up behind his son and spoil whatever he was doing, whipping the young Salahuddin's bedsheet off at night to reveal the shameful penis in the clutching, red hand. And he could smell money from a hundred and one miles away, even through the stink of chemicals and fertilizer that always hung around him owing to his being the country's largest manufacturer of agricultural sprays and fluids and artificial dung. Changez Chamchawala, philanthropist, philanderer, living legend, leading light of the nationalist movement, sprang from the gateway of his home to pluck a bulging wallet from his son's frustrated hand. "Tch tch," he admonished, pocketing the pounds sterling, "you should not pick things up from the street. The ground is dirty, and money is dirtier, anyway."

On a shelf of Changez Chamchawala's teak-lined study, beside a ten-volume set of the Richard Burton translation of the Arabian Nights, which was being slowly devoured by mildew and bookworm owing to the deep-seated prejudice against books which led Changez to own thousands of the pernicious things in order to humiliate them by leaving them to rot unread, there stood a magic lamp, a brightly polished copper--and--brass avatar of Aladdin's very own genie-container: a lamp begging to be rubbed. But Changez neither rubbed it nor permitted it to be rubbed by, for example, his son. "One day," he assured the boy, "you'll have it for yourself. Then rub and rub as much as you like and see what doesn't come to you. Just now, but, it is mine." The promise of the magic lamp infected Master Salahuddin with the notion that one day his troubles would end and his innermost desires would be gratified, and all he had to do was wait it out; but then there was the incident of the wallet, when the magic of a rainbow had worked for him, not for his father but for him, and Changez Chamchawala had stolen the crock of gold. After that the son became convinced that his father would smother all his hopes unless he got away, and from that moment he became desperate to leave, to escape, to place oceans between the great man and himself.

Salahuddin Chamchawala had understood by his thirteenth year that he was destined for that cool Vilayet full of the crisp promises of pounds sterling at which the magic billfold had hinted, and he grew increasingly impatient of that Bombay of dust, vulgarity, policemen in shorts, transvestites, movie fanzines, pavement sleepers and the rumoured singing whores of Grant Road who had begun as devotees of the Yellamma cult in Karnataka but ended up here as dancers in the more prosaic temples of the flesh. He was fed up of textile factories and local trains and all the confusion and superabundance of the place, and longed for that dream-Vilayet of poise and moderation that had come to obsess him by night and day. His favourite playground rhymes were those that yearned for foreign cities: kitchy--con kitchy-ki kitchy-con stanty-eye kitchy-ople kitchy-cople kitchyCon-stanti-nople. And his favourite game was the version ofgrandmother's footsteps in which, when he was it, he would turn his back on upcreeping playmates to gabble out, like a mantra, like a spell, the six letters of his dream--city, _ellowen deeowen_. In his secret heart, he crept silently up on London, letter by letter, just as his friends crept up to him. _Ellowen deeowen London_.

The mutation of Salahuddin Chamchawala into Saladin Chamcha began, it will be seen, in old Bombay, long before he got close enough to hear the lions of Trafalgar roar. When the England cricket team played India at the Brabourne Stadium, he prayed for an England victory, for the game's creators to defeat the local upstarts, for the proper order of things to be maintained. (But the games were invariably drawn, owing to the featherbed somnolence of the Brabourne Stadium wicket; the great issue, creator versus imitator, colonizer against colonized, had perforce to remain unresolved.)

In his thirteenth year he was old enough to play on the rocks at Scandal Point without having to be watched over by his ayah, Kasturba. And one day (it was so, it was not so), he strolled out of the house, that ample, crumbling, salt-caked building in the Parsi style, all columns and shutters and little balconies, and through the garden that was his father's pride and joy and which in a certain evening light could give the impression of being infinite (and which was also enigmatic, an unsolved riddle, because nobody, not his father, not the gardener, could tell him the names of most of the plants and trees), and out through the main gateway, a grandiose folly, a reproduction of the Roman triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, and across the wild insanity of the street, and over the sea wall, and so at last on to the broad expanse of shiny black rocks with their little shrimpy pools. Christian girls giggled in frocks, men with furled umbrellas stood silent and fixed upon the blue horizon. In a hollow of black stone Salahuddin saw a man in a dhoti bending over a pool. Their eyes met, and the man beckoned him with a single finger which he then laid across his lips. _Shh_, and the mystery of rock-pools drew the boy towards the stranger. He was a creature of bone. Spectacles framed in what might have been ivory. His finger curling, curling, like a baited hook, come. When Salahuddin came down the other grasped him, put a hand around his mouth and forced his young hand between old and fleshless legs, to feel the fleshbone there. The dhoti open to the winds. Salahuddin had never known how to fight; he did what he was forced to do, and then the other simply turned away from him and let him go.

After that Salahuddin never went to the rocks at Scandal Point; nor did he tell anyone what had happened, knowing the neurasthenic crises it would unleash in his mother and suspecting that his father would say it was his own fault. It seemed to him that everything loathsome, everything he had come to revile about his home town, had come together in the stranger's bony embrace, and now that he had escaped that evil skeleton he must also escape Bombay, or die. He began to concentrate fiercely upon this idea, to fix his will upon it at all times, eating shitting sleeping, convincing himself that he could make the miracle happen even without his father's lamp to help him out. He dreamed of flying out of his bedroom window to discover that there, below him, was -- not Bombay -- but Proper London itself, Bigben Nelsonscolumn Lordstavern Bloodytower Queen. But as he floated out over the great metropolis he felt himself beginning to lose height, and no matter how hard he struggled kicked swam-in-air he continued to spiral slowly downwards to earth, then faster, then faster still, until he was screaming headfirst down towards the city, Saintpauls, Puddinglane, Threadneedlestreet, zeroing in on London like a bomb.

o o o

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vacuousfool · 6 years ago

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My soul is weak but I will be strong [SELFPOST]

[ In response to this ]

It had been a year since he had met and befriended Adachi Tohru. Yu was amazed by how quickly time had flown by: he had promised himself he would only stay in this city for a few days, yet, he always found himself returning. Perhaps he had realised that Tohru was lonely too, and that they needed each other to some degree.

They spent a lot of time, doing many things, in that year: Yu had told Adachi Tohru about his travels, about his fighting skills ( he had even helped train Tohru in some of them! ), about the sights he’d seen. In turn, Tohru told him a bunch about things Yu just didn’t know from lack of experience, not from lack of knowledge. Like school, and what it was like to go shopping ( Yu had no real concept of money, as he and his parents had never needed to use money to buy things ).

Each day, Yu found himself becoming more and more attached to Tohru; he liked seeing him smile, enjoyed hearing his laughter, and realise that for the first time since his parents had died, he was letting himself be vulnerable. Yu always cared about others, his parents had instilled that in him and he just wanted to help, but it was one thing to care about everyone as a whole, and another to care about someone as an individual.

Once Yu realised these things, he supposed he just couldn’t bring himself to leave. Not quite yet. He wanted to really tell Tohru what was going on. His mission to rewrite the universe, to save everyone. To help everyone. Maybe if he told Tohru, Yu could help bring him along into the newer universe.

It was a day like any other, really: Yu and Tohru were hanging out, eating ice cream together at the pier, overlooking the vast ocean. Yu had never been around such a vast body of water, untainted water, so he had taken to the ocean and the pier immediately. Other than the park, this was often where Yu and Tohru came to spend time together.

Yu says something rather dark ( he has a dry, almost intense sense of humour due to his upbringing ), and laughs at his own joke, glancing over at Tohru to ask him if he feels the same way. That’s when Yu feels Tohru’s lips upon his own, and he instantly stalls.

Everything stops; and for a split second, Yu feels fear. Not at the kiss. Not at Tohru’s feelings. But at what this means. Yu’s not loved anyone other than his parents. Yu has not ever considered the idea of dating. He had fully prepared himself to focus only on his mission, not at the expense of others ( Yu still helped people whenever and wherever he could ), but, it was very important.

Thinking about it, though, his parents would be happy for him. Yu is certain of that: they would have wanted him to find a chance to live, while also fulfilling his goals and ideals. With Tohru, he’s happy. Smiling, Yu leans into the kiss, choosing to let go of the ice cream and cup Tohru’s face gently, like he remembers his mother always doing to help reassure him.

Tohru frantically says sorry for Yu losing his ice cream, and Yu can’t help but laugh at that. Oh Tohru, you silly! It’s you that’s important, in the moment! Yu promised that they could buy ice cream again, tomorrow, and then they head off. Walking hand in hand, Yu makes sure Tohru gets home safely, and says his goodbyes, promising to meet up again tomorrow.

He had left the city, intent on heading back to his home in the mountainous region, in high spirits. Is this what they meant, by ‘being on cloud nine’? Either way, Yu was distracted. He wasn’t as alert as he’d normally been. The year had made him complacent:

That was what she had been banking on.

He was hit before he could react; or, rather, pushed. He felt a hand on his back, and it just, pushed him forward. Yu stumbled, but not along the pathway he’d originally been walking along. No, he stumbled into a rift in space-time, and was gone before he even finished stumbling.

Now, he was in this endless void of sky; a glass-like flooring reflecting the sky above, making it seem endless both horizontally and vertically. His breathing caught in his throat, initially at the beauty of this spectacle. Then, Yu felt it, in his soul -- that resonance of the one thing he had sought after for nearly half of his life.

The essence of this universe: contained in a small sphere of pure white light, idly floating in the middle of the area. That light reflected in Yu’s eyes, and he was in awe. He barely had a few moments to take this in, before she appeared.

It had been many years since he had last seen the woman with long, flowing dark black hair, and golden coloured eyes. She was as ethereal as when he’d first glimpsed her outside of his cabin as a younger child.

“Child of Destiny: I am here to pass judgement upon you. You wish to alter this world? First, you must become as a God.” Her voice, it was so, neutral. Neither condemning nor singing his praises. Become as a God?

Yu smiled, that expression a mix of empathy, yet remorse.

He knew he was supposed to hate them; the demons, the gods. His parents had never spoken of them except in negative ways. They had tried to cast stones, but Yu had seen it, demons who were hunted for sport, gods’ shrines that had been defiled or torn down. No one worshipped the gods now, no one tried to understand the demons.

“I, don’t want to hurt you.”

She holds her palm upwards, and bolts of sheer plasma-like energy begin to rapidly rocket towards Yu. He’s quick, he can see them with ease; he begins to run not forward, but to the side, weaving and darting as to avoid them, ignoring that bursting of wind and energy nipping behind him that threatens to send him off his feet.

He has to skid to a stop, to duck, because she’s in front of him now, attempting to palm strike him. Yu moves, and quick jerk of his body; he’s grabbed her arm, and pulled, tossing her over his back. Or, he would have, but she is agile, she is otherworldly.

She floats easily and throws him mercilessly into the air, before striking his backside with some bolts of energy. Yu inhales, and turns mid-air, his eyes burning; he can feel his eyes, his soul, burning as he calls forth that magical energy. It’s always with him, it’s always ‘on’ in a sense, but even with all of his training, Yu has never needed to utilise this much constantly.

He fires a blast of ice magic toward her with his right hand, and his left arm is beginning to spark with that charge of electrical bolts. She dodges, but then Yu moves; rushing forward with the inhuman speed of his own, he gets to the left side and quickly shoots lightning at her. Point blank range.

She is thrown backwards, skidding along the glass like ground, and then a sword appears in her left hand. The goddess swings the blade, upwards, and acidic like rain begins to fall from the sky. Yu grits his teeth, ignoring that burning smell; his body is trying to heal that damage to him, so he can feel his skin melting and then continuously reforming. Smoke constantly wafts from his body.

He rushes at her, and they exchange hits, dodging; she with her sword, he with his fists and legs. Yu has no true weapon to speak of, besides, he’s always been better with magics and his bare hands.

Separating, Yu once again calls forth ice, but this time, in a vast wall that rushes forward instantly; it catches her by the left arm, and then he shatters it. Her arm is now gone, but she does not bleed. Gods do not have blood, not in the traditional sense. Instead, her arms seems to give off faint glowing particles that float over into the sphere of essence that is still in the middle of this area.

He feels pain at having caused her such harm: but she is smiling. Before he can comprehend what this means, she’s rushing at him again. Yu steps back, startled; what a foolish notion, she must be thinking. To be empathetic towards your ‘enemy’ in midst of combat.

She is not his enemy, however. He has never once thought of another as his enemy, he isn’t about to start now.

She tries to slash at him, he deflects it, she anticipates this, because she trips him. Somehow, he hadn’t been expecting that.

He’s been stabbed before, but never quite like this. Her blade pierces through his chest, and then she twists it, and he coughs back a scream. A gods’ blade was powerful, sheer strength itself, so even though the metal looks as though a regular swords’, it feels like Yu is being stabbed by 50 tons of pressure, of weight, tearing along his insides.

Dying. This is what this sensation is. He is dying. Tears running down his jawline, Yu’s left hand reaches upwards, then, his right hand. He grips at the blade with both of his palms, and then focuses. Before she can react, he sends every single ounce of electrical magic that he can through her blade, and into her; into both her and Yu, himself.

She lets out a horrible wail of a scream, one that seems to reverberate into the vastness surrounding them. Yu’s eyes, their sclera turns black; from the sheer overwhelming force of using so much magic. His body can’t handle it all at once. It takes thirty seconds of continuous shocking at 1000% for her to cease.

For the goddess to stop existing. She is thrown backwards, and lands on the reflective ground. Yu is still laid there, that sword embedded into him.

Then, he remembers: oh, it’s a gods’ sword. Made of a god, by a god. Then, he can... Yu focuses, and feels the sword, meld into his soul. It sinks into his soul, and adds itself to his very essence, his very being. He has absorbed a gods’ power.

He can feel it, and his appearance changes: his irises transform from a bright blue to a very intense golden yellow, a bright golden yellow. His sclera remains that blackened colour. Exhaling, Yu pushes himself onto his feet, stumbling, his muscles and bones aching as his body rapidly heals with, and adjusts to, its newfound energy.

Yu focuses, and that sword-- the goddess’ sword, now his own, he supposes-- appears in his left hand. He swings it, trying to reconcile that weight. It isn’t heavy; a gods’ sword is supposed to nigh impossible to lift, let alone swing. Still tired, Yu walks past the goddess’ body and towards that sphere of essence.

“....Hello.” It’s said with some, meekness, a tad uncertainty: Yu doesn’t know the etiquette of the souls of universes, but it feels rude to just, grab the sphere, “I’m, not going to destroy you. Not, like you might think. I’m going to absorb you, and together, we’re going to make things better.”

“I want to create a universe where demons and humans can help each other: where we can all co-exist happily, peacefully. Will you lend me a hand?”

Lifting his palm, Yu watches as the sphere seems to shift briefly, but then, float towards him. Smiling gently, his hand moves towards the sphere. Yu doesn’t notice the goddess moving behind him.

It’s when he grabs the sphere, and starts to absorb it into him, that she stabs through his chest with her bare arm. His body jerks, blood coughing from his mouth; Yu’s eyes go blank. The sky overhead simultaneously goes pitch black, and the reflective ground beneath them begins to crack and shatter, falling away around them.

Tears start to fall from Yu; from that essence. Beyond, the world as Yu knew it begins to break. Everything starts to go wrong: multiple natural disasters, the ground itself starts to tear and deform, winds pick up to the point of ripping mountains apart and shredding trees and what little relic of buildings there are dotting the land.

The goddess, she smiles, “You failed.” Yu can’t-- he won’t-- accept this!! Before she can pull away from him, the restart is fully activated; a light bursts out from Yu’s body, his form silhouetting, and the goddess screams. That light washes over everything, and then pulls inside of itself.

The universe is still for a few moments, before rapidly beginning to be born anew...

#emptyjester #[HEADCANONS] “FACTS ABOUT ONESELF.”#[YU;CHILD] “INNOCENCE NOT YET CORRUPTED.”#[TRUEV] “BACK TO THE VERY START OF EVERYTHING.”#[YU] “HE WHO SEEKS RESOLUTION.”#[MAINV] “NEED TO START SOMEWHERE.”

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i-want-my-iwtv · 6 years ago

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So I've been in the fandom for about...2 weeks. In the middle of the 4th book right now. I've heard that the books get worse and stuff and I wonder if I should read all of them or skip some or...?

This is really hard to answer, and I nearly answered it privately, bc I don’t want to sow dissension in the fandom, it’s something ppl love to scream into the void about. But I see you’ve already started drawing some fanart for the fandom, so I want to encourage you to stay with us!

Some fans would tell you that #4 onwards in canon have certain characters being forgotten or mistreated by the author. I would say that there are storylines that are dark to the point that, even with my very high threshold for Crazy Shit, even I’ve had to close whatever one of these later books and just say, “omgz Aaaaaanne, whyyyy… We didn’t want this, nobody wanted this…”

If you’ve come looking for perfect cinnamon rolls, we only have one, Mojo, and he’s a dog ;)

I’ve heard that the books get worse and stuff and I wonder if I should read all of them or skip some or…?

So this depends on your definition of “worse.” They are a pile of dysfunctional hipster trash vampires, and several characters, but specifically the main character in the books, do some exceedingly problematic stuff, and, arguably, he is not condemned by the author in the text. There are fans who choose to disregard all the books from #4 onwards bc of that, and that’s totally fine.

Your headcanon is your own, and you do NOT have to accept all of canon, and you do NOT have to interpret canon the way any other fan interprets it. Don’t let another fan bully you into thinking their interpretation is the Only one.

PERSONALLY, and I know I’m not the only one who feels this way: back in the old days we called the later books #the Vampire Crackicles (spoilers in that tag) and enjoyed them for the silliness, bc there is plenty of humor still in the darkfic. And there are those, like me, who want to read darkfic, too. We want to go there in fiction, and explore what the consequences of even the most atrocious actions are. Can a character who’s committed X crime ever be redeemed? Redemption might not even be about forgiveness from the victim, but the effort of that character to strive to improve. That can be so cathartic for the reader, whether the character achieves it or not, the inspiration can come from the fact that they TRY and FAIL! repeatedly.

I always recommend that ppl give each of the books a chance, even the most cracky have some good stuff in them.

For the most part I think we’re a kinder fandom than others, since we suffered through our own fandom creator waging war on our fanfic and driving us underground for years. And the fandom is pretty welcoming, but I’ve found it’s better if you know what happens in canon, and can talk about it with other fans, make fanworks about it, or whatev. Even to criticize.

Like any social media, though, your fandom experience is what you make of it, follow the #vampire chronicles tag, find some bloggers you like, and reach out!

#42sunberries #ask #iwantmyiwtv has opinions #The Vampire Crackicles #that was a thing then #darkfic #dark fic #dark fiction #VC #vampire chronicles #long post #gif #britney spears #castle

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miluette · 7 years ago

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Ignoct Week Day 4 ~ Fatebending

(For @ignoctweek -- Every week is Ignoct Week in my heart. I struggled with finishing this for multiple reasons, but I’m calling it done now. There are tense switches and probably still errors in spite of that.)

Simple: Injury Situational: Noctis is the one who goes blind instead of Ignis

(Thankfully, both prompts are kind of the same thing…)

Rating: E10+ Tags/Warnings: injury, blindness, Episode Ignis spoilers, tangentially domestic ending

“If thy will is true, thou shalt wear this ring and lose your life, but not also without cost to the King Himself.”

Ignis, surrounded by the Rulers of Yore, stares up at the cold, unfeeling mask of the Mystic. “What cost should he incur? I told you I will pay the price!”

“The Anointed still wieldeth the power of our Star, a power unequal to all of life upon it. From Him we shalt take His sight.”

“No!”

“Then burn as others before you.”

“No -- I -- I won’t let him die, not for this! It’s not right! It’s not...fair!”

“Our concern is the fate of the Star,” says the Fierce.

“You’re taking everything from him! Even this world--”

“It is thou who interfereth with fate.”

Ignis throws his gaze to his feet. Will Noctis ever forgive him? Not knowing he has to die, but eventually, someday, somehow, knowing that Ignis’s actions cost him his sight… Will Noctis even stand to be around him anymore?

What hurts more: the world without Noctis, or Ignis’s world without Noctis?

Yet true is it that there is no decision to be made. Fate be damned, the world will have Noctis, and Noctis will have the world. The Prince will regain his life. Noctis will live on to love again, to rest peacefully, to have children who would carry on his legacy. Noctis deserves no less.

Eyes rising again slowly, they meet the Mystic with a determined pain. “So be it.”

The Rulers’ voices boom as one. “The contract is forged. The ring is now thine to control.”

“...Forgive me, Noct.”

…

For Noctis, it wasn’t painful. He came to, and all he opened his eyes to was a thick, deep darkness.

Luna’s light had left him. Everything lay in ruin around him, no signs of an Altar, an Altissia.

Darkness.

Yet, his friends were there. All but one.

It was days more before they found Ignis. Rushing across vast distances, Ravus commanded an entire army against the missing Chancellor. “Wherever he is, you’ll find Ignis,” he had said.

As an airship split the sky, Noctis’s friends were forced to explain what had happened. Only Gladiolus had known the full truth. The Shield could hardly look at his Prince -- not that it would have mattered. Fading eyes unseeing, Noctis couldn’t measure his brother’s pain, not so long as the Shield kept his voice steady, struggling against deep-seeded and aching gasps that came with the memory of his foretelling.

Awe would simply bring Prompto to silence. His hand seldom left Noctis’s shoulder. Never had he felt smaller, yet he who would soon Ascend as the Chosen made it known that Prompto mattered more to him now than ever in these dark times, a friend ever at his side in spite of all that had happened.

When finally he had gotten a moment to himself, Noctis had nearly vomited.

He had faltered in his true responsibility, and this was where it had led them. His only family. The only people he loved. Condemned to suffering, dying. Sacrificing what little they had left, tearing away their very essence.

For what? For him? He who had neglected to care for himself for so long? He who had spent more time playing video games than leading people?

But there had been no time for this self-pity. There had been no time for him to run his mind back through all the missteps that led to this moment, nor was there time to mourn. No; a King’s vision extended beyond his eyes, and his power extended to all of those who he loved. Ignis...was still alive. He could feel it in the sparks about his skin. Ignis had still been fighting for his life. So, too, would he fight for Ignis.

…

Noctis feels an immense power bend to his will. It isn't like the hollow void of melancholy he’d felt as he parted ways with Ravus, leaving him to tend to his dear sister. In the liminal space created by a single man's passion, ruin lying in the wake of the Crystal, he feels something entirely new awaken beneath his skin.

The power of life.

In his arms, Ignis, body ashen, lies succumbing to this power, the grips of Eos delivering him from the brink.

As his consciousness returns, the first thing he sees is Noctis’s eyes, pale as an overcast day, determined yet sharp between thick strands of jet black hair. He notices that the Prince wears his birthright before their hands slip away from each other’s.

“Noct…”

“I’m going to fix everything, Iggy.”

“Heal yourself, Noct…”

The form of the Crystal's power edges around Ignis’s face, illuminating a jaw still set strongly in spite of his strife, eyes full of concern. All the sounds -- the Crystal’s radiant pulsing, Gladiolus’s uneven breath, Prompto’s fidgeting -- go quiet as Noctis is enveloped with this new sight.

Yes.

This is his Ignis.

Ignis had given up the world for him.

Noctis presses his forehead to Ignis’s, feeling as the warmth and light return to him. As he pulls away, Ignis's eyes fall on him, and Noctis smiles.

“Wait for me.”

…

Ignis found it somewhat hard to live with himself for a while. That’s why his friends had come together for him. On certain days, he wouldn’t even trust himself, and the others wouldn’t leave him alone with his thoughts. Together, in unison, they moved forward and completed the work their future King had started, traveling the land, rallying the remnants of the Glaive, strengthening themselves.

When the King finally returned, he emerged to a world made darker in his absence. He followed the light on the horizon, the call of his friends, the pull of his heart.

For as he slept for ten long years, he felt someone with him, a soul-visitor. In sharing this Ring, the divine right of the blood of Lucis Caelum, Ignis had bonded with him. Planes drift closer in slumber, and two minds nearly become one.

“I’m here.”

When their consciousness had drifted together, when by spirits outstretched and ephemeral fingertips touching their minds could meet, they sought to remind each other that there was an end to this separation. There was light beyond the dark shroud of the Star.

There had been a plan.

And when the sun rose again, they had their King. And when the sun shone upon him, all he wanted was Ignis’s frame bathed in citrus hue. Gone were kings past, though what remained was their scar. Gone was any sense of the eye that once drew a shape of sculpted jawlines and arched cupid’s bows, delineated the arc of thin glasses frames with seafoam eyes behind them. What remained was the memory of a feeling etched into his skin, flaring in the warmth of daylight as lips again met.

Ignis had Noctis’s love.

…

“Why did you do it?”

The question comes decades after Noctis has settled into the throne and Lucis has regained some of its luster.

“Pardon?”

It comes over breakfast, another of Ignis’s innumerable, loving creations. Noctis enjoys chocobo-shaped pancakes even without sight.

That he would ask this question now… “It’s just amazing to me,” Noctis says, tone almost matter-of-fact. “For a while, I thought I’d lost it all. But...here we are. We have a home. A family. A world. It’s thanks to you. I...think about it every day, but I never say it, do I?”

“I believe you say it multiple times a night.”

Noctis waves his hand with a light chuckle. “Ignis… You nearly died.”

Noctis hears the clatter of Ignis’s silverware as the man resumes finishing off his plate. “Hurling myself at a catoblepas for food money and putting on the Ring of the Lucii aren’t much different from each other, in the scheme of things.”

Noctis laughs, a genuine and loud sound that makes Ignis’s heart swell, each and every time.

“I’m serious.”

“I know.” A hard grin parts a well-kept and greying beard with eyes to match. Noctis stands to walk to Ignis’s side of the table, fingers gliding along the edge. “I always knew you had a secret wild side.” As the King places himself in the other king’s lap, Ignis almost automatically wraps his arms around his waist. “Only you could have pulled off something like that.”

“Only you could have set things right. I always believed in you. Though, I thought for certain that you would be...upset.”

“Upset’s one way to put it. One could hardly argue with the outcome, though.”

“If I could’ve wrapped my arms around you like this--”

“I felt you in my heart. It made things easier. Like...way easier. Besides, how long’s it been? I’ve been wrapped in your arms every night since.”

It is true: Ignis had wanted to impress upon Noctis his shape, never let him forget the feel of his embrace, the warmth of it. As the light of the Kings’ power now lights the sky, Noctis has also burned the memory of Ignis’s face into his mind’s eye, lest his inner vision remain dark.

Hair that dances like fire. Eyes that bring him to calm. Speckled skin as if each dot were placed by the paintbrush of the gods. A smile that had pierced his heart the moment he’d seen it with the ethereal vision that no one else possesses.

How it matched his memory of their first meeting.

Ignis lights up his world.

“So, you're saying that apologizing now would be silly?”

Noctis laughs. “I love you.”

He refuses to forget.

#ignoct #ignoct week #ignoctweek #ignis scientia #noctis lucis caelum #ffxv #final fantasy xv #ff15 #final fantasy 15 #tlym #fanfic #fanfiction #drabble #mine

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velerodra-valesinger · 7 years ago

Text

Defeat

Heart racing, and in a cold sweat, eyelids snapped open. Two dim lanterns in a dark room.

"Follow the Song on the wind, to find your path. You'll find it eventually"

Ava's voice echoed in her ears as clearly as if they'd been spoken yesterday. The scene replayed itself. Indri's baby had just been born, and Ava was tending to the newborn. Mere weeks after she'd severed Vel’s soul from her own.

"We are all lost, in our own way. Many times we will lose the way, or turn from a Path because it no longer suits us. Frequently we find Causes that call to us for a little while, but rarely do we find our True Path. In theory, you will find yours eventually, though chances are also that you may not. One cannot say for sure, and we will not lie to you and say it will be easy." She shrugged, handling the baby with the idle ease of one very well-practiced in such things.

She hated her in that moment. Her words - amounted to nothing. 'In theory, you will find yours eventually, though chances are also that you may not'. It was a sentence utterly void of meaning. So many times she spoke as if she were an authority on things that - when one carefully picked apart the words - meant nothing at all. She claimed to be a guide. But Vel had come to realize she was emulating a guide. She was not some sage. She was just a girl, who had strayed from the Light, whose faith was broken by a Demon. She embraced Teachings, but she - never understood them. Not really. They were just something to replace the Light, something she could put her faith in. She peddled her words as significant but they were all vacuous. Velerodra shifted in her bed.

"Of all the dreams, of all the things that could haunt my dreams, why the fuck is it you? How is it my nightmares are of something so simple as a memory of a misguided, mess of a woman coddling a child?"

She roared. The coughing spell that followed made her regret it.

In the past she'd experienced many things that, in theory, would have made for proper nightmares. Yet for Vel a nightmare was a mundane moment spent with her. They stirred her resentment, but also stirred her love of the flawed creature that had once taken her as a daughter. The intensity of the emotions were what terrified her.

"Did Ava leave a hole in you that big that you needed to go find a Legion master to fill it? The Legion has already has already -lost- their war, I could have told you that months ago. It was silly for you to even bother at all."

Now Zara's mocking tones echoed in her mind. Though the petite redhead did not quite pin down Vel's motives, she had been right in saying the Legion had lost. Vel knew it at the time she said it. The writing had been on the wall for a while. Now it was official.

The Dark Titan's Crusade was over. Argus no longer loomed above. What demons lingered on Azeroth would be hunted. The remnants of those who once served the Legion were unlikely to try and unite without the influence of Dark Titan. Demons as it turned out, were often self-serving.

A pained groan was coerced from the depths of her lungs as the battered monkette forced herself from her bed and to her feet. She staggered in place. Every nerve in her body screamed at her for moving so quickly.

Silly... that is what Zara had called it. Others will not be so kind, they would consider it traitorous. All of Azeroth save a few outcasts would see me dead if they knew I had aligned myself with the Legion. If they knew I'd used the banner of Crimson Wings to gain access to military plans and turn them over to their enemy. -Their- enemy. Not mine. I was their enemy. I -am- their enemy. I betrayed all of Azeroth. I caused units to fall prey to ambushes. And if ever I am asked if I regret my decisions, I cannot say I do. I followed the Song on the wind. Ava...

Her thoughts raced, and she reached through the darkness of her bedroom and took hold of her dresser, a bulky piece of Pandarian craftsmanship. Dark cheery wood. She held her weakened body up and caught sight of her eyes peering back at her through the darkness. Reflected by the mirror above her dresser. At this she hissed. Her body trembled as her ribs begged her to stop making noise. She dug her nails into the wood. In defiance of her body her thoughts spilled from her lips, forced into venomous words.

"And where are you now Ava? Did you follow the Song to battle? Like a proper warrior. Or were you only hollow words. -I- followed the Song. I have found a Path. A Path that lead to defeat. I followed it anyways. I knew where it was going, but never again will you be able to question my convictions. My commitment. I have damned myself to this world. And have been condemned to dwell on it. Fuck you Ava. Fuck you. I am stronger now, I have found control of the chaotic energies you 'blessed' me with, yet never taught me to manage. You spoke of Ascension, but your Ascension was forced. I have Transcended. I am not a Demon, I am more insidious, I am a seed cast from above, imbued with knowledge even you - would never have obtained. I am -worse- than any Demon. Because I go unseen. An invisible corruption that walks among the enemy. I will show you Ava, I will show you the daughter you could have had. I will guide you. If your soul has not fallen in the Crusade, I will pluck it from across the cosmos, and you will behold the being you created. You will look into my eyes, and I will see you tremble before me. I will hold your soul in my hands, and I will show you, my Truth."

Each word was spoken jaggedly and teemed with delusions and madness. And yet, there was a desperation the lurked beneath it all. A sorrow. She could taste blood in her mouth, and her lungs could not sustain her monologue and words broke down into a hacking cough. She felt faint, and placed her head against the wooden surface, still able to see the glow from her eyes peering at her from the mirror.

"Fuck you too. You most of all." she sputtered weakly, as she met her own reflected gaze.

Tears slipped from the corners of her eyes as she thrust a weak hand into the mirror, too weak to shatter it. Of course she was too weak to shatter it. So much for her ego-trip. Honestly, it amused her, the laughter that followed was more coughing than laughter. And her body finally gave out of her, she fell to the floor and just lay there - staring up at her ceiling.

When the tears stopped. When the laughter stopped. When the coughing stopped. She kept her voice low, and spoke again. "I miss you..."

Her words had no way to reach their intended target. There were few she could ever speak to about what she did on Argus. She was only gone a month, but she had seen other worlds. She had been to places where time passed differently. She'd only been gone from Azeroth for a month, but it felt, and seemed as if she'd spent years among the stars. She'd experienced many things. She knew herself better now. Emotions, to a degree, made more sense to her. She knew she was just - empty now. She'd committed herself to the losing side of a war against the world she must now live on. She was a remnant of a cause that had been snuffed out.

She had little to distract herself with when she spent time in her body. She needed to allow herself time to heal. She needed to rebuild the muscles that had wasted away. A process. She needed to stop - making it harder for herself with these little outbursts.

She felt alone.

But that was nothing new, was it?

It was different now.

There was no redemption for her.

She was no demon, her soul had been claimed and reclaimed, twisted and re-twisted.

She did not belong on Azeroth, but in truth, she had not belonged on Argus either.

She thought about Aria. About what she had said when they'd been in Deatholme.

Vel had asked why Aria had shown her what she had.

Aria had told her because the others the Vel worked with did not understand.

Only now did Vel truly grasp what she was saying.

Others thought that Aria might be changed.

Vel never thought she needed to.

If anyone might understand,

Aria might, understand.

When she was capable, she'd go to Northrend. For now, she let her eyes close.

@avaraelia, @thefrozenheart

#the dark side #evil Vel #(evel?)#handling defeat #(the best kind of demons are mortal)

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go-redgirl · 5 years ago

Text

BREAKING: BIG NEWS! President Trump Reaches Historic Trade Deal with Japan GP ^ | August 25, 2019 | by Jim Hoft

President Donald Trump is attending the G7 Summit in Biarritz, France this weekend.

The liberal mainstream media was pretty certain this would be a complete disaster and that the countries were at odds. This is what they reported for several days before the summit began.

Then President Trump dropped this wonderful news on Sunday.

(Excerpt) Read more at thegatewaypundit.com

TOPICS: Breaking News; Business/Economy; Japan KEYWORDS: click bait; side barab use; trump asia; trump g7; trump trade

___________________________________________________________________

INDIVIDUALS/COMMENT/POSTS:

Democrats Outraged!

2 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:24:23 AM by dsrtsage (For Leftists, World History starts every day at breakfast) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To: mplc51 Has Nancy Pelosi condemned it yet?

3 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:26:19 AM by Pilgrim's Progress (http://www.baptistbiblebelievers.com/BYTOPICS/tabid/335/Default.aspx D) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: mplc51 Colluding with Japan, eh?

4 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:27:18 AM by bigbob (Trust Trump. Trust the Plan.) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: bigbob BIG for Farmers. Buying lot’s of Corn.

5 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:28:19 AM by mplc51 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: mplc51 But no doubt the Democrat media has already written their reviews and proclaimed the President’s conference as a “failure.”

6 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:28:29 AM by txrefugee --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: lonevoice Well done, President Trump!!!

7 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:29:18 AM by Pride in the USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: txrefugee But no doubt the Democrat media has already written their reviews and proclaimed the President’s conference as a “failure.” Can't change it now, the old grey whore has gone to bed.

8 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:31:44 AM by null and void (Heaven has an impenetrable wall, and a welcoming gate for those qualified, Hell is wide open.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: mplc51 Still not tired of winning Very tired of the whining.

9 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:32:27 AM by FatherofFive (Islam is EVIL and needs to be eradicated) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: mplc51 Can’t find this news elsewhere...

10 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:34:57 AM by Sacajaweau ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: mplc51 At the presser announcing this great for USA trade deal Trump mentioned he would invite Russia to summit. CNN blasted him saying Trump only wanted Russia there since he needed Russia to fraud the election in Trump’s favor. smh

11 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:35:03 AM by RWGinger (Does anyone else really) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: mplc51; null and void; Shimmer BIG for Farmers. Buying lot’s of Corn. That will be very bad for the Japanese.

I have come to know, from my own bodily experience, that High Fructose Corn Syrup causes (or greatly contributes to) Type II Diabetes.

Furthermore, the French (!) actually understand how bad corn is for you. Short story: My cousin married a guy from the French region of Canada. During the wedding, the French-Canadian guys' parents flew in from France. We treated them to a good-old Upstate New York country cookout on our property. We served them a plate of the regular fare -- BBQ pork, hamburgers, potato salad, macaroni salad, a few other items, and a couple of ears of corn slathered in butter.

The French parents looked at the plates like they had just been served dog food.

We asked them what was the matter. They explained, through the son, that corn is what LIVESTOCK ate. You NEVER serve it to a human.

Nowadays -- after having acquired Type II -- I agree.

12 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:35:15 AM by Lazamataz (We can be called a racist and we'll just smile. Because we don't care.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Sacajaweau Take back on my previous post...

13 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:36:29 AM by Sacajaweau ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: RWGinger He's not the only one who said Putin should be invited...and I don't believe he was the first to say. G-20...G7....what a lot of crap these meetings are...No wonder the President doesn't want to go.

14 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:41:46 AM by Sacajaweau ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To: Lazamataz Thanks for posting. Health/life BUMP.

15 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:43:43 AM by PGalt ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: mplc51 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/08/25/trump-g-7-us-japan-reach-new-trade-agreement-in-principle/2113934001/

16 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:43:48 AM by Sacajaweau ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To: Lazamataz “The French parents looked at the plates like they had just been served dog food.”

What, no french fries, fried chicken, and other deliciously fried foods?

17 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:43:56 AM by Swirl ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: bigbob We need an investigation!!!

18 posted on 8/25/2019, 10:44:19 AM by mykroar (Congratulations President Trump)

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

To: Lazamataz I would like some of that for breakfast, before facing the ravenous hordes, at work!

41 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:11:33 AM by going hot (happiness is a momma deuce) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: mplc51 Way to hit one out of the Park.... President Trump!

Treating people fair. What a concept.

Way to Go President Trump!

42 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:18:36 AM by EnglishOnly (eWFight all out to win OR get out now. .) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: mplc51 “...BIG for Farmers. Buying lot’s of Corn....”

Yeah, let’s hear the hateful RATS bad-mouth this to the farmers. Hey farmers, who has your backs??

43 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:19:24 AM by EagleUSA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To: bort Boy I’m sure that’s true but after being home recovering from injuries for more than a few years I ballooned (perfect word) to 435.

And not for a week. :)

Down to high 280s which is still awful and my fasting glucose never went above 85.

Not even pre diabetes.

They kinds make it sound like eating 10 cookies in a row will ruin you and cause diabetes.

How about two boxes a night for 4 years??

Disgusting i know.

But still doesn’t explain why I don’t eve have PRE diabetes.

And I’m losing now,, not gaining so odds of me getting it at 51 are pretty slim, unlike me :)

Maybe it’s genes too.

Or maybe they’re a little off in the big picture about what exactly causes it.

44 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:24:17 AM by dp0622 (Bad, bad company Till the day I die.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Lazamataz They explained, through the son, that corn is what LIVESTOCK ate. You NEVER serve it to a human. Silly Eurotrash. They say the darnedest things.

45 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:25:07 AM by humblegunner ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To: null and void Actually they are Aryan ethnic group and hugely disadvantaged and downtrodden. You are obviously have mistaken them for Slavs which are Caucasian.

Slavs are far less numerous, but are highly creative which is why they are time-honored slaves, unlike the poor Hindus who are forced to drink from the same river they dump corpses into and have been sinking into obscurity due to mistaken Western misidentification such as you pointed to.

This is a common failing, because the Slaves are not too far geographically (on most maps) from India (usually only a few inches), so the confusion is self-evident. So you should give more than a damn in order to say in the bounds of modern politically correct speech and thought, lest you fall prey to doxing and other misadventures.

46 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:25:48 AM by PIF (They came for me and mine ... now it is your turn ...) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: null and void Carbs and sugars cause obesity. It’s in EVERYTHING you buy at the store. My wife and I started cooking our own meals and eliminated sugar and reduced carbs to under 20 grams a day about 20 months ago. Lost 30 pounds in the first 2 months and feel great and think clearer. Carbs and sugar turn into fat. When you reduce sugar and carbs, you replace it with fats. Meats, eggs, cheese, nuts, some veggies. A high fat diet with lots of cholesterol is good for you and your brain. It’s a keto diet. I swear by it.

47 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:26:26 AM by Sodbuster ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Lazamataz In actually some corn products have far less carbs than wheat does. A generous serving of polenta, for example, has 32 carbs as opposed to a plate of pasta which has 54 carbs or more.

48 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:28:23 AM by angry elephant (My MAGA cap is from a rally in Washingon state in May 2016) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Lazamataz They explained, through the son, that corn is what LIVESTOCK ate. You NEVER serve it to a human.

They were just beingf snobs. The Brits were once that way about oats, fits only for horsdes and Irish. 49 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:29:32 AM by Dr. Sivana ("...a choice between Woke-fevered Democrats and Koch-funded Republicans is insufficient."-Mark Steyn) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Lazamataz They explained, through the son, that corn is what LIVESTOCK ate. You NEVER serve it to a human.

Italians are serious about food, too, and they have no problems making polenta. 50 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:32:17 AM by Dr. Sivana ("...a choice between Woke-fevered Democrats and Koch-funded Republicans is insufficient."-Mark Steyn) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: mplc51 Wait... this cannot be true. Bloomberg and C-NN told me all week long that world leaders knew this G7 would be a complete waste of time, and that nothing would come from it, because the world leaders are sick and tired of Trump!

HOW CAN THIS BE?

51 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:33:16 AM by tcrlaf (They told me it could never happen in America. And then it did....ew) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To: txrefugee But no doubt the Democrat media has already written their reviews and proclaimed the President’s conference as a “failure.” The corrupt spineless media usually follows the New York Times so it'll be 'failure' AND 'racist failure'...

52 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:38:18 AM by GOPJ (Epstein provided white liberal 'elites' with children to rape. The white liberal press ignores ...) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Lazamataz Sweet corn on cob. Butter. Salt. Summer treat.

53 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:39:40 AM by LeonardFMason ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Dr. Sivana Italians are serious about food, too, and they have no problems making polenta. ....and thus the Italian women.

54 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:39:52 AM by Lazamataz (We can be called a racist and we'll just smile. Because we don't care.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To: Dr. Sivana Grains — all of them — are poison.

55 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:40:44 AM by Lazamataz (We can be called a racist and we'll just smile. Because we don't care.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: humblegunner Eurotrash, sure.

However, even trash can be right from time to time.

As evidence, I offer myself.

56 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:41:43 AM by Lazamataz (We can be called a racist and we'll just smile. Because we don't care.) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: bort I won’t dispute that there are healthier foods to eat than corn. However, type two diabetes is caused by obesity and lack of exercise. My brother was diagnosed with type two diabetes. He was significantly overweight. He started lecturing me on my diet. I told him the reason I do not have type two diabetes is that I run on the treadmill 4 to 5 times per week. I told him to do the same and his type two diabetes would go away. He took me up on the challenge, and three months later he was off of the medication for type two diabetes. So yes, Diet does play a role. However, if you exercise frequently, you do not have to worry about acquiring type two diabetes, and if you currently are diagnosed with it, it will go away with the exercise. There is a problem with your formula.

You fail to take into account my incredible laziness.

57 posted on 8/25/2019, 11:42:43 AM by Lazamataz (We can be called a racist and we'll just smile. Because we don't care.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

OPINION: And, The Donald Hits A Home Run Once Again!🏌🏿

0 notes

lunamanar · 7 years ago

Text

I Needed This

This is something I posted a month or two ago, but it was then pointed out that almost all of the links were broken...and at the same time, tumblr enacted their new restrictive linking policy. Meaning almost no one it was directed at actually saw it. I haven’t had the chance to correct the problem until now, and in that short time, the post referred to has climbed to over 14,000 notes. Like...what? Holy crap. Okay.

I wish I could sit down and reply to everyone who responded to the post, but at this point that’s just impossible. Just know, I do see the notes, and I’m grateful for every single one.

Below is the fixed post, as it was supposed to appear in April. If you’ve already read it, feel free to disregard this and scroll on by.

So...I’m gonna do one of my weird things. This isn’t really to do with FFVIII, but...I feel like I owe people this. Because I’ve been watching this silly little writing power build and build and snowball, and...it just seems...so counter to the situation of the people I seem to be reaching, that I can’t just let it sit there and rack up “points” in the form of notes without taking a moment (well, a few hours at this point, but I had the time, and this is what I decided to do with it) to at least acknowledge the response. I’ve received messages from people, a flood of kind comments and tags, I’ve watched people reach out to one another to support them in their writing endeavors. Most of it has been outside this fandom, so...I apologize ahead of time if this is somewhat off-topic.

I really don’t know how to begin talking about this, because I’m terrified it’s going to sound like I’m trying to call as much selfish attention as possible to a viral post I made by total accident. That’s not what I want to do at all, here, and please believe me when I say that I don’t think I did anything to deserve thousands of notes on what amounts to a “top ten” post of personal writing philosophies. When I posted it, I thought it might be helpful to a few very specific people in my immediate fandom circle. I never thought it would escape that circle, much less become the...giant ball of positivity that it has. Not that I’m complaining! I’m so beyond floored that it reached as far as it has, I don’t even know what to feel about it, anymore. I certainly don’t feel like I wrote anything brilliant. More than anything, I’m just...puzzled. And flattered, by how many people have been leaving kind tags and notes for me.

The other thing that I feel about it, though, is...sadness. Sadness that so many people feel such anxiety over their writing abilities. So many personal things have been said on this post, by total strangers, about their struggles with anxiety, depression, trauma, alienation and isolation when it comes to their writing. Some people write thousands of words and post them with bated breath, only to be met with a few hits and no comments. Some people are so certain that they have nothing of value to add that they can’t even bring themselves to start. Some think they’re too old to start now, that all their peers of the same age are so far “ahead” of them, they’ll never have any hope of “catching up.” Some are embarrassed to be writing at all, then they’re unemployed and feel like they should be looking for a “real” job instead of indulging in hobbies. There are so many hundreds of ways writer’s block and blues affects people, and the reality of it is, well...I wish they would all go through the hundreds, even thousands of tags and replies simply so they could see how not alone they are in their struggles. Maybe they could even find other people who would be up to being their reading partner, so they could have someone to trade stories with. So many people posting to a void, and it’s hard to see that it should have to be that way.

So...I mean, I don’t know what this will do, if it will do anything. This makes me feel nervous in itself, actually, because I’m not only reaching out to strangers, I’m going to be tagging people who aren’t even a part of the pleasant little community that is FFVIII. A lot of them. And maybe I’ll screw up...maybe I’ll tag someone who doesn’t want the exposure. I tried to comb through bios and take out anyone who explicitly said they were selective about who they talked to. If I tag you here, and you want me to delete your name, please send me a message and I will do so as soon as I see the request.

But at the very least...I do want everyone I ping in this post to know that someone--me, at least--saw their response, and felt it, too. I want their stories to be written and I want them to find the audience who enjoys those stories. I’m here saying, “hey, I see you. I give a shit.” Even if I don’t know anything about whatever fandom you’re in, or if you’re writing a completely original story, or whatever...it’s important. There is nothing more tragic to me than a story aching to be shared that never sees the light of day.

I also want to acknowledge some potential mistakes I may have made in writing that post (and this one). Few people had anything bad to say about it--and thank you all, for such tolerance of my rambles--but I am certainly not perfect, and I want to try to improve my communication where I can so I do ever less harm.

...I guess I’ll start, then.

Tumblr is chock full of “don’ts” when it comes to writing, and it’s my opinion that there’s just not enough love out there for the simple act of writing, itself a massive investment of time, energy and brain cells. Not every piece you write will be a success, but there is much to be said for the energy it takes to carry a story in your head, let alone take that and translate it into words so others can share the meaning it holds for you.

So, take a look at this. I posted that list sometime in...October 2016? I think? And in 7 months, 11,000 people either liked or reblogged it, and most people who reblogged it left a tag or two. By far, besides your generic “writing” or “writing advice,” the most common tag of note was this:

#I Needed This

...or something to that effect. I tried to find and count as many as I could. And I really want people to see just how many accounts out there who just happened to see a single writing tips list felt that they needed the encouragement. And those were the ones who were able to work up the nerve to say so in the comments or tags. I’m sure many more were too shy (and that’s OK).

@finduilasnumenesse @amid-a-lightless-place @phan-band-fandoms @powerfulweak @kayteonline @anotherwinchesterfangirl @blue-phoenix-tears @requiemforthewolves @indi-flying-with-dragons @puppytoast @bxanxgtan @mcfuzzy20 @hexthespectre @purple-and-red-ribbons @fromotterspace @burn-it-slow @tehartmonkee @dutifullymadameashley @killiandameron @captainpoopweinersoldier @artlessictoan @purrtlepuff @chocolatebunnycake @argent-gale @nothingtoleave @nightmare-fantasia @midniallsnack @andromedas-daughter @my-write-mind @different-principles @tangeythetangerine @c-e-gold @random-alefiasolar @ellebeedarling @droid-to-the-world @xpress--urself @closeonmarksnosedive @thinkblueandr3d @novemblu @leopoldfitz @tonks42 @seraphim-of-the-finale @dragonshost-fanfiction @poketin @ofcoursetheymind @author-of-sins @peetaspikelets @officialao3fandomlastforever @randomfangirllaughs @thereddestglass @gaybirdkid @sailorgreywolf @strangesorceries @thecorruptedquietone @melifair @ganbareno @peanutbutterflutist @bi-antagonist @preciousgaby @atomicpen @mariamagica @comebacknow @reconfemmandoforares @happiestastronaut @marmaladephan @ayumichan46 @sergeantrooper @weldlys @bearlytolerable @thatnewcarsmeli @rozenly @notori @mymomthinksimfunny1 @sylvesterelle @edwardsisland @be-kita

@welkikitty

...I know people tend to not like vertical lists of @’s, but I just...want to illustrate that each of these tumblr names is a person who has a story to tell, is in some way struggling with their confidence level, and often, that lack of confidence is due to obscurity. Frequently, feeling intimidated by the work and popularity of one’s peers is just as pen-stopping.

But just by skimming each of their blogs (which I did, individually--this has taken hours of my time), I can say with certainty that none of these writers are bad ones, and I wish I had the time to sit down and read everything they all had to offer, not just to make them all feel better, but because I am sincerely curious! Look at all the fandoms! Look at all the genres here! This is a veritable cornucopia of colorful ideas and potential. Most of these people are relatively unknown. If you’re in one of the fandoms you see here, aren’t you curious about what you’re missing? Goes double for people who have original novels they’re working on, but have no one to read over their script and help them with it. Seriously, isn’t there something that can be done about that?

The second most popular tag was some variant of “thank you.” Which is very sweet, but I really don’t read that as indicating any virtue of mine so much as just another indication of need, someone who needed to read or hear that their situation isn’t hopeless, they don’t suck, and they can write that story they’re struggling with. They don’t hear anyone else telling them that on any sort of regular basis. Especially for someone who’s still trying to find their footing/niche as a writer, that’s a toxic, tragic state of being if writing is something you love. And for the record, I don’t buy for a second that love is enough to keep someone writing if no one is there to read it. Not for struggling authors and people just starting out. Silence is just as bad as, if not worse than condemnation for emerging writers. It’s one thing for an established writer to let a quiet, or disappointed crowd roll off their backs; they have the experience to know and trust in their own skill, and--largely because they already have a support network--can get back on that horse and keep writing even if they produced a lemon or two. Someone without that experience or support? Silence and strict criticism, more than anything, tends to cause a shutdown. (Yes, I’m aware there are exceptions, but in general, it’s true, and I’ve seen it again and again: “My writing doesn’t meet x standard, so what’s the point in even trying?”)

The point is that you usually have to walk before you run, and you can’t even get that far without support, encouragement, praise and redirection. You don’t even have to be an established mentor, you can be a passerby--hey that’s a nicely worded metaphor, good job...you misspelled “principle,” there--and you cannot understate just how helpful even that little interaction can be, if you’re positive about it. Even if you were flying at one point, it’s possible to fall, and if you do, you’ll need some help picking yourself back up. So when I say “don’t write in a vacuum,” that’s what I mean: even if you don’t show your work to anyone until you finish it, just knowing that there is someone out there waiting to see it, and anticipating it, willing to help you with it if you need it, and cheering you on all the while, is empowering. Isolation, on the other hand, not knowing who if anyone will even care to read your work or like it once it’s done, breeds blank pages and brain fog. Much of creativity is about communication. If there’s no one to communicate with, creativity suffocates. Unless you are a particularly talented introvert, you can only carry on a conversation with yourself for so long before all the words start to sound the same.

So, to @castiel-comatose, to @satari-raine, @referencesforpiamio... to

@blue-phoenix-tears @mama-sally @indi-flying-with-dragons @acidmatze @vanillaroses @fromotterspace @pristinepastel @blankinsidecards @nynynightmare @ruminationandtea @chocowl @chiyala @mag-i-cal @andromedas-daughter @megatraven @the-real-inu-girl @remsyk-blog @universe-apart @xmayleensyo @ellipsesarefun @internallydeceased @kigamin @sweeneymads @wepush @heartofpages @lauralot89 @franzwantscoffee @loveablelevi @poketin @maginpui @richard-of-windoor @yuri-on-ice-ice-babyyyy @azurethoughts @thunderstormsandcuddles @bekasyura @contentmintdraws @kurosakiami01 @strangesorceries @brynnmclean @howtotrainyouragents @lumierc @spywerewolf @yourcouragetothestickingplace @heuvelliedje @kateandtheuniverse @weeardo0 @ayumichan46 @silverbuttercups @rozenly @heartofwriting @darthshizuka @guardianmantis @gladnis-trash @firstorderelite @amiitens

...You’re welcome for the post, but it really was just...that sometimes, *I* feel isolated, and I feel like my writing is shit and no one could possibly care. But experience has taught me that there are so many reasons that’s simply an illogical sentiment, and those ten-ish items help me remember why it’s far more reasonable to assume I’m a good writer who faces the inherent difficulties of publishing in a vast sea of other writers on the Internet. In many ways, including with the list itself, I got lucky, got noticed by other people who already had a lot of followers, and through them I found people who were interested in my work, not because I’m some amazing writer (I’m not...just look at this structural disaster of a post at 5-something in the morning), but because I bothered to reach out in the first place. I’ve made similar posts several times in the past, and they didn’t go anywhere, but this time, I just ran into the right people at the right time. So it got to you, and you commented or tagged, and now you’re on this post with a bunch of other people you probably don’t know. Keep trying, and it happens, eventually. You will be seen.

That’s the real tragedy of all this...your ability to be seen and heard is attributable as much to chance as it is anything else. And you can’t really start to make your own luck until you have some social capital. I have a few followers, and so I hope that posting this can facilitate at least a little bit more luck for everyone I mention. So don’t be scared to respond (reblog--more people see that than when you comment), and say what you’re working on that you want people to see, or that your afraid won’t be finished, or won’t turn out right. Start a conversation about it. Say what about the story is important to you. Reach out. Let people know you have a story you want to tell, one that really matters to you. Maybe give a brief synopsis--you’d be surprised how that can pique someone’s interest. Really, anything. Just keep trying. Over time, people will find you.

Either way, point is, I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, but just because you left a tag on a post that helped you, someone saw you, liked you, and has every confidence that you have beautiful stories in your head that you are more than capable of putting to the keys. Whatever else you do with that information, please do not stop writing, and if you need help, maybe look through some of the people here who are or have been feeling rather invisible--there’s likely someone who shares your interests. Or just reblog, or message me, or message someone you know who maybe you haven’t thought to ask before, whatever it is you feel brave enough to do. If you want to, that is. If you don’t want to, that’s alright. I just...wanted to give everyone I saw a chance, a platform for it.

If I have one thing to add to my list--a #11--it’s that if you have a lack of support, encouragement and visibility in your writing life, you should probably treat that as a primary obstacle to your writing, before you blame yourself or your abilities. Beating yourself up for not being able to grab people’s attention without a preexisting network isn’t fair to you, although the inclination is understandable, given the expectation people tend to have for writers to do exactly that. But the truth is, you owe it to yourself to reserve judgement on your own work until you’ve seen what you can do with that support.

Now that I’ve spend entirely too many words explaining what’s probably a very simple concept, there were a few responses to the post that I felt...like I should answer, specifically. This isn’t because these people are better than anyone in the lists above (in fact many of them are in those lists), it’s simply because they said something I happened to have a specific response to. So...here goes nothing. Making friends, I hope!

@night57byrd

replied to your post

“Things I Try to Remember When I’m Nervous About Writing”

Thank you for this advice and wisdom. I have long harbored dreams of writing but have allowed my inner inner critic hold me back. This posting has given me a tremendous boost. Thank you for the gift.

This was one of the most heartwarming comments I received, and it showed up on my dash on a day where it seemed like everything was just falling apart around me. I should thank you, for giving me the synergy boost to soldier through the rest of a very difficult day. Knowing that at least I’d done something that had helped someone that much helped me make it through without breaking down. So thank you, for your gift of strength to me. I sincerely hope you enjoy getting into the wonderful, if often stormy world of writing (and I hope you’re able to get another season out of Pitch--I’ve been meaning to give that show a shot, along with Southside With You, but it just hasn’t happened for me, yet).

@wtf-and-shit

replied to your post

“Things I Try to Remember When I’m Nervous About Writing”

I really needed this cause I’ve been in a slump of sorts. Even asked myself “what do others want to read?”

And @whenimaunicorn has similar woes:

sometimes i lose my own voice trying to please the whole crowd but i'm just writing 'my' story not 'the' story i gotta remember that

Asking what others want to read (or conversely, what other want you to write) is a nasty trap I’ve fallen into multiple times. It’s not even conscious, half the time, you just start worrying if the words you’re putting on the page are just going to be too weird, to boring, or just not what people want to see. You start tweaking things to better reflect what you think others want to see, and before you know it, you’re writing something you really just don’t care about at all. I really sincerely believe that the best way to keep a story from falling over dead is to be continually invested in the content, even if that means changing the story to accommodate you when your interests change. That can sometimes lead the story in strange directions, but better a story be strange than incomplete, I would think.

Several people commented about calling themselves names:

@freestridingprinces said:

One of my very cute kouhais tagged me in this. I have a terrible habit of doing all of the negative things on this list. I’ve called myself boring many times. I will stop. I would never call anyone else who I’ve ever spoken with boring. So, I’m working on staying positive and nice to myself along with you all. Thank you for being kind to me when I needed it.

while @thecrimsonarcher is similarly inclined:

#10 is my biggest issue. Honestly, judging by the lack of feedback from my writings, I have come to the conclusion that my writings lack creativity because I am unable to hold anyone’s attention. My story is a mixture between Lovecraftian horror, psychological horror, and Southern gothic. Nobody wants to read that during this day in age.

and further notes the difficulties of competing with erotica (sorry, I switch the order of paragraphs for effect):

It’s made worse when no one gives me feedback or likes the post. Was my story really that bad? Did it suck so bad it didn’t warrant a response? More often than not, I find myself deleting my progress that I post on Facebook or Tumblr. If no one will give it the time of day, why even post it? What’s the point? The only way you’ll ever get recognized for writing on Tumblr is if you do fanfics, especially erotic fanfics.

I suspect one of the reasons fanfiction is as popular as it is, is that you automatically have something of a fan base right from the getgo, because the material in question is...well, by definition, a product of fandom. It’s also just a fact of life that people love smut, and often they love it for smut’s sake, rather than paying much attention to the quality of the writing. And that’s fine! But it does make things complicated when what you write is not smut.

One thing I would recommend is looking up some good Genfic groups. Even if you’re not planning on writing exclusively sex/relationship-free stuff, they might be a good place to start with short stories, just to build an audience and start working in the right direction to find more people who are looking for more than just getting off.

@dust2dust34 chimed in,

i've been very unkind to myself lately with blood hands very unkind

and @headphonesandbackpack also gives themselves a hard time,

#i need to keep that in mind #also i tend to hate my writing style #i think it's incredibly boring #i bore the shit out of myself while boring #but my french teachers seem to love what i write??? #and when i read it like a year later i think it's not that bad #i guess i need to believe in myself

There’s a lot of people out there who beat themselves up over their percieved skill level:

@lechatrouge673: I HAVE A CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE AT LEAST ONCE A WEEKAND I FEEL LIKE AN UTTER FRAUD

@ishipmyselfwitheveryone: +sometimes i call myself 'useless sack of severed cocks' when i won't write good +maybe that's part of my problem

(Well...tbh, yes? haha, I can think of several politicians who are far more deserving of being called that right now...*ahem* ANYWAY...)

@dragonsinparis has some strong feelings (that I agree with) while falling to #10 even in tags:

#i'm a lazy enough writer that i only actually get off my ass if there's a story i desperately want that I can't find #(hence state of grace and this isn't what we meant especially) #but what you're looking for that you can't find can be as simple as a style or an aspect or a moment or a choice #which means that it is still rooted in your voice #ANYWAY EVERYONE KEEP WRITING #STORIES BUILD COMPASSION AND IF THERE IS ANYTHING WE NEED MORE OF IN THE WORLD IT IS THAT

So the self-berating issue seems to be pretty common, if completely unnecessary. Again the ability--or inability--to be able to get the words out perfectly is held as a measure of one’s talent or potential, and frustration with that and/or a lack of feedback leads to self-abuse--or it seems that way to me, correct me if I’m wrong, or want to add to this analysis. I’m no expert...but I remember that’s kinda how it worked, for me. I thought I should be able to just be better, and additionally, I didn’t want anyone to think I was stuck-up or pretentious about my work, so I said a lot of damaging things about myself and my writing, just to keep my expectations down so I could avoid disappointment. Problem was, the more I said it, the more I believed it, and the harder it was to actually feel like writing was worth the effort. It wasn’t until very recently I found enough support for that behavior to change, and I’m much less likely to put myself down nowadays.

Several people were just happy that kindness showed up in their feed:

@litwww: Thank you, kind person who randomly appeared on my dash ❤

@letspartyrightnowplease: I really needed this right now as I’ve been struggling and stressing the heck out

@zodiacdog101: Thanks dude this helped through the slump I’m going through

@classicbkrder815: Reblog. Thanks i needed this today. Lol I’m going to read it everyday to inspire myself.

@orcaspanielmermaids: These are some of the kindest words I’ve received all week, after struggling with RL issues on top of fighting to get out of the corner I’ve written myself into. Thank you, OP. <3

@gymleader-nick: You have no idea how bad I needed to hear this right now.

I swear I’m not including these to fan my ego, I was just very surprised how many people seemed surprised to find something encouraging on their dash. I am very happy that the list helped! I hope it continues to. But as @dragonsinparis opined above, encouragement and compassion in the writing world appear to be in lamentably short supply.

Guilt over breaks, unfinished work and asking for attention also seems to be a big culprit of empty-page syndrome:

@beqm: I love the ‘You’re allowed to take breaks.“ Because right now I feel like I’m being a horrible slacker. I want to write but everything else seems to bee getting in the way.

@perpetuallyfive: #the guilt is what makes writing the hardest for me? #any time i'm struggling with something and think ''maybe switch to another piece for now'' i feel bad #any time i ask someone to look at my stuff #anytime i want to say i'm trying to write a thing and i worry i won't finish in time and then all i can think is that i never finish in time #i sometimes try not to even post a thing until another thing is half finished because there are those times when no one cares #about that last thing you posted and it's SO DISCOURAGING #like you accept that you just write for you but it makes it hard to continue the next thing when you can't stop thinking you know #maybe you're not that good anymore #maybe you never were maybe it was just the fandom you were in was fucking thirsty #writing is the worst honestly except for those limited few times when it's the best #(i've been trying to write lately. if you couldn't tell.) #anyway i'm going to reread this list a lot right now.

@icybluepenguin: #I wish I were better talking about my stories with other writers #It always helps #But I always feel so guilty

@woodlandcrowns: I'd love to have a support circle of [fanfiction] writers--or even for original stuff at timesbut I believe I'd be a bother

@effinunicorns: I need to work on the 'talking to people about my fic' thing more but it feels so awkward

#7 of the list is a quick reminder for me that however many unfinished works I have that I never tell anyone about, there are just as many behind all the finished, polished stories I see on the AO3 pages of my friends. And hey, some people are simply more prolific than others, and that’s all right. Has no bearing on your worth as a writer if you cannot churn out chapter after chapter. Focus on what you want to do, what’s exciting for you to write right now. Then go for it. At some point, you’re going to get absorbed in one of those projects until it’s finished. It might take a while, even years, but it will happen, and you’ll find your groove along the way.

I should’ve made a 7.1: the number of finished works is not a measure of whether you’re a good writer. It’s worth considering that the purpose of writing, as an art, isn’t always to follow a story all the way to completion. If writing is a sort of “zen” thing for you, something you do to explore ideas for yourself, communicate them to others, and just enjoy and grow as a person through the process, it really doesn’t matter if the stories go unfinished, as long as you benefit from the exercise. Writing can be as much akin to meditation as it can be a job that you live off of. If that’s how it works for you, it’s still legit and you can still be extremely good at it. Even if you never finish a single piece, if it’s making your life better, don’t sweat it. Enjoy your talent for what it is. You can always hone it, but if the process of trying is both failing and causing you to lose confidence or self-esteem, maybe your writing pattern and skill is just different from that of the typical “career writer.” Maybe not, but it’s worth thinking about, and if that’s how it is for you, don’t let anyone tell you that you suck just because.

A lot of people are scared/already convinced that nothing they produce is any good and no one wants to read it:

@formsans96: I just feel that no one does like them that much. Even my finished works.

@canadian-buckbeaver: I keep looking at the views and kudos of other stories and it immediately affects me. “Why am I not that popular?” “Am I not that good?” But then I read everyone’s comments… immediately feel better.

@noodle-dogs: #I HAVE LIKE....3 BIG PLOTS IN MY HEAD RN #BUT IM JUST SCARED MY WRITING WONT BE GOOD ENOUGH

@decembercamiecherries: I get really nervous when writing WTWFI'm scared it won't turn out good and pple will be disappointed

@talentlessandoptimistic: #the downside is I'm literally the only person who wants to read it #which is why I don't share it

@sandrasr91: sometime I want to write but I don't know if it'll be any good

@itsactuallycorrine: # i keep telling myself i just need to put words on the page # but i'm at the halfway point and doubting everything

This is writer anxiety #1, and I’m 100% convinced that (in addition to the effects of more uncontrollable factors such as clinical depression and other intrusive MI in some individuals) it results from a lack of support. If no one ever reads your stuff or says anything good about it, how are you supposed to know if it’s an effective piece of writing or not?

That’s another way of combating writing anxiety: Don’t judge stories in terms of “good” and “bad.” I tend to think of most stories as “good,” even if they’re poorly written. We all wrote crappy stories before we wrote “good” ones, but it was still good that we went through the experience of writing the crappy ones, and old stories still have a certain charm about them.

Rather, I try to look at stories in terms of their effectiveness: did they reach the reader on a personal level? Did I communicate what I wanted to say? If so, then the piece was a success, was effective. If not, it was an ineffective piece, and I’ll just have to work on making sure the next one comes across more clearly.

But nothing, no philosophy, no reminders, no lists can substitute for friends and writing/reading buddies. It’s so important to establish those, or you’re likely to feel isolated and distraught when you post your blood sweat and tears to a brick wall and receive nothing in response for your efforts.

If you’re not writing fanfiction, there is a group called Critters (critters dot org) that I cannot recommend highly enough. They call themselves a “workshop,” but really, they’re a fantastic resource for submitting manuscripts for (gentle, but useful!) critique. There’s a very reasonable, common-sense but quite in-depth etiquette for critting others’ work (people tell you when you do something RIGHT, too!), and you are required to critique a few short stories before you can submit your own, but it’s not hard, and gives you a lot of great practice on both giving and receiving writing assistance. I used this group for a few years while I was unemployed, and the people there are wonderful and helped me a great deal. Do give it a look if you’re having a hard time finding anyone to read your work. You’ll make some friends!

There was one comment that caught my eye on this note:

@mamakat926: All good things I need to remember when I’m struggling to write my first fanfic…

I wish you the best of luck! The first one is always hard. And even though you’re writing fanfiction, it’s worth having a look at Critters (critters dot org)! There’s so many resources there to help you get off the ground with your first attempts.

Of course, I have to mention the lovely @lidicores, who translated the entire post into Portuguese. I can’t read a lick of it, but that was awesome, haha!

I needed this right now. I’ve been lacking drive to write since last november. The emptiness is excrucianting. Then a week ago a friend asked me about the story and I suddenly started to think about it again. I even reread some chapters… hopefully I’ll be back soon. Hopefully…

Oh, English is not my first language, so, don’t you worry, I’m not this bad writing in Portuguese. LOL

Having two or more languages under your belt already gives you a leg up on most writers. I hope you’re able to get back into it, soon.

Several people expressed concern about coming back to writing after a long hiatus:

@mxrdins: #i wanna start writing fanfics too :( #i mean long ones in englisn #but am i too late with it #after all im 18 lol and there is a looooong break behind me in writing

@sazula: I haven't written anything in so long but i want to

@arie-172: # i need to remind myself of so many of these# idk but it's been so long since i've written something that i had forgotten what it was to feel this way# you know the way in which you kind of second guess everything

@dragontameroutofcharacter: mmmmm i feel like this is · why i can't write lately tho · there isn't · anything i want to read · like honestly lately i just · want to sleep · i work and i come home and i try to stay awake until evening · i've got books i was so excited to get · that i'm still not reading · haven't even started · i miss writing ·

Just like when you’re first starting out, getting back into it is a question of connection and support, knowing who and what your resources are, and using them. And patience with, and compassion for yourself. You can’t expect the first thing you produce to be as clean as the last thing you wrote before your hiatus, so avoid comparing them. Maybe you want to try a new style or a different perspective, just for fun or to keep the results from being comparable in the first place. I really hope all of you are able to dive back in, though. And 18 is not at all too old! I skipped 3 years of writing between 16 and 19, and it didn’t take me long to get back up to speed.

One person expressed skepticism at the implications of needing/taking writing advice from a tumblr post:

@epherians: #I DON'T FEEL SURE WHEN I HAVE TO FIND COMFORT IN WRITING ADVICE POSTS…

I understand and even share this sentiment, and of course you’re perfectly welcome to throw all this out the window with no resentment from my end! But...I’m curious, have you ever seen the movie, Adaptation? If not, you really should. Even though it has Nick Cage in it. Or because it does, depending on your persuasion.

Now, to a few slightly more personal responses. The first is more of a question, because I spotted this tag in one of the reblogs: ableist language ...I wanted to ask, @arathergrimreaper, was this meant to note that I used such language in my post? If so, please let me know where I messed up so I can fix it! And I’m quite sorry if I injured anyone with some bad wording in there.

@theladyjanes used the tag such powerful words for the post, and that...I dunno, it just hit me hard. Thank you. Powerful is not often a word that is used to describe me or what I say, so I appreciate it, a lot.

@americannoteven said,

#I've reread this about 15 times now #each time feels more and more personal #bc fuck #I should... stop being so hard on myself

Yes, please...if you can manage it, give yourself a break. I hope that the list helped you, and I hope you work through your writing struggles soon. My message and ask boxes are always open, to everyone. =)

@xbean wrote,

#It's taken me a while to get back into it especially when someone you called your best friend read one and made you feel like shit after the

Okay so this messed with me, because...well, because this happened to me several years ago. And I’m sorry, so sorry that that happened to you. It’s a horrible, awful feeling. I hope you can get back into the swing of writing--and if you have to, use spite and resentment to fuel your determination to write, no matter what anyone thinks about it. It’s yours. Do your thing! The best antidote for the shame and hurt is to just keep writing, and when you finally get through the pain, you will have leaned an incredible amount about what parts of your writing are yours and how to discard the pieces you put in there simply to please others. Be strong, you can make it through.

@bamfcoyotetango raged,

FUCK IF I DIDN'T NEED THIS AFTER THE SHIT SHOW THAT GREETED MY LATEST CHAPTER

29 HITS FOR A CHAPTER NEARLY 2K LONG

Another awful feeling, working especially hard on a story or chapter, only to have no one comment, and hardly anyone even look at it.

It likely isn’t that your writing is bad or even ineffectual, though. It could have been a bad time of day to post. Your normal readers just might not have been available. Did you let anyone know that the chapter was up? Try pinging them, if not. In any case, don’t immediately think that silence means it sucked and no one liked it, or that it was too boring for strangers to notice. True is, it’s really hard to make a title that gets people’s attention without designing it as pure clickbait (and if you’ve avoided that nasty habit, good on you!).

I hope your next chapters garner more interest. Out of curiosity, what’s the story about?

@takemeawaymothman said, this last one really like? got to me

-- and it seems like, while #1 (write what you want to read) was the most popular/cited, #10 (don’t call yourself names) had the strongest reaction...a few tags suggesting it pulled some tears. I’m a little curious as to why that is...is it really so rare for anyone to tell you that you are not stupid? Gosh...I want to give all of you hugs, haha!

(also, cool account name!)

@bastian-casillas-fussballgott (omg, I spelled it!) simply said, this means a lot to me. This seems like one of those quiet, but profound statements, and I’m happy that this little list was so meaningful. I hope it helps.

@fireferns said,

#making a bunch of these things stuff i think and believe had helped my writing more than anything

And I wholeheartedly agree that...nothing on that list really does anything to help if you do not internalize it. It has to be something you’re just as willing to tell other people. And it’s not comprehensive! Nor is it for everyone. Many people mentioned that they actually do write better without any outside interference. That’s great--the list was just my list, and I think everyone would probably benefit from making their own, tailoring it to what works best for their writing style.

@infinitelystrangemachinex echoes my feelings:

#I am nervous about writing 100% of the time#It is the most stressful and unforgiving thing I have ever done and ever will do#but I also love it more than anything

Yes, yes! Even writing this, I am constantly thinking about how it all can go wrong, how people might be mad at me for @’ing them, or think I’m creepy for having gone through all the notes and read them...but, I just have this thing I have to get out, you know, and as terrifying and sometimes heartbreaking as it has been, nothing has ever been more rewarding to me, or caused so much positive growth in me, than my writing. And if I don’t constantly defy my anxiety, it takes hold of me and paralyzes me. So, writing is not just important. To me, it’s necessary. I imagine it’s that way for many other people, too.

@pandora15 had a conundrum:

#this is giving me inspiration to work on my clone wars fic

#but like

#i have an exam tomorrow

#so i shouldn't

#ugh but I WANT TO

#this is hard

I have to know...what did you choose?

@thetamburlaine got excited about their AU plotbunny--er, porpoise?:

this actually got me writing right away after a few weeks slump the two first points did it i think anyway for future encouragement free willy au here i come

WOW, I’m glad it helped that much--and also, wow again, a Free Willy AU? I’d never have imagined there would be fanfiction for that movie, but now that I think about it, it kinda makes sense. I’m very curious!

@irresistible-revolution said that #i might be crying #the blogger had an emotional day y'all and I really hope that wasn’t a bad thing. I don’t want my post to have made things worse! I hope you’re all right.

And finally, @positivelycurious writes #needed this as I'm attempting to finally write a memoir -- A memoir, really? That’s awesome, I’ve never met anyone who’s written one, before. Good luck!

Um...okay, I think that’s all. I know that there will be more notes after this date (05/07/2017), but unfortunately it will be very hard for me to separate old from new comments and tags, so I may never be able to get to answering any more. Sorry about that, but please know that I read everything, even tags, and this post has just gone on an unbelievable journey through so many people, if only briefly. I appreciate all the feedback and hope it continues to help others get out of their writer’s block.

I also apologize if this post is in any way out of line or uncomfortable to those I’ve tagged in it. I mulled for a long time on whether or not to do it this way, rather than just sending individual messages to everyone I mention here. Again, if you want to be removed from this post, tell me and I will do so immediately. The reason I made this post is at least partially based on a post I made about two years ago, where I called out as many of my followers as I could to tell them how and why I was thankful for them. Really, that’s what I’m trying to do here, too. Although most of you do not follow me, and honestly, you probably have no reason to start, just being aware of you and your writing troubles, and the fact that I may have helped them just a little bit, makes you all very important to me. There’s so much creativity out there and I hate to see it bottled. Your gratitude and thanks have been a constant stream of comfort during a terribly stressful time in my life, and for that, I really cannot thank you enough.

Even though we’re complete and total strangers, I know you matter, and so do your stories. Do not give up on them. The world is better if they’re written, that they might fall into the hands of someone who needs them.

-Luna

#misc #writing #writer problems #response post #long post #longpost #stories are important #please tell yours #even if it's fiction #there is nothing fictional about the comfort of fictional things #not video games #essay #okay #this is my last attempt #if tumblr breaks it again...oh well #we'll see

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