#extraordinary machine universe

[lilislegacy]

imagine being someone at new rome university and not knowing percy is the same guy as “percy jackson, son of poseidon, two-time hero of olympus, former praetor” because the thought doesn’t even cross your mind. like… he’s percy. he’s a total frat boy. on a normal night, he walks into a party, refers to everyone as bro or dude, socializes with every living (and not-living) person in the room, makes at least 50 sarcastic comments, plays 12 rounds of beer pong, drinks way too much, and then skates around campus on his skateboard yelling “I LOVE NEW YORK” (which makes no sense, because they’re in california) until someone calls his girlfriend to come get him.

and then one day there’s an attack, and frat boy percy is all of a sudden a fighting machine. he’s yelling battle cries alongside the praetors frank zhang and hazel levesque as they lead everyone into battle. (why is he with the praetors? and why…. why in the world do the praetors seem to be following his lead?) his sword slashes through armies of monsters faster than you’ve ever seen. he’s controlling the entire river surrounding the camp, creating huge waves as tall as skyscrapers that crash down all around him, wiping out monsters and causing mass destruction to his enemies’ ranks. the sky is suddenly dark above you, ice-cold water droplets are slashing through the air, and the wind is blowing so aggressively that it’s making it hard to stand up steadily. because he’s somehow created a hurricane.

and he looks terrifying. you can feel the power radiating off of him. he’s like a god. or maybe a monster. it’s hard to tell. you’re a little scared of him, to be honest. but also in total awe, because it’s extraordinary. he’s extraordinary.

frat boy percy is not who you thought he was.

[theostrophywife]

kiss with a fist | chapter one.

masterlist 💋 chapters 💋 playlist

pairing: theodore nott x reader.

song inspiration: kiss with a fist - florence and the machine.

author's note: i'm so excited to share this series with everyone. this was literally meant to be a one shot fic but i have no self control therefore it spiraled into a whole series. without further ado, please enjoy the first chapter and let me know what you think 🤎

Wit beyond measure is a man’s greatest treasure. 

Intelligence, knowledge, wisdom. These were the traits that Ravenclaws valued most, but if the founder of your house could see you now, Rowena Ravenclaw would probably roll over in her grave. 

Because there was nothing smart about falling in love with Theodore Nott. 

In fact, it might be the most idiotic thing you’ve ever done in your entire life. 

So why did it feel so bloody exhilarating? 

To understand your descent into madness, it was prudent to trace the events back to point zero. 

It was a rainy September afternoon, unusually dreary even for the Scottish Highlands. The first week of your return to Hogwarts had been chaotic to say the least. Between performing your prefect duties by showing the first years around the castle and dealing with the clueless third year that accidentally set off Weasleys' Wildfire Whiz-bangs in the Great Hall, you were absolutely knackered by the time Friday rolled around. 

Unfortunately, you had no time to rest. Even though the term just started, you were already spending much of your nights studying until your eyes felt like they were going to fall out of your skull. Tonight, you were in the potions laboratory tackling a particularly stubborn advanced draught. No matter how hard you tried, you just couldn’t figure it out. 

You dropped a sprig of wormwood into the cauldron and stirred counterclockwise then clockwise, just like the recipe instructed. The concoction bubbled to the surface. Holding your breath, you peered into the mixture with hope that this try would finally turn out successful. The potion turned a vibrant magenta color before exploding all over the front of your uniform. 

Sadly, this was the closest you’d come to brewing the Angel’s Trumpet Draught. You sighed, wiping down your tie with a washcloth. It did nothing except make the mess worse. What you needed was a good old fashioned soak.

Luckily, you had access to the prefect’s bathroom on the fifth floor. During this time of night, it would be gloriously empty. Giving you the perfect opportunity to wallow in bubbles and self pity. 

The trek from the dungeons to the fifth floor was fortunately uneventful. The hallways were dark and quiet, allowing you to slink off to the bathroom in peace. With a whisper of pine fresh, the pearly gates opened.

You turned on the faucets, setting the temperature just below boiling and dispensing herbs and fragrances into the tub. When you were finally satisfied, you quickly discarded your soiled clothes and eagerly stepped into the warm bath. The scent of rosewater and pink himalayan salt instantly relaxed you. 

You sighed deeply, leaning against the marble tile and closing your eyes. This was definitely not the way you thought seventh year would go. Your last year at Hogwarts was supposed to be the highlight of your academic career. While your housemates fretted and fussed over quidditch games and blood moon balls, you refused to take your eyes off the prize.

Ever the diligent student, you had no interest in extracurriculars unless it brought you closer to your dream of becoming an accomplished potions master, which would hopefully catch the eye of the Most Extraordinary Society of Potioneers. Joining the prestigious group was a dream that you had been working towards since first year. Blood, sweat, and tears had gone towards achieving this goal, especially during your most recent break. 

You spent the entire holiday interning at the Brewery, attending lectures at the Magical Division of the University of Oxford, and you had not only completed the assigned reading for your Advanced Potions class, but Professor Slughorn’s personal recommendations as well. All of that hard work should have placed you ahead of the curve, but your class rank remained the same as always. 

Second. 

Not first.

Never first.

No, that spot belonged to that rich infuriating smartass pureblooded motherfu—

“Theodore Nott,” you said, lacing your voice with as much venom as you could muster. 

Between the pale moonstone pillars stood the source of your academic anguish. Theodore was dripping sweat, his green and silver quidditch jersey covered in mud and grime. The prefect badge pinned to his robe was barely visible, more brown than silver. His curly brown hair fell erratically across his cheekbones as he brushed a stray strand away to squint in the faint light. 

The side of his mouth quirked up into a smirk when he recognized you. “You know, most people just call me Theo.” His gaze lingered on your form, which was barely covered by pink suds. “Especially those who know me rather intimately.”

You flushed in response. Amusement danced in his watercolor eyes, which seemed brighter now thanks to his sun kissed complexion. Knowing Nott, he probably spent his summer laying out in the Italian sun while attractive witches fed him grapes by hand. You didn’t get a tan like that from holing up in the English countryside with nothing but a boiling cauldron and a dusty textbook for company. He didn’t even have the audacity to pretend like he was worried about his class ranking. The bastard. 

“Every rule has its exception, Theodore,” you gritted out. “Now get the fuck out.” 

He cocked his head, sending a mass of wavy brown locks to spill to one side. “You’re right. Most people don’t usually say my name like it’s an unforgivable, but I guess you’re special in that way, diavolina mia.”

Little devil, Nott's idea of a fond nickname, irritated you to no end. Your annoyance only made him use it more. Gods, what a wanker. 

“Are you deaf or just thick? This bathroom is occupied,” you huffed, sinking lower into the bubbles. “Leave before I scream bloody murder.” 

Theo smirked. “Oh, I guarantee you’ll be screaming.” He kicked his shoes off, leaving them in a messy pile beside your own neatly arranged boots. “Though the only thing I’ll be murdering is that pu—”

The glare you sent his way would have sent lesser men running for the Forbidden Forest. “I’m serious, Nott. I’ve had a terrible fucking day and I am not giving up the bath.” 

“Neither am I,” he countered. “Practice was brutal. I ate shit on the pitch and all I want to do is to reap my prefect benefits via bubble bath. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to learn how to share, sweetheart.”

You watched in stunned silence as he peeled off his jersey. The moonlight streamed through the glass stained windows, painting him in a surreal sort of light. There was no ounce of shame to be found in Theodore Nott as he stripped off his trousers and stood stark naked in the middle of the bathroom. 

Look away, you thought. Look the fuck away now.  

But like a moth to a flame, you found yourself horribly drawn to the cocky, arrogant, son of a bludger. His tall frame cut an imposing figure in the dark as slivers of moonlight danced across his ridiculously toned chest and well-defined abs. He was neither brawny nor scrawny, but somewhere in the middle, which unfortunately happened to be your sweet spot. 

To make matters worse, the smug prick seemed perfectly aware of your ogling. You could’ve sworn Theo flexed as he stalked towards you. Unlike most boys his age, he wasn’t awkward or bumbling. Theo was confident in his body. Too confident. 

You sighed. “Can you at least attempt to be decent?” 

“Why? It’s not like you haven’t seen it all before.”

As if you needed a reminder of this ongoing tryst between you. Theo waded to your side, leaning his head back as the warm water sloshed around him. His eyes fluttered close, those thick lashes of his kissing the top of his cheekbones. Water trickled down his collarbone and you had to fight the urge to lean over and lick it off. 

“I told you, last time was—“ 

“The last time,” Theo finished. “I’m perfectly aware, principessa. You say it every time.” 

“I mean it this time.” 

He cocked his head, flashing those hypnotizing eyes at you. “Oh?” Theo drawled slowly, reaching out to brush a wayward lock of hair that had escaped from your braid. “Did my poor little Ravenclaw finally find the courage to say no to the big bad Slytherin?” 

Your breath hitched as he pressed his lips against your throat. “Fuck,” you whispered. 

“Go on then, love,” Theo hummed against your skin. He kissed the sensitive spot beneath your earlobe, making you involuntarily arch into him. Slender fingers wrapped around the base of your throat, holding you in place. “Tell me what you want, diavolina.” 

You sighed in defeat. “Stop being an asshole and kiss me, Nott.” 

Theo grabbed the back of your head and crashed his lips against yours like a man starved. After months of going without, you came to the horrid realization that you craved this as much as he did. You crawled into his lap, straddling him as he gripped your hips hard enough to leave bruises. 

I am a stupid girl, you thought. A stupid, horny girl who had no business snogging Theodore Nott. 

One, you were bitter rivals. Two, Theo awakened a dangerous side of you that defied all logic. This whole fucked up situation started because of your lapse of judgment last winter. As always, Theo had said or done something to annoy you during class and in return you hexed his drink to taste like dragon dung. He retched for a week straight. Somehow Snape found out that you were to blame and placed both of you in detention.

One thing led to another in the potions classroom and you ended up with your skirt around your waist and Theo’s head between your legs. You quickly resolved that the only way to shut him up was to keep him occupied and occupied he was. Ever since then, the two of you had been at it like rabbits. 

You thought that you would leave all of it behind in sixth year, but barely a week into this term and you were already repeating the pattern. 

“I’ve been thinking about this all summer,” Theo groaned into your mouth. 

“That’s cute, Nott,” you responded sarcastically. “Miss me over the holidays, did you?”

Theo rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. Don’t act like you haven’t been thinking about this too. You’ve been testier than a Hungarian Horntail since the minute you got off the platform. I could tell that you haven’t been properly fucked since our little impromptu goodbye in the broom closet last spring.” 

“You’re absolutely repulsing.” 

He smirked. “Then why are you pulling me closer?” 

You rolled your eyes. “Shut up and fuck me before I change my mind.” 

“You could say please.” 

“I could,” you said with a shrug before gripping his cock and lining him up at your entrance. Theo groaned as you sank down into him with a satisfied little smirk. “But I won’t.” 

The moan that came out of his mouth barely sounded human. “Fuck,” he said, burying his head in the crook of your neck. “How do you always feel so fucking good?” 

You knew what he meant. As much as you hated to admit it, Theo was right. You hadn’t gotten properly laid since your last tryst. There had been other boys this summer, but none of them made you feel like this. Because sex with Theo wasn’t just sex. It was warfare. You fucked like you both had something to prove. 

Even now, as you grinded your hips against him, Theo thrusted upwards with equal force like you were competing for the bloody house cup. You ran your fingers through his hair, frowning a little. 

“What?” Theo asked. 

“Did you cut your hair?” 

He grinned as he trailed kisses along your jaw. “You don’t like it?”

“Less to hold onto.”

“Don’t worry dolcezza,” Theo chuckled darkly. He squeezed your thighs and pressed you against him roughly. “I’ll make sure to hold on tight for the both of us.”

You hummed in agreement before sinking down again, setting a steady rhythm as you rode him with reckless abandon. For someone who valued logic, every ounce of common sense you possessed went out the window when it came to this infuriating boy. 

Maybe you were a masochist. But as Theo thrust sharply into you, the stupid little voice in your head said that you didn’t really mind the pain. 

You moaned as Theo tilted your chin, capturing your lips with his. It was a clash of tongue and teeth as you fought for dominance, putting your bodies to the test. He knew exactly what buttons to press, which sensitive spots to hit, how to challenge you physically and mentally. 

“Gods, right there.” You whimpered, digging your fingernails into his back. Theo’s hypnotizing eyes snapped to yours, piercing through every layer until you felt even more bare than you already were. “Don’t fucking stop, please.”

He smirked. “So you do have bedside manner after all.” 

“Not for you,” you said as you grinded down hard, making Theo bite into your shoulder. 

“Salazar fucking save me,” he grunted. 

“Your founder can’t save you now, Nott.” 

“Cruel, ruthless woman.” Theo looked up at you like he was praying to the stars. His movements stilled as your gazes collided. “Tell me you missed this. Tell me that no one else makes you feel like this.” 

You whined at the loss of friction. “You’ve picked a shit time to get all sentimental on me, Nott.”

“It’s not sentiment, it’s the truth,” Theo declared, thrusting lazily. “And I want to hear you say it.” 

“Why?”

“Call it curiosity,” he said casually. “I want to know if I measure up to the boys back in Oxford.”

Not even close, you thought. But you were not about to admit that out loud. 

“Curiosity killed the cat, you know.” 

Theo chuckled before sinking his teeth into your neck. “But I’m not a cat, little bird. I’m a snake and I’m coiled around you ready to strike if you say the word.” 

You shivered slightly. This constant back and forth, all the bickering and banter, was just you and Theo’s sick and twisted version of foreplay. Gods, you fucking missed it. 

“Fine,” you grumbled. “Theodore Nott, you are an infuriating little shit but you fuck like an absolute demon. I missed sneaking around with you in the broom closet, the charms classroom, the astronomy tower, and wherever else we managed to defile in this bloody castle. Is that what you wanted to hear?” 

The shiteating grin on his face almost made you want to take it all back, but then he flipped you over, laying you down on the cold marble tile and staring at you with so much lust in his eyes that you felt the depths of his desire in your core. He crawled over you, water trickling down his tanned skin. 

“Close enough,” he remarked before hiking your leg over his shoulder and burying himself so deep that you clawed the edge of the tub to keep yourself from slipping. 

The rest of it was a blur of skin on skin as Theo unleashed himself on you. His mouth, his fingers, his cock were all just tools of seduction that he wielded with lethal precision. 

The pleasure washed over you in waves, crashing again and again as he made you cum not once, not twice, but a total of three times. By the time he reached his peak, you were so exhausted that the two of you collapsed in the dark. 

You laid side by side, staring up at the domed glass ceiling in stunned silence. After a moment, Theo turned over to face you.

“So?” 

“So what?”

“Did I manage to knock that stick out of your arse?”

You rolled your eyes, pushing off the tile. “And that’s my cue to leave.”

“I’m kidding. I’m good, but I’m not that good,” Theo teased, following closely behind as you put your clothes back on. He eyed the bright magenta stain on the front of your uniform. “What happened there? Did you murder some poor unsuspecting pygmy puff?” 

“No, but I did a number on the potions lab,” you lamented with a sigh. “That stupid Angel’s Trumpet Draught is bloody impossible to brew.” 

“That old thing?” Theo asked, pulling out a fresh set of clothes from his quidditch bag. “I finished it ages ago.” 

You gaped, nearly tumbling over your own skirt. “How? I followed the recipe word for word and this disastrous stain was all I managed to achieve.”

“Sometimes you have to go off the book,” he replied. “Experiment a little.” 

“No thanks, I’d rather keep all my limbs intact.”

“I think you’re doing a rather splendid job of endangering yourself all on your own,” Theo said sarcastically. He cocked his head as you slipped on your boots. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll show you how to brew the draught in exchange for a favor.” 

You narrowed your eyes in suspicion. “What kind of favor?” 

“That’s for me to decide and for you to accept.” 

“I’d rather not give an egomaniac a nuclear advantage.” 

Theo rolled his eyes. “Do you want my help or not, diavolina?” 

“Fine,” you said with a sigh. “But only because I’m desperate.” 

“Words every bloke is dying to hear.” 

Without a word, he tossed a mass of balled up fabric in your direction. “What’s this?” 

“A jumper, an article of clothing generally worn to retain warmth in colder climates,” Theo deadpanned.

“I know what a jumper is, you tosser. Why are you giving it to me?” 

“Because, you’ll get a cold walking around like that,” Theo explained with a longsuffering sigh as though you were a clueless first year. The corners of his mouth quirked up. “Plus, I can see your nipples through your blouse and as much as I enjoy the view, I doubt that flashing Filch is at the top of your bucket list.” 

“You truly are appalling,” you replied, shrugging the slightly faded jumper on. The thing was so worn that you couldn’t even make out the inscription on the front. The fabric swallowed you whole, skimming the top of your thighs. It also smelled like sea salt and smoke and boy. One boy in particular. 

“You’re welcome, sweetheart.” He grinned, showing off those stupid little dimples of his. “Meet me in the potions lab tomorrow. Eight o’clock sharp, just like old times. And bring a muffin.” 

“For the draught?’ 

“No, for me.” Theo said, holding the door open. “I’ll need motivation if I’m spending my Saturday morning with you.” 

You slipped into the hallway and flipped him the bird. His laughter followed you in the dark like an annoying shadow.

“See you tomorrow, my little pygmy puff!”

Taglist: @annaisabookworm@marina468@yaraasthings @the0doreslover@bubybubsters@moony-artemis @natasha887@lucyysthings@criesinlies @bunnymallowo@niktwazny303@letmedownslows @siriuslyalovergirl@wordsarelife@clairesjointshurt @daydreamingabthar @mishtay @cherry-hoe  @littlebookbengal @maybefoxysouls @nomup  @aliensknowmyillusions

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

The Chic Magazine interview with the Good Omens cast and crew by Keeley Ryan, August 2023 :)

'It was wonderful to get the Good Omens family back together'

There were plenty of miracles, mysteries and mayhem when Good Omens returned to the small screen for a second season.

The PrimeVideo series, which was originally based on Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's best-selling novel, is heading beyond the source material this season.

The six-part series highlights the ineffable friendship between Aziraphale, a fussy angel and rare-book dealer, and the fast-living demon Crowley.

And while the duo put a stop to the apocalypse last time, there are the sparks of a new mystery that will take viewers from before The Beginning, to biblical times to grave robbing in Victorian Edinburgh; the Blitz of 1940s England to the modern day.

The cast includes David Tennant and Michael Sheen as Crowley and Aziraphale, Jon Hamm, Maggie Service, Nina Sosanya, Miranda Richardson, Shelley Conn, and Derek Jacobi also star in the series.

And Michael Sheen told how the Good Omens "world has grown" with season two - and opened up about his first day back at Aziraphale's bookshop.

In an interview conducted before the SAG strike, he said, "It was lovely to be back in the bookshop after having seen it burnt down the ground.

"Clearly I had managed to save a few books! Actually, it was extraordinary - your brain does a double take - my desk, the cash machine, the record player - everything is all so familiar even though it is a totally different location.

But we have expanded - there is much more of the world of Soho here including Aziraphale's favourite the magic shop and my favourite the pub - our world has grown."

The actor also praised Neil Gaiman's writing, noting how there's "something about the way Neil sees the mundane that is extraordinary."

He said, "His writing has such a breadth of reference and yet is so accessible and entertaining even when taking on big epic or philosophical issues.

There's something about the way Neil sees the mundane that is extraordinary. When things filter through his imagination they emerge in an entirely unique way and yet it feels like it's always been there.

Add in the sprinkling of the imagination of Terry Pratchett and cocktail has been created - utterly familiar."

Producer Sarah-Kate Fenelon told Chic how the second season of Good Omens is "building on the universe" - and how they had been "sowing the seeds of a second season without anybody knowing" last season. "

She said, "I work with Neil Gaiman and know in part that Gabriel, who is played by Jon Hamm, his character is not in the book of Good Omens - but it was included in the first season. We were sowing the seed of a second season without anybody knowing.

"That character was written by Neil and Terry as a potential second book. They never got to write it, but now we're able to tell Gabriel's story. It's kind of a lovely evolution, where we're just expanding the universe.

"A lot of locations on the set are locations from season one. We've also been able to explore new shops, like we've got the record shop and we've got The Dirty Donkey pub, which we go into - it was in season one, but we never got to go into it.

"Season two is just building on the universe."

The Wicklow native added that it was "wonderful to get the Good Omens family back together" for a second season.

She said, "We were lucky that a lot of our crew and creative talent were able to come back for a second season. But also, we had our cast return. Miranda Richardson plays a totally different character this season and we have a new Beelzebub.

"And then obviously, we've got Maggie and Nina playing themselves, Maggie and Nina, as written by Neil. It was wonderful to get the Good Omens family back together again."

Noel Corbally, who works as an associate producer on the series, recalled how they marked a special anniversary of the first season's release while prepping for season two.

The Irishman said, "We went for dinner that night to relive the celebration, happy to be back again.

"Even now, it's been more than a year since we wrapped and to be able to come back into the studio that's just been frozen in time with everything wrapped up — we had a week to turn it back to life, have it be a live street again.

"It's been a week. But it's been amazing. We had our original lighting team come back, our original art department — and they've just done a fantastic job."

And while there are plenty of easter eggs for fans to spot throughout the six episodes, the pair shared their favourites.

Noel shared, "I think that my favourite easter egg is actually in the record shop. It's a song that we play in the background. It's so subtle, but it's from the musical Happy As A Sandbag.

"Maggie's character Maggie runs the record shop, which was owned by her grandfather in the story. But the musical, Happy As A Sandbag, Maggie Service the actress - her mother and father met on the musical and fell in love. Having that was an homage to them for bringing us Maggie."

Sarah-Kate said, "I quite like the easter eggs in the title sequence. If you look really closely, there is a Gabriel or Jim in every shot, which people tend not to notice. It's like Where's Wally?"

Rob Wilkins, who manages Terry Pratchett's estate and serves as narrative EP, told how he was "elated" for the second season to be out — and about moving beyond the book's source material.

He explained, "There were lots of nerves, because there is no source material. There's no book. I went through the whole of season one with the mantra that we've got a beginning, a middle and an end.

"And at the end of season one, which was the only season at the time, I felt very relaxed - we're all grounded through Terry and Neil's words, and that's fine. We know where we're going, we've got the novel to refer to.

"And so with season two, of course there's going to be nerves — there's no source material.

"But Neil is 50% of the creative team that brought you Good Omens, so in him we trust. And we genuinely do, from the bottom of my heart - of course we do.

"There's excitement about what Neil is going to bring from the page and from the page to the screen, but trepidation as well — I'm a fan as much as anybody else, I want to know where the stories are going."

Rob added that some of his own favourite easter eggs within the second season include a nod to Terry in The Dirty Donkey pub - as well as a special sight in the bookshop.

He said, "I love the fact that in the bookshop, Teny's hat and scarf are just hanging there. Terry, as a huge patron of bookshops around the world, he just left his hat and scarf in there and moved on one day and left them behind.

"That's a lovely one for me, as well - it means more to me, I think, than anything else."

Rob opened up about the success of the first season - and why it was something that he didn't necessarily expect.

He continued, "There's the Terry Pratchett fandom, there's the Neil Gaiman fandom and push them together and there's a big crossover. But what we created with season one, we created Good Omens fandom from the show.

"People came to Neil's work and Terry's work through the show. It created something entirely individual of its own making, and that freaked me out because I didn't see that one coming.

"I didn't see that as a thing. I thought the fans would be rooted in Terry or Neil. I didn't realise that the ineffable husbands in all of that - I love David and Michael, but I didn't realise the love people would have for them as our demon and our angel.

"I shouldn't be surprised. It's just my admiration for them as actors and for what they do, and for people getting it I think that that's the thing that's meant a lot to me, that people have understood what we tried to do."

Costume designer Kate Carin told how having the opportunity to join Good Omens' second season was a "gift" - and opened up about why it was impossible to pick a favourite scene.

She explained, "When you see the whole show - you think, when you're watching episode one, you're like, 'oh my god, that's the best'. But then you watch something in episode two and it's like, 'that's awesome!'

"I would say that I'm a disciple of the show now. I didn't know the book when I was approached about the job. I'd obviously heard of it, and I'd seen season one — as a punter, I watched it.

"To get the opportunity to come and work on season two, it's a gift for a costume designer.

"You do fantasy, you do period, you do contemporary and all of the wavy lines in- between - you're given a lot of rope to play with."

The character of Shax, played by Miranda Richardson, was a "really fun character to design for" - as Kate told how plenty of ideas jumped to mind after reading the description.

She said, "When Neil writes on the page that you have a 50s inspired female demon, that gives you a lot of scope to play with. "

And when I started drawing her, I actually had to stop myself because I kept coming up with ideas."

And with the series jampacked with magical moments and settings, set decorator Bronwyn Franklin told how there was one particular shop that has a "certain magic'!

She said, "I actually think the magic shop is my favourite shop. The bookshop used to be, but now that l've done it twice - it's still beautiful. It is Aziraphale's home. It feels more magical because Aziraphale lives there, and there's the whole angelic side.

"But this one, it really has a certain magic. From a set decorator's point of view, it's a joy. Will Godstone, he gets to sit there and he's got his little cash register and if he's got no customers, he can sit there and have a little cup of tea.

"You just have to feel that person, live that person and think that it's yours. I always come into a space like this and think, 'how would I like to be?' Because if it makes me happy, it'll make the cast member happy, it'll make the viewers happy."

Michael Ralph, who is the series' production designer, told how while it's impossible to pick a favourite set, the bookshop is "one that will resonate most'.'

Aziraphale's bookshop contains more than 7,000 real books and Michael noted that it was important for the setting to feel real, not just for the audiences at home but for the cast and crew.

He said, "There's not a fake book in here. Couldn't do that. In a way, if you look at any bookshelf - I spent almost a day just moving books around, to make the bookshelves look like they're real. They could be flat dressed, and then they're not real. But this is real, when they're just moved around a little bit; or people have pulled them out and put them in incorrectly.. .that's what's real about a bookshop."

[kaeso4ka]

You were kidnapped by a truck

Pairing: yandere! Optimus Prime x human reader

Space was squeezing you. It literally flattened you against the seats and made you gulp air noisily, like a beached fish. Until that moment, you didn't realize you were so afraid of confined spaces. No, not of them. It's who you're forced to be alone with.

Jesus... Why did you get in that damn truck? Why did you do something so stupid that not even a six-year-old would do? I wish you'd just been kidnapped by humans.

"My Spark," Optimus' voice came from everywhere and nowhere in particular, "please calm down. Breathe with me, on the count, okay? One - inhale..."

There was absorbent cotton in my ears. You could barely make out Prime's words. You wanted to go out into the open, but the doors were blocked.

"Breathe," you wheezed, "let me out... Let me..." you foolishly slammed your palm on the door, trying to fumble for the handle. But there was no handle. Optimus controlled every part of his body with ridiculous ease.

"We've been over this before. You try to run away without paying attention to the plugs twisting your arms," Optimus sounded moralizing. "It's okay. I'm right here with you. You don't have anything to worry about. Do you want me to put on some music?"

No, you didn't want to. Music would remind you that there was a whole world outside the cab of the damn truck. A normal world. With normal people. Normal cars. A world no longer available to you.

Somehow, in one universe, there were many races. Different, peculiar. But a separate alien race of cars, airplanes and other machinery?

A technophile's paradise. It's a technophile's paradise.

You never wanted to fuck a machine, but the machine wants to fuck you.

"I'm sick," a pitiful gurgle came out of somewhere in her throat. You couldn't even tell if you were saying it, "Optimus…?"

"I'm here, my Spark."

Here. Everywhere. Everywhere.

Optimus became literally everything to you. It surrounded you. You slept on it, sat on it, sat in it… It was hard to comprehend. Sometimes you'd forget, you'd sink into the seat and cry. And then you'd flinch. It was like you were crying into Prime's shoulder. That's how he saw it. The plugs stroked you then, soothing you. Prime's gentle voice promised you everything. Except freedom.

Optimus loved you, I think. He showed it in ways that an intelligent machine from another planet could.

For example, he fed you. What did he feed you? Fixing you with plugs, making you stop twitching; unclenching your jaw. You were afraid of pain, so at this stage you hardly resisted.

Then the plug with a peculiar nozzle slipped inside and pumped jelly-like slurry. At first you often choked, and Optimus didn't know how to feed people. Then each of them got the hang of it. You to swallow, and Optimus…

After the feeding session, it was oral sex. Prime didn't call it that, of course. It was pretty obvious to you. The truck's plugs were an erogenous zone, and Optimus liked your mouth a lot. That's why he fucked you in it every time he ate.

You almost learned how to give a throat blow job. You'd do better if you didn't throw up after every session.

And sometimes you did throw up. Not just throw up, but urinate. And you did a lot of other things that people do every day.

For you, even that routine was an extraordinary stage of humiliation.

No matter how much you talked about how people didn't do these things in front of others; no matter how much you begged to be forced to do it while indoors... Optimus wasn't listening. He was fine with everything.

And to his credit, there was a reason for that: the smells in the cabin didn't linger for long. The alien ventilation was working properly.

This was getting a little ridiculous. The rear seats slid apart to form a sort of toilet. You'd also lock yourself in and Optimus always made a mess of it. Reduced it to sex. And you could almost believe that he didn't really understand. That everything was normal to him.

To bring you to orgasm by pressing on your urethra and stimulating your clitoris to make you cum and relieve yourself? Every day! Several times a day.

It was humiliating, and you really didn't like to be humiliated. Optimus was forcing you to put up with something that was breaking you.

But after everything - everything! - Prime had real penetrative sex with you. And that was what he called "conniption."

How could a goddamn truck have a metal dick that extended over the same back seats...? You didn't know and didn't want to know, even though Optimus was actively educating Cybertronians about anatomy.

And that's where Optimus's fantasy played out to perfection. He'd put you on top of the connector with the stylus, he'd lay you sideways and the connector would slide in like a goddamn piston… To Optimus's credit, he really did care about you cumming on him. As he himself admitted, it was the liquid he liked best.

That's how you lived… How long? A month, two, three? Time passed too quickly, too slowly. When asked directly about the date, Prime was thoughtfully silent.

The only plus and outlet for you was music and... The view outside the window. Optimus traveled on Earth on public roads, and you enjoyed the freedom outside the tinted window.

"I love you," Optimus' voice made you wince. Your chest clenched in anticipation of another panic attack.

[minty-drop]

hello there can you do a platonic ford x demon reader

so reader is a demon of negative energy so others would think they are dangerous but nope the reader just spends most of their time nice and calm but also in pillow bases and forts all over the shak when the reader can and ford is just taking notes while it's happening and gets pulled into one of the forts with them.

Platonic ford x demon reader

Warnings: none

Type: headcanon platonic

✎ᝰ. Ford was always naturally a smart and intelligent person. So why in his right mind did he decide to let you stay here in the shack with them? For the research of course.

✎ᝰ. Negative energy is more cosmic then most think, unbounded by the pull of the universe itself, for negative energy simply isn’t emotion. In fact, emotion doesn’t even have to do with the feeding process of these forces of raw energy itself like most would assume from the name itself. A festering pool of dark energy collected in a plain of existence where space bends and time slows. matter not visible to the eye yet so powerful it sucks in anything, similar to how a vacuum cleaner sucks in surrounding dust from the suction force of the machine itself, trapping those particles inside it. A plain of existence far from man’s comprehension. Invisible to all senses until it is too late. To be hunted by creatures that aren’t physically present.

✎ᝰ. Some call them demons, violent creatures of sin and wrath, grasping everything in their claws like a wild animal caged in a chamber of fire. This depiction was far, far from the truth of these extraordinary beings, these beings powerful enough to break through there own worlds boundaries to exceed beyond there own realms in search for something as a shared goal. It was different from a hive mind, far more complex than any.

✎ᝰ. It seemed though you in particular strayed far from that collective mind, having made yourself home cocooned in the plush blanket fort that not so neatly draped blankets over chairs to form its shelter from the ceiling fans light, pillow cases and couch cushions shoved inside the fort itself to finish off the cozy makeshift tent like bed. How odd.

✎ᝰ. The only evidence of your presence was the invisible force picking up the blankets, and draping them around yourself, enjoying staring at the tvs flashing lights and colours that illuminated the room. It was fascinating how you could see the dimension you were in yet, no one could see you. Perhaps you were a higher being, or perhaps your realm was a dimension between the third and fourth? A path way to both ends where the universe is at its thinned string when meeting ends.

✎ᝰ. Perhaps your presence wasn’t entire here, a face of yourself that is projected to interact with the social life of a different realm? To research just like him. Even so. Why insist on him joining you in the tent. You couldn’t feel warmth from the blankets and yet you clung to them, you couldn’t speak to him but continued to gesture with objects around to communicate. Why go through the trouble of it? What was the purpose of it?

✎ᝰ. Though, this wasn’t entirely bad, for this shall be a new opportunity for him. And perhaps for you as well to learn about your realms and each other.

Do not copy and claim my work as your own

[karolamurdock]

𝐒𝐩𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐫-𝐖𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝟐𝟎𝟗𝟗 Pt. 1

Miguel O'Hara x Spider!Reader

Sinopsis: The year is 2106. By day, you work as the head of the Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology division at Alchemax. By night, you are the one and only Spider-Woman, fighting tirelessly to protect New York from the tyrannical clutches of crime and delinquency. Your days are spent in an ordinary, organized routine: it's just you, the only barrier between your city and oblivion, dealing with the violence and pain that comes with being a superhero.

Everything is just normal. Then your dead husband appears in front of you, talking about alternate universes, spider societies and canonical disasters, and you discover that all your sorrows, losses and failures were possibly always meant to happen.

What the fuck.

Notes: You can keep track of this little fic on our Ao3 page. In our profile you can also find the Spanish version.

Warnings: Angst, violence, sad reader.

Word count: 2K.

Pt 1 - Pt 2 - Pt 3 - Pt 4

Dusk painted the city red. The last rays of evening flashed against the lenses of your mask as you gazed, crouched on the edge of the Chrysler Building, at the bustling streets of the City That Never Sleeps. 

The afternoon had been running smoothly, as usual. Minor crimes, a couple of robberys, a botched assault and a small fire that was quickly put out. For the city, it was just another, ordinary afternoon.

Not for you. For you, it was a day of regret. Because that day was the seventh anniversary of the day you became the one and only Spider-Woman.

That day was the seventh anniversary of your husband's death. 

🕷 🕷 🕷 🕷 🕷 🕷 🕷 🕷

Your name is (T/N). You were the victim of an 'accident' that caused an alteration of your genetic code. The machine caused your DNA to mutate, fusing 50% with the DNA of a spider. 

As a result of the incident, you acquired superhuman strength; speed and flexibility far beyond the physical limits of the most gifted human athlete. You had an extraordinary durability, very acute reflexes, ultra-sharp vision and an accelerated healing factor. 

You were also 'gifted' with sharp, venomous fangs which produced a non-toxic substance that paralyzed your enemies, as well as retractable claws on your fingertips that allowed you to easily attach to any surface. 

Your eyes, once glowing (E/C) orbs, had become tinted with a reddish hue that you covered with dark glasses (which served the dual purpose of deterring curious civilians and protecting you from sensory overstimulation). 

The world knew you as a heroine. Selfless, courageous and capable. A fitting antithesis to your civilian identity. An acclaimed geneticist of few words and a fleeting smile. With few close friends, a quiet, cold, almost impersonal apartment. Your only companion was a fat, lazy cat who, like you, fended for himself and appreciated your silent company while taking long naps on your stomach. 

Your days consisted of a long shift at Alchemax, as head of the Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology division, and grueling night patrols as New York's most famous Spider.

You didn't sleep very much. After your long days (with and without the suit), you would finally drop off exhausted and look forward to a short, dreamless rest. Your routine was such. The days finally blurred into one another, and you concentrated on living them one at a time. 

That day, however, something changed. 

🕷 🕷 🕷 🕷 🕷 🕷 🕷 🕷

A commotion was heard in the distance. You watched the smoke column rising near the 5th Avenue, and you quickly changed the direction of your swing to deal with the emerging threat.

You gazed at the strange creature as you glided on the air currents with the aid of the anti-gravity particles emitted by your suit of unstable molecules. Holding on to a streetlight as you analyzed the individual before you, you frowned at his anomalous appearance; the elongated mask, the green suit and the archaic glider. His maniacal laughter filled the street, and the fire reflected in his orange glasses as he turned his head in your direction. 

The smile carved into his mask would have caused you to shudder with revulsion had it not been for your sour mood. You were already late to leave the arrangement of carnations on your husband's grave. You were hoping to get it over with that lunatic quickly so you could spend the rest of your night in your bed, marinating in your loneliness. 

"Well, well. What do we have here? You're not the spider I'm used to playing with."

"I'm the spider that will put an end to your fun". You replied. "What do you want?"

The creature laughed, and... flickered? Like a failing hologram, his own form superimposed upon itself in a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes that took a second to return to its place. 

You frowned, suddenly feeling more alert, and braced yourself when the creature threw two orange spheres in your direction as it laughed:

"Never mind! After all... This will be another world to conquer."

Catching the spheres with your webs, you threw them into the sky, accurately predicting the great explosion that lit up the night sky, away from the terrified crowd running away from the scene. 

You dodged the projectiles hurled in your direction, and somersaulted through the air as the individual lunged at you, clawed hands outstretched in your direction. 

You aimed your webs again; the gleaming golden ribbons wrapped around your wrists, and used a manhole cover to spin around and propel yourself into the air, crashing the hard metal into the glider and ducking behind a smoking van across the street. 

The creature jumped, and his ruined glider crashed into a streetlight, causing an explosion of sparks to rain down around you. 

"You may not be my spider. But you're just as sneaky. Come here!"

And he leapt forward, lashing out with his claws aimed at your throat. You deflected the blow, but he was quick and turned around to throw a punch that landed on above your eyebrow. Your vision blurred, and you blinked in surprise as you had to take a couple of steps back from the shock. This creature... it seemed to have an idea of your range of motion, as well as a brief notion of the range of your reflexes. 

Not the spider you're used to playing with.... 

Before you could give the idea any more thought, you caught a movement out of the corner of your eye, and you reflexively spun around with a kick that hit the creature squarely in the chest, throwing him back a few feet and drawing a pained laugh from him. 

"You're strong... just like him." The creature coughed. "You're fast... just like him." He took a couple of slow steps around you, and scanned you up and down. Your dark suit, your upright posture, and the evident claws in your hands. "You even look like him... but you're not Peter Parker, are you?"

You hid a shudder by crouching against the ground in a battle stance. This creature... 

You had no time to ramble. He came at you once more, and you used your webs to leap away from his thrusts. You jumped over a streetlight, and watched him rip the door off a pickup truck to throw it in your direction. You kicked it out of the way, a second too late to notice the small orange orb stuck to the side of the door. 

His mocking laughter was lost in the roar of the explosion. Your body was hurled toward the concrete, and you barely had time to cover your head before you hit the ground, hard. 

Your ears were ringing, and you tasted blood where your fangs scratched the inside of your lips. You remained motionless, listening to the crunch of his footsteps approaching to your collapsed form. You counted the seconds, watching the creature's fluctuating reflection against the cracked windows around you. 

In other circumstances, against any other opponent, you would have jumped up at once and taken the battle elsewhere, away from the street. But in this situation, you didn't want to give the anomalous creature a chance to escape, or else... to see more of your world. You didn't like the way his mask swiveled, taking note of the towering buildings and iridescent lights. The lenses of his mask paused an extra second on the giant letters above the OSCORP tower, and you heard his curious humming just as his hand reached out to grab you by the neck. 

You finally moved, and twisted his arm, breaking the archaic armor with your claws as you summoned your superhuman strength to smash your other elbow into his mask. 

The impact shook his head, and you briefly glimpsed a small glowing eye through a broken lens before feeling the air against your chin as your suit retracted to allow you to plunge your venom into the creature's exposed forearm. 

You watched his breathing quicken. Finally, you released him, and you exchanged a couple of blows that rapidly decreased in intensity and force. When he stopped flailing, and you finally beheld his stiff muscles and slumped figure, you threw him against a parked vehicle, mentally apologizing to the poor owner, and wrapped several webs around it, forming a golden cocoon that covered him almost completely.

You watched his perpetually smiling expression, and lifted your arm to wipe your lips, ready to shred the rest of the mask and find out the identity of that you were taking to the authorities that night. You could already hear the sirens in the distance. 

And then you heard the clattering of stones all around you. 

Debris and stones rose a foot in the air. You watched in morbid bewilderment at the flickering lights, the creature, slack against the hood of the vehicle, and you briefly averted your gaze only to behold a blue hand tearing the air, the fabric of reality stretching into a luminous hexagon, edged in orange, pink, and yellow colors. A blue silhouette appeared from the center of the hexagon, and you watched in horror as a person sprang into existence right under your nose. 

Your mask quickly returned to its place. You fell into a defensive position. With one hand against the pavement and another poised in the air. The man, whom you now recognized as such, wore a piercing blue suit with red lines that seemed to converge in a spider design... a design eerily similar to yours. Even his mask, with lenses edged with sharp red lines, resembled your own dark mask. 

"Thank you for your support. We'll take it from here." He said, and motioned to the creature as he ordered, "Ben."

Distantly, through the sumptuous flow of blood you felt ringing in your ears, you became aware of the arrival of another hooded figure, wearing a red suit, blue vest, and a mask that matched the popular spider theme. 

For the first time in almost 6 years, you had difficulty articulating your words. Your tongue felt heavy, your fangs were once again too big for your mouth, and you dug your claws into the concrete to keep yourself upright in the face of the flood of anguish that completely overtook you.

His voice... 

"I don't think so." You took a step in the direction of the Spider... Man, the one with the blue vest. "Who are you, and what do you have to do with that creature?"

"It's classified." Replied the tall, broad-shouldered man in the blue suit. At his response, you held your ground in front of the creature, though you watched... Ben? Analyzing the individual slumped over the car. 

"He's alive. He's not unconscious, he's..."

"Paralyzed." Said the man and you at the same time. And Ben jumped on his toes with his hands covering both sides of his mouth. 

"Could you be...?" He started. But the mistery man wouldn't let him continue.

"That's the Green Goblin over there. In his world, he's Norman Osborn, previous CEO and ex-president of OSCORP. He became the Green Goblin after experimenting with a serum that drove him insane." 

You frowned, but grudgingly allowed Ben to restrain the newly named Green Goblin as you took a close look at the burly man in front of you. 

His broad back. His big arms, his lean waist. 

His firm pose. His beautiful voice. 

"We are Spider people. Just like you. Our job is to deal with anomalies like him, who threaten other worlds by slipping through the cracks between realities. The fate of the multiverse depends on it. "

You had difficulty wrapping your mind around the idea, but you didn't let your hesitation show in your posture.

"If you come with us, we can show you. You did a good job containing this anomaly. We could make good use of your support." 

"Who are you?"

His mask retracted. An invisible hand wrapped around your throat, and you felt the ghost of your own venom paralyzing your body; perhaps finally your DNA had destabilized, and you were suffering a biological rupture. It had to be a manifestation of your delirium: his dark curls, his high cheekbones, his strong jaw. 

"My name is Miguel O'Hara, and I am the leader of the Spider society."

You closed your eyes. 

He held out his hand, looked at you, and you thought you saw his eyes softening a little.

Then you dug your claws into his throat.

[stoplookingup]

Umbrella Academy S4 reaction (spoilers)

I'm a little surprised how negative the reaction to S4 has been. It's flawed and a bit too loose, sure, but I think there's a thematic arc, to do with the painful but redemptive potential of selfless love, that a lot of people didn't recognize, or didn't like, possibly because it's too sentimental, or too tragic, or both.

In particular, I have a really different take on That Relationship. You know the one I mean.

But before I get to that, I just want to address the issue of unexplained plot points, of which there are certainly many.

Short version: Just let it go.

Long version: Comic-book storytelling is all about the impossible premise, the unlikely twist, the overblown threat, the arbitrary race against the clock, the catastrophic non-ending. A big part of TUA's appeal is that it takes that formula to an absurd extreme, unwinding a plot so convoluted and horrifying as to be comedic, then offering a resolution that raises more questions than it answers, and that seems final -- but is it ever? There could always be more. Even now. Because reasons.

But scratch the surface, and it's really all about the over-the-top super(anti)heroes who are surprisingly endearing, nuanced and tragic, whom the audience roots for despite a million reasons not to. Would S4 have benefitted from a few more episodes? No doubt, mostly to give each character their due (Klaus, my Klaus, you deserve more!), and to let the story breathe a bit. The plot probably wouldn't have made any more sense anyway. But c'mon, did it ever, really? So, why a subway? Why a squid? Why a diner? Does it really matter?

On to That Relationship, the much-criticized story of Lila/Five (aka Live -- can I copyright this?). This comically trope-laden ship (forbidden love, montage love, love triangle, enemies-to-lovers, pocket universe, happily-ever-after, etc) fits right into TUA sensibility. Despite being a bit underbaked, it's moving. The actors play it well, and in dropping their characters' armor, you realize how much armor they're usually wearing, how hard they're always working to cover their feelings. Out of all the characters, seeing these two having real emotions is most devastating, especially with each other. It's because this pairing is wildly unlikely that it hits.

Lila and Five have similar histories as traumatized, sensitive souls turned cold, cruel killing machines. They're smarter, more cynical, and stronger-willed than everyone around them. And they are clearly starved of love and desperate for connection. (Everyone on this show pays a price, but I find Five's terrible loneliness the most heartbreaking of all.) So then fate throws them together in a way that makes it inevitable they'll form an attachment, only to then demand of them the ultimate sacrifice. Their surprisingly quiet, life-affirming, Guinevere-and-Lancelot love is redemptive, in contrast with the meddling, selfish, and/or destructive love of others: Reginald and Abigail, Ben and Jennifer, Gene and Jean. Live aren't an unnecessary digression, they're central to the thematic development of the story. Sacrifice saves the world, but without love, there is no sacrifice.

And yes, I absolutely think Lila loves Five to the end. And while I appreciate that some might find the age difference between the actors off-putting, I don't think there was anything inappropriate on a Doylist level, and it all makes perfect sense on a Watsonian level.

Also:

Aidan Gallagher and Ritu Arya are extraordinary;

the use of Baby Shark is genius;

Diego, Luther and Allison have been the least interesting characters from the start, and S4 does nothing to change that;

Viktor needs a sense of humor;

I love that alternate universes are all the rage these days (so many great tropes started with Trek), but tbh Loki does it better;

as visual representations of the space between realities, I love both the Loki automat and the UA subway, but at some point, using recent-past retro design to signal liminal space is going to get old, which, come to think of it, will be deliciously ironic.

[autisticgirliesbracket]

Welcome to the Autistic Girlies Bracket

A series of polls which strives to highlight all the canon autistic and autistic-coded girlies out there in media!! And then pit them against each other to prove who is the girlie of all time <3

View the Propaganda Masterposts!

> Round 1 results. > Round 2 results.

Revival Rounds Part I are currently ongoing, come and cast your vote!

Round 3 begins on Friday 30th June at 1pm EST / 6pm BST.

A complete list of girlies competing in Round 3 can be found under the cut:

Round 3

Matchup 1: Lilo Pelekai (Lilo & Stitch) 'VS' Lunella Lafayette (Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur)

Matchup 2: Matilda Wormwood (Matilda) 'VS' Lilith Clawthorne (The Owl House) 'VS' Rebecca Hawkins (Yu-Gi-Oh!)

Matchup 3: Entrapta (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power) 'VS' Woo Young-Woo (Extraordinary Attorney Woo)

Matchup 4: Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade Series, with bracket art created by @anthyies) 'VS' Norma Khan (Dead End Paranormal Park) 'VS' Peridot (Steven Universe)

Matchup 5: Harrowhark Nonagesimus (The Locked Tomb) 'VS' Asa Mitaka (Chainsaw Man)

Matchup 6: Maya Fey (Ace Attorney) 'VS' Twilight Sparkle (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic)

Matchup 7: Mabel Pines (Gravity Falls) 'VS' Marina (Splatoon) 'VS' Ayda Aguefort (Dimension 20: Fantasy High)

Matchup 8: Katie Mitchell (The Mitchells vs. the Machines) 'VS' Elle Woods (Legally Blonde) 'VS' Futaba Sakura (Persona 5)

[arting-block]

you can do Eleventh Doctor x reader

The reader deals with the consequences of being the doctor's companion and unrequited love.

𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐧𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 | Eleventh Doctor x GN! Reader

❝𝘪𝘧 𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘱 𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘢𝘴𝘬.❞

Summary: You see the Doctor's love go to someone other than you.

Warnings: Angst, unrequited love

Words: 1.1K

A/N: Cooked this up with 3 braincells and lots of River x Eleven edits.

It wasn't anything special that made you like him.

Granted, everything the Doctor does is extraordinary in some way. Something hardwired in his brain that allows him to break boundaries. What is and is not possible is merely a dare for him to engage in. For him to show you just how limited your perception of this universe is. True this part of him, all alien in every way is something you valued in him, it’s not what brought the weakness in your knees. 

No, it’s something far more ordinary. Very unlike him. 

A gradual buildup that took years of small moments with the Doctor. Taking your hand in a gentle tug, pointing to various attractions to visit. Complimenting an outfit you put together for the time period you ended up in. Praise for studying hard and wanting to impress the locals. 

Above all, it was the times where nothing was said what solidified your love for the man. The TARDIS idly floating in the vacuum of space. Your legs dangling over the edge of the open door, staring out to whatever nebula you found yourself in. The Doctor would often tuck himself next to you, shoulder to shoulder. You let the air around you carry your emotions; your mind conjuring your confession. 

He would look at you, a small smile to let you know he’s there for you. And maybe, if the adventure was too taxing, the Doctor would let you lean into his side. Arms wrapping around each other, cuddling while gazing at stars.

Your face against the soft cotton of his shirts, hearing the two thuds of his own hearts. 

Leaning against the textured wall, you observe the Doctor. Once a week, every week, and without fail the Doctor would dedicate time to tinker with the console of the TARDIS. Sounds of bolts hitting the clear floor and the cranking of tools would accompany the Doctor’s rare curses. 

A familiar routine. Private.

The Doctor keeps this ritual to himself. In the little spare time he has he closes off into a bubble. Various machine parts and thick cables surround the area creating a partition. 

You wouldn’t dare to impede on the Doctor. There’s been too many close calls, more than enough life-ending encounters lately.

He needs this, you think to yourself, if he wanted your help he would ask.

You’ve chosen a small nook to occupy, elevated so you could get a bird’s eye view of the Doctor. His back faces you, hunched over the same area of the console for the last thirty minutes. Another curse tumbles out of his lips. Quiet, but your ears never fail to hear his voice. You knew the Doctor could easily rip the entire place apart and rebuild it from scratch. Something else is haunting him, and the poor console is taking the brunt of it. The side where the Doctor is working on had its lights shut off.

Go ask. Let him know you’re here.

Your feet stay planted to the ground. Feelings aren’t something the Doctor discusses. In the few times he does expose a piece of his past, he does so with reluctance. For someone who loves taking you to it, the Doctor hates looking back. It’s one of the unspoken rules you’ve discovered rather quickly. 

The Doctor ran his fingers through his hair. His face is obscured but you can imagine his frustration as clear as day. Brows pinched, mouth in a tight line, and his jaw clenched. 

“You’ve certainly made quite the mess here,” a voice—familiar and dreadful—cuts through silence like a knife, “Are you sure that button is in its rightful spot?”

River Song passes the partition with graceful, measured steps. Blonde hair cascading down her shoulders and a pristine outfit of a t-shirt and pants. Despite just hours ago the three of you trekked the slopes of a mountain River always seemed to look fresh out of a photoshoot. You’re pretty sure mud still caked the cuffs of your jeans.

You’ve met the archeologist a few times. More often than not it’s because she orchestrated some sort of meeting to get the Doctor where she needed to be. They regarded each other with such familiarity that jealousy was all you could see. 

Plucking a metal part from the Doctor’s hand, River ducked beneath the console. A few moments later the console’s lights finally turned on. 

“I was just about to do that, but I was taking a break,” the Doctor explains. 

River hummed, not too convinced, “What’s got the almighty Doctor stuck in his own head? Certainly had to be worrisome if he couldn’t connect the converter to the energy shaft. Even a baby could rig that up.”

A crack of a smile formed on the Doctor’s face, “Always observant, aren’t you Song?”

You shouldn’t eavesdrop like this; clearly a private conversation. 

A nagging voice at the back of your head tells you to stay put. To watch. See if the Doctor indulges River in the luxuries you want. Some part of you wants to know what exactly River is to the Doctor.

River is just a friend. The Doctor said so. He wouldn’t keep something like that from you.

The two of them step towards one another in sync. River with her all-knowing gaze and cunning smile; the Doctor with the weight of his problems sagging his shoulders. 

You watched helplessly as River placed a hand on the Doctor’s face. With a stomach full of lead, you watch the Doctor lean into her touch. His own hand ghosting over River’s hip as if it belongs there. 

Thousands of words spoken with just their eyes. Eons of friendship—love, perhaps between the two. 

You’ve never explicitly asked what their relationship to one another was. In a way, you dreaded what the answer would be. 

“Are you leaving soon?” the Doctor whispered. Longing.

You can’t turn away, no matter how much your heart ached.

“Do you want me to stay?” River shifted closer, her other hand resting above his chest, “If so, I might need a little convincing.”

An invitation.

The Doctor looked at River as if she hung the stars themselves. Their hands around one another in a way that reminded you of a married couple. Time moves slowly in the moment leading up to their foreheads touching. A tooth-achingly sweet, intimate gesture. A sight that makes your insides churn painfully.  

“Please, River. Just for the night,” the Doctor begs, “I need you.”

River lets out a small chuckle. Untangling herself with the Doctor, she moves to rearrange the parts surrounding the two of them, “Can’t leave the TARDIS like this. What would happen if Y/N tripped over your mess?”

The sound of your name made you strain for a response.

“They won’t. I’m sure they could figure out where to put these if they put their mind to it.”

Praise coming from the Doctor would normally make your heart flutter. In its place a cold, awful feeling that anchors itself in your gut. Your feet finally move from the corner of the room to the winding hallway. The faint chatter of the two fading away until the only sound you hear is the beating of your heart. 

They never kissed, yet the scene that unfolded made you wish they did. A kiss wouldn’t hurt as much as the Doctor begging River to stay. His voice above a whisper so that only she would hear. A moment so tender that it forcefully shifted your thinking. Those heartfelt moments you had with the Doctor were nothing more than platonic. You were never a contender for his love. It’s almost comical how you could even think that you were worthy of him. A human with such a fragile body and short lifespan. 

Even if by some miracle he did reciprocate those feelings, it wouldn’t matter.

Her. There would always be her.

[chaos-the-stinky]

Waiting to get a copy of tbob. Uhh The Great Gatsby

Chapter 1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, "Why—ye-es" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

"How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion. Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it—I had no sight into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

"Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

"I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.

"It belonged to Demaine the oil man." He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside."

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

"Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically.

"The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there's a persistent wail all night along the North Shore."

"How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. Tomorrow!" Then she added irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby."

"I'd like to."

"She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?"

"Never."

"Well, you ought to see her. She's—"

Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

"What you doing, Nick?"

"I'm a bond man."

"Who with?"

I told him.

"Never heard of them," he remarked decisively.

This annoyed me.

"You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East."

"Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. "I'd be a God Damned fool to live anywhere else."

At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.

"I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember."

"Don't look at me," Daisy retorted. "I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon."

"No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, "I'm absolutely in training."

Her host looked at her incredulously.

"You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me."

I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

"You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there."

"I don't know a single—"

"You must know Gatsby."

"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"

Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.

"Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

"We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.

"All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly. "What do people plan?"

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.

"Look!" she complained. "I hurt it."

We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.

"You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to but you did do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a—"

"I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding."

"Hulking," insisted Daisy.

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here—and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.

"You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or something?"

I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way.

"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"

"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

"Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—"

"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things."

"We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

"You ought to live in California—" began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.

"This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and—" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again. "—and we've produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?"

There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me.

"I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?"

"That's why I came over tonight."

"Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose—"

"Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker.

"Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position."

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing.

"I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation. "An absolute rose?"

This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house.

Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said "Sh!" in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.

"This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor—" I said.

"Don't talk. I want to hear what happens."

"Is something happening?" I inquired innocently.

"You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. "I thought everybody knew."

"I don't."

"Why—" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York."

"Got some woman?" I repeated blankly.

Miss Baker nodded.

"She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't you think?"

Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back at the table.

"It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gayety.

She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and continued: "I looked outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away—" her voice sang "—It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?"

"Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enough after dinner I want to take you down to the stables."

The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.

The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.

"We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly. "Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding."

"I wasn't back from the war."

"That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything."

Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.

"I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything."

"Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?"

"Very much."

"It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

"You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in a convinced way. "Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated—God, I'm sophisticated!"

The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.

Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the "Saturday Evening Post"—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.

When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.

"To be continued," she said, tossing the magazine on the table, "in our very next issue."

Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up.

"Ten o'clock," she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. "Time for this good girl to go to bed."

"Jordan's going to play in the tournament tomorrow," explained Daisy, "over at Westchester."

"Oh,—you're Jordan Baker."

I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.

"Good night," she said softly. "Wake me at eight, won't you."

"If you'll get up."

"I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon."

"Of course you will," confirmed Daisy. "In fact I think I'll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—"

"Good night," called Miss Baker from the stairs. "I haven't heard a word."

"She's a nice girl," said Tom after a moment. "They oughtn't to let her run around the country this way."

"Who oughtn't to?" inquired Daisy coldly.

"Her family."

"Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick's going to look after her, aren't you, Nick? She's going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her."

Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.

"Is she from New York?" I asked quickly.

"From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white—"

"Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly.

"Did I?" She looked at me. "I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know—"

"Don't believe everything you hear, Nick," he advised me.

I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called "Wait!

"I forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West."

"That's right," corroborated Tom kindly. "We heard that you were engaged."

"It's libel. I'm too poor."

"But we heard it," insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. "We heard it from three people so it must be true."

Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn't even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come east. You can't stop going with an old friend on account of rumors and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumored into marriage.

Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich—nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he "had some woman in New York" was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.

I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

Chapter 2

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress.

The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car.

"We're getting off!" he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl."

I think he'd tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.

I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside.

The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes.

"Hello, Wilson, old man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. "How's business?"

"I can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly. "When are you going to sell me that car?"

"Next week; I've got my man working on it now."

"Works pretty slow, don't he?"

"No, he doesn't," said Tom coldly. "And if you feel that way about it, maybe I'd better sell it somewhere else after all."

"I don't mean that," explained Wilson quickly. "I just meant—"

His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:

"Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down."

"Oh, sure," agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom.

"I want to see you," said Tom intently. "Get on the next train."

"All right."

"I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level."

She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door.

We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track.

"Terrible place, isn't it," said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg.

"Awful."

"It does her good to get away."

"Doesn't her husband object?"

"Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive."

So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train.

She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of "Town Tattle" and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass.

"I want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly. "I want to get one for the apartment. They're nice to have—a dog."

We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.

"What kind are they?" asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window.

"All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?"

"I'd like to get one of those police dogs; I don't suppose you got that kind?"

The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.

"That's no police dog," said Tom.

"No, it's not exactly a police dog," said the man with disappointment in his voice. "It's more of an airedale." He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. "Look at that coat. Some coat. That's a dog that'll never bother you with catching cold."

"I think it's cute," said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. "How much is it?"

"That dog?" He looked at it admiringly. "That dog will cost you ten dollars."

The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale concerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture.

"Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked delicately.

"That dog? That dog's a boy."

"It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it."

We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.

"Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here."

"No, you don't," interposed Tom quickly. "Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't come up to the apartment. Won't you, Myrtle?"

"Come on," she urged. "I'll telephone my sister Catherine. She's said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know."

"Well, I'd like to, but—"

We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in.

"I'm going to have the McKees come up," she announced as we rose in the elevator. "And of course I got to call up my sister, too."

The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies of "Town Tattle" lay on the table together with a copy of "Simon Called Peter" and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door.

I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of "Simon Called Peter"—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn't make any sense to me.

Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door.

The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.

Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below. He had just shaved for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone and he was most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He informed me that he was in the "artistic game" and I gathered later that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson's mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was shrill, languid, handsome and horrible. She told me with pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had been married.

Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

"My dear," she told her sister in a high mincing shout, "most of these fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet and when she gave me the bill you'd of thought she had my appendicitus out."

"What was the name of the woman?" asked Mrs. McKee.

"Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people's feet in their own homes."

"I like your dress," remarked Mrs. McKee, "I think it's adorable."

Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain.

"It's just a crazy old thing," she said. "I just slip it on sometimes when I don't care what I look like."

"But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean," pursued Mrs. McKee. "If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could make something of it."

We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson who removed a strand of hair from over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr. McKee regarded her intently with his head on one side and then moved his hand back and forth slowly in front of his face.

"I should change the light," he said after a moment. "I'd like to bring out the modelling of the features. And I'd try to get hold of all the back hair."

"I wouldn't think of changing the light," cried Mrs. McKee. "I think it's—"

Her husband said "Sh! " and we all looked at the subject again whereupon Tom Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet.

"You McKees have something to drink," he said. "Get some more ice and mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep."

"I told that boy about the ice." Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. "These people! You have to keep after them all the time."

She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.

"I've done some nice things out on Long Island," asserted Mr. McKee.

Tom looked at him blankly.

"Two of them we have framed downstairs."

"Two what? demanded Tom.

"Two studies. One of them I call 'Montauk Point—the Gulls,' and the other I call 'Montauk Point—the Sea.' "

The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.

"Do you live down on Long Island, too?" she inquired.

"I live at West Egg."

"Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named Gatsby's. Do you know him?"

"I live next door to him."

"Well, they say he's a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. That's where all his money comes from."

"Really?"

She nodded.

"I'm scared of him. I'd hate to have him get anything on me."

This absorbing information about my neighbor was interrupted by Mrs. McKee's pointing suddenly at Catherine:

"Chester, I think you could do something with her," she broke out, but Mr. McKee only nodded in a bored way and turned his attention to Tom.

"I'd like to do more work on Long Island if I could get the entry. All I ask is that they should give me a start."

"Ask Myrtle," said Tom, breaking into a short shout of laughter as Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray. "She'll give you a letter of introduction, won't you, Myrtle?"

"Do what?" she asked, startled.

"You'll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can do some studies of him." His lips moved silently for a moment as he invented. " 'George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,' or something like that."

Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: "Neither of them can stand the person they're married to."

"Can't they?"

"Can't stand them." She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. "What I say is, why go on living with them if they can't stand them? If I was them I'd get a divorce and get married to each other right away."

[slowd1ving]

III. THE CONCEPT OF FRIENDSHIP .・゜DAN HENG

One of the theories pushed forward in this universe—a common conjecture between scientists throughout the stars—is that there are disturbances in a system that is being observed, versus one that is not. This is astutely named the observer effect. And this situation is the first proper example he’s seen of that. Dan Heng feels that as soon as he takes his eyes off you, you’ll phase back to a space between these dimensions, like some specter there are only myths about. when data nerd Dan Heng finds the forbidden dictionary and masters the hidden art: synonyms male! engineer reader warnings: eventual nsfw, kind of but not really spoilers to dan heng's backstory, amab reader

HONKAI STAR RAIL MASTERLIST

DRINKER OF THE MOON, DEVOURER OF DREAMS MASTERLIST

MASTERLIST ・゜・NAVIGATION

PREVIOUS PART . 　⁺ NEXT PART

Friendship. The definition provided by the Standard IPC Dictionary of the True Universal Language (TUL) Dialect describes it as a strong interpersonal bond in which involved parties have a relationship of mutual trust and affection with each other. He knows it well. 

The book was logged in approximately a month ago, and it has been accessed recently once more. 

He looked it up first out of boredom—the definition had stood out when he skimmed through, looking at various slang and wondering whether he could finally put meaning to your long strings of curses. 

“I think you’re the only friend he has apart from me, Pom-Pom and Welt,” Himeko had told him once: a simple additive after her lively discussion on the current politics of the Palosia-VI strata in the Palosian cluster. 

“I see.” His reply was bland and blunt, just like him. 

Mutual trust and affection. He looked it up again, just to make sure he hadn’t hallucinated the first occasion he’d looked at it. 

He supposed he hasn’t—which is why he’s mystified when he recalls her words. 

Mutual trust. He doesn’t trust you. You don’t trust him. No, maybe there is some element of ‘trust’; there’s simply nothing below the dermis. It’s like comparing a breathing, living human to a mannequin. It’s a deplorable imitation. 

He’ll be leaving soon enough anyway. That trust will never come to fruition. 

Mutual affection. He supposes that yes, in its own twisted way, affection has been borne. Nightmare after nightmare has reduced him to a shell, and the feeling of someone caring— whether it be through tossed clothing and a cold glass of water—is something that does feel like affection. There was that one night, and it was anomalous in every shape and form—but in some way, that was ‘affection’ too.

Except, not really. 

He’s seen the look in your eyes as you gaze at your machines. It’s not adoration, or anything close to it. It’s akin to understanding, one that almost extends to your eyes when you talk to Mr. Yang, and sometimes Himeko. He supposes you’re a lot more affectionate with your creations. 

When you look at him, there’s simply that dispassionate neutrality, as though your projects were breathing humans and he was just some scrap metal. 

He laughs bitterly. 

You make it so easy to consider stepping off the train and into the void; yet, at the same time, you’re the biggest obstacle in preventing him.

And as luck would have it, he’s given the opportunity to help deepen his understanding of you, just near the three month mark of his stay. 

“We’re nearing the Argo cluster,” Himeko starts off the day, which is rare as she doesn’t tend to speak before she’s at least drunk half her coffee. 

Well, this is an extraordinary conversation, if he takes the time to calculate the probability of you appearing in the past fifty-eight days (one-point-seven percent). Of all days, you chose to seat yourself at the breakfast table, next to Mr. Yang. That seat is opposite Dan Heng’s. 

You glance at him briefly, and for once it’s him avoiding your eyes. 

“I do believe I should be sent to Argo-II to safeguard any contingencies for the bronze negotiations.”

Not Himeko? The question is obvious in Dan Heng’s eyes as he tries to surreptitiously stare at first the person in question, then Mr. Yang. 

“Well, I’d normally go, but there needs to be at least one person on the Express when we visit various planets,” she explains. It makes sense. Her words ring out logically. They do. They should, but suddenly they don’t, and she’s mystified him once more. 

At least one person implies that all persons—save Pom-Pom and Himeko–will be embarking on this mission. 

All persons. That definition includes you.  

You blink innocently at him.

“You and him are going to Argo-I.” 

What?  

He’s not just mystified. He’s baffled, he’s confounded, he’s every synonym of confused. Both you and Pom-Pom are constants with each mission; neither of you ever leave this train. Even Himeko occasionally joins either him, Mr. Yang, or both of them when they visit another planet together. He’s gotten the impression that you’ll never leave this train until you’re old and grey. 

“What’s our mission, then?” Dan Heng instead chooses to ask. 

“You’ll see.” She’s got a tight-lipped, cryptic smile when she speaks, and yours isn’t much better. 

He sighs.

Ultimately, he gives up. He gives up trying to figure you out when you’re packing literally hours before the scheduled departure (at three system hours, the time you’re supposed to be in the kitchen). You cut the conversation short early, excusing yourself to do something you should’ve been doing sooner. 

Despite your usual lethargy, there’s a certain nervous, jittery anticipation to you as you breathe quicker than usual. And even though you try hide it, each careful step onto Argo-I betrays the complex feelings you have towards this place. 

But as he mentioned previously, he’s given up in figuring out what lies beneath the painted statue. 

This isn’t the first time something hasn’t gone to plan, after all. 

Especially now. 

It’s still the first day. It either slipped his mind, or perhaps he simply heard wrong—he focused on Argo and not the distinction between the two, planet-sized ships (according to the Handbook on the Mitaras Nebulae, the Argo cluster is distinctly considered a cluster of planets with spaceship qualities—he’s not entirely sure what that means, but he’s sticking to both concepts).

That’s not relevant. 

He just assumed Mr. Yang would be there as well. Not just the two of you. 

Aeons, it’s never felt more surreal to experience you talking to him while the artificial sun shines and it’s daytime. 

Well, you’re not exactly talking right now. You’re racing on the streets on a motorbike, and he’s sitting right behind you with his arms wrapped around your waist. 

He can feel his jagged pulse as it spikes with adrenaline, each brush of air against his body—it snarls his jacket and allows it to billow in the wind. He’s been on starskiffs before, but this is so entirely different. 

It smells like you: the motor oil, the metal, the roughness of it all. Here, he can feel each bump of the road as you navigate your way with an ease that almost takes his breath away. 

Is this where you’re from?

You take him past towering skyscrapers, through grey landscapes with nothing but endless roads in sight, past foliage and cliffs and cities and small towns, until you finally arrive at your destination. 

Behind the two of you is the setting sun and the vast metropolis gleaming with lights. Before the two of you is the spreading ocean, swallowing the last lights of ‘day’.

“The Argo-II is renowned for its sophisticated bronze architecture and cities,” you begin, slow and soft to match the pace of this evening. Dan Heng doesn’t reply, instead trying to read your wistful gaze.

This isn’t the gaze of someone looking at their home. 

“It’s beautiful,” you continue. He doesn’t think he’s ever heard that sort of turmoil within your vocal chords—like they’ve been stretched thin with tension. “I would’ve told you to go with Mr.Yang, since I come here alone usually when we’re near the Argo; this city isn’t as technologically advanced, or as clean. There’s remnants of air pollution, after all.”

There’s a million questions he could ask. He could ask, but he doesn’t. 

“It’s a breathing mechanical metropolis, coexisting with what remains of nature. Industrialisation has led to less death, more resources—yet it slowly kills the planet over a few centuries in return. In fact, that’s the reason there's more people migrating to Argo-II.”

You speak like you know this reality well. 

“There’s no mission here. I just take a week to let go of shitty memories in a shitty time period.”

Your smile is strained. 

It’s the first time he’s seen you vulnerable like this. 

“Ah, forget it,” you sigh. “I’m sorry Himeko dumped you with me.”

He can’t recognise you at this moment. It’s metamorphosis; you’ve shed your marble exoskeleton and become something else. 

“No,” he finds himself blurting out. “I don’t mind spending time with you.”

He’s blunt with it—always has been. 

It’s the first time your eyes meet his own tonight. 

Mutual trust. 

He thinks he’s getting closer to that overwhelming precipice. 

　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　   ☾

It’s the second night on Argo-I that he learns your definition of relaxation. 

The hotel you found was in the heart of the bustling city; right next to the beating metal heart. Steel skyscrapers and office buildings rose in the metropolis, and despite how bleak it looked during the day, he thought it looked rather pretty at night. 

You and him have separate rooms, and there’s no shared communal space on your floor. 

For once, there is no meeting at three system hours. 

He wakes up panting, then wears himself out by whirling Cloud Piercer in short, precise drills that leave him dizzier and dizzier. Though his sleep at four is filled with similar nightmares, he can’t bring himself to knock on room 137. And so it repeats, until he finally wears himself enough to have dreamless, restless slumber. 

Dan Heng stumbles out of his room at roughly eleven system hours. And when you inevitably encounter him in that hallway— like fate— your eyes can’t help but flicker to the dark circles under his eyes. 

“More nightmares?” Affirmative. He nods yes, and you exhale wryly. 

“Is that so…” you trail off, and once again he is reminded that some things never change. The roll of your eyes as you mull over a problem. The tilt of your head as you fix the stiff joints in your neck. The slouch of your shoulders as you lean against the wall. 

“Actually, there is one thing that helps me through tough nights here,” you laugh. It’s a strange mixture of self-depreciation and bitterness. 

There it is. That vulnerability.

“What?” It’s a little desperate, but he’s long stopped caring. 

“There’s a specific booze sold in the bars and clubs of this city.” You speak like you haven’t forgotten up until now. You speak as though you know of the drink full well. It’s a nostalgic sort of hum, one that makes him glance at you anew all over. 

“People turn to vice in hopeless situations. For those stuck in poverty, for those who have nowhere to go, for those longing for just one sweet dream—drink and gambling go together.” It’s a tired anecdote. 

What is the hopeless situation like for you, then?

“Argo-I is no exception,” you murmur, brushing a stray piece of lint from his jacket. The proximity makes him swallow. “Tonight, we’ll drink the devourer of dreams.”

“What does it do?” he breathes, careful not to disturb your fluttering hands as they quickly fix his collar too. 

“What else?” 

Gentle dust motes float in the warm air, backlit by the rays of the artificial sun. 

“Your dreams will be fully lucid.” You step back. “You’ll get rid of your nightmares for a night.” You place your hand on your doorknob. “All for the price of a glass or two.”

Finally, you pause. 

“I’ve got a few of my engineering society contacts to meet today while I’m here,” you inform him. “Be here before 22 hours and dressed in something—” you eye his clothes, briefly contemplating his gear. “—suitable for going out.”

It’s hard to take you seriously while you’re sporting the baggiest clothes to man, but he finds himself nodding in agreement regardless. 

You leave, and he takes the chance to wander around aimlessly. 

It’s not entirely unpleasant, but the pulse of the metropolis feels diluted without you there to breathe life into it. 

Though the blistering sun beats down, you could hardly tell it was daytime at all with the dark clouds that seem to permanently linger across the firmament. There’s a odour that grows stronger as he passes the alleyways; trash overflows, there’s dried gum and plastic littering the grey pavements, and the trees that have been planted aren’t as vibrant as he’s witnessed on the Luofu. 

It slowly kills the planet after a few centuries. 

It makes him wonder how Argo-I is special to you. 

This isn’t a useless day, not by any means. The first and second day are spent for reconnaissance anyway; he doesn’t feel like he’s wasted his time. 

Still, it’s decidedly strange—doing things without a specific goal in mind.

Dan Heng walks back to the hotel approximately three system hours before he’s due to report to you. You made it sound so serious, as though your plan was a definite fix. Though maybe he’s the idiot, for trusting your word just like that. 

It’s getting colder. Frigid air nips at his nose and face, while the bag he carries containing newly-purchased clothes cuts the circulation in his fingers off—just a bit. He takes the time to clear his head. 

From the doorway of the hotel lobby, he watches people live their lives in the grey streets. It’s an exercise meant to develop his understanding of you all without your knowledge. 

He studies them. Their clothes, their faces, the fate they slowly face that’s imminent to all: erosion. Planet extinction and destruction is a path that no one is impervious to, not even Aeons. Why is Argo-I so special to you, then?

There’s a wide variety of visages—as on all planets. 

If he had to note distinctions in clothes, it’s that they’re unusual. There’s a medley of fabric; all sorts of various fashions and garb he can’t quite place. It’s not like on the Luofu, where each garment is intricately tied to your own legacy, your status and the role you’ve taken on. 

There’s not many similarities interpersonally on Argo-I, either. From pressed charcoal suits, to bizarre shirts, to very casual attire, there’s too much variation to pick up a pattern. 

He can hear yells, laughs, and chatter from where he observes. It’s a range of human emotions: there should be, of course, the knowledge that one day this planet will fall and it will be humanity’s fault. But there’s a drive to move forward that he senses—something so intrinsic to people that it always fascinates him. It’s a perseverance despite the impending death that will eventually greet them: the greatest masterpiece of people. 

What is it? 

What exactly does this place remind you of?

He wonders these questions as he finishes changing. As he fumbles with the mesh long-sleeved top that rests over his black vest, as he pulls on the baggy trousers that have too many fastenings, as he slips on the silver jewellery he bought on impulse, he cannot help but ponder your sentiments—over and over and over. 

He’s ready to knock on room 137 to let you know he’s back. At this point, it’s almost two hours until the allotted meeting time—but checking in early won’t do any harm, right?

Or at least, he tries to knock. 

He’s sure the Elation has a hand to play in this—in a bizarre twist of fate, the door swings inward just as he’s about to rap his poised knuckles on the honey-coloured wood. 

“Oh–” you blink, and he simply stares. “I wasn’t expecting you just yet.”

And he keeps staring, since he wasn’t expecting this either. 

You’re not in your usual gear—slicked with machine oil and various stains from your work—but in something suited for going out, as you put it. It’s like his, except so different he cannot help but question if you and him have wildly different definitions for the phrase. 

Delicate chains criss-cross the black straps that pattern your body—the vast expanse of dermis has been exposed to the cold air. Dan Heng can count each scar you’ve gotten from your work. 

He observes the slope of your rolling shoulders as you open the door further. He observes the way your trousers crease like his when you lean onto your other leg. He observes the way the various pieces of jewellery adorning you clink just like the metal pieces do when you put them together. 

He swallows. 

It’s not everyday he sees something as unpredictable as this, but you’ve already established yourself as a paragon of inconsistency. 

“Did you need something?” 

It’s just like that first night. 

Except, he can actually hear you this time. 

“No,” he finds himself admitting. “I just decided to come back early.”

What will you do about that? What will you say back?

“Really? Guess you wouldn’t know the good places in the city,” you comment mildly, heading further into the spacious room while leaving the door open behind you. He follows you in. “I’ll have to show you around properly tomorrow and the days after.”

When you take a seat at the small table on the balcony, he takes the other side. 

It’s quiet. Save the sound of cars and bustling lives, the time passes with no words. 

He finds he doesn’t mind it. 

　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　   ☾

He takes back what he said. This place is loud. 

There’s that music that he occasionally hears from your room: a churning, thumping beast that he can feel pulse against his own heart. It’s dark—illuminated only by the flash of the strobe lights and the silver jewellery sported in this place. 

The crowd isn’t large enough to be suffocating, yet the twisted mass of people pushes him to the outskirts where the bar is. Where you are. Against the colours skimming you, the Argo-I silver illuminates you in a way he’s never seen before. 

It’s fascinating. 

You’re running a finger against the rim of your coupe glass, idly nodding your head to the heavy beat. The enticing liquid within is shimmering with the incandescence and topped with a slice of what appears to be a mandarin. He recognises it as the faint trace that appears when he takes your scent in: lingering, just barely noticeable. 

“You made it to the bar,” you note in amusement at his struggle to get through without stumbling. 

“Haha,” he scowls. He sits roughly onto the stool adjacent to yours, knees almost touching. The faintest brush of fabric against fabric makes him flinch slightly. 

You don’t seem to notice. 

Instead, you take a long swill from the glass, choosing to place your gaze on the amorphous mass of bodies, rather than him. 

“It’s not the classiest place, is it?” 

It’s loud. There’s a dazed, hallucinatory energy superposing his fatigued lethargy. No, it’s not, he wants to say, but there’s something that tells him it’s not quite the truth. 

“Human struggle is everywhere. In a bar for the elite, it’s only more prominent,” you murmur, pressing your chin into your palm. “Look. Ordinary people swarm here and forget their sadness briefly.”

“Do they really?” He can’t help but disagree. He’s seen enough people on Argo-I to know that behind their smiles, there’s a tiredness they can’t wash away. 

“I guess not.” A nail taps against the clear vessel. “But they’re trying. I think that’s what counts.”

You push the drink towards him. He stares it down; there’s a faint imprint of your lips on the edge from the tint of your lip balm. 

“I’ve already had a glass.” Your eyes meet his. “I’m sure you’ll like it.”

“What’s it called?” His chest feels tight, and the inquiry bubbles up as he notices your body poised like you’re about to take your leave like you always do. 

“There’s no formal name for it, but it’s nicknamed the devourer of dreams.” You slide off your stool, coming far too close to him. “Wanna know why?”

“Why?” His whisper is soft— strained. He can guess this is the mysterious elixir promised to him, yet he grasps at the smoke of your phantasm with the naivety of the fool attempting to touch the moon. Stay a little longer. That is the underlying message beneath the question.

“Figure it out yourself.” With a consoling pat to his shoulder, you’re swallowed up by the crowd. Dan Heng is left grasping nothing but the stem of a coupe glass and the warmth you imparted on the shoulder covered only by thin mesh. 

“Aeons,” he breathes, swallowing half the drink in one go—unconsciously directing his mouth to where yours was. For something meant to give sweet dreams, it’s surprisingly bitter. He supposes it complements you in that way. 

There’s a poster displaying the liquor only a few stools away. If he was a bit more diligent tonight, he might have read it. Warning— it reads— over-consumption of this drink may lead to side-effects such as projecting into others’ dreams, waking hallucinations, or a severe headache. Please drink with caution. 

Perhaps in another parallel universe, he might’ve spotted the bold red letters—and the poster in the first place. 

Unfortunately, in this specific strand of the universe, he doesn’t. 

He watches you instead. You somehow slot into these people like you belonged all along: moving when they move, dancing with strangers to the bass he doesn’t know. There’s a smile on your face—one he’s never seen before. 

It’s a strange mixture of exhaustion, layered with faint guilt and wistfulness. But, beneath that, it’s easing into relaxation.  

You, with people you’ve known less than a few minutes, have shown them more depth than he’s seen in around three months. 

His eyes narrow, and he swills the rest down with a scowl. 

There’s an unbearable feeling inside. Empty glasses start crowding around his right hand. Even when you come back, he can still feel its pangs.

“Now, we go to sleep and experience the effects of our dear devourer.” Your body carries the new smell of alcohol, and he can’t help but take you in fully once more. There’s a buzz to you now—tainted with liquor and slight tipsiness, while your skin glistens with sweat from the exertion. A small bead trails down your chest and out of sight, and his eyes can’t help but follow it. 

“And it just works like that?” He can’t help but be sceptical, but he wonders just how far it’s scepticism and not the urge to remain like this for a few moments longer. 

Pointedly, you eye the neat row of glasses by his elbow. “I’ll be more surprised if it doesn’t work.”

You’re closer to him than you would be in any other situation. 

He can almost taste the liquor still on your lips, and involuntarily, his eyes flicker downwards—too fast for you to perceive it. 

“What do I get from you if it doesn’t work?” 

Just a little longer. Let him stay seated with you by his side a little longer. 

“Nothing, since I never guaranteed anything,” you reply brusquely, seemingly unaffected by the proximity once more. “But I’ll buy you a round of SoulGlad from Penacony if we ever go.”

There’s a lingering feeling of disappointment that he can’t suppress. It’s your usual style of reasoning, so why is he feeling that way?

“Wow,” he remarks dryly. “What an interesting way of following Akivili.”

“Make a contract next time if you want a favour,” you yawn, grabbing his hand and tossing down currency that doesn’t resemble the uniform pristineness of credits. The various notes—both crisp and rumpled—are a light green and host different portraits on them. But he doesn’t focus on that—rather, he’s committing the feeling of your skin to his memory. “And I am trailblazing. New ways of negotiation.”

It’s raining when the two of you stumble outside the club. The skies have turned pitch black—nothing like the vast galaxies that watch over the Luofu—while the lamplight shines orange on the wet tarmac. 

You’re still holding his hand while you take the lead. 

He can’t see your face, but he can feel your fingers digging into his palm as you stare resolutely forward. 

If he looks closely, he thinks he can see your shoulders trembling. 

You alright?  

That’s what he wants to say, but he presses his icy lips together instead as you both take the elevator up. When the doors open again, it’s not the familiar hallway that greets him but the very top of the hotel. The skyscrapers surrounding the roof glitter like stars, and he wonders if this is the detachment constellations feel from the rest of the universe. 

You lean against the railing, allowing the wind to tussle and tug at your clothes and skin. There’s a bitter smile on your lips as you beckon him to your side. 

The rain may have slowed to a drizzle, but someone is definitely going to come down with a cold and it won’t be him. 

He doesn’t bluntly tell you that you’re being a fool at this moment. 

He’s sure you’re already well aware. 

“What do you think when you look at this world?”

Dan Heng pauses. 

“It’s… loud. Chaotic. There’s not much rhyme or reason to this place.”

And as expected, you neither confirm nor deny his statement.

“It’s also impossible to generalise this place to just that. There’s struggle, there’s perseverance, and there’s sincere effort to try despite the knowledge that this planet is dying,” he finally summarises. “It’s a quality that can’t be tamped down in this universe.”

“If these people knew there was a chance to escape and live only in paradise, do you think they’d take it?” Your lips form hollow words—so fragile they’re battered bloody in the cold wind. 

He thinks carefully about his next reply. It could hold the key to chipping more of that marble exoshell from you. 

“Some would, some wouldn’t. You’ve already got people migrating to Argo-II for a better life. You’ve already got people succumbing to vice,” he leans back against the railing too, until his gelid shoulder presses against yours. “No matter where you go, you can’t have paradise. There’ll always be something missing. And what’s missing is unique to every person. Paradise is only a temporary fixture, and a pointless goal in the first place.”

Was that the right thing to say? It’s the first time he’s mulling over the strings escaping his larynx—the first time he’s properly consoling someone who looks so stricken at the sight of people below. 

“Is it the wrong choice to escape? To take the dreams of others to escape and achieve it while they can’t?” 

“No.” He meets your eyes this time. Dan Heng watches as they widen, then close in what he can only assume is relief. “To clarify, there cannot be a ‘right’ choice when it concerns doing what’s best for you. We survive and we move on.”

“I think it’s admirable when people decide what’s best for themselves. After all, we aren’t responsible for others choosing what’s best for themselves either,” he adds. 

You can’t save everyone, he wants to say. 

“Thanks.” It’s a quiet word, accompanied by you waving him forward. When he glances back, your face schools itself into a weak smile. 

Perhaps if he were a bit quicker, he might’ve not heard the lapse in strength—the vibrant vulnerability in your voice once more. 

But as Vidyadhara, his hearing is good, while his timing is the worst. So while he’s carefully propping the door behind him so it doesn’t get locked, he overhears three words clearly not meant for him. 

“I miss Earth.”

It’s a foreign phrase, one he doesn’t know the meaning of. It’s not the True Universal Language dialect, nor is it any he recognises. 

He can only memorise the shape of the sounds and hope that one day, you’ll tell him with your own words what it means. 

　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　   ☾

If he had to describe his second night on Argo-I, it would be kind. For once, there’s a lack of nightmares—only a lucid field that describes itself as Asphodel. 

Peace for the unremarkable. 

In fact, he feels so well-rested in the morning that there’s even a mild smile on his face when he knocks on your door: something so uncharacteristic for him that he can feel his facial muscles practically creak with disuse. 

You take him everywhere you can think of on the motorcycle. There’s the beach again; the waves lapping at his feet are cold and unlike the lightless waters he saw at night.  He holds no particular love for the casino, and it appears you don’t either—you bet the minimum, easily resisting the beginner's urge to continue when your luck appears to be high. 

You take him to scenic parks, loamy forests, and peaceful lakes. You take him to bookstores, coffeehouses, and various restaurants. And when the artificial sun is hidden, you take him to that club. 

Dan Heng downs glass after glass of the dream devourer, never pausing to glance at the poster only a few feet away. And even if he did, he’d think the blood of Long would make him impervious to most of alcohol’s effects. Hallucinations, migraines, projecting into others’ dreams. 

And each night is pleasant, save the very last. 

He’s drunk more than usual tonight. He, also, has not noticed that crucial factor yet—the poster warning against overconsumption. 

This is his first mistake. 

His next mistake is drinking several glasses of this every night. Naturally, he assumed a larger dose before he slumbered would be more effective as a Vidyadhara. 

So naturally, the latent effects are built up too quickly, too immensely. 

Dan Heng still thinks everything is fine when his head hits the pillow. He thinks everything is fine even when the fields of Asphodel aren’t resembling the landscape he’s seen every night. In fact, he’s still thinking everything is fine when the topography begins changing. 

Why wouldn’t he?

He’s had a taste of peace, so forgive him for craving it. 

Clean, warm wind brushes past his face. This is no field. This is a beach: golden sand (unlike the gritty, grey stuff of Argo-I), aquamarine waters (also unlike the grey stuff here), and vegetation that befits this scene. 

His eyes take it all in: the scenery, and you.  

He can see you—your back is facing him, but he could recognise your form anywhere. Dan Heng swallows. There’s nothing covering your skin except a white fabric draped around your waist and cascading down your legs, and golden jewellery adorning your flesh. It shines against the vast dermis, and he thinks for a moment that he’s never seen something as entrancing. 

However, you’re not alone. There’s various wisps surrounding you, speaking to you in murmurs he can’t decipher. It’s an alien language—untranslatable to him, but he recognises exactly one word from the conversation.

“◼◼◼◼— ! ◼◼ Earth ◼◼◼◼; ◼◼◼….”

“◼◼, ◼◼◼◼◼ ◼◼◼◼◼◼◼   ◼◼◼◼,” you reply. There’s barely any coldness left in your normally harsher tone. Instead, your cadence is fragile and heartbroken. “◼◼.”

This is a dream, Dan Heng reminds himself. This isn’t reality, nor are you actually showing him layers of yourself you hadn’t before. 

So, he watches as the wisps dissipate. He watches as you stay staring at the sea, watches as your shoulders relax in acceptance. 

This is a dream, he repeats, before making his way to your side. Being lucid like this comes with clear benefits, but it also makes him notice details in his dreams with painstaking detail. 

Of course, that’s a beneficial function.

But currently, he’s fighting himself to not collapse in shock. 

When he noticed the fabric draped only around your waist, he naively assumed your torso was at least covered from the front, if only by those straps from the club. 

It isn’t.

His eyes can’t help but trail across you, noting the gold dripping down your flesh, the metallic colour painting the skin of your face in graceful lines. And his cheeks can’t help but begin to flush rosy at the sight. 

“Dan Heng?” It’s the first time he’s heard you say his name. Though your voice is harsher when you revert to Universal, he thinks it’s never sounded better. 

“Yes,” he affirms immediately. 

“Why are you here?” It’s not an accusation. It’s more tinged with disbelief, rather than anything. 

“Why not?” he breathes. This is a dream, he thinks, so he doesn’t stop his hand from lifting and placing itself on the side of your face. 

Why? His heart is thumping right out of his chest—skin and muscle taut as a result. Why does he feel this way?

“You appeared to distract me, didn’t you?” Your laughter is genuine. It’s so clear that you can’t be anything but a figment of his imagination—he’s never heard you sound so amused. 

His skin burns where it’s come into contact with yours. If this were reality, he’d never have the courage to do this. 

“Do you want to be distracted?” he replies, mind already hazing over as it succumbs to his body. 

“Sure.” Your voice is steady, as though you’re utterly unaffected by this. So unlike him, where his legs are beginning to grow unsteady and his chest is rising and falling faster. “And you’ll achieve it, how, exactly?”

Aeons. His subconscious has replicated your mannerisms almost perfectly. 

His other hand traces the planes of your face, finally settling across your cheek to mirror the first. He’s clasping your visage, while you quietly watch him. 

What will your next move be?— your expression asks. 

And he’s tired of his fluttering heart, tired of your elusiveness, tired of how it never seems to be enough—how he never seems to be enough to capture your attention like those machines do. 

Dan Heng’s not entirely sure when the lines merged between friendship and something else. Looking at you like this in the palm of his hands, literally, he thinks it’s finally clicked for him. 

This is a dream, he acknowledges. You won’t be looking at him like this in real life. 

“You trying to kiss or gawk at me?” you ask bluntly, suddenly grasping the front of his turtleneck and pulling his face closer to yours. “Don’t waste my—”

He cuts you off with his own lips, pulling your face towards his while he feels your hand form a fist in surprise. 

You taste like the sea. It’s yet another layer that’s been uncovered, except this is only a dream. 

It’s only a dream, he thinks bitterly as your hands fall to his sides and press him into your bare torso. You’re warm, even through the seawater currently clamming your arms up. Some things simply don’t change. 

It’s only a dream, he thinks with regret as his fingers trace the expanse of your body, watching the gold on you smear and leave its matching imprint on his own palms. 

It’s only a dream, as he moves his mouth to your jaw and trails a burning path down to your collarbone. 

“You—” Finally. You’re breathing heavily as he holds you as though you were his lifeline—lips still latched onto the juncture between neck and shoulder. Clearly, you’re not as unaffected as you seem. 

Vidyadhara physiology is fascinating. Not only can he taste the salt of your skin, feel the dermis breaking slightly beneath sharp canines—but he can feel your pulse as it quickens to a dizzying allegro. 

You wrench him away from you, and he’s still processing his disorientation over you when your palms push him into lying against the sand. He’s barely propped himself up on his elbows when you’re suddenly looming over him—almost straddling him as you bring him back into a bruising kiss. 

He’s gasping now himself; not out of a need for air in particular, but because you’re practically forcing it out of him. He’s a greedy man—almost reflexively, he manoeuvres his arms to wind around your neck so he can press himself closer to you. 

Dan Heng is losing his mind. 

While there was a real possibility of that anyway after his stint in the Shackling Prison, he thinks he’ll go mad within the next system minute. 

You’re straddling him fully now, and there’s only some folds of fabric separating you from him that are slowly riding up your thighs. 

I need you.  

The words go unspoken, but he doesn’t get an opportunity to speak them in the first place. 

He’s fading away, grasping at your material form with his own incorporeal hand. 

No, he begs. 

This is a dream.

This is a dream. 

This is a dream, therefore the lucidity with which he moved ends when he’s waking up. 

This is a dream, so the surprise in your face isn’t real as he feels himself drift back into consciousness. 

This is a dream. This is not reality. 

He wakes up panting. Sweat drenches his skin and makes his clothes stick uncomfortably against his body: suffocating, so overwhelmingly profound that his fingers scrabble against the hotel bed to make sure he’s not still at that fateful beach. 

What the—

For once in his life, he is utterly and completely lost. As Dan Feng, letting himself be swept up by emotions was the end of him and his freedom. The plight of Dan Heng continues due to the downright foolish actions of his predecessor, which is why he resolved to act pragmatically and logically—to avoid those same mistakes. 

The man buries his face in his hands. Those palms are clammy; after all, his nervous system has basically just rewired itself at your touch. Your phantom touch— because, as he reminds himself, it was not real.  

He’s not an idiot. But currently, he feels like one. How else would he explain why he dreamt about his friend, and with all his mental faculties in order, chose to kiss him? This was a lucid dream. This was a lucid dream, meaning his limbs were in direct control of his mind. 

The only other explanation would be madness induced by avoiding his usual nightmares. He must’ve lost all his senses by all the adrenaline catching up to him. 

How will he face you?

At least, with his nightmares, there’s a very clear lesson embedded within them. Avoid the man with red eyes. It’s instinctual—primal, even—to run when he feels that disturbance caused by the man who perpetually hunts him down. That, though not easy, is relatively straightforward to deal with. It’s a matter of fight or flight. This, on the other hand, is perplexing to say the least. At four system hours in the morning, it is even more difficult to deal with. 

This is now reality. 

This is no longer a dream. 

　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　   ☾

There’s a certain sort of word attributed to situations like this. Shame. According to the standard TUL dialect, it refers to the painful humiliation or distress caused by being conscious of a foolish action. And he’s feeling plenty of it as he stares at you in the hallway. 

The sensation is strange—like he’s hearing it through the deep end of water. In his past life, the emotion lingered in his shadow and was a constant reminder of his sins. He may not be able to remember the specific fragments clearly, but Aeons is the feeling palpable. 

“What?” you yawn widely. A loose pair of trousers sits at your hips, and he’d think that were normal if it weren’t for your top half only consisting of another loose piece of fabric flung around your shoulders. It hits far too close to home—just when he thought he’d composed himself, there’s a rosy tint to his cheeks once more. “You gonna miss Argo-I?”

No. Yes. 

He won’t miss the clamour that comes when watching the streets. He won’t miss the chaos and the glitzy facade this city puts up. He won’t miss the suffering found in these same streets that promise abundance and glory. 

He will, however, miss this aspect of you. These glimpses of you he’s never caught before—flashes of pain, grief, acceptance, hopelessness—put cracks in your sculpture that he wouldn’t mind peering at forever. 

But he can’t tell you that.

“Not particularly.” 

“Right.” You lean against the doorway with a sharp grin, and he follows the motion with an accelerating pulse. “That explains why you look more depressed than usual.”

He frowns, and it almost feels like regular back-and-forth you two have slowly settled into. 

“This planet is depressing,” he deadpans. 

“Did the devourer of dreams not work this time or something?” you wonder instead. “And I almost completely won the little bet you tried to initiate.”

Dan Heng’s face goes through a rather alarming progression of waxy-white to puce. To his credit, he manages to compose himself remarkably quickly; it pays to have a resting bored face, after all. 

Do you know? Have you somehow pieced together his erratic behaviour and drawn out his dreams for your own amusement?

Behind his back, his nails dig into his palms and form bloody crescent moons shaped just like your grin. 

“No,” he grits out. “My dreams were the same as I’ve had all this week. You think we could get the drink imported?”

It’s not what he wants to say. After tonight, he doesn’t think he can ever touch another coupe glass without it feeling indecent. 

“That’s interesting,” you tilt your head thoughtfully. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think you��were the one following The Hunt and not him. “I had quite the fascinating dream last night.”

What does that mean? The way you word it has his skin prickling uncomfortably, but there’s no way you’d know what he dreamed. It doesn’t make sense. Not at all. This isn’t the legendary Penacony he’s heard about, and this sort of dreamscape offered is nothing more but cheaper mimicry made by the desperate for the desperate. 

He’s still paranoid, and he hopes you don’t recognise his slightly shallower breathing. 

“But no,” you add. “The specific composition in the drink makes it impossible to preserve for import, from what I’ve heard.”

“Actually,” you murmur, seemingly mystified. “What the hell is in that thing?”

Dan Heng has never agreed with you as profoundly as he does now. 

　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　   ☾

[sillypuppetmeister]

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been un­usually communicative in a reserved way, and I under­stood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, pre­occupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiv­ering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infi­nite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If per­sonality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that reg­ister earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This respon­siveness had nothing to do with that flabby impression­ ability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short­ winded elations of men.

* * *

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradi­tion that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware busi­ness that my father carries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why—ye-es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weatherbeaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a few days until he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

“How do you get to West Egg Village?” he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighbor­hood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was be­ginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mæcenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all spe­cialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epi­gram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual forma­tions of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical re­semblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more ar­resting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every par­ticular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swim­ming-pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and gar­den. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gen­tleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neigh­bor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashion­able East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

this is such a good passage i love this book. a must reread.

Antinous just kind of… listens, for once. He’s been so scatterbrained with Penelope on his heels (for good reason) that he’s just.. tired. So he listens, and seems surprisingly attentive, muttering something about ‘I like this Gatsby fellow’ before nodding off.

[queen-of-the-avengers]

Iron Man 2: Part One

Pairing: Natasha Romanoff x Female!Reader

Word Count: ~2k

Warnings: canon violence and angst

Author’s Note: any and all comments are appreciated <3

x

Nick Fury sits across from you in the dimly lit room. On the desk in front of you is a file he's been working on since you and Carol parted ways in 1995. He's been waiting patiently for the past ten minutes while you read through it all.

"This is what you were working on after Carol left?" you ask and scan the pages in your hand once more.

"I didn't realize exactly what's out there until you and Carol. I have no idea what we might face, and I think it's about time to bring together exceptional people with extraordinary powers such as yourself," Fury explains.

"What are you trying to put together? Some kind of superhero team?" you chuckle.

"It's good to know what's out there. It's better to be prepared for it."

"You think I'm worthy enough to be in this group?"

"Have you met you? The woman I knew in 1995 would jump at the chance to be on this team."

"I have to admit, you've got some good stuff in here," you sigh and set the file on the table.

"But...?"

"I've seen this kind of thing before. Someone puts together a team of exceptionally gifted people who can do incredible things, but conflict arises and it never works out. Your heart is in the right place, but I don't think your head is. Have you thought this through?"

"More than you think I have. I think with the right motivation, this team can be the greatest thing this world has ever seen."

"I don't know," you bite your lower lip in worry.

"Who survived the Kree not once but twice? Who fought Hydra in World War II? Who helped defeat Stane? Who helped Bruce?"

"Okay, first, Stane was a douchebag in a machine he didn't know how to control. Anyone could have beaten him," you roll your eyes. "Second, Bruce came to me thinking I was a scientist. He heard about me back in 1945, found out how to contact me, and I was there for him. I didn't know what I was signing up for when he went all Hulk on me."

"Think about it, Y/N. This is something that can be truly remarkable with the right people. I already have two agents on board."

"Who?"

"Black Widow and Hawkeye."

You don't know who Hawkeye is but you've heard plenty about the deadly assassin. She's popped up over the years but you've always stayed out of her way in fear she'll start hunting you. Never did you think you'd get to be able to work with her. You take the file from the table and look at Black Widow's section.

Damn, she's gorgeous.

"Is she seeing anyone?"

"Excuse me?"

"You know, is she in a relationship?"

"I'm not doing this. Ask her yourself. Take some time and think about it."

He gets up and is about to leave the room when you swivel around to face him.

"How's your eye doing?"

"Don't start," he shakes his head and leaves the room.

Not only do you have this to think about, Tony's speech has been on replay over and over in your mind. You told the world that you were the Avatar while Tony confessed to being Iron Man. The weeks following the press conference have been nothing but chaos as the public made you and Tony celebrities. While you did confess to being able to control the elements, you're not going to tell the world the planet you're truly from. You're not sure they're ready to hear they're not alone in the universe.

Dr. Erskine, Peggy Carter, and Howard Stark took it well because they were already working in that area, so it didn't come as a shock to them. Despite being inventors, doctors, and secret government agents, they were scientists. They knew there were other lifeforms out there.

They may have been ready to learn about you, but the rest of the world isn't.

You and Tony have been put in the spotlight, making you two out to be idols. People love the Avatar and Iron Man and often want you two to be out together in public. With his newfound sense of fame, he decided to reopen the Stark Exposition where he showcases all the things he's invented while encouraging people to show off their inventions.

If you know Tony, and you do, he's gonna want to make a grand entrance into his Stark Exposition. He's going to use the suit to fly into the arena with you by his side. To do that, you have to get high, which is why you two are on a small plane to take you to that height.

"I never got the chance to tell you how risky of a move it was to reveal yourself like that," you say to him while you're waiting.

"It's bound to come out sooner or later," Tony shrugs.

"They're going to start asking questions."

"They were already doing it before."

"Life is going to be different for us."

"Eh, what else is new?" he chuckles.

The plane flies higher, and you and Tony get ready to jump out of it.

"So, how are you and Pepper doing? Have you kissed her yet?"

"Don't start."

"What? Come on, you two almost kissed. There's some sort of feelings there, no?"

"I don't know," Tony sighs. "Do I really want to involve her in my life?"

"You need someone like her to keep you grounded. She's been with you for ten years and has done more than what you've asked her to do. She likes you, Tony and I know you like her, too. Tell me, imagine if she wasn't in your life. How would that make you feel?" Tony can't answer because he knows the answer. He knows he'd be devastated. "Exactly my point."

"Two hundred and seventy at thirty knots. Holding steady at fifteen thousand feet. You are clear for exfiltration over the drop zone," the pilot informs.

"Time for show business."

The launch door on the bottom of the airplane opens, and Tony doesn't hesitate to jump out of it. You jump off the landing strip and follow him as he zips through the air at a fast pace. The wind whips through your hair, the breeze is nice against your skin, and you're having fun just flying wherever you please to go. 

Tony takes the lead to the Stark Expo, and he lands on the stage with a loud thump. You're more delicate with your entrance, and you slowly lower yourself next to Tony until your feet are planted on the ground.

Tony has to make this event as grand as it can be which means there are fireworks, a very bright light show, dancing girls dressed like Iron Man, and a raging crowd to greet him. Sure, you told everyone you're the Avatar, but they're more interested in the billionaire. Not that you're complaining, you're content with being in the background.

You take a few steps back to let the machines underneath the stage remove Tony's suit for him. The platform he's on is slowly spinning as robotic arms are dismantling his suit. The showgirls continue to dance in the background until the song that's playing is over. They do some big dance number that you couldn't possibly follow, and they leave once their parts are over with. 

The lights dim to focus on you and Tony.

"Tony! Tony! Tony! Tony!" the majority of the crowd yells. 

Your name is being scattered throughout the crowd, but it's mostly for Tony.

"It's good to be back. You missed me?" he chuckles.

"Blow something up!" a man in the crowd screams.

"Blow something up? I already did that," he dismisses him until the crowd dies down. "I'm not saying that the world is enjoying its longest period of uninterrupted peace in years because of us. I'm not saying that from the ashes of captivity, never has a greater phoenix metaphor been personified in human history. I'm not saying that Uncle Sam can kick back on a lawn chair, sipping on an iced tea because I haven't come across anyone who's man enough to go toe-to-toe with us on our best day!"

"It's actually not about us," you chime in. "It's not about you. It's about legacy. It's about what we choose to leave behind for future generations. That's why, for the next year, and for the first time since 1974, the best and brightest men and women of nations and corporations the world over will pool their resources and share their collective vision to leave behind a brighter future."

"She's absolutely right. Therefore, what we're saying, if we're saying anything, is welcome back to the Stark Expo," Tony smiles and the crowd goes wild. "Now, making a special guest appearance from the great beyond to tell you what it's all about, please welcome my father, Howard."

You and Tony leave the stage as the video of Howard starts to play. 

"He looks so young there," you comment after your microphones have been turned off.

"What, you didn't know him like this?"

"I knew him when he was in his twenties. He was bright for his age. He loved inventing."

"Yeah, even more than his own son," Tony scoffs.

"He loved you so much, Tony. Even before you were even an idea. He talked about having children with so much love and admiration. He was a good man. He helped me and Steve become who we are."

"It's nice to know you have fond memories of him," he nods passive-aggressively.

It's clear he doesn't like to talk about his dad a lot, and you don't really understand why. While you were off-planet, he was here building his family. You weren't fortunate in seeing Howard as a parent since you met Tony only a couple of years before his parents died. Tony never liked how Howard parented, but you have a feeling he refuses to see why Howard did what he did.

"I'm sure if he were here, he'd be so proud of you."

Tony doesn't respond to that. He turns away from the screen and pulls out a device that measures his blood toxicity levels. The palladium in the arc reactor is slowly killing him, so he has to check how toxic his blood is every hour. You're working on a cure, but there isn't an acceptable replacement for palladium. The continued use of the Iron Man suit is killing him, and it's very hard to make him see the seriousness of the situation.

Only you know about this because he refuses to tell anyone what's actually happening. He doesn't want anyone to worry about what's going on with him even though they deserve to know. Pepper deserves to know. Even with your vast knowledge of powers and serums, you don't know how you'll be able to fix this one.

If Tony is good at anything, then it's how he throws after-parties once the main one dies down. As soon as the Expo is over, everyone huddles around the front of the building to meet you and Tony. Happy stands in front of you two to carve a path back to the car. Tony stops to sign autographs and take pictures with devoted fans while you keep your head down. You hated your picture being taken in the 1940s and you hate it being taken now.

Pictures are proof you were here.

Happy escorts you to Tony's brand new convertible car while the building's security prevents people from crowding you at the car.

"Very mellow," Tony comments.

"I thought it was going to be worse."

A slim, young woman walks to the car with two men behind her just as you get in the backseat of the car.

"Hi, and you are?" Tony asks as he slides into the front seat.

"Marshal. Pleased to meet you Tony and Y/N."

"I'm sorry, what are you doing here?" you ask.

"Looking for you two," she grins, "and serving subpoenas."

She hands him a piece of paper and he visibly gulps. He hates being handed things, which you never understood.

"Yikes," he mutters. 

"He doesn't like to be handed things. I'll take it," you smile and take the letter she offers. 

"Yeah, I have a peeve," Tony nods. 

"I got it. You two are hereby ordered to appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee tomorrow morning at nine a.m."

"Can I see a badge?"

"You wanna see the badge?" she grins. 

"We'll be there," you interrupt her meaningless flirting. "How far are we from D.C.?"

"Two hundred and fifty miles," Happy answers. 

"We'll be there. Thank you."

Tony turns the car on and takes off toward the highway. It's night right now, but it will be morning by the time you get to D.C.

x

Follow my library blog @aqueenslibrary​​​​​​ where I reblog all my stories, so you can put notifications on there without the extra stuff :)

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Beetles living in the dark teach us how to make sustainable colors

Inspired by beetle cuticles, scientists have developed optical structures that can produce vibrant, iridescent and completely biodegradable colors using chitin—the world's second most abundant organic material. "Extreme scarcity conditions have enabled natural materials to evolve into some of the most extraordinary materials on Earth, such as incredibly strong spider silk and impact-resistant seashells," said Javier Fernandez, Associate Professor of Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). Throughout history, scientists have consistently turned to nature for inspiration to solve problems and develop new technologies, from da Vinci's flying machines modeled after birds to efficient swimsuits that mimic shark skin.

Read more.

[cleolinda]

Varney the Vampire: A Preface

I want you to think back to what it’s like to reread your old work from years ago—your old stories or poetry, your old school papers, or even your old tumblr posts. Sometimes you’re actually kind of pleased, sure, but I want you to really go back and locate yourself in the heady cringe of that feeling.

In related news, I'm going to pick back up with the Varney the Vampire recaps I started in late 2010 CE. I got about nine chapters in, and then something, who knows what, derailed my life, as things tend to. Like, I'm used to this, it happens with the regularity of a lunar cycle. But I like writing about vampires (clearly), and since I feel like Dracula has been tread pretty thoroughly in recent times, I figured I might go back to something different; we had some lively discussions about Varney back then.

But 2010 was a time before A Lot of Things happened. I was in my early 30s at that point, so I won't say, "Oh, I was so young," but I had a very different energy as a blogger 12-13 years ago. So I've decided to rewrite the recaps a little—some more than others, some not much at all. I just feel like I have a really different perspective on the first chapter in particular, in 2023.

As before, I'm using the full, unabridged text. It is hideously long, something like 230+ chapters, but go big or go home, I figure. The thing is, I was using the files hosted at the University of Virginia, and now you can only get those through the Wayback Machine, but they are still usable for now. I have various backups saved, but I do want you to be able to see that I am, as ever, Not Making It Up.

I'm also not going to quibble anymore as to whether James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Peckett Prest wrote this behemoth. Per Wikipedia sources, scholars seem to agree that it was all or mostly Rymer. When it's mentioned that they figured this out based on his dialogue style, I went... yeah, that checks out. Because it sure is A Style, and I'll be honest, the repetitive filler dialogue in chapter 10 was such a speedbump for me that I just threw up my hands and said, "I don't know how to recap this. Something I can't remember now is going on in my life and I Cannot. I no longer Can."

Well, it's the 2020s and we're gonna. Like I can't tell you how much stress I do not have about this. I've had covid three times and also spinal surgery. Varney the Vampire can no longer hurt me.

To start, this ordeal has a preface—apparently written upon the occasion of collecting the serial into book form—wherein The Author expresses his gratitude for "unprecedented success of the romance of Varney the Vampyre." First off, Rymer uses "vampire" and "vampyre" interchangeably, because fuck me for caring about consistency, I guess. Second, as Wikipedia notes,

It first appeared in 1845–1847 as a series of weekly cheap pamphlets of the kind then known as "penny dreadfuls." The author was paid by the typeset line [YEAH, I NOTICED], so when the story was published in book form in 1847, it was of epic length: the original edition ran to 876 double-columned pages and 232 chapters. Altogether it totals nearly 667,000 words.

For comparison, all of Lord of the Rings plus The Hobbit is 576,459 words. I sure do blanch every time I see those numbers! It's fine. We're gonna be fine. Back to the preface:

The following romance is collected from seemingly the most authentic sources, and the Author must leave the question of credibility entirely to his readers, not even thinking that he is peculiarly called upon to express his own opinion upon the subject.

"Seemingly" is doing a lot of work here.

Nothing has been omitted [for real, nothing down to the tiniest fly-swat has been omitted] in the life of the unhappy Varney, which could tend to throw a light upon his most extraordinary career, and the fact of his death just as it is here related, made a great noise at the time through Europe, and is to be found in the public prints for the year 1713.

I've seen more than one Dracula multimedia art project where people recreated the letters and diaries and recordings in the book (have you heard my whole thing about how Dracula actually was a cutting-edge techno-thriller back in 1897?), but I've never heard of anyone creating ARG-style media for the Totally for Actual-Fact Real tale of Sir Francis Varney the Vampire, and I think it would be hilarious if someone did.

I won't belabor the entire preface, but what I do want to touch on is Rymer's mention of "unprecedented success." Varney is actually standing on the shoulders of a vampire giant, and it's not the one we would think of. Nowadays, our big touchstone—the influence so great that most works either evoke it or take the trouble to say "Our vampires are different"—is Dracula, obviously. Which was published exactly 50 years after Varney, in 1897. But Varney's touchstone is Polidori's short story "The Vampyre" (1819). And for most of the 1800s, this was everyone's touchstone. Per Wikipedia (which I'm going to lean on for how concise it is, but I concur with this from my own research as well):

An adaptation appeared in 1820 with Cyprien Bérard's novel Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires, falsely attributed to Charles Nodier, who himself then wrote his own dramatic version, Le Vampire, a play which had enormous success and sparked a "vampire craze" across Europe. This includes operatic adaptations by Heinrich Marschner (see Der Vampyr) and Peter Josef von Lindpaintner (see Der Vampyr), both published in the same year. Nikolai Gogol, Alexandre Dumas [note: I have the Ruthven play he wrote around here somewhere] and Aleksey Tolstoy all produced vampire tales, and themes in Polidori's tale would continue to influence Bram Stoker's Dracula and eventually the whole vampire genre. Dumas makes explicit reference to Lord Ruthven in The Count of Monte Cristo, going so far as to state that his character "The Comtesse G..." had been personally acquainted with Lord Ruthven. [...]

In England, James Planché's play The Vampire, or The Bride of the Isles was first performed in London in 1820 at the Lyceum Theatre based on Charles Nodier's Le Vampire, which in turn was based on Polidori. Such melodramas were satirised in Ruddigore, by Gilbert and Sullivan (1887); a character called Sir Ruthven must abduct a maiden, or he will die.

Back when no one gave a shit about copyright, Polidori's work was spun out into a cottage industry of knock-off stories and plays, an entire horror zeitgeist. Lord Ruthven was, for 78 years, who you copied, who you riffed on, who you parodied, what Count Dracula is to us now: the archetypal vampire. The Big Guy. And Varney is clearly cut from his cloth—the ostensible gentleman who worms his way into the lives of respectable, unwitting people. Unlike Dracula, there's no foreigner Othering, no "historical basis," no undercurrents of contagion and infection, no ambition to make the world his wine-press, none of that; Ruthven is a simpler figure, but the dominant one of this time no less. He is a stranger who shows up in the middle of London high society, icy and distant, his eyes “dead grey”—stern, yet somehow compelling when he cares to be. And when he cares to be, you're in trouble.

And this is the cultural consciousness when Francis Varney shows up.

[Chapter one will go up sometime this week, March 8-10 or so.]

[supermaks]

U know like the edits of "what's a mob to a king, king/god, god/non-believer" and when I see them max always is the non-believer but like why? It feels right but I can't out my finger on why it suits him

Reallll omfg it’s so interesting isn’t it. Idk either but ig we can try to discuss that thru the religious metaphor thing. Well when u deep it f1 is a sport of icons. at their best, their most insane and awe inducing, they're wearing helmets and going 200mphs and u cant c them u only see their hands on the machines. And their machines are completely out of our reach. It’s not like a ball for example or stuff thats easily obtainable and u can touch and feel for yourself like wid f1 we can read about the technology and try to learn but even when ur at a race u kind of feel like ur watching aliens at work. Their world is not accessible to us. It’s like a whole different universe. So that distance creates a lot of room for imagination and mythology. f1 drivers the the only human shape to all that, they become kind of like pastors here, the human vessels of this strange, fast, technologically impossible world. And not only that they’re the ones who give it meaning, by risking their lives, by achieving speeds no one else can, and battling one another, and pushing one another, sometimes to the point of no return. Theres some that are so good they go go a step beyond that and start to become part of the technology, part of the dream, and they begin to peddle their own faith. For example lewis hamilton and his huge presence and what he represents and the way he cultivates such intense type of connections wid his fans. Then u got charles leclerc and his tragic type of greek tale trying to push the boulder up the red mountain that u want to c try and try and try again because maybe one day the boulder will be nice to him or whatvr. And then sitting next to these type of characters u have Max. And max calls this a job. Max clocks in like u and me and everybody else wud. What is god to a man who has mastered his craft to the point he doesn't require belief? To a man who deems himself ordinary and yet continuously does extraordinary things? In a universe built around faith the bro who sits on the throne needed none at all. He got it because he could and because what was a dream to you, and me, and them, to him was a matter of time