#fallen london: the imperial college

[hekateras]

On the extraction of astringents from Coffea presbyterata

Some fictional botanical illustrations/scientific notes. More text on AO3.

[upsettingandunfortunateclasshate]

“They’ve fallen by 30 places, which is pretty startling,” said Professor Tim Cole, an expert in child growth rates at the Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, University College London told The Times newspaper. “The question is why?”

The professor, who was not involved in the most recent study, said wider data on the height of 19-year-olds suggested that growing up in the 2010s “which happens to coincide with the period of austerity . . . tells me that austerity has clobbered the height of children in the UK.”

In 2020, an Imperial College London team behind a study into height of children up to the age of 19 warned nutrition - and especially a lack of quality food - may lead to stunted growth.

[hcartcorruptcd]

ELLINGTON "EL" TAYLOR survived another night. The town would certainly feel less safe without a them close by. Not to mention, we can’t lose another LEVEL THREE MECHANIC, plus they’re only THIRTY-THREE years old. Crazy to think, it’s been TWO YEARS since their arrival, though in a place like Oblitus it can feel much longer. Good thing they’re staying at the RESIDENTIAL AREA. Almost like it happened yesterday, they still remember LONDON, ENGLAND, and where they came from. It’s no secret, they were LEAVING THE AIRPORT FROM A WORK TRIP when they came across the tree, and is still keeping them up at night. Truth be told, they’re awfully COMEDIC and DISTANT, but they’ve survived this long. Well, it’s almost day light again, maybe they’ll play SITTIN ON THE DOCK OF THE BAY by OTIS REDDING this time. Welcome to another night in Oblitus, please don’t open the doors. (fitz, 27, he/him, est)

BASIC INFORMATION

NAME: Ellington "El" Taylor GENDER: Non-binary (they/them) NICKNAMES: El BIRTHDAY: April 23, 1991 AGE: 33 ASTROLOGY: Taurus Sun, Taurus Moon, Cancer Rising SEXUALITY: Lesbian HOMETOWN: London, England BIRTHPLACE: London, England RELIGION: Agnostic EDUCATION: Master of Engineering (MEng) in Aerospace Engineering from Imperial College London RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Single

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS

HEIGHT: 5'8' EYES: Green HAIR: Brown BUILD: Slim DISTINGUISHING MARKS: Large back tattoo of an airplane

PERSONALITY & BEHAVIOR

HOBBIES: Model Plane Building, Stargazing, Gardening, Cooking/Baking, Vinyl Record Collecting, Photography LIKES: Routine, Neatness, Reading, Meaningful Conversations DISLIKES: Rashness, Superficiality, Crowds, Loud Noises. QUIRKS: Fidgets, Slightly Mismatched clothing, Ritualistic morning routine, Collects small objects. STRENGTHS: Patient, reliable, empathetic, determined WEAKNESSES: Stubborn, overly-cautious, emotional absorption.

BACKSTORY:

you can find the full story here.

BACKSTORY BULLET POINTS ( tw: addiction. overdose. death. )

Family: Youngest of three; parents instilled a love for precision (mother was a nurse, father an engineer). Childhood: Quiet, introverted, obsessed with model planes; early fascination with aircraft due to father’s influence; El's mother hurts her back lifting a patient and begins on a tumultuous path with prescription pain killers. Teen Years: Developed a passion for aviation; earned a private pilot's license at 18; inspired by father's military stories to join the Royal Air Force (RAF). Tragedy: Just before leaving for basic training for the RAF, El's mother overdoses on heroin. Military Career: Served as an aircraft technician in the RAF, excelling in aircraft quality assurance; served for five years. Education: Left the RAF and earned a Master of Engineering (MEng) in Aerospace Engineering from Imperial College London in 2019. Post-Military: Worked as a global aerospace quality assurance engineer, conducting aircraft inspections. Personal Life: Had a serious relationship with Maude, a fellow servicewoman, but they broke up due to emotional differences. Trapped: On their way back from a work trip in 2023, encountered the mysterious tree in the road and became trapped in a strange town with no way out. Life in Town: Struggles with anxiety and the loss of routine but uses their problem-solving skills and military training to contribute to the community.

WHERE WAS YOUR CHARACTER WHEN THEY SAW THE TREE AND THE MURDER OF CROWS? WHERE WERE THEY GOING? WERE THEY TRAVELLING ALONE? HOW DID THEY FEEL?

As El returned from a work trip, their mind was still filled with thoughts of quality checks on the latest aircraft. The long day at the facility had drained them, yet the routine of their job had provided a comforting structure amid the chaos of the town they found themselves in. The evening air was cool as they drove, the familiar route easing their mind, but the calm was shattered when they encountered a massive fallen tree blocking the road. “Of course there’s a tree in the road,” El muttered, rubbing the back of their neck as they slowed the car. The sight felt surreal—like something out of a horror film rather than the mundane reality they had come to accept. The tree lay sprawled across the asphalt, roots exposed like the twisted fingers of a buried hand clawing for freedom. They parked a few feet away and stepped out, heart racing as the cawing of a murder of crows echoed ominously overhead. “What now?” El sighed, running a hand through their brown hair. The tree, large and menacing, seemed to loom over them, its presence a stark reminder that this town was anything but ordinary. El's analytical mind, trained to assess and diagnose issues in aircraft systems, began to work overtime. “This must have fallen recently,” they thought, observing the fresh splintering at the base and the disturbed ground. Their engineer instincts kicked in, but an unsettling feeling prickled at their skin. The air felt heavy, as if the tree had absorbed the darkness of the night. Stepping closer, El felt a wave of anxiety wash over them. The crows’ caws intensified, and they glanced up, trying to read the sky for answers. “It’s just a tree, right?” they reasoned, but something in their gut whispered otherwise. They took a deep breath, trying to shake off the discomfort that had settled in. “Just get past it, El,” they urged themselves, but the sight of the tree held them captive. The serene world of aircraft engineering felt a million miles away. “What if this is a sign?” El took a step back, the urge to turn around growing stronger. Their practical nature battled with an emotional intuition that had been sharpened by their experiences in this strange place. “No need to tempt fate,” they decided, finally pivoting on their heel, ready to find another route.

DESCRIBE YOUR CHARACTERS FIRST DAY/NIGHT IN TOWN. DID THEY ARRIVE IN THE DAYTIME? WERE THEY WARNED BY THE RESIDENTS? DID THEY HAVE TO BE RESTRAINED?

El's first day in town was a slow descent into confusion and dread. After arriving in the late afternoon, they felt an uneasy air of anticipation wrapping around them. The sun hung low, casting an orange hue over the streets, but as they drove through, an unsettling realization struck: every turn led them back to the same spot. It was as if the town itself conspired against them, trapping them within its confines. After several frustrating attempts to leave, El began to feel the weight of impending nightfall pressing down on them. Just as the last rays of sunlight dipped below the horizon, they spotted a townsfolk wandering by—a woman with wide eyes, her demeanor frantic and wild. Desperation surged through El as they pulled over, stepping out of the car and rushing toward her. “Please, can you help me? I can’t leave!” they exclaimed, shaking her shoulders gently. “What is happening here? Why can’t I get out?” The woman’s eyes widened in alarm, and she took a step back, her hands trembling. “You have to stay away from the trees and—” she started, but El’s mind raced, logic slipping away as panic gripped their chest. In an instant, the serene engineer was replaced by a whirlwind of anxiety. “No! This doesn’t make sense!” El gasped, their breath coming in quick bursts. The world around them began to spin, shadows stretching and creeping closer, and they could feel the pressure building in their chest as the realization of their captivity hit home. “Breathe, El! Just breathe!” they muttered to themselves, trying to cling to the remnants of their calm nature, but it felt futile. The anxiety attack washed over them like a tidal wave, and they stumbled back, disoriented and gasping for air. Within moments, the townspeople had gathered, understanding the urgency of the situation. They moved in, gentle but firm, restraining El as the darkness thickened around them. “You can’t be out here when it’s dark,” one of them said, voice steady, almost soothing amidst the chaos. El's heart raced, and they fought against their hold, a mixture of fear and frustration coursing through them. “I just want to go home!” they cried out, but deep down, they knew that was no longer an option. The sun had set, and with it, the true nature of this place began to reveal itself. As night enveloped the town, El felt the reality of their situation sink in, the comforting familiarity of their engineer’s mind now a distant memory.

WHAT DID THEY LEAVE BEHIND? WHAT WAS THEIR LIFE LIKE ON THE OUTSIDE?

Before El found themselves trapped in the mysterious town, their life outside was one of structured routine and quiet heartache. As an aerospace engineer, El thrived in their work, meticulously overseeing quality checks on aircraft and collaborating with a dedicated team. Their days were filled with problem-solving and innovation, but the weight of a recent breakup lingered heavily on their shoulders. El's life was centered in London, where they lived in a cozy apartment adorned with model planes, vinyl records, and a small herb garden that they tended to with care. Although they cherished the serene evenings spent stargazing from their balcony, contemplating the vastness of the universe, the shadows of their past relationship cast a long pall over their thoughts. El had recently broken up with Lila, an artist whose vibrant spirit had once breathed life into their more structured world. Their relationship had been passionate and creative, but the differences that once attracted them eventually created rifts that were too wide to bridge. Lila’s spontaneity and free-spirited nature often clashed with El’s need for stability and routine, leading to a heartbreaking conclusion. Their last conversation still echoed in El’s mind—an emotional farewell that left them feeling adrift, yearning for the connection they had lost. Now, facing the horrors of their new reality, El felt the ache of what they had left behind—an unfulfilled life, a job they loved, and the memories of laughter and friendship shared with Lila. Those recollections became increasingly distant, tantalizing yet painfully unreachable, as they grappled with the chilling thought of whether they would ever return to that life or if they were destined to remain in this endless nightmare, haunted by both the town and the echoes of a lost love.

CONNECTIONS IDEAS

Mentor-Like Figure: El has bonded with an older resident who has been stuck in the town for much longer. This person could serve as a mentor, helping El navigate the strange rules and creatures that roam at night. Close Confidants: After two years, El has found people they trust deeply and they all rely on each other for survival. A Rivalry Turned Alliance: This is another resident who challenges El’s way of thinking, maybe someone more impulsive or emotionally driven. They clash over how to handle their entrapment, but after a crisis (like a close encounter with the night creatures), they realize that working together is the only way forward. Unspoken Romantic Tension: El develops a complex connection with someone in town who reminds them of what it is like caring for someone else romantically, sparking a mix of nostalgia and hesitation. Their connection could be subtle and unspoken for a long time, with moments of vulnerability and near-confession. The town’s dangerous environment could keep them from pursuing anything deeper out of fear of attachment and loss. Sibling Dynamic: El has taken a protective role over someone younger, perhaps a teenager or a young adult who stumbled into the town recently. This person could look up to El, relying on their patience and problem-solving abilities. Resource Exchange: El has a transactional relationship with another resident (neighbor?), where they trade resources, skills, or information. This person might be particularly good at scavenging or making life in the town bearable, while El offers practical engineering skills, such as maintaining equipment or building makeshift defenses against the night creatures. Newcomers: After being trapped for two years, El encounters a new arrival who refuses to accept the reality of the town, mirroring El's own initial reaction. The newcomer’s optimism might trigger memories of when El still believed in escape, creating a bittersweet dynamic.

LEARN & LISTEN: pinterest, playlist.

[theinvisibledreamergirl]

Sweet dreams, TN

Pairing: Ethan Ramsey x F!MC (Helena Craig) x M!OC (Clay Banner)

Words count: ~2.1k

Category: Smut/Angst/AU

Warning: 🔞 content/Language

A.N: I really wanted to picture something else. What if my MC didn’t get her place at Edenbrook Hospital in her first year and her boyfriend did? And what happens if she comes as a surgical resident in the 2nd year? Also I’ve decided that in this fic I’ll call MC in her middle name Helena or shortened Helen/Ellie. It’s the alter-ego of Klaw so it has nothing to do with her. After posting this I’ll log off from Tumblr ‘cause I know it’s a disaster😭😭😭😭

Song: “Sweet dreams, TN” - The Last Shadow Puppets (pls hear this first to understand it better ❤️)

MASTERLIST

———————————————

I just sort of always feel sick without you baby

I ain’t got anything to lick without you baby

Nothing seems to stick without you baby

Ain’t I fallen in love

“Do you have the keys for the handcuffs?”

“Whoa. Is someone getting a little afraid hm?”

“Well I don’t want to be useless without my hands. So I can touch you.”

“I do have the keys darling.” The two faces were closer breathing into each other’s air. “But I need you to be quiet now.”

“Show me then.”

It’s just the pits without you baby

It’s really just the pits without you baby

It’s like everyone’s a dick without you baby

Ain’t I fallen in love

The command was clear and both of them entered to the inevitable path.

Feeling each other’s skins in the most obscenely way and falling to that wild imagination that both of them had been restraining for a long time.

It was a heavenly and a desirably emotion that led themselves to be part of this trap.

They could hear their accelerated heartbeats as more and more they looked hungrily and darkly like animals fighting for domination.

Blue vs Brown.

“I missed you.”

“I missed you too.”

And all my pals will tell me is that I’m crazy

You bet I’m loopy alright

And I just don’t recognise this fool

That you have made me

Whoa I ain’t seen him for a while

Panting breath wasn’t in their expectations and shared a laugh before they reached the culmination and he unlocked her handcuffs to fall completely in his arms.

Their strong embrace fitted perfectly the curves of their bodies despite their sweat. When he was about to pull off she pouted in a whisper.

“No. Stay.”

“I will.” He promised with a searing kiss.

“But you did left me.” Her expression changed completely and in a mere of seconds she wasn’t there.

He blinked. “What?”

The sound of the alarm woke him up and suddenly he felt his underwear soaked.

“Holy shit I did this again!” He growled in frustration as he rubbed his face.

He made attempts to get up but his knees were too weak to keep his balance. Another attempt and he slowly started to walk. Or better a crawling you may call it.

He turned on his bathtub to make a quick shower and to clear this mess of himself. But the hot water made him feel again those goosebumps of that sweet dream and closed his eyes again.

She looped his arms around his waist and start to kiss his shoulders slowly and gently while moving her hands up and down his bellybutton. He let a content sigh while drifting again to that imaginary scene.

And as your shrinking figure blows a kiss

I catch and smash it on my lips

Darling I can’t seem to quit.

When there wasn’t a shoulder to lean on his head, he slapped his face growling loudly and continued his shower in disappointment.

Completely falling to bits

I really might be losing it

The idea that you’ve existed all along is ridiculous

I don’t know what to say

He missed her.

Not longer after that he arrived at Edenbrook gladly on time thanks to his fast BMW vehicle. He carried his bag through the hall of the hospital and a megawatt smile that he recognised it very well stopped him.

“Yo yo look who’s back again. My mann!” They clapped their backs.

“Ooff Bryce!” He was breathing hardly. “We were celebrating yesterday for the end of our intern year. I’m sure that we didn’t miss each other that much.”

“C’mon Banner can’t you just be funnier person in your life for once hm?”

Clay rolled his eyes. “Anyways I have to change my clothes unless you don’t have anything else to say.”

“I do actually.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “I met someone today.”

“So?”

“You have no idea whom I have met.”

“Let me guess did President Biden come here?” He snorted when he saw Bryce’s not amused reaction. “Okay fine go on.”

“As I was saying I met today a female but let me tell you man... this woman is not like the others. She’s like a goddess that entered to this building and blessed my life when I made eye contact with her.”

Clay was really trying his best not to laugh to this exaggeration. “You have met plenty of women and it’s not your first time Bryce.”

“Tsk. It is my first time. And may I add she was like queen Cleopatra that summoned everyone when she walked here.” Bryce added in a wandering gaze while he was doing his usual ministrations. “Black stilettos clicking and wearing those black leathery pants revealing her curves...ohh I’m thinking I’m going to fall in love man. She had a long coat on her shoulders and that white shirt mmhmm.” He closed his eyes. “She truly was the boss and I’m betting on this... her elegant body will be in my bed. But-”

“And there’s always a but right?”

“Can you believe I didn’t get her name?! Not even her number!”

His friend squealed in laughter. “What did you think fool? That she was going to follow you straight into the on-call room?”

“Yes!” Bryce exclaimed. “That’s what I thought too man but I lost her because that damn nurse came to me for signing a patient in a surgery.” He sighed and shook his head. “I lost the most perfect chance today and I don’t even know what she was doing here... she can’t be a doctor though ‘cause she’s too beautiful for this job.”

“Well then good luck on finding her ‘cause I have to go now. See you.” He trailed off to the direction of the elevator.

“Yea see ya.” He waved back at him before he muttered. “Go back to surgery Bryce before Tanaka cuts you off.”

————————

“This is going to be your office.”

“Thank you so much Mist- Dr. Tennant!” She corrected herself briefly before she would say another embarrassing thing. “I really don’t know how to express my gratitude for this.”

He scoffed. “Please can you just talk normally Dr. Craig? I think at the first time we met the rule was by names. Call me Simon.”

“Sure. Simon.” She really wasn’t used to it though. First no title of Miss/Mister and now calling by names. USA had really big differences with UK not only in titles but also in medical policy and legacy.

“And now I must say to you congratulations!” They shook hands. “And also I’d like to introduce you to our Diagnostics Team.”

She nodded in agreement.

When they finally arrived at the front door Simon stepped first to get the attention of his colleagues who seemed to be occupied as they were studying a case so he cleared his throat loudly. All of them turned their gazes to him except for an attending who didn’t even have to recognise his friend’s voice.

“What now Simon?”

“Hello to you too my pal. You know everyone that there was going to be a resident in the absence of Edgar’s, right?”

“Yes we know that.” The Japanese-British woman spoke.

“Have you brought him here?!” Judging by his accent it was an Indian man who exclaimed happily.

Simon chuckled. “Yes Baz but it’s her.”

“Ooooohh.”

“Let’s hope she’ll be useful for this job.”

“Don’t worry Ethan. She was selected as the best surgical intern in Imperial College of London Hospital and many other things among but I’ll let her to present herself.” He made her a signal to come inside.

“Everyone this is Dr. Helena Craig.”

“Please you can call me Helen or Ellie if you want.”

“I like Helen better.” The woman got up and shook her hand. “Dr. June Hirata.”

“Me too! Hi I’m Dr. Sebastian Mirani but everyone calls me simply Baz.”

“Ethan?” Simon asked quietly to get up and greet with her but he wasn’t moving any inch.

Helen gave him a knowing smile and said without breaking her gaze to him. “It’s alright for me if we don’t shake hands. I feel the same way too when I meet people that haven’t given me a good and a reliable impression at first so I completely understand your condition now.”

She caught him off guard. Ethan Ramsey expected her to scowl or glare into his eyes but instead she was killing him with that radiating smile.

Fuck.

The same smile that was reserved for him yesterday at Donahue’s bar.

In the corner of his eyes there was an unfamiliar face that stayed some stools away from him.

She lit up a cigarette even though Reggie had been strictly to every client not to use it but it seemed she didn’t care about it.

Her blonde hair was tied up in a bun revealing her constructed jaw and her long neck.

She had also earrings pierced. Was she a troublesome woman? Or maybe a drugs dealer judging by her extravagant outfit. But what caught his attention was that she didn’t look amused or happy.

She was sad. And exhausted.

Along with her was a small luggage that she had carried with herself here. She called Reggie to bring her a strong scotch and found by the latter that she was British and it was her first time in Boston.

She had also asked him for a hotel nearby this place and Reggie suggested some of them including “La Vista” Hotel which was the best. She thanked and left him the payment.

Now her eyes landed on the icy blue that had been staring on her for a long time and gave him a wicked smile. She raised her glass in purpose and licked her lips after drinking bits of it.

She was really gorgeous in all of his honesty and they didn’t break their eye contact for maybe a couple of minutes. He could do it every time without any hesitation just to rest in those piercing brown’s.

He was a very handsome man and even though he seemed older than her, she didn’t give a single shit. She could imagine his toned muscles and abs beyond those pesky clothes. She was marveled and could sense that he felt the same too.

It was like they both understood each other.

No words needed.

Only looks.

But she knew who he was. Ethan Ramsey. And she was glad that made him completely at her mercy and was enjoying it.

Poor man she thought.

She couldn’t wait for his reaction tomorrow when he would find out who she was actually.

His colleague.

Helen could imagine his flustered face and transfixed into her with his mouth agape.

She got up from her seat slowly in a tantalizing move while he drank in one gulp his scotch and called Reggie again for another fill.

She walked past him but before leaving with her luggage she lowered her head to his ear whispering dangerously. Her breath was a tingle in his ears and could almost feel her lips brushed.

“Thank you for the distraction. I really needed it.” 

She left unceremoniously when something dropped from her and he immediately caught it.

It was one of her earrings with the initial ‘H’. He was about to call her but she was gone.

Maybe he would find her tomorrow again. Here.

And he really found her. In the most obscenely and the most embarrassing way if he could describe it. Instead of what she said he got up with his smuggling look.

“Wrong observation.” When she heard his deep voice for the first time she gulped and could see his eyes glimmering triumphantly. “I hope you don’t ruin this opportunity.”

He caught her off guard. While they were touching each other’s palms an unknown heat coursed down in their bodies. Bullshit they thought because he was just an attending and she was a resident. Suddenly another voice was approaching to them.

“I’m terribly sorry for my lateness but I was-”

He abruptly stopped himself when he saw her.

His eyes were widened and his breath hitched.

She was here.

Baby we ought to fuck

Seven years of bad luck

Out of the powder room mirror

Could I have made it any clearer

She saw him too.

But not with a happy or a grateful face that always had welcomed his heart.

This was a mere seconds of glaring and then a plastered smile that he knew too well.

Clay Banner had screwed things up a year before he entered Edenbrook Hospital.

And now the woman of his dreams was standing right in front of him with his attending.

His girlfriend.

His Helen.

Or... was?

It’s love like a tongue in a nostril

Love like an ache in the jaw

You’re the first day of spring

With a septum piercing

Little Miss Sweet Dreams, TN

—————————————————————-

TAGS WILL APPEAR IN A REBLOG!

Ps: if this fic doesn’t surpass The Grinch Girl fic notes... there’s not going to be a part two😂😂 sorry...and Happy (late) International Women’s Day💪🏻💋🥰🥰

UPDATE: Part two is posted and it’s called- She’s thunderstorms

[ineloqueent]

dreaming of you

Brian May x Reader

synopsis: a storm results in a power cut, after you get locked out of your flat. luckily, your neighbour is home.

warnings: swearing, drinking

word count: 2.7k

a/n: i hope you don’t mind that i took a few creative liberties with the prompts, m’dear <3

see the moodboard here!

⭒

London, 1973

It was one of those days that simply went from bad to worse. And then fell down the stairs. And into a frying pan. And then leapt out of the frying pan and into the fire. Except the fire was not simply a fire, but a flaming pit, that was somehow also freezing cold and pitch black.

In short, you’d had a terrible day. And as life would have it, your day was about to get a hell of a lot worse.

It had started that morning, when you’d got out on the wrong side of the bed, quite literally. You had fallen face-first over your office chair, which stood mere millimetres from the left side of your bed, because you lived in a tiny flat on Camden High Street, above a shoe shop, where, in the winter there was rarely hot water in the pipes, and you were forced to scrape ice off of the bathroom mirror with a razor in order to see your reflection.

So, you’d fallen out of bed and bruised— your forehead— instantly, only to realise that you’d slept through your alarm, and forgotten to lay out clothes for the day the night before. This was then followed by a rushed—  cold— shower, and jumping in front of the iced-over mirror to glimpse the large bump already forming on your forehead.

You’d made it to the kitchen, and found that you’d run out of both coffee and tea, forcing you to decide between going without caffeine, or being late to work in the process of getting a takeaway beverage. You opted for the latter, and sprinted out the front door with your scarf only half-slung around your neck.

You’d shouted a hasty good morning to your shop keeper neighbour from the lower floor, before running straight into your other neighbour, the one who lived right next door to you, and shared your rice paper-thin walls.

He’d narrowly avoided spilling his cup of scalding coffee down your front, but in avoiding spilling it on you, the poor bloke had instead dropped the mug at his feet, and watched it shatter to pieces, coffee spattering his white shoes.

Still, he was the first to apologise.

He was like that, Brian May. Very polite. Well-mannered. Ever the friendly neighbour.

And very beautiful. You’d noticed.

Off to work you’d rushed, once you’d helped him to clean up the mess, because you weren’t about to leave him standing in a pile of shattered porcelain, the existence of which was quite honestly your fault.

You’d been not five, not ten, not twenty, but thirty minutes late to work, and your boss had been none too pleased.

“Deadlines,” he’d told you. “We have deadlines!”

Deadlines your arse. You’d watched that man leisurely read his morning paper, with his feet on an ottoman, whilst you scrambled to get your affairs in order.

It’d then been a drab day, working at the newspaper, because it seemed that nothing was happening in the world, outside of your own little corner, where everything seemed to be happening all at once, and thus, there was no story for you to write. You’d been reduced to running fax and photocopies for various people, and— ironically— doing a coffee run, because everyone else was too busy for such a frivolous thing as a coffee run. Funny, though; for all they shunned the coffee run, they could not do without their precious caffeine to fuel their productivity.

The day seemed to drag on, and when it finally let up, the rain came down with the night, and you, with no umbrella and a good walk on either side of your tube ride, stared miserably through the window at the depressing weather.

But at home, pasta and television and your lovely, soft bed awaited you, and so, you were desperate to get home as quickly as possible.

With a sigh, you stepped outside, and let the rain soak you as you went on your way, having once read in a scientific study in the newspaper which had concluded from a series of experiments that one got more wet from running through rain than from walking through it.

The tube was crowded, as usual, and like a good citizen, you offered your seat to an elderly lady, only to realise upon second glance that she was not elderly at all, and you had just morally offended a rather prim-looking business woman. And lost your seat to the smirking man who’d watched the exchange occur.

You tracked mud all the way up to your flat, nearly breaking your foot at least twice when you nearly slipped on the rain-slick wood of the stairs.

The final nail— or so you thought—  in the coffin of your terrible day came when you fumbled in your jacket pockets for your key.

The sinking feeling in your stomach was perhaps the heaviest you’d ever felt.

In your rush that morning, you’d forgotten your key.

Brian May walked up the stairs just in time to see you kick your shoe off in frustration, and let out a laugh at the sight of you.

You looked up from your abused shoe to find Brian paused at his door, one eyebrow slightly raised in concern.

“Alright?” he asked, dubiously.

You took a deep breath, in an attempt to remain calm and appear normal at the height of your despair. “I’ve had a shitty day, since before you saw me this morning, and now I’ve locked myself out of my flat. Alright, you think?”

“No,” he conceded, “but it seemed polite to ask.”

“Do you always just do what’s polite?” you sighed.

“Now that,” said Brian, inclining his head, “wasn’t very polite.”

You shook your head quickly. “That’s not what I meant. I meant it in a much more flattering way, like, you never fail to be polite, even when it’s hard to be, or when I’m sure you’d much rather say something sarcastic, or even just plain rude. You know,” you rambled, “you’re good at that—” you waved a hand, and amusement flitted across his eyes— “filter thing. You have a filter, I mean.”

“And you don’t,” he observed.

“Exactly.”

“Well, to tell you the truth, for once,” said Brian, “you look an absolute wreck, but—”

At that moment was when the real final nail of the coffin fell into place.

Because at that moment, accompanied by an ear-splitting peal of thunder, lightning struck, and eradicated the power supply of approximately one-third of the London metropolitan area.

“Bloody hell,” Brian remarked, as the rumble of thunder receded. The two of you stood in darkness on the landing, and while before, there had only been one bare lightbulb to light your surroundings, it was greatly different to be standing in total darkness when the city outside had become equally as dark.

“The power—”

You thought Brian nodded across from you where he stood, in the blackness of the hall.

“So…” you muttered. “What now?”

“Well, given our presently rather strange circumstances, I’ll offer to let you sleep on my sofa, and we can talk to Clarisse in the morning.”

Clarisse owned the shoe shop beneath your flats, and therefore your flats as well. She was yours and Brian’s landlady, but, as with her shop, she was only ever in from nine to five. Given that it was now six in the evening, she was most certainly long gone.

You considered Brian’s offer.

The two of you had shared a landing for four, almost five years now, since you’d each come to London, and yet, though you were friendly, you’d never got past having coffee together. You knew that Brian was studying astrophysics at Imperial College, which was very impressive indeed, and that he was the guitarist in a talented, but relatively unknown band. You’d encountered the other members of the band a few times here and there, every year, given that they sometimes practiced, or held meetings, at Brian’s residence. Clarisse didn’t mind the band playing, and as the next door building always had loud music pounding, there was no danger of annoying the neighbours to the point of the police being phoned, so Brian and his band were free to hold their rehearsals. You knew they were talented because you could hear them playing through said rice paper-thin walls.

And having had coffee with the man in question at least three times, you felt safe enough in taking up his offer. You only regretted that in all your years living next door to him, you’d never invited him over. Then again, he’d never invited you over either. But here he was now, in your hour of need, and that had to count for something.

You nodded gratefully, then remembered that he probably couldn’t see you all too well, and said,

“I think I’ll take up your offer. You’re a lifesaver.”

“Nonsense,” said Brian. “I’m just polite.”

You thought he might have winked, but of course, in the dark, you couldn’t be sure.

He unlocked his front door, and you followed him inside.

“Watch out for the—”

You stumbled over what felt and sounded to be a guitar case.

“Oh shit, fuck, I’m sorry,” you apologised profusely.

He chuckled. “It’s fine. It’s empty.”

“Oh, thank god,” you muttered. “Thought I’d just destroyed something, again.”

“Yeah, it was bad enough that you ruined my coffee cup this morning.”

Reflexively, you covered your blush with your hand. “Please don’t remind me,” you groaned.

“I won’t miss it,” Brian assured you, tossing his keys onto a little table. “It was a hideous thing. Something Fred got me once from Kensington Market, where he works. Pretty sure the thing was second-hand too.”

Fred. Freddie, lead singer of the band you’d only heard through walls. Funny, charming, friendly though shy.

You wrinkled your nose. “Second-hand…”

“Yeah. He’s got no taste, silly bugger.” Though Brian’s remarks sounded harsh, he spoke with a fondness that could only have been reserved for the highest regard of friendships, and you thought that he and his bandmates must be quite good friends.

“Hungry?” Brian asked. “I’ve only got some left-over lasagna, unfortunately, since I wasn’t expecting company, and it’s vegetarian, but we can heat it up in the oven, and there’s enough for the both of us.”

“Honestly, Brian, that sounds delicious.”

Your eyes had begun to adjust to the dark, and so you saw his smile in response to your comment.

“Well, great. I’ll heat that up, then. Make yourself at home. If you can find the living room,” he added with a laugh. “There’s some candles in the chest of drawers by the window, so if you get those out, I’ll find some matches too, and we can have some light.”

“Will do.”

You set about your task, managing to only stub your toe once after removing your shoes, and set up candles about the living room, where you assumed Brian intended to set up dinner.

He brought you matches, and brought with him a glass bottle.

“Wine?” he offered you, having poured himself a glass, and you accepted, because it was Friday night and what the hell.

You lit the candles as Brian went back to his cooking, and before long, he returned with the lasagna dished up.

As your host sat down across from you, you couldn’t help but laugh to yourself.

With the candles providing a rather romantic glow, catching on Brian’s pretty ringlet curls and dancing in his eyes, plus the wine, and now, the static-y music coming in over a battery-powered radio, this atmosphere was a lot cosier than you had expected.

Brian furrowed his brow at your noise of amusement. “What..?”

“Are we on a date right now?”

With a glance about the room, with its overstuffed cushions and stitched drapes, the two of you eating a meal by candlelight, Brian laughed too.

“It would seem that way.”

He raised his glass to you, and you would have been lying if you’d said that the gesture and his words hadn’t made your heart skip a beat.

You ate in silence for a few moments, until Brian spoke again.

“Would you mind awfully if we were?

The question startled you a little, and you swallowed your wine carefully.

“No,” you said honestly.

A small smile graced his mouth, before his eyes dropped to his lap. “Good,” he said softly. “Because I always meant to ask you out.”

You blurted, “Did you really?”

He smiled fully now. “Yeah. But I’ve always been so damn shy.”

You were the one to raise your glass this time. “Well, here we are now. And you’re not getting rid of me. At least until tomorrow.”

He laughed gently in response, and you thought of how lovely and warm the sound was.

If only you were as warm as that laugh. The rain that had soaked your clothes was beginning to take its toll on you.

You finished dinner in silence, and Brian cleared the plates in silence too.

He came back after washing the dishes, just in time to see you shiver.

“Oh, yes,” he said thoughtfully. “Extra blankets.”

He fetched them, but then looked down at the bundle in dismay. It was very little; you could both see that.

You watched him close his eyes briefly in the wash of candlelight, saw him grit his teeth. You waited with bated breath for what he was going to say.

“It gets really cold here at night.”

This you already knew, from your experiences at your own flat.

“Yeah.”

“And it’ll get even colder now that we’ve lost all form of central heating… Forgive me if this is entirely over the line...” he sighed, and opened his eyes, watching you with a cautiousness that betrayed nerves. “But it might be best if I sleep here, near you. Body heat, and all that.”

“Oh,” you said, blushing slightly. Stupid blush. “Yes, that’s probably a— uh— good idea.”

“Right. Um. Bathroom’s down the hall, if you wanted to chan— oh. Well. Hang on. I’ll get you a jumper or something to change into.”

Your blush only deepened, knowing that you would be wearing his clothes.

You couldn’t look at him when you took the dry, clean clothes he handed you, and hurried to change in the bathroom, before returning to the makeshift bed now established on the floor of Brian’s living room.

He brushed past you to use the bathroom himself.

You slid under the duvet laid out, and shifted the pillow beneath your head, making yourself comfortable.

Brian returned, and began extinguishing the candles around the room.

Finally, a soft shuffling sound announced that he had laid down beside you, and you released a breath of relief, knowing you could soon go to sleep and forget the awkwardness you were so adept at in your conscious state.

But then you noticed that Brian, in his flannel pyjama trousers and t-shirt, was going to sleep with only a single blanket pulled over him; he’d let you have the duvet without a word.

You weren’t about to let him freeze to death on his own living room floor.

With a courage you knew not from where, you rolled over to face Brian. Or rather, Brian’s back. He was turned away from you. He probably thought you’d already gone to sleep.

You laid your hand gently on his shoulder, and he turned slowly.

“Hey,” you murmured, as his eyes met yours. “Sleepover?” You offered the duvet, a gift of peaceable intentions.

He smiled softly, and accepted with grace. But it was a stretch, with how far he lay from you.

“Oh, come here,” you said, and draped your arm over his lithe waist, drawing him closer to you. A little wine-tipsy and a little tired, a little cold, a little lonely, you nestled your cheek against his chest, your hands against warm skin beneath thin fabric.

Slowly, his arms wrapped around you too, and you breathed a soft sigh against his skin.

“Is this alright?” he asked carefully.

In silent response, you lifted your head, and kissed his pretty lips.

He reciprocated almost immediately, his kiss sleepy but tender, and you pecked his mouth gently once more. Then you nuzzled into the crook of his neck, and touched the skin there with another caress of your lips.

“Tomorrow,” you whispered, and he ghosted a kiss upon your temple.

“I can wait for tomorrow,” he said.

And soon you both drifted off, you in warmth and contentment, and Brian dreaming of you.

[littlequeenies]

Christine “Chrissy/Chrissie” Mullen was Queen’s Brian May wife from 1974 to 1988.

Early Life

Christine was born in Leeds circa 1950 and she was student from the Maria Assumpta Teacher Training College, in Kensington (London).

Life with Brian May

In 1968 Chrissie’s flatmate, Josephine “Jo” Morris, was dating medical student Roger Taylor, who also played drums in a band called “Smile” and run a stall in Kensington market selling second hand clothes with a friend who called himself Freddie Mercury. When Jo took Chrissie along to one of “Smile”’s gigs at Imperial College she was introduced to Roger’s friend and bandmate Brian May,nwho played the guitar.

Slender, with long dark hair, Chrissie had a pretty elfin face, and that evening there was an instant connection between her and Brian, though initially they settled for being just good friends, as he was dating a girl named Mary Austin, who eventually would date Freddie Mercury. Chrissie was happy to rank among the growing circle wich formed “Smile”’s travelling support.

In 1970 “Smile” disbanded, but Brian May and Roger Taylor, and his housemate and fellow Kensington stall friend Freddie Mercury formed a new band, named “Queen”. By 1973 “Queen” had signed a record deal and had their first big hit, “Seven Seas Of Rhye”. 

An important part of the fabric of Brian’s life now was Chrissie Mullen. From being good friends they had fallen deeply in love. This romantic commitment went further that Brian had ever experienced and he found it hard to envisage life without her. The anchor of a stimulating yet stable relationship provided a solid platform from wich he could try to further his ambitions. At the begining of the New Year [1976] he and Chrissie Mullen set a wedding date. They had been together for seven years and for a lot of that time had been inseparable. On 29 May 1976 he and Christine Mullen married at st. Osmund`s Roman Catholic Church in Barnes, Richmond-upon-Thames, London. By the end of 1976, Brian and Chrissie had bought a comfortable house in Barnes.

They were married to 1988 and they had three children: Jimmy who was born on 15 June, 1978; Louisa who was born on 22 May 1981 and Emily Ruth who was born on 17 February, 1987.

Brian left his wife Chrissie for British soap-actress star Anita Dobson in 1987 and Chrissie and Brian got divorced in 1988.

Recent Years

As through all her life, very little is known about her, as she keeps a private profile.

***

Sources:

Queen, the Ultimate Ilustrated History of the Crown Kings of Rock by Phil Sutcliffe.

Brian May: The Definitive Biography by Laura Jackson.

[corkcitylibraries]

Frederick Douglass Series | Part 2

Frederick Douglass escaped slavery as a young adult in 1838 and became an influential leader in the struggle for abolition and women’s suffrage. His dedication to and passion for the protection of human rights brought about transformations in the US constitution.

This year marks the 175th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’ visit to Ireland.

Douglass Week, which runs from 8-14 February 2021, coinciding with Frederick Douglass’ assumed birthday, commemorates this revolutionary man’s visit to Cork.

Cork City Libraries will publish a four-part series, during Douglass Week. This series will chronicle Frederick Douglass’ childhood, his experience as a slave and escape from slavery, his time in Ireland and, in particular, Cork, his two wives, his meeting with Daniel O’Connell and his achievements as an abolitionist, orator and suffragist.

  Frederick Douglass in Ireland

by Mary Horgan

 Frederick Douglass, 1845 – a whole-plate daguerreotype, which he had taken shortly before his visit to Ireland (from Picturing Frederick Douglass:  An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American)

 In 1845, shortly after the publication of Frederick Douglass’ first autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written By Himself, the American Anti-Slavery Society sent the 27-year-old, as a lecturing agent, on a very successful two-year tour of Great Britain and Ireland to forge stronger links with their anti-slavery movements and to attract new supporters to the abolition cause. Also, he was advised to leave America for his own safety. As Douglass was still considered a fugitive slave under the Constitution of the United States, he lived in the constant knowledge that he could be returned to bondage at any time.  Anti-slavery societies in various parts of Great Britain and Ireland were working to enlighten the public mind on the subject of slavery as well as raising funds to aid fugitive slaves as they tried to make good their escape north on the Underground Railroad – a network of secret routes and safe houses - to free states and to Canada.

Soon after his arrival in Dublin on 31 August 1845, Douglass wrote to friends in America: “I am safe in old Ireland, in the beautiful city of Dublin.”   He began his four-month visit to Ireland at the home of James Webb and his family, near Trinity College.  James’ brother, the Quaker anti-slavery activist, Richard Davis Webb was a friend of American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and an important link between British, Irish and American anti-slavery activists.  Webb was a founding member of the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society in 1837 and had founded a printing company in Dublin, in 1828, publishing works from various philanthropic, social and political organisations.  In late September 1845, Webb published the first Irish edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with a print run of 2000, which would be sold at Douglass’ various speaking engagements throughout the country.  It contained the following notice of recommendation for Douglass from the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society.  

  A notice of recommendation for Douglass from the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society, Richard D. Webb, Secretary (from Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By Himself.  Dublin: Webb and Chapman, 1845, Special Collections, UCC Library).

 After a month in Dublin where he gave a number of lectures and met Daniel O’Connell, whom he greatly admired, Douglass travelled onto Wexford and Waterford before arriving in Cork.  Though Cork’s 18th/early 19th century economy had benefited through trade links from the existence of slavery in the West Indies, Cork also had a committed Anti-Slavery Society (CASS).  It was formed on 6 January 1826, by the Quaker, Joshua Beale, at the Assembly Rooms in George’s Street (now Oliver Plunkett Street).   CASS was ecumenical in its membership; as well as Quakers and other protestant dissenters including Unitarian Presbyterians and Methodists, it also attracted members of the Established Church of Ireland as well as Roman Catholics.  After the abolition of slavery in the West Indies in 1833, CASS turned its attention to working for the abolition of slavery in the American South.  Its auxiliary branch, the Cork Ladies Anti-Slavery Society (CLASS) collected contributions for Bazaars organised by the American Anti-Slavery Society.  The following is an appeal from Cork Ladies Anti-Slavery Society for contributions for the Twelfth Annual Bazaar in 1845.

 Appeal from Cork Ladies Anti-Slavery Society

A visit by Douglass to Cork was organized by the Cork Anti-Slavery Society (CASS) and its auxiliary branch, the Cork Ladies Anti-Slavery Society (CLASS). On arrival in Cork on 10 October 1845, Douglass went to stay with Thomas and Ann Jennings and their eight children at 9 Brown Street, where he enjoyed the lively family atmosphere and stimulating discussions which helped to make his time in Cork such a personal highlight of his two year tour of Great Britain and Ireland.  Thomas owned the Jennings Soda-Water Factory at 11/12 Brown Street.  Brown Street is no longer in existence but at the time of Frederick’s visit, it ran through what is now the Paul Street Shopping Centre down towards the River Lee.  One of the daughters of the family, 32-year-old Isabel, was Secretary of the Cork Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and her sisters Charlotte and Hannah also attended its weekly meetings.  Isabel arranged Douglass’ speaking engagements, so she was soon able to report to Maria Weston Chapman of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society that his lectures in Cork had been such a success that:

“There never was a person who made a greater sensation in Cork amongst all religious bodies  . . . He feels like a friend whom we had long known, and I think before he goes we will quite understand one another”.

Her sister Jane was equally impressed writing to Mrs Chapman:

“We are a large family, my mother, three brothers and five sisters, generally considered not easily pleased – but Frederick won the affection of every one of us.”

(Letters from the Jennings family to Maria Weston Chapman held at Boston Public Library)

 During Douglass’ time in Cork, nearly 250 copies of the Narrative of Frederick Douglass were sold in the city, which were on sale in bookshops such as Purcell & Co and Bradford & Co on Patrick Street. So successful was the first Irish edition that a second was published in early 1846.  Douglass’ busy schedule in Cork involved at least thirteen lectures with people turning out in droves to hear him.  In a series of lectures at the Wesleyan Chapel, the Court House, the Temperance Institute, Lloyd’s Hotel, the Imperial Hotel and the Independent Chapel, Douglass’ powerful oratorical skills drew a wide cross-section of Cork society.  He spoke at temperance meetings as well as abolitionist meetings, where he would leave his audiences in no uncertainty about the evils of slavery. On Tuesday 14 October, he gave a breakfast speech at Lloyd’s Hotel, George’s Street, (now Casey’s, Oliver Plunkett Street) where he reminded his audience:

“You will remember that I was a slave . . . that I am still a slave according to the law of the State from which I ran, and according to the General Government of the States of North America”.  

(from Cork Examiner, 15 October, 1845).

One of his Cork speeches was reprinted in an American abolitionist newspaper with the following warning:

“Southern slaveholders read the following proceeding, if you wish to know what are the feelings of the People of Ireland, in reference to your nefarious slave system.”

(from The Liberator newspaper).

During Douglass’ time in Cork, he became friendly with the then Mayor of Cork, 51-year-old Richard Dowden, a Unitarian, philanthropist and member of the Cork Anti-Slavery Society. Dowden later ran the Jennings Soda-Water Factory after the death of Thomas Jennings.  

  Richard Dowden, Mayor of Cork, 1845 (JCHAS, 1992)

Douglass attended the Unitarian Church, Princes Street with Richard Dowden. This church is listed as the oldest place of continuous worship in the city since it was opened in 1717.  Dowden was closely associated with Father Theobald Mathew, often fundraising for the ’Apostle of Temperance’ and it was in this church that Father Mathew signed the Temperance Agreement in 1839.  Fr Mathew attained national and international prominence for his temperance crusade of the 1830s and 1840s and Douglass was already a great admirer of Fr Mathew when he came to Ireland. Soon after his arrival in Cork, he attended a Temperance soirée with music, dancing and fireworks at the Cork Temperance Institute, Academy Street, to mark Fr Mathew’s fifty-fifth birthday.

Opening of the Cork Temperance Institute, London Illustrated News, 1845 www.corkpastandpresent.ie  

Shortly after this, Fr Mathew invited him to breakfast at his home at 7 Cove Street, which Douglass described as being of “all of a very plain order . . . too plain, for so great a man”.  Though Douglass had been teetotal for eight years, he was moved to renew his pledge to abstain from alcohol from Fr Mathew, writing:

“So entirely charmed by the goodness of this truly good man was I, that I besought him to administer the pledge to me . . . “

On 20 October, Douglass spoke at Cork Temperance Institute, on ‘Intemperance and Slavery’.   Only a few years later, Douglass would be greatly disappointed in Fr Mathew.  Though he was a supporter of the anti-slavery cause, Fr Mathew refused to attend anti-slavery rallies or to speak out against slavery when on tour of the United States in 1849.   In Douglass’ newspaper, The North Star, he wrote: “We had fondly hoped, from an acquaintance with Fr Mathew . . . that he would not change his morality by changing his location . . . We are however grieved, humbled and mortified to know that HE too, has fallen”.   Fr Mathew felt he had to prioritize his temperance crusade and that to condemn slave owners during his visit to the United States would lose his campaign much support.  

 Cork Examiner, 13 October 1845

This is an advertisement for a lecture titled, ‘I am Here to Spread Light on American Slavery’ at the Court House, Great George’s Street, (now Washington Street), on the following afternoon.  The Cork Examiner, 15 October 1845, reported that “The Grand Jury Gallery was thronged with ladies, who seemed to take the liveliest interest in the proceedings” and went on to praise the two-hour lecture as being “one of the most eloquent and impressive discourses we ever heard”.      

On Friday 17 October, Douglass delivered a two-hour lecture at the Wesleyan Chapel, St Patrick’s Street,  titled ‘Slavery Corrupts American Society and Religion’  in which he was critical of different Protestant groups in America for their lack of support for the anti-slavery cause.  In Ireland, he drew people from diverse backgrounds to hear him, cutting across social, religious and political divides.  As well as those from the more affluent sections of Cork society, “the suffering poor”, as they were referred to by the Cork Examiner, also came in great numbers.  Douglass was adept at being able to tailor his speeches to the different audiences.  For instance, when speaking at the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, he refrained from mentioning Daniel O’Connell at all, but at the Court House, where many in the audience were from the Roman Catholic working class, he extolled the man they called ‘The Liberator’, saying that they felt “more sympathy with the slave than did the other sects”.

(Cork Examiner, 15 October 1845).

 Cork Constitution, 21 October 1845

Douglass’ final public appearance in Cork was at the Independent Chapel, George’s Street (now Oliver Plunkett Street) on 3 November 1845.  This chapel which was built between 1826 and 1831, on the site of the old Assembly Rooms, was the chapel of the Congregationalists, who were also known as Independents because they believed in liberty of conscience and the independence of each congregation.

 The remains of the Independent Chapel today behind Euro Giant , Oliver Plunkett St.,  www.corkpastandpresent.ie

 A number of placards including one which read Céad Míle Fáilte decorated the room.  Ralph Varian, the secretary of the Cork Anti-Slavery Society read an Address to Frederick Douglass:

“ . . . In the happy hours of social intercourse which we have enjoyed in your society, a further opportunity has been afforded us of becoming acquainted with the details of that abominable system of savage law, and degraded public sentiment by which three millions of human beings are held in bodily and menial bondage yoked to the oar of American Freedom.  Never were we so impressed with the horrors of the system, as while listening to one, who was himself born subject to the lash and fetter  . . .  yet who is so gifted, as he to whom we dedicate this Address, with high [ ], intellectual, and spiritual power, together with so much refinement of mind and manners.

Allow us to say that in estimating the pleasures and advantages which your visit has conferred upon us – we value highly those derivable from your excellent Anti-Slavery work – the unpretending memoir of your escape from chattled bondage to the liberty and light of a moral and intellectual being. While perusing it, we have been charmed to the end by the power of simple truth, and warm and genuine feeling . . . “

Extract from an ‘Address to Frederick Douglass from the Anti-Slavery Society of Cork’

Cork Examiner, 7 November 1845

 A verse, ‘Céad Míle Fáilte to the Stranger’ was composed for the occasion by local poet, Daniel Casey, and sung by those in attendance:

 “Stranger from a distant nation

We welcome thee with acclamation

And, as a brother warmly greet thee –

Rejoiced in Erin’s Isle to meet thee

Then Cead Mille Failthe to the stranger,

Free from bondage, chains and danger.

 Who could have heard thy hapless story,

Of tyrants – canting, base and gory;

Whose heart throbbed not with deep

pulsation

 Oh! Why should different hue or feature

Prevent the sacred laws of Nature,

And every tie of feeling sever? –

The voice of Nature thunders ‘Never!’

 Then borne o’er the Atlantic waters

The cry of Erin’s sons and daughters

For freedom shall henceforth be blended

Till Slavery’s hellish reign be ended.”

 (by Daniel Casey)

 In return, Douglass was moved to sing an old abolition song.  In his reply to the Address, he thanked the Cork press for reporting his words, saying:

“I did not expect the high position that I enjoy during my stay in the City of Cork . . .  I want the Americans to know that in the good city of Cork, I ridiculed their nation - I attempted to excite the utter contempt of the people here upon them”.

(Cork Examiner, 7 November 1845)

Mayor Richard Dowden gave Douglass a signet ring, on behalf of the city, to symbolize the relationship between Frederick and people of Cork.   On the next leg of his Irish tour, Douglass sent a letter of heartfelt thanks to Dowden on 11 November 1845.

Letter from Frederick Douglass to Richard Dowden (part) (Courtesy of Cork City and County Archives)

 The following is a transcription of part of the letter which is now held at Cork City and County Archives.  

              “I speak just what I feel – and what all who are acquainted with the facts will confess to be true, when I say that to yours and the deep interest which the Miss Jennings took in me and my mission, I am almost entirely indebted for the success which attended my humble efforts while in the good City of Cork.  I shall ever remember my visit with pleasure, and never shall I think of Cork without remembering that yourself and the kind friends just named constituted the source from whence flowed much of the light, life and warmth of humanity which I found in that good City . . .

. . . I received the token of your esteem which you sent, I have it on the little finger of my right hand, I never wore one- or had the disposition to do so before, I shall wear this, and prize it as the representative of the holy feelings with which you espoused and advocated my humble cause”.

Douglass wrote of his time in Ireland as being transformative.  As he was about to leave Ireland, he wrote from Belfast the following to William Lloyd Garrison:

“I have been here a little more than four months . . . I can truly say, I have spent some of the happiest moments of my life since landing in this country.  I seem to have undergone a transformation, I live a new life”.

(Letter of 1 January 1846, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass).

 Douglass continued his anti-slavery lectures in England and Wales throughout the rest of 1846 and early 1847.  On his return to the U.S in April 1847, he published newspapers and further autobiographies.  He provided aid for fugitive slaves.  During the Civil War, he campaigned for the rights of African Americans to enlist in the Union Army.   He was consulted by President Lincoln and later presidents, from whom he received several political appointments.   Throughout his life, Douglass was also a great supporter of equal rights for women.  

 In 1887, Douglass made a short return trip to Dublin to “once more look into the faces and hear the voices of the few remaining friends who gave me sympathy and support during my visit 41 years ago”.  He visited the family of Richard Webb, the abolitionist and publisher, who had died in 1872.

Frederick Douglass in Killiney, Co. Dublin, 1887, when he visited the Webb family. (from Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American)

On return to Washington D.C., Douglass spoke in favour of Irish Home Rule.  

Frederick Douglass died of a heart attack near Washington D.C. on 20 February 1895 after attending a meeting of the Women’s National Council.

 Bibliography:

Douglass, F.,  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, Webb & Chapman, Dublin, 1845. (Special Collections, UCC)

Douglass, F.,  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An  American Slave, Written by Himself, Norton & Co., New York, 1997.

Fenton, L., Frederick Douglass in Ireland: ‘The Black O’Connell’. Ulverscroft, Leicester, 2015.

Foner, P. ed), The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglas, International Publishers, New York, 1987.

Kinealy, C., Frederick Douglass and Ireland: In His Own Words, Vol. 1, Routledge, New York, 2018.

Stauffer, J., Trodd, Z., Bernier, C., Picturing Frederick Douglass:  An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American, Norton & Co., New York, 2018.

 Ferreira, Patricia J., ‘Frederick Douglass in Ireland: The Dublin Edition of His “Narrative”’, New Hibernia Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring, 2001.

Harrison, Richard S., ‘The Cork Anti-Slavery Society, its Antecedents and Quaker Background 1755-1859’, JCHAS, 1992.  

Jenkins, Lee, ‘Beyond the Pale: Frederick Douglass in Cork’, The Irish Review, No. 24, Autumn, 1999.

Quinn, John F., “Safe in Old Ireland”: Frederick Douglass’s Tour, 1845-1846’, The Historian, Vol. 64, Spring/Summer, 2002.

Cork Constitution

Cork Examiner

The North Star

www.corkpastandpresent.ie

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[theuniversitychallengereview]

UC 50.26 - Balliol, Ox vs King’s, LDN

For the second week in a row we have an Oxbridge college taking on a London college. I really would like to put together a searchable database of all the University Challenge matches so that I could come up with ludicrously niche stats about things like how many times such a sequence has occurred before. There are a few people on Twitter who have that sort of dataset for football and they come up with the most marvelously trivial coincidences (see links)

Disregarding any insights that may or may not have arisen from the analysis of such a spreadsheet, Balliol came into this quarter final having scraped past Clare College Cambridge (a satisfying triple C) in a low scoring first round match, before beating an impressive St John’s in a much improved round two performance. Like Imperial, whose Captain Kohn used the extended gap between recordings to get mentally swole, Balliol appear to have got some serious practice in. King’s, meanwhile won a pair of low scoring matches, though they did so convincingly, and it will be interesting to see how they stack up against a resurgent Balliol.

I’ve also come to a conclusion about what to call the name of the quarter final format. If you read last week’s review you’ll know I had some qualms about the use of the term double elimination since the rest of the tournament doesn’t follow those rules, so I reckon single stage double elimination double qualification just about covers it (SSDEDQ). If none of this makes any sense to you then go and heck out last week’s post, which may (or may not) help you.

Anyway, that’s enough talk of double S ded Q (as it would surely be referred to), here’s your first starter for ten (brief aside here to mention VCM’s closer on tonight’s OC, in which she said that a Michael Portillo show would be replacing The Challenge, because she may have surpassed herself in the bad jokes (are they jokes) stakes with her worst one ever)

Balliol captain O’Connor is repping a set of dungarees in a move I, as a recent purchaser of dungarees, respect to the highest degree. He just about manages to avoid the ‘minion cosplay’ combo (which I have fallen accidental victim to) of yellow jumper and blue dungs, with a sea-green set of overalls. No one else is wearing dungarees, and it shows, as O’Connor takes the opening starter with I. A religious set of bonuses gave them fifteen points, but the captain dropped five of those with a neg next time out.

This was picked up by a lackadaisical Triggs, leaning back relaxedly in his chair, but King’s could only manage one bonus on Irish sports stadiums. Another from Triggs gave them the lead - perhaps dungarees don’t make as much of a difference as I insinuated earlier on - which they extended with one more on crystallography.

Both sides miss the picture starter, but O’Connor picks up the replacement. Scholefield then becomes the first non-Triggs/O’Connor contestant with a correct buzz, an impressive one of planetary nebulas. She looks rightly pleased with herself.

A strong night for Triggs continues on the next starter, before we have what feels like a very early music question, which no one recognises. Its the Everly Brothers, and Triggs is the only one to guess, with an apologetic ‘Mamas and the Papas?’. When the bonuses come, Balliol struggle with them too. I wonder how long it will be before a simpering Daily Mail article comes out about how young people have no respect for the cultural history of the west (apart from all the ones about statues I mean).

There was a video on the #UniversityChallenge hashtag last week of a guy filming the TV as a question about Rosewood was read out. He kept repeating ‘rosewood’, ‘rosewood’, ‘rosewood’, ever more exasperatedly as the team struggled to get it, and when they guessed mahogany he grunted out ‘idiots!’. I’m always amazed by how annoyed people get at the contestants for not knowing certain things, when they know quite a lot about a lot of other things. 

Going into the music round the scores were tied at 55 each, but Balliol took the match by the scruff of the neck and would score 90 points before King’s won another buzzer race. Actually, thats not true, they did win one, but they were wrong, and only succeeded in losing five points.

With the game lost, King’s restore a bit of respect, and three starters in a row almost lets them creep into three figures.

Final Score: Balliol, Ox 145 - 95 King’s, LDN

A surprisingly low scoring match, with flashes of brilliance from both teams. But both will need to do better if they are to win their next matches and move onto the next stage of the gruelling SS DED Q format.

If you want to read about the SS DED Qs from 2015-16, you can do so on Patreon, where I’ve been writing retro review for that series. Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you next week

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=16447756&fan_landing=true

[justforbooks]

We’re not going back to normal

To stop coronavirus we will need to radically change almost everything we do: how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, take care of family members.

We all want things to go back to normal quickly. But what most of us have probably not yet realized—yet will soon—is that things won’t go back to normal after a few weeks, or even a few months. Some things never will.

It’s now widely agreed (even by Britain, finally) that every country needs to “flatten the curve”: impose social distancing to slow the spread of the virus so that the number of people sick at once doesn’t cause the health-care system to collapse, as it is threatening to do in Italy right now. That means the pandemic needs to last, at a low level, until either enough people have had Covid-19 to leave most immune (assuming immunity lasts for years, which we don’t know) or there’s a vaccine.

How long would that take, and how draconian do social restrictions need to be? Yesterday President Donald Trump, announcing new guidelines such as a 10-person limit on gatherings, said that “with several weeks of focused action, we can turn the corner and turn it quickly.” In China, six weeks of lockdown are beginning to ease now that new cases have fallen to a trickle.

But it won’t end there. As long as someone in the world has the virus, breakouts can and will keep recurring without stringent controls to contain them. In a report yesterday (pdf), researchers at Imperial College London proposed a way of doing this: impose more extreme social distancing measures every time admissions to intensive care units (ICUs) start to spike, and relax them each time admissions fall.

Each time ICU admissions rise above a threshold—say, 100 per week—the country would close all schools and most universities and adopt social distancing. When they drop below 50, those measures would be lifted, but people with symptoms or whose family members have symptoms would still be confined at home.

What counts as “social distancing”? The researchers define it as “All households reduce contact outside household, school or workplace by 75%.” That doesn’t mean you get to go out with your friends once a week instead of four times. It means everyone does everything they can to minimize social contact, and overall, the number of contacts falls by 75%.

Under this model, the researchers conclude, social distancing and school closures would need to be in force some two-thirds of the time—roughly two months on and one month off—until a vaccine is available, which will take at least 18 months (if it works at all). They note that the results are “qualitatively similar for the US.”

Eighteen months!? Surely there must be other solutions. Why not just build more ICUs and treat more people at once, for example?

Well, in the researchers’ model, that didn’t solve the problem. Without social distancing of the whole population, they found, even the best mitigation strategy—which means isolation or quarantine of the sick, the old, and those who have been exposed, plus school closures—would still lead to a surge of critically ill people eight times bigger than the US or UK system can cope with. Even if you set factories to churn out beds and ventilators and all the other facilities and supplies, you’d still need far more nurses and doctors to take care of everyone.

How about imposing restrictions for just one batch of five months or so? No good—once measures are lifted, the pandemic breaks out all over again, only this time it’s in winter, the worst time for overstretched health-care systems.

And what if we decided to be brutal: set the threshold number of ICU admissions for triggering social distancing much higher, accepting that many more patients would die? Turns out it makes little difference. Even in the least restrictive of the Imperial College scenarios, we’re shut in more than half the time.

This isn’t a temporary disruption. It’s the start of a completely different way of life. Living in a state of pandemic.

In the short term, this will be hugely damaging to businesses that rely on people coming together in large numbers: restaurants, cafes, bars, nightclubs, gyms, hotels, theaters, cinemas, art galleries, shopping malls, craft fairs, museums, musicians and other performers, sporting venues (and sports teams), conference venues (and conference producers), cruise lines, airlines, public transportation, private schools, day-care centers. That’s to say nothing of the stresses on parents thrust into homeschooling their kids, people trying to care for elderly relatives without exposing them to the virus, people trapped in abusive relationships, and anyone without a financial cushion to deal with swings in income.

There’ll be some adaptation, of course: gyms could start selling home equipment and online training sessions, for example. We’ll see an explosion of new services in what’s already been dubbed the “shut-in economy.” One can also wax hopeful about the way some habits might change—less carbon-burning travel, more local supply chains, more walking and biking.

But the disruption to many, many businesses and livelihoods will be impossible to manage. And the shut-in lifestyle just isn’t sustainable for such long periods.

So how can we live in this new world? Part of the answer—hopefully—will be better health-care systems, with pandemic response units that can move quickly to identify and contain outbreaks before they start to spread, and the ability to quickly ramp up production of medical equipment, testing kits, and drugs. Those will be too late to stop Covid-19, but they’ll help with future pandemics.

In the near term, we’ll probably find awkward compromises that allow us to retain some semblance of a social life. Maybe movie theaters will take out half their seats, meetings will be held in larger rooms with spaced-out chairs, and gyms will require you to book workouts ahead of time so they don’t get crowded.

Ultimately, however, I predict that we’ll restore the ability to socialize safely by developing more sophisticated ways to identify who is a disease risk and who isn’t, and discriminating—legally—against those who are.

We can see harbingers of this in the measures some countries are taking today. Israel is going to use the cell-phone location data with which its intelligence services track terrorists to trace people who’ve been in touch with known carriers of the virus. Singapore does exhaustive contact tracing and publishes detailed data on each known case, all but identifying people by name.

We don’t know exactly what this new future looks like, of course. But one can imagine a world in which, to get on a flight, perhaps you’ll have to be signed up to a service that tracks your movements via your phone. The airline wouldn’t be able to see where you’d gone, but it would get an alert if you’d been close to known infected people or disease hot spots. There’d be similar requirements at the entrance to large venues, government buildings, or public transport hubs. There would be temperature scanners everywhere, and your workplace might demand you wear a monitor that tracks your temperature or other vital signs. Where nightclubs ask for proof of age, in future they might ask for proof of immunity—an identity card or some kind of digital verification via your phone, showing you’ve already recovered from or been vaccinated against the latest virus strains.

We’ll adapt to and accept such measures, much as we’ve adapted to increasingly stringent airport security screenings in the wake of terrorist attacks. The intrusive surveillance will be considered a small price to pay for the basic freedom to be with other people.

As usual, however, the true cost will be borne by the poorest and weakest. People with less access to health care, or who live in more disease-prone areas, will now also be more frequently shut out of places and opportunities open to everyone else. Gig workers—from drivers to plumbers to freelance yoga instructors—will see their jobs become even more precarious. Immigrants, refugees, the undocumented, and ex-convicts will face yet another obstacle to gaining a foothold in society.

Moreover, unless there are strict rules on how someone’s risk for disease is assessed, governments or companies could choose any criteria—you’re high-risk if you earn less than $50,000 a year, are in a family of more than six people, and live in certain parts of the country, for example. That creates scope for algorithmic bias and hidden discrimination, as happened last year with an algorithm used by US health insurers that turned out to inadvertently favor white people.

The world has changed many times, and it is changing again. All of us will have to adapt to a new way of living, working, and forging relationships. But as with all change, there will be some who lose more than most, and they will be the ones who have lost far too much already. The best we can hope for is that the depth of this crisis will finally force countries—the US, in particular—to fix the yawning social inequities that make large swaths of their populations so intensely vulnerable.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazil sees early signs coronavirus spread is slowing

The spread of coronavirus in Brazil could be about to slow, the Health Ministry said on Wednesday, amid reports the transmission rate has fallen below the key level and early signs of a gradual decline in the weekly totals of cases and fatalities.

The cautious optimism comes despite figures again showing a steady rise in the number of confirmed cases and death toll in the last 24 hours, cementing Brazil’s status as the world’s second biggest COVID-19 hot spot after the United States.

According to ministry data, Brazil has seen a drop in the number of new confirmed COVID-19 cases to 304,684 last week from a peak of 319,653 in the week ending July 25. The weekly death toll has fallen to 6,755 from a peak of 7,677 in the last week of July.

A study by Imperial College London, meanwhile, showed that for the first time since April, Brazil this week registered a transmission rate below 1, according to Brazilian media reports. A so-called “R rate” below 1 indicates that each infected person will infect less than 1 person, thus reducing the epidemic.

“In a way, it is a trend. We have to see how the disease behaves in the next two weeks to see if there is a significant drop,” Arnaldo Medeiros, Secretary of Health Surveillance, told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday.

Continue reading.

[scienceetfiction]

2018 in Science

from Wikipedia 

Some highlights:

1 January – Researchers at Harvard, writing in Nature Nanotechnology, report the first single lens that can focus all colours of the rainbow in the same spot and in high resolution, previously only achievable with multiple lenses.

2 January – Physicists at Cornell University report the creation of "muscle" for shape-changing, cell-sized robots.

3 January  – Scientists in Rome unveil the first bionic hand with a sense of touch that can be worn outside a laboratory.

9 January  – A pattern in exoplanets is discovered by a team of multinational researchers led by the Université de Montréal: Planets orbiting the same star tend to have similar sizes and regular spacings. This could imply that most planetary systems form differently from the Solar System.

10 January – Researchers at Imperial College London and King's College London publish a paper in the journal Scientific Reports about the development of a new 3D bioprinting technique, which allows the more accurate printing of soft tissue organs, such as lungs. 15 January –  University of Washington scientists publish a report in the journal Nature Chemistry of the development of a new form of biomaterial based delivery system for therapeutic drugs, which only release their cargo under certain physiological conditions, thereby potentially reducing drug side-effects in patients.

17 January – Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin, in collaboration with Peking University scientists, announce the creation of a memory storage device only one atomic layer thick; a so-called 'atomristor'.

19 January – Researchers at the Technical University of Munich report a new propulsion method for molecular machines, which enables them to move 100,000 times faster than biochemical processes used to date.

22 January –  Engineers at MIT develop a new computer chip, with "artificial synapses," which process information more like neurons in a brain.

24 January – Scientists in China report in the journal Cell the creation of two monkey clones, named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, using the complex DNA transfer method that produced Dolly the sheep, for the first time.

25 January –  Researchers report evidence that modern humans migrated from Africa at least as early as 194,000 years ago, somewhat consistent with recent genetic studies, and much earlier than previously thought.

Scientists working for Calico, a company owned by Alphabet, publish a paper in the journal eLife which presents possible evidence that Heterocephalus glaber (naked mole-rat) do not face increased mortality risk due to aging.

29 January – Scientists report, for the first time, that 800 million viruses, mainly of marine origin, are deposited daily from the Earth's atmosphere onto every square meter of the planet's surface, as the result of a global atmospheric stream of viruses, circulating above the weather system, but below the altitude of usual airline travel, distributing viruses around the planet.

6 February  –  The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reports that global sea ice extent has fallen to a new record low. 9 February – Human eggs are grown in the laboratory for the first time, by researchers at the University of Edinburgh.

14 February  – Researchers found that blocking the enzyme beta-secretase (BACE1) in mice reduces formation of plaques responsible for Alzheimer's disease.

16 February – Scientists report, for the first time, the discovery of a new form of light, which may involve polaritons, that could be useful in the development of quantum computers.

19 February – Scientists identify traces of the genes of the indigenous Taíno people in modern-day Puerto Ricans, indicating that the ethnic group was not extinct as previously believed.

28 February – Astronomers report, for the first time, a signal of the reionization epoch, an indirect detection of light from the earliest stars formed – about 180 million years after the Big Bang.

9 March – NASA medical researchers report that human spaceflight may alter gene expression in astronauts, based on twin studies where one astronaut twin, Scott Kelly, spent nearly one year in space while the other, Mark Kelly, remained on Earth.

19 March – Uber suspends all of its self-driving cars worldwide after a woman is killed by one of the vehicles in Arizona. This is the first recorded fatality using a fully automated version of the technology.

18 April  –  Nanyang Technological University demonstrates a robot that can autonomously assemble an IKEA chair without interruption.

25 April   –  Scientists publish evidence that asteroids may have been primarily responsible for bringing water to Earth.

27 April – Stephen Hawking's final paper – A smooth exit from eternal inflation? – is published in the Journal of High Energy Physics.

30 April – Researchers report identifying 6,331 groups of genes that are common to all living animals, and which may have arisen from a single common ancestor that lived 650 million years ago in the Precambrian.

10 May – NASA's Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) is cancelled by the Trump administration.

17 May – Scientists warn that banned CFC-11 gas emissions are originating from an unknown source somewhere in East Asia, with potential to damage the ozone layer.

22 May –  Scientists from Purdue University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences report the use of CRISPR/Cas9 to develop a variety of rice producing 25-31% more grain than traditional breeding methods.

24 May  –  Researchers at the University of Leeds report that climate change could increase arable land in boreal regions by 44% by the year 2100, while having a negative impact everywhere else.

30 May  –  The first 3D printed human corneas are created at Newcastle University.  The FDA approves the first artificial iris.

Physicists of the MiniBooNE experiment report a stronger neutrino oscillation signal than expected, a possible hint of sterile neutrinos, an elusive particle that may pass through matter without any interaction whatsoever.

4 June – Direct coupling of the Higgs boson with the top quark is observed for the first time by the ATLAS experiment and the CMS experiment at CERN.

6 June –  Footprints in the Yangtze Gorges area of South China, dating back 546 million years, are reported to be the earliest known record of an animal with legs.

8 June – The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveils Summit as the world’s most powerful supercomputer, with a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second, or 200 petaflops.

20 June  – Gene-edited pigs are made resistant to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, one of the world's most costly animal diseases.

2 July  –  First confirmed image of a newborn planet, exoplanet PDS 70b, several times larger than the planet Jupiter.

11 July – Scientists report the discovery in China of the oldest stone tools outside of Africa, estimated at 2.12 million years old.

12 July – The IceCube Neutrino Observatory announces that they have traced a neutrino that hit their Antarctica-based research station in September 2017 back to its point of origin in a blazar 3.7 billion light-years away. This is the first time that a neutrino detector has been used to locate an object in space.

Using NASA's Hubble and ESA's Gaia, astronomers make the most precise measurements to date of the universe's expansion rate – a figure of 73.5 km (45.6 miles) per second per megaparsec – reducing the uncertainty to just 2.2 percent.

17 July – Scientists led by Scott S. Sheppard report the discovery of 12 new moons of Jupiter, taking its total number to 79. This includes an "oddball", Valetudo (originally known as S/2016 J 2; Roman-numeral designation Jupiter LXII), that is predicted to eventually collide with a neighbouring moon.

20 July – Scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham announce the reversal of aging-associated skin wrinkles and hair loss in a mouse model. 25 July –  Scientists report the discovery, based on MARSIS radar studies, of a subglacial lake on Mars, 1.5 km (0.93 mi) below the southern polar ice cap (see image), and extending sideways about 20 km (12 mi), the first known stable body of water on the planet.

27 July – The longest total lunar eclipse of the 21st century occurs.

30 July –  Using high-resolution satellite images, researchers from the Chizé Centre for Biological Studies report an 88% reduction in the world's biggest colony of king penguins, found on Île aux Cochons in the subantarctic Crozet Archipelago.

A study by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center concludes that terraforming of Mars is physically impossible with present-day technology.

1 August  –  Lab-grown lungs are successfully transplanted into pigs for the first time.

16 August  –  Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories reveal a platinum-gold alloy believed to be the most wear-resistant metal in the world, 100 times more durable than high-strength steel.

16 August  – First complete map of the wheat genome.

18 August – Research presented at the Goldschmidt conference in Boston concludes that water is likely to be a common feature of exoplanets between two and four times the size of Earth, with implications for the search of life in our Galaxy.

20 August –  Scientists report that life, based on genetic and fossil evidences, may have begun on Earth nearly 4.5 billion years ago, much earlier than thought before.

22 August   –  Scientists report evidence of a 13 year-old hominin female, nicknamed Denny, estimated to have lived 90,000 years ago, and who was determined to be half Neanderthal and half Denisovan, based on genetic analysis of a bone fragment discovered in Denisova Cave; the first time an ancient individual was discovered whose parents belonged to distinct human groups.

Researchers report evidence of rapid shifts (in geological-time terms), nearly 30 times faster than known previously, of geomagnetic reversals, where the north magnetic pole of Earth becomes the south magnetic pole and vice versa, including a chronozone that lasted only 200 years, much shorter than any other such reversal found earlier.

30 August – Researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong report a new way of controlling nanobots, using swarm behaviours to do complex tasks in minimally invasive surgeries.

6 September – A study by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign finds that large-scale solar panels and wind turbines in the Sahara desert would have a major impact on rainfall, vegetation and temperatures – potentially greening the region.

12 September – Scientists report the discovery of the earliest known drawing by Homo sapiens, which is estimated to be 73,000 years old, much earlier than the 43,000 years old artifacts understood to be the earliest known modern human drawings found previously.

20 September – Scientists discover molecules of fat in an ancient fossil to reveal the earliest confirmed animal in the geological record that lived on Earth 558 million years ago.

A paper in the Cryosphere journal, from the European Geosciences Union, suggests that building walls on the seafloor could halt the slide of undersea glaciers, which are melting due to warmer ocean temperatures.

Using data from the European Space Agency’s X-ray observatory XMM-Newton, astronomers report the first detection of matter falling into a black hole at 30% of the speed of light, located in the centre of the billion-light year distant galaxy PG211+143.

25 September  – Scientists determine that Vorombe titan, an extinct elephant bird from the island of Madagascar which reached weights of 800 kg (1,800 lb) and heights of 3 m (9.8 ft) tall, is the largest bird known to have existed.

26 September – Researchers provide evidence that phosphorus compounds, key components for life, are made in interstellar space and distributed throughout outer space, including the early Earth.

27 September – A study in the journal Science concludes that polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) could halve killer whale populations in the most heavily contaminated areas within 30–50 years. 1 October –  NASA-funded researchers find that lengthy journeys into outer space, including travel to the planet Mars, may substantially damage the gastrointestinal tissues of astronauts. The studies support earlier work that found such journeys could significantly damage the brains of astronauts, and age them prematurely. However, unlike the conditions in space, the study admitted the full radiation doses over short periods.

Astronomers announce the discovery of 2015 TG387 (also known as "The Goblin"), a trans-Neptunian object and sednoid in the outermost part of the Solar System, which may help explain some apparent effects of a hypothetical planet named Planet Nine (or Planet X).

11 October   –  Physicists report that quantum behavior can be explained with classical physics for a single particle, but not for multiple particles as in quantum entanglement and related nonlocality phenomena ("spooky action at a distance" ["gruselige Action in einiger Entfernung" (german)], according to Albert Einstein).

Harvard astronomers present an analytical model that suggests matter—and potentially dormant spores—can be exchanged across the vast distances between galaxies, a process termed 'galactic panspermia', and not be restricted to the limited scale of solar systems.

The world's fastest camera, able to capture 10 trillion frames per second, is announced by the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) in Quebec, Canada.

15 October – A study by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute finds that insect populations in Puerto Rico have crashed since the 1970s, with some species witnessing a 60-fold decrease in numbers. The fall is attributed to a 2.0 °C rise in tropical forest temperatures.

16 October   –  A comprehensive analysis of demographic trends published in The Lancet predicts that all countries are likely to experience at least a slight increase in life expectancy by 2040. Spain is expected to overtake Japan as it rises from fourth to first place, with an average lifespan of 85.8 years.

Astronomers report that GRB 150101B, a gamma-ray burst event detected in 2015, may be directly related to the historic GW170817, a gravitational wave event detected in 2017, and associated with the merger of two neutron stars. The similarities between the two events, in terms of gamma ray, optical and x-ray emissions, as well as to the nature of the associated host galaxies, are "striking", suggesting the two separate events may both be the result of the merger of neutron stars, and both may be a kilonova (i.e., a luminous flash of radioactive light that produces elements like silver, gold, platinum and uranium), which may be more common in the universe than previously understood, according to the researchers.

17 October –  Researchers report possible transgenerational epigenetic inheritance (i.e., transmission of information from one generation of an organism to the next that affects the traits of offspring without alteration of the primary structure of DNA) in the form of paternal transmission of epigenetic memory via of sperm chromosomes in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, a laboratory test organism.

24 October – Scientists report discovering the oldest weapons found in North America, ancient spear points, dated to 13,500 – 15,500 years ago, made of chert, predating the clovis culture (typically dated to 13,000 years ago), in the state of Texas.

1 November  – The Earth BioGenome Project is launched, a 10-year global effort to sequence the genomes of all 1.5 million known animal, plant, protozoan and fungal species on Earth. Astronomers from Harvard University suggest that the interstellar object 'Oumuamua may be an extraterrestrial solar sail from an alien civilization, in an effort to help explain the object's "peculiar acceleration".

2 November  – The world’s largest neuromorphic supercomputer, the million-core 'SpiNNaker' machine, is switched on by the University of Manchester, England.

5 November  –  Polar ozone holes are healing faster than previously thought, and are expected to completely heal by 2060.

5 November –  Astronomers report the discovery of one of the oldest stars, named 2MASS J18082002-5104378 B, in the universe, about 13.5 billion-years-old, possibly one of the very first stars, a tiny ultra metal-poor (UMP) star made almost entirely of materials released from the Big Bang. The discovery of the star in the Milky Way galaxy suggests that the galaxy may be at least 3 billion years older than thought earlier.

Scientists report the discovery of the smallest known ape, Simiolus minutus, which weighed approximately eight pounds, and lived about 12.5 million years ago in Kenya in East Africa.

7 November – Scientists report the discovery of the oldest known figurative art painting, over 40,000 (perhaps as old as 52,000) years old, of an unknown animal, in the cave of Lubang Jeriji Saléh on the Indonesian island of Borneo

12 November – China's Institute of Plasma Physics announces that plasma in the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) has reached 100 million degrees Celsius.

Researchers at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) reveal a humanoid robot prototype, HRP-5P, intended to autonomously perform heavy labor or work in hazardous environments.

20 November – The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) publishes its latest Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, showing record high concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, with levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) reaching 405.5 parts per million (ppm) in 2017, up from 403.3 ppm in 2016 and 400.1 ppm in 2015. The WMO reports that "there is no sign of a reversal in this trend, which is driving long-term climate change, sea level rise, ocean acidification and more extreme weather."

22 November  – Research published in Environmental Research Letters concludes that stratospheric aerosol injection to curb global warming is "technically possible" and would be "remarkably inexpensive" at $2 to 2.5 billion per year over the first 15 years.

23 November – The Brazilian government reports that deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has reached its highest rate for a decade, with 7,900 sq km (3,050 sq miles) destroyed between August 2017 and July 2018, largely due to illegal logging.

24 November – Scientists report that nearly all extant populations of animals, including humans, may be a result of a population expansion that began between one and two hundred thousand years ago, based on genetic mitochondrial DNA studies.

25 November – Chinese scientists report the birth of twin human girls, Lulu and Nana, as the world's first genetically edited babies. The human genes were edited to resist the HIV virus.

27 November – Researchers at the University of Southern California publish details of a freeze-dried polio vaccine that does not require refrigeration.

30 November – Astronomers report that the extragalactic background light (EBL), the total amount of light that has ever been released by all the stars in the observable universe, amounts to 4 × 1084 photons.

10 December – Voyager 2, a space probe launched in 1977, is confirmed (image of onboard detections) to have left the Solar System for interstellar space on 5 November 2018, six years after its sister probe, Voyager 1.

Four glaciers in the Vincennes Bay region of Antarctica are found to be thinning at surprisingly fast rates, casting doubt on the idea that the eastern part of the icy continent is stable.

Researchers announce the discovery of considerable amounts of life forms, including 70% of bacteria and archea on Earth, comprising up to 23 billion tonnes of carbon, living up to at least 4.8 km (3.0 mi) deep underground, including 2.5 km (1.6 mi) below the seabed, according to a ten-year Deep Carbon Observatory project.

11 December – A report on the impact of climate change in the Arctic, published during the latest American Geophysical Union meeting, concludes that populations of wild reindeer, or caribou, have crashed from almost 5 million to just 2.1 million animals in the last two decades.

17 December  –  Astronomers led by Scott Sheppard announce the discovery of 2018 VG18, nicknamed "Farout", the most distant body ever observed in the Solar System at approximately 120 AU.

Scientists announce that the earliest feathers may have originated 250 million years ago, 70 million years earlier than previously thought

18 December – Scientists report that the earliest flowers began about 180 million years ago, 50 million years earlier than previously thought.

and more

[radiosteve]

Need Your Loving Tonight Ch. 1

Summary: Y/n sits at her desk late one night in 1967, hung up with making the biggest decision of her life. College. To stay or to go? Ultimately her choice leads her to the far off land of London where she has a little trouble adjusting. But one tall, curly haired boy in her astronomy lecture might change that. 

Note: Hi, this is the first fanfic I’m posting on tumblr so I hope you enjoy!! I’m planning on making it into a series and I’m not sure how many parts it will be. It’s going to start off a little slow and the actual main romance won’t come in for a few chapters. But here is some back story and a little platonic Brian. (This can be viewed with the bohrap boys as well if you want but I imagined the actual members of Queen as I wrote) The photo is one I found on google. I do not own any rights to it.

Side Note: The italicized sentences are the readers thoughts. It just felt better writing them that way.

Pairing: (will be) Roger Taylor x Reader x John Deacon

Words: 1.6k+

April 10, 1967

This was huge. It was the biggest decision you’ve made in your life thus far. You sat at your desk, staring at the ink covered pages that sat before you. All three welcoming you to a new chapter of your life. The first one, the cheapest, but ultimately the most unsatisfying. The second, the smartest, but also the most stressful. And the third page, the farthest and most daunting. One wrong choice and your whole life could change forever. A future that may never be just because you chose a different option.  Damn it. Stop panicking.You’re making it way harder than it has to be. I mean, it’s just college right?

Ok, lets go over the options again. Cheapest, smartest, farthest. You glanced across your desk, catching a glimpse of a worn photo in a shattered frame. The photo showed a small girl with two pigtails wrapped in red bows sat on top of a slide, laughing as a man and woman stood by her side ready to catch her. If only life had stayed that simple. Unfortunately, that little girl had to grow up and so did her parents. They learned to despise each other, staying together only to protect that small girl with pigtails. Little did they know that their anger for each other was the thing that drove the girl away. 

With a sigh, you turned your focus back to the three acceptance letters that still occupied your thoughts. Your heart began to pound. It’s only the rest of your life. Your breath quickened and you couldn’t breathe. Not this shit again. Close your eyes. Close ‘em. 

A cool breeze floated all around you as your vision was blurred by the sun. The sound of waves crashing echoed across your mind as you averted your gaze from the sky. The sand between your toes grounded you as the sea air slowly filled your lungs. A sense of peace washed over you like the waves that stood only a few feet away. It was the place you felt safest. Your happy place.  

You opened your eyes again, grabbing the seashell that sat on top of your desk next to the picture frame. Feeling the rough surface of the shell made the decision much easier. It’s all about risks and taking chances. You threw two of the three papers away and quickly picked up the pen that rested next to the remaining letter. This is what I need, newness and distance. Uncapping the pen you scribbled a check mark next to the box that said “I will attend Imperial College London for the 1967 fall semester. 

August 29, 1967 

Surprisingly, saying goodbye to all of the loved ones you’ve ever known wasn’t the hardest part about the move. Instead, it was the actual moving that was the issue. Packing up all of our worldly possessions to take on an airplane to London was quite the tedious task. If you didn’t believe that your dad hated you before, you definitely believed it after watching him groan while he paid the extra luggage fees. After and abridged goodbye to your parents and a long flight to London, you felt at peace with abandoning your small town in Southern New Jersey. It will still be waiting for you when you get back. The beach will still fill your best and calmest dreams. But now it was time for something new. The future. 

September 19, 1967

Entering your third week of college in the great city of London felt strange and surreal. Little five year old Y/n could never have dreamed that she would one day end up at an incredible school in a foreign country. She also wouldn’t believe that you’ve been here for nearly a month now and the only person you’ve befriended was your roommate Sally. You kind of want to kick your dumbass self for thinking it would be easy to make friends in college. You also think that being one of the only Americans at Imperial was definitely something you should have considered before checking that “will attend” box. 

You were still adjusting to the college lifestyle and the change in time zones. Needless to say, you didn’t get much sleep. That’s how you found yourself here, fifteen minutes into your intro to astronomy class with a dazed look on your face as your hand struggled to hold your head up. Eventually the battle of consciousness was lost and your head slowly drifted towards the desk in front of you. Your sheet of notes was left abandoned as you slept for what felt like the first time in weeks. Thank god it was a big lecture hall so hardly anyone cared or noticed that you had fallen asleep in the middle of class.

But one person that did notice was the tall, fluffy haired boy that sat beside you. Ever since the first day of class he always admired the clothes that you wore and how you presented yourself. Your array of band shirts and the latest fashion drew him in, but not as much as the smile that was always painted on your face as you entered the lecture hall . You seemed tough and courageous in his eyes but also so shy and small. He gently removed your hair from your unfinished notes and began to scribble on the sheet, barely paying attention to the professor in the front of the room. 

“Alright, that’s enough for the day,” the professor said after another forty minutes of class. “I’ll see you all again on Thursday. Class dismissed.” The curly haired boy stood up, grabbing his bag and slinging it across his back. He leaned down to tap you on the shoulder, effectively waking you up. Your eyes shot open and you slowly picked your head up off the desk, smoothing your hair down. 

“You fell asleep about fifteen minutes in,” the boy spoke as you began to gather up your things and shove them in your bag.

“Shit,” you mumbled and stood up, trying to catch a peak of the clock but being denied by the small afro of curls sported the boy in front of you.

“I-uh took notes for you after you fell asleep,” he spoke as he handed you a sheet of the most meticulous and detailed notes you had ever seen. “I’ve read all about astronomy. I secretly think I know more than the professor,” he added, and the small smile that he had grown to admire appeared on your face. 

“Thanks,” you spoke softly before finally seeing the clock on the wall that read 1:47. Shit. You told Sally you would meet her at your dorm at two o’clock so you two could go to Fine Fare and get some snacks. You began to leave the classroom, thinking no more of the tall boy’s nice gesture. 

“Where are you going,” the boy followed next you as you pushed through the hallway, trying to find the exit. 

“To my dorm. I’m supposed to meet my roommate at two,” you said, finally finding the glass doors that led outside. The boy beside you looked a little taken back after you spoke. What the hell was so wrong with meeting up with your roommate? 

“You’re American?” he asked, a look of surprise filtered across his face. That’s when you remembered that despite the fact that you now live in London, you’re still some out of place American. You nodded, a little afraid to speak again and confirm you American-ness. “That’s so cool! I’ve never met an American that goes to Imperial before,” he exclaimed as he continued to follow your route across campus to your dorm. “I’ve always dreamed of going to America one day with my band,” he spoke so quietly that you barely heard it.

“You’re in a band?” you asked, looking up to meet the eyes of the tall boy walking beside you. There were two things you loved with all your heart: music and the beach. Moving away from the sandy shore had taken its toll but you have been trying to fill it with the soft sounds of a guitar. Befriending a boy in a band could help bridge that gap a little quicker. 

“No, no. I’d love to be. I want to be. I just haven’t found the right people yet,” he glanced down at you, and you flashed your bright smile at him once more. “I love music, probably more than astronomy. I’d love to immerse myself in it and I think a band would be great for that.”

“So not only are you a science geek, but you’re also a music nerd?” you giggled as a smirk appeared on your face. His mouth opened and closed as if he was trying to speak but couldn’t form the words. You stopped walking as you approached the front of your dorm building before he spoke again.

“Yeah, I supposed I am,” he grinned while you laughed at his response. 

“Well, this is my dorm. It was really nice to meet you. And thanks again for the notes,” you said, showing him the paper, covered with his writing that you still had clutched in your hand. 

“It was no problem really,” he replied, looking back at you before you began to turn away from him. “I’m Brian by the way!” he yelled across the grass that stood between him on the sidewalk and you near the entrance of your building.

“Y/n,” you called back, flashing your famous grin. “I’ll see you in astronomy. Try not to nerd out too much,” you pushed the door open and stepped inside as you heard a faint shout from behind you.

“I will! As long as you stay awake next time!” And with that you headed towards the stairs with a page full of astronomy notes and a new curly haired friend.

[susandwrites]

Fallen Through Time - Chapter 36

Greg felt as though his mind had been squeezed through a garlic press. All of this was way beyond his ken, but Chris had the patience of a saint. Time travel and the paranormal had never interested Greg, so the jargon was all new to him. But if Chris was willing to take the time to walk him through the desert, Greg owed it to him and to Sherlock to make it to the Holy Land. As it were.

They had relocated their research to the Central Library of Imperial College, where Chris was a student. Thankfully, the library was open twenty-four hours, so even though they had passed into the wee hours and were closer to dawn than dusk, they had the luxury of a full-service library at their disposal. 

“Alright,” a heavy sigh preceded Chris’s arrival back at their table and he dropped a large atlas-style book down in front of Greg. “Maps of ley lines around the globe.”

“And ley lines are where weird stuff has happened,” Greg confirmed, trying to remember all that he had learned with Chris in the past day.

“Right. Points all over the world where supernatural events have occured, connected by straight lines across the map.” He flipped through the pages until he came to a map of London. “This is just a possible theory ‒ I don’t know if any of the points line up.” The map was crossed all over with red indicator lines and a few large red dots that formed triangles over the city. A few of the points were familiar to Greg, spots where stories of weird events had taken place.

“The first place is Tower Bridge,” Greg leaned in, cursing himself for having left his readers sitting on his desk back at the Yard, and examined the spot through squinted eyes. “The line doesn’t cross exactly through the tower where Sherlock fell, but one does go through the bridge itself.”

“And there are a few lines that surround the area,” Chris said encouragingly.

“How exact does it have to be?”

“I’m not sure,” he answered. “But I’m sure there’s some room to… wiggle. We’re talking about energy, not guided missiles. I’m sure there’s a possibility for a flow or even a pool.” Greg chewed his lip in thought. “Where else?”

“Gower Street,” Greg said, running his finger along the map. “Again, it’s between three lines.” He paused, thinking as hard as he was able.

“Has it only been those two places?” Chris pressed.

Greg sighed, feeling defeated. “So far. And they were ages apart, so it’s difficult to determine a pattern.”

“When were they?” Chris sat down across the table and gave an exhausted stretch, arms over his head, and cracked his back against his chair.

“Erm…” Greg flipped through the notebook he kept in his jacket pocket for making case notes on the fly. “Twenty-second September and twenty-first December.” They were both growing tired and Greg could almost feel the drowsiness wafting off of Chris. He fought a yawn as Chris leaned forward again.

“Wait…” Every thought and sentence came so slowly. “The equinox and the solstice?”

“The what?”

“Many civilizations celebrate festivals at the turning of the seasons.” Sitting up straighter, Chris grabbed a book and pulled it forward, flipping through until he came upon an illustration of planets and their movements. Apparently it was some sort of calendar. “The Celts have Lùnastal and Samhain ‒ the first days of fall and winter. Their calendar is a bit earlier than ours, but the idea is the same.”

Greg was definitely in over his head. “What idea?”

“That at certain times of the year, supernatural events are more likely to occur because of an imbalance in the forces of the universe.” If Chris weren’t so nice and helpful and obviously intelligent, Greg would swear he was a lunatic. “The earth is either closest or farthest from the sun in its revolution.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“No one really knows,” Chris admitted with a shrug. “The earth is made of magnets that are constantly pulling and pushing things. Maybe when the earth is more or less magnetized, something happens.” Jeez, it’s all so vague, Greg thought. “Maybe the veil between this plane and another is made thin. Or even torn.” Chris gave Greg a look that suggested he really didn’t know, but believed it all the same.

Why not?

*-*

Read the rest on AO3.

[hearts-hunger]

Dear Friends || Brian May x Reader

Summary: With only a few hours left before Brian leaves for the American part of the tour for three months, you’re already missing him so much you can’t sleep. Brian always knows how to take care of his best friend, though, and he’s more than happy to spend his last hours at home holding you.

Pairings: Brian May x Reader

Genre: Fluff, a little bit of angst

Word Count: 3.3k

Warnings: None!

A/N: This fic is dedicated with so much love to @tv-saved-the-teenage-girl, whose roommate-turned-best-friend-turned-lover fics with Brian always manage to make me smile, even on really rough days. This one doesn’t come close to how cute hers are - y’all should go read them all on her writing sideblog @word-babble - but it’s a very loving homage and the best way I could think of to tell her how much I love her and how thankful I am for her. Let me know what you think, and I hope you like it! ♡

You stood from where you’d been sitting on the edge of your bed, smoothing out the comforter until your bed matched the neatness of the rest of your room that you’d been obsessively straightening for hours. Too wound up to sleep and unwilling to allow yourself the tears you’d been keeping at bay since last night, you’d put yourself to work getting to every odd job and little bit of organizing your room needed that you’d been putting off for ages. You’d tried your best to keep it down, knowing how thin the walls of your apartment were, not wanting to wake Brian. He needed his sleep, and you didn’t think you’d be able to keep up your fragile exterior around him.

You looked at the clock on your bedside table. It showed 4:28 a.m., the red glow of the numbers vaguely contemptuous as it plainly reminded you how long you’d been avoiding sleep. You frowned at it and placed Brian’s copy of The Glass Bead Game in front of it so you wouldn’t have to see it any more.

“Y/N?”

Your hand flew to your chest as you startled at his voice, even gentle as it was. You turned to see Brian standing in the doorway, a smile quirking his mouth even as his expression flickered with concern.

“Sorry, love,” he said. “Didn’t mean to frighten you. You alright?”

You let your hand drop. “Yeah, sorry. I didn’t know you were up yet.”

He nodded as he took a sip of his coffee. “Yeah, I figured I’d give myself some time to wake up before I got ready. Roger and Freddie were out late last night, so they’re sure to be barely conscious, and it wouldn’t be terribly kind of me to leave Deaky to wrangle all three of us.”

You smiled a little at the thought. Roger was already not a morning person, and after a night of revelry he was sure to be less than pleasant. Freddie wouldn’t cause trouble but he would be a handful anyway, falling asleep on any vaguely horizontal surface if left to his own devices. It was very like Brian for him to wake himself up early so he could be of help to Deaky, an early bird by nature, in making sure everything was packed and getting Freddie and Roger settled so they could sleep through the first leg of the flight to America.

“When does your flight leave again?” you asked, though you already knew. You’d been dreading it for weeks.

“Seven,” he said. “So we’ll have to be at the airport by six. God knows why they booked us such an early flight, our first set isn’t until the day after tomorrow. It’s not like we’ll be rushing around to get there or anything.”

You felt that familiar ache in your chest that had settled there days ago and resurfaced every time Brian or the boys talked about the upcoming tour. You’d been able to keep it in check so far, but now that it had finally come time for them to leave, you felt the dangerous sting of tears and bit the inside of your cheek to keep them from falling. The last thing you wanted was to make the last time Brian spent with you for months be a mess of tears and heartache. There’d be plenty of time for that when he was gone.

He sat at the foot of your bed, looking up at you with affectionate worry written plainly in his expression. “What are you doing up so early, though?”

You shook your head. “I, um - I wanted to see you off, that’s all.” Not technically a lie, though it did allow you to keep hidden the fact that you hadn’t yet been to sleep since you’d told him goodnight six hours ago.

He gave a soft chuckle. “I wouldn’t have left without saying goodbye, love. I was planning to let you sleep as long as I could, but I’m kind of glad you’re up. It’s sort of lonely drinking coffee by yourself before the sun’s even up.”

You managed a weak smile, though you couldn’t help but think of the months you had ahead of you of having your morning coffee alone. You’d been best friends with Brian since your days as classmates at Imperial College London, and you'd been roommates since your graduation. Over the past two years you’d fallen into a comfortable routine of domestic life with him. Among the patterns of who did dishes on Tuesdays and whose turn it was to go to the grocery store, the two of you had made your morning coffee a kind of tradition. No matter how busy life got, you two always found a way to have your first cup of coffee together.

The Queen II tour the year before had been the first time you’d spent a significant amount of time apart from each other, and it had made you realize how much you loved being with him and how tightly woven your daily lives were. The boys were practically family to you, and it had been miserable to be without them, Brian most of all. You’d realized just how empty and lonely your small apartment could get without his lanky legs taking up all the space under the dinner table and his voice constantly telling you some new research he’d done on zodiacal light and the wailing of the Red Special drawing angry knocks on the door from frustrated neighbors.

When Brian had collapsed in New York in May and the boys rushed home to get him into the hospital, you’d been at a loss as to how to feel. Your worry for Brian was at a fever pitch, of course, and you’d hated that he was in so much pain, but it had also brought him home a whole month and a half sooner than you’d anticipated. Thankfully he was well enough to travel for the European leg of the Sheer Heart Attack tour in the fall, and it hadn’t been so terrible - they were still relatively close and you had been able to go see them when they were too busy to make it home. They’d gotten back from Spain in early December and had a break for Christmas through January.

You’d been dreading the first week of February for longer than you wanted to admit, as it meant they’d be leaving again, this time for America and then Japan. If all went according to plan, they’d be gone until the beginning of May. You’d found yourself sick with grief and worry every time you thought about it, and it had come to a head last night as the hours until their flight ticked by faster than you thought possible. You couldn’t ignore it any more - Brian was leaving in less than two hours. The coffee in his favorite mug - the horribly tacky Christmas plaid one you’d bought him as a joke years ago - would be the last you would share in over three months.

“D’you want some?” he asked, breaking into your thoughts. “I didn’t make that much because I didn’t know you’d be up, but I can make more if you want.”

You tried to take a deep breath past the tightness in your chest. “No, that’s ok. Thank you, though.”

He cocked his head and looked at you with a gentleness that made you feel like your heart was in a million pieces. It was moments like this that made you realize just how long you’d loved him, how many times you’d seen him in that faded yellow t-shirt with his hair messy from sleep and known with everything in you that you would never love anyone like you loved Brian May, even if you’d never worked up the courage to tell him.

“You look tired, love,” he said. “How long have you been up?”

You couldn’t help how your shoulders fell.

“I haven’t been to sleep yet,” you admitted, your voice soft with shame. You didn’t want to worry him, but you also couldn’t lie to him again.

His eyebrows shot up. “You’ve not been to sleep yet?” he repeated. “You mean you’ve been up since I went to bed?”

You nodded.

He set his mug on your desk and reached for your hand, gently pulling you towards him. You didn’t resist his pull and allowed yourself to stand between his knees, only taller than him by a few inches even as he sat on your bed. He looked up at you, his hazel eyes studying your face.

“Oh, love, why didn’t you say?” he asked, concern and sympathy in his gentle tone. “You could have gotten me up, I wouldn’t have minded.”

You willed yourself not to cry. “You needed to sleep, Bri.”

He ran his thumb over your knuckles. “So did you, sweetheart,” he said. “And you still do. You’ve got to be exhausted.”

You shrugged, not trusting your voice.

“Come on,” he said, standing. You stepped back to make room for him as he comfortably towered over you again. He turned the blanket down and got in your bed, gesturing for you to do the same.

“You’re supposed to be getting up,” you said, laying down next to him nevertheless. He pulled the blanket back over the two of you, wrapping his arm around your waist and pulling you close to him. You could feel his heartbeat as your back pressed against his chest, strong and steady.

“Lucky for you I got up earlier than I was supposed to,” he said, nuzzling against your neck. You wondered if he even realized he was doing it, or if it meant to him what it meant to you to have him so close.

His breath was warm on your skin. “You can always come get me if you can’t sleep, love,” he said. “You don’t have to stay up pacing your room by yourself, alright?”

You could only nod, knowing your voice would give away the tears you finally found yourself unable to stop. He was leaving, and you knew that you’d never be able to keep count of all the sleepless nights you were going to spend missing him and worrying about him. You wished more than anything that things could stay as they were right now, his arms around you, his warmth keeping the icy loneliness and exhaustion from taking you over completely. You drew a shaky breath, glad that your back was to him as tears traced down your cheeks.

You felt him lift his head. “... are you crying, love?”

You quickly ran your hand over your cheek to get rid of the telltale tears. “No,” you lied.

“Hey, look at me,” he said softly. Despite yourself, you turned to face him; he cupped your cheek in his big hand, running the pad of his thumb over your skin to catch the tears you hadn’t been able to stop.

“Oh, love,” he said gently, his voice heavy with sadness.

“I’m sorry,” you said, your voice barely above a whisper.

He gave a soft laugh, the sound colored with sympathy. “‘S ok, love,” he said, gathering you close. “You’re allowed to cry.”

You buried your face in his chest, shoulders shaking as you finally let yourself feel the full extent of your sadness. “I don’t want you to go, Bri.”

He traced his fingers up and down your arm. “Me either.”

“What if something happens?” you said, voicing a fear you hadn’t known you had until now. “What if you get sick again, and something happens, and I can’t be there?”

He kissed your forehead. “Nothing’s gonna happen, sweetheart, I promise. Doctor’s given me a clean bill of health, and you know the boys will be hovering over me every second to make sure nothing like what happened in New York happens again.”

He chuckled. “Besides, even if something did happen, d’you really think they wouldn’t find a way to get you to me? They’d move heaven and earth to get you where you wanted to go, you know that. Especially if I’m on death’s door.”

“Oh, don’t even joke about that,” you said, your scolding half-hearted. Brian was right - even if something did happen and he fell ill again, nothing would stand between you getting to Brian, not if you and the boys could help it.

“I’m not worried about that, love,” he told you. “What I’m worried about is you being here by yourself. You’ve got me thinking I should call and make sure you’re going to bed at a reasonable hour.”

“Maybe you should,” you said, only half joking.

“I will if you want me to,” he said. “I’ll ring the phone right off the hook if it’ll make you happy. You’ll get so tired of me calling that you’ll be as bad as Ms. Esther.”

You gave a watery laugh. Ms. Esther, your neighbor who was easily pushing ninety, couldn’t hear a thing when you were trying to talk to her but would come banging on the door in her nightgown if the phone rang past eight at night. You’d learned to keep it off the hook after dinnertime, reminding the boys that they’d have to come over if they wanted to get ahold of you.

Now, though, Brian would be calling from a different time zone, and you’d personally have words with anybody who had a problem with Brian ringing you at any hour of the day he could manage.

“Will you call as much as you can?” you asked him.

“Yes,” he promised. “I don’t know how consistent it’ll be as far as time goes, but I’ll call as much as I can.”

You moved to lay your head on his chest, feeling the weight and warmth of his arms around you.

“I’m really gonna miss you, Brian.”

He sighed. “I’m really gonna miss you too.”

You listened to the steady sound of his breathing, your tears stopped for the time being but sure to come back when he was gone. For now, though, you felt your pain and worry ease for the first time in days; you were safe, and loved, and held close to the man you loved more than anything else in the world. For now, for the precious little time you had until he left, you felt more at home than you’d ever felt anywhere else.

“Did I ever tell you I put constellations up there?” he asked after a few minutes. He lay on his back looking up at the glow in the dark star stickers he’d helped you put on your ceiling when you first moved in, saying that if you were going to live with an astrophysicist, you’d better look the part.

“You did?” you asked. You hadn’t paid attention to where you’d put your half of the stickers and you’d assumed Brian hadn’t either. “Which ones?”

He pointed at a line of stars near the door. “You see that cross shape?”

You hummed in agreement. “Is it the Northern Cross or the Southern Cross?”

“Northern,” he said. You could hear the smile in his voice. “It’s an asterism that’s a part of Cygnus, the swan, and if you look at the arms of the cross, you can see her wings coming up.”

You followed his hand as he showed you the swan’s wings, feeling a wave of affection for him so strong that it nearly took your breath away. He’d taken the time to put constellations on your ceiling for you, knowing you probably wouldn’t notice and maybe wouldn’t have ever recognized them unless he pointed them out to you. Now that you knew they were up there, though, you felt a bit of your loneliness at the thought of his leaving ease. On those sleepless nights sure to come, you could look up at the stars on your ceiling and see the constellations that Brian had put in your own night sky just for you.

“I put Lyra up too,” he said, “and a few others. I wanted to do Pegasus but I didn’t have enough stickers. Positionally it’s not very accurate, I’m afraid, but they’re all Northern Hemisphere constellations that you can see at night.”

“Can you see them in America?” you asked.

“Yes you can,” he said, knowing why you were asking. “You can see them in Japan as well.”

You traced your fingers lightly over his collarbone under his soft yellow shirt almost unconsciously, knowing you’d never been quite so close and intimate with Brian but unable to make yourself worry about it. Things would probably go back to the way they had always been when he got back, but for now you were content to lay like you would with the man you loved as if he knew you loved him, and as if you knew he loved you back. Of course Brian did love you, you’d never doubted that; but whether he loved you like that was another matter entirely, one you’d never been able to really know with certainty. He’d never said anything about it, never tried to take the shift from friends to lovers, so you guessed he hadn’t wanted to. That didn’t matter now, though; all that mattered was that he held you for a little while longer, as long as he could before he couldn’t any more.

“You should try and get some sleep, love,” he said gently. “I’ll wake you when I leave if you want, but you need your rest.”

You sighed. “Okay,” you said. You’d try, anyway, for his sake. “But only if you promise to wake me up before you leave.”

“I will,” he assured you. “Couldn’t leave my best girl without saying goodbye, now could I?”

You couldn’t help but smile at that. His best girl? He’d never called you that before, but you liked it.

“No, you couldn’t,” you agreed. Then, after a moment, “Brian?”

“Hm?”

“... can you sing something?”

He breathed a laugh. “If you want me to, love, sure.”

You curled closer to him as he lightly combed his fingers through your hair, feeling the words of “Dear Friends” in his chest as he sang them in his gentle voice.

“Go to sleep and dream again; soon your hopes will rise and then from all this gloom life can start anew, and there'll be no crying soon.”

Eased by his warmth and the sound of his voice, you were almost asleep when you heard him say something. You nuzzled against him.

“What’d you say?” you asked, you voice heavy with sleep.

“Shh,” he soothed. You could hear the smile in his voice. “I’ll tell you again later. So often you’ll get sick of it, if you’ll let me.”

You knew then what he’d said, and you didn’t react any of the ways you’d ever envisioned yourself reacting. No gasping, no crying, no kissing, no grand theatrics of years of pent-up dreams finally coming true. You just felt his hand take yours as he kissed your forehead. But really, this was how it was always meant to be said; your head on his chest and his arms around you, the faint birdsong just outside your window, the constellations he’d made for you shining softly above you. You wouldn’t have changed it for the world.

“I love you too, Bri,” you said.

He breathed a sigh as he drew you closer, one of relief and contentment, and you knew it would be ok. No matter how far he went, no matter how long he was away from you, he’d always come back home to you. And as sweet as your best friend's homecoming would surely have been, the homecoming of the man who’d confessed his love at his leaving was a thought far more wonderful, one that would ensure you made it through the nights without him just to be with him like this again at his return.

forever taglist: @tv-saved-the-teenage-girl

[livinglikebritishroyalty]

𝒫𝓇𝒾𝓃𝒸𝑒 𝐸𝒹𝓌𝒶𝓇𝒹

♕ 𝐹𝓊𝓁𝓁 𝒩𝒶𝓂𝑒: Edward George Nicholas Paul Patrick

♕ 𝐹𝓊𝓁𝓁 𝒯𝒾𝓉𝓁𝑒: His Royal Highness Prince Edward The Duke of Kent

♕ 𝐵𝓸𝓇𝓃: Wednesday, October 9th, 1935 at No. 3 Belgrave Square in London, England

♕ 𝒫𝒶𝓇𝑒𝓃𝓉𝓈: His Royal Highness Prince George The Duke of Kent (Father) & Her Royal Highness Princess Marina Duchess of Kent (Mother)

♕ 𝒮𝒾𝒷𝓁𝒾𝓃𝑔𝓈: Her Royal Highness Princess Alexandra The Honourable Lady Ogilvy (Sister) & His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Kent (Brother)

♕ 𝒮𝓅𝓸𝓊𝓈𝑒: Her Royal Highness Katherine The Duchess of Kent (M. 1961)

♕ 𝒞𝒽𝒾𝓁𝒹𝓇𝑒𝓃: George Windsor Earl of St Andrews (Son), Lady Helen Taylor (Daughter), Lord Nicholas Windsor (Son), & Lord Patrick Windsor (Son: Stillborn on Wednesday, October 5th, 1977)

♕ 𝐸𝒹𝓊𝒸𝒶𝓉𝒾𝓸𝓃: Ludgrove (In Berkshire, England), Eton College (In Berkshire, England), Institut Le Rosey (In Rolle, Switzerland), The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (In Berkshire, England)

♕ 𝐼𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓇𝑒𝓈𝓉𝓈 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒲𝓸𝓇𝓀: Interests: Armed Forces (Air Force, Allied Code-Breaking, Arms, Armour, Army, Artillery, Aviation, Blues and Royals, Children of Deployed Parents, Defense Studies, Fallen Soldiers, Lifeboat Services, Life Guards, Navigators, Navy, Pilots, Retired Service People, Security Studies, World War 1 & 2), Business (Business Leaders, Community Leaders, Investments, & Trade), Education (Electronics, Engineering, Chemistry, Global Aerospace, Heritage of Counties, Informational Technology, Science, & Vocational Training), Health (Apothecaries, Burn Treatment, Chest Illness, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Dentists, Doctors, Environmental Medicine, Heart Illness, Hospitals, Leukemia, Myalgic Encephalopathy, Occupational Medicine, Pharmacists, Plastic Surgery Treatment, Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome, Strokes, Surgical Research, & Veterinarians), Other (Agriculture, Conservation, Geography, & Railways/Trains), People (Boy Scouts, Civil Servants, Freemasons, Joint Cultures, Motor Safety, Polish People, Social Clubs, The Disabled, & Young People), Sports (Alpine Ski Racing, Bobsled, Cricket, Croquet, Falconry, Fishing, Golf, Hunting, Lawn Tennis, Race Car Driving, & Skiing), & The Arts (Art History, Broadcasters, Cloth-making, Dance, Journalism, Literature, Music, Opera Music, Photography, & Writers). Work: Associate Member of The International Lawn Tennis Club of Great Britain, Chancellor of The University of Surrey, Fellow of The Royal Society, Founding Member of The International Baccalaureate School, Freeman of The City of London, Freeman/Liveryman of The Honourable Company of Air Pilots, Freeman/Liveryman of The Worshipful Company of Mercers, Gold Card Life Member of The The Children’s Charity Variety, Grand Master of The Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George, Grand Master of The United Grand Lodge of England, Grand President of The Masonic Charitable Foundation, Honorary Chair of Gilwell Fellows, Honorary Doctor of Law of The University of Leeds, Honorary Doctor of Philosophy of London Metropolitan University, Honorary Fellow of The Charted Management Institute, Honorary Fellow of The Institution of Engineering and Technology, Honorary Fellow of The The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Honorary Fellow of The Royal Aeronautical Society, Honorary Fellow of The Royal College of Surgeons of England, Honorary Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom, Honorary Fellow of The Royal Society of Medicine, Honorary Freeman of The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London, Honorary Life Member of The Band of Brothers, Honorary Liveryman of The Worshipful Company of Clothworkers, Honorary Liveryman/Assistant Emeritus of The Worshipful Company of Engineers, Honorary Member of Cambridge University’s Scientific Society, Honorary Member of The Guild of Motoring Writers Limited, Honorary Member of The Household Division Yacht Club, Honorary Member of The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, Honorary Member of The Royal Automobile Club, Honorary Member of The Royal Photographic Society, Honorary Member of The Work Foundation, Honorary Membership of The Old Wellingtonian Lodge, Honorary Preses of The Royal Caledonian Hunt, Honorary President of The Airlander Club, Honorary President of The Royal Geographical Society, Honorary President of The Royal United Services Institute International, High Steward of The Borough Council of King’s Lynn and West Norfolk, Joint Associate Member of The Lawn Tennis Association, Joint Patron of The Anglo-Jordanian Society, Liveryman of The Worshipful Company of Salters, Master of The Lodge of Antiquity, Member of The Blue Seal Club, Member of The Countryside Alliance, Member of The Honourable Artillery Company, Member of The Mountbatten Medal Advisory Panel, Patron of Bal Polski, Patron of Bloodwise, Patron of Boundless by CSMA, Patron of Buck’s Club, Patron of The Canterbury Cathedral Trust, Patron of The Catalogue Raisonne of Works by Philip de Laszlo M.V.O. P.R.B.A. 1969-1937, Patron of Combined Cavalry Old Comrades, Patron of Endeavor National Youth Organization, Patron of Everyone Can!, Patron of St. Mungo’s, Patron of The Army Winter Sports Association, Patron of The Bartok Festival, Patron of The Bletchley Park Trust, Patron of The British Computer Society, Patron of The Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust, Patron of The Devonshire and Dorset Regimental Association, Patron of The Edge Foundation, Patron of The Freemasons’ Fund for Surgical Research, Patron of The Gallantry Medallists’ League, Patron of The Hanover Band, Patron of The Institute of Advanced Motorists, Patron of The Institute of Export, Patron of The Institute of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Birmingham University, Patron of International Musicians Seminar Prussia Cove, Patron of The Kandahar Ski Club, Patron of The Keighley & Worth Valley Railway Preservation Society, Patron of The Kent County Agricultural Society, Patron of The Kent County Cricket Club, Patron of The Lifeboat Fund, Patron of The London Philharmonic Orchestra, Patron of The Myalgic Encephalomyelitis Association, Patron of The National Army Museum, Patron of The Newbury Spring Festival, Patron of Opera North, Patron of The P.G. Wodehouse Society, Patron of The Polish Hearth Club (Ognisko Polskie), Patron of The Restore Burns and Wounds Research, Patron of The Royal Air Force Charitable Trust, Patron of The Royal Armored Corps War Memorial Benevolent Fund, Patron of The Royal Institution of Australia, Patron of The Royal West Norfolk Golf Club, Patron of The Scots Guard Association, Patron of The Ski Club of Great Britain, Patron of The Society for Army Historical Research, Patron of The Staff College Club, Patron of The Supreme Council 33°, Patron of The Tank Museum, Patron of The Tree Council, Patron of Trinity College London, Patron of The Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, Patron of The UK Friends of the Felix-Mendelssohn-Bartholdy-Stiftung Foundation, Patron of The University of Surrey’s Postgraduate Medical School, Patron of The Watlington Hospital Charitable Trust, Patron of The Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum, Patron of Wigmore Hall, President In Chief of The British Racing Drivers’ Club, President of The All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club, President of The Anmer Club, President of The Army and Navy Club, President of The Association of Men of Kent and Kentish Men, President of The Cavalry and Guards Club, President of The Chest/Heart/Stroke Medical Research Funds of Scotland, President of The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, President of The Duke of York’s Royal Military School, President of The Engineering Council, President of The Football Association, President of The Henley Society, President of The King Edward’s VII’s Hospital (Sister Agnes), President of The King’s Lynn Festival Limited, President of The Noel Coward Society, President of The Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund, President of The Royal Armories Development Trust, President of The Royal Choral Society, President of The Royal Institution of Great Britain, President of The Royal Nation Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), President of The Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies, President of The Scout Association, President of The Stroke Association, President of The Board of Trustees of The Imperial War Museum, President of The UK Trustees of The His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh’s Commonwealth Study Conference Leaders, President of Wellington College, Royal Bencher of The Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, Royal Fellow of The Royal Academy of Engineering, Royal Member of The Royal Society Club, Royal Patron of The Admiral Ramsay Museum, Royal Patron of The American Air Museum in Britain, Royal Patron of The British-German Association, Royal Patron of The Dresden Trust, Royal Patron of The Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, Royal Patron of The Last Night of the Proms in Crakow, Special Representative (Formerly a Vice-Chairman) for The United Kingdom’s International Trade & Investment, Vice-Chairman of The British Overseas Trade Board, Visitor of Cranfield University, & Visitor of The Centenary World Scout Jamboree.

[ineloqueent]

Starstruck: Part 14

Brian May x Fem!Reader

This is Part 14 of a multi-part fic. Click the links below to read the Masterpost, the previous part, or the next part of the fic :)

Masterpost / Part 13 / Part 15

Summary: When studying at Imperial College in the 1970s, your path is crossed by a beautiful boy as much in love with the stars as you.  

Warnings: angst, mentions of drinking, swearing

Historical Inaccuracies: N/A :)

Word Count: 4.5k

⁺˚*·༓☾ ☽༓･*˚⁺

My birthday had been an absolute disaster, to say the least.

It hadn’t started out as a disaster, waking up with the morning sun warming my face. I normally hated to be woken up that way, because it meant that the dawn had broken into a new day when I’d only just managed to fall asleep. My thoughts kept me awake most nights, and when on a rare occasion they left me alone, the sounds of parties or sloshed band members took up the torch.

But I’d fallen asleep before the dawn on my twenty-seventh birthday, and had awoken with a rather lovely girl in my arms. Sure, I’d woken up with lovely girls before, but that had usually been after a drunken round of bedroom pleasantries, ones that became very much unpleasantries as soon as the night came down.

This had been different.

For one, I hadn’t taken her to bed, but for another, what had been beautiful in the nighttime remained so in the light of day.

She, usually alternatingly vibrant with talk and reserved with intelligent pensiveness, had seemed almost subdued where she lay in my arms. Her hair was messy, no doubt from my lack of usefulness as a pillow, and her lips, subtly pinkened, looked powder soft where her face was nestled against my chest. I felt afraid to move; she looked delicate in her unconsciousness, and my clumsy hand would only shatter her.

Yet I longed to touch her cheek.

Strange, this longing.

From my chest it ran to my fingertips and toes, and stole my breath away, like a thief who’d noticed that I’d purposely left my doors unlocked. Purposely, because I wanted this— I wanted to touch her cheek, to hold her in my arms. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d wanted something so terribly, yearning taking over the few thoughts that did not concern themselves with my general fears of failure in life.

And I wanted to hear her laugh, all the time, because, god, that laugh. I wouldn’t mind kissing her laughter away, stopping only to hear it again.

When I spoke, she listened, listened like she truly wanted to hear what I had to say, not like she was just being polite and waiting for me to finish so that she could leave and get on with her day. No. when I talked with her, my words were light and they flowed that way, stories I’d never told anyone spilling from my tongue as though I believed I had it in me to continue to trust her, forever. As though she and her familiar presence would stay with me forever, would always be there to welcome me home.

But I’d just about ruined it all only a few hours later, in telling her the only truth I’d ever feared to tell her— the truth that would push her away if she chose not to come with us on tour. And of course she’d said no, because her whole life was in London, in the city, and neither I nor anybody else had the right to take that from her. Deep down, I’d known that she would say no, but my naïve and wasted heart had still tried to convince me otherwise, and so I’d asked her.

Now there was nothing to do but to leave and to bury whatever nonsense I’d been carrying around my head for the past few years.

Years I’d spent gazing at her, first from afar, and then from such a closeness that when a sigh escaped her lips, it brushed mine. If anything had been meant to happen, it would have happened by now.

And now, as I gathered my things from around my bedroom at Ridge Farm, it was too late. Six weeks had gone by, and six weeks had brought me as close to her as I’d ever get.

Soon, this would all be a memory. A sickening memory and a fever dream that would keep me awake for many, many nights to come, restless and sleepless and full of regrets of not making something happen when I wanted it to, instead of fucking waiting around for some divine intervention to lead into my arms the girl with stars of lovingness in her hair.

I’d have waited forever if I could.

But life goes on. And if you don’t move, the world will pull the rug out from under your feet and let you fall.

I hadn’t moved, I’d waited. The rug had been pulled, and I had fallen.

Wasn’t that what they said about love? That you fell?

Not that this was love, but hell, it might have become it.

⁺˚*·༓☾ ☽༓･*˚⁺

“Cheer up, Brian,” said Roger unhelpfully. “We’re going back to London to record an album, not attend your funeral.”

I continued to drink my coffee in silence, staring out the window. The sky was grey and the weather threatened rain. Just the thing to lift my spirits. Although, I supposed I was being selfish because the summer had been dry of late, and the farmlands needed water sooner rather than later.

But though the light outside was dim and the indoors were subsequently dark, there were no stars, no little pinpricks of light, to penetrate the gloom. At least in the night, I had that.

What would it be like if we could see beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, see the stars, during the day? she had asked me once.

I hadn’t said anything.

It’d be like looking into your eyes.

That was what I had wanted to say.

“Oh, Roger,” Freddie said, almost despairingly. “Can’t you see, darling?”

“No, Freddie. It’s all smudges and shapes.”

“You really must get that eyesight of yours sorted out. How can you even see the drums? No wonder you keep falling a beat behind.”

“That’s ridiculous. I could play the drums in the dark and you know it, Fred.”

“Brian?” John’s hand fell to my shoulder.

“Hm?” I looked up from my coffee.

Deacy was frowning.

“Are you quite alright, lovie?” asked Freddie, sweeping around the kitchen counter to sit down across from me. Roger wriggled the coffee cup from my grasp before pouring me another mugful, his expression far too concerned for my liking. Attention wasn’t something I relished. Particularly not when it involved having my picture taken. I took all the pictures, I didn’t look good on camera. I didn’t look good being looked at. It was a wonder I’d made it this far in the world of stage business at all.

“You’re moping,” Freddie remarked when I again neglected to answer.

“No, I’m not,” I muttered finally, figuring it would put him off.

An absurd notion, really. Nothing in the world put Freddie off.

“You are,” he insisted. “You’ve been moping ever since your birthday. You were fine in the morning, but then cranky in the afternoon and every day after.”

“On and on like a broken record,” Roger put in. “If I’d had wanted a broken record, I’d have scratched one myself, not asked for you to bloody become one.”

I sighed, feeling too tired to make a proper reply. Perhaps all those nights of staying awake were finally catching up with me.

“You’re all just as blind as Brian himself,” John tutted, passing Roger a couple of sugar packets so that he could get his one-and-three-sevenths.

Freddie narrowed his eyes at me, crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair, as though he knew exactly what my problem was. He probably did know. I wouldn’t put anything past him. “Ah. So what now?”

I sipped my coffee. “So, what? We’re leaving, her life is here, ours is out in the world of never staying the same place twice—”

Roger smirked. “I see.”

“Said the blind man,” Deacy laughed.

“See what?” I snapped. “What is it you all claim to see? There’s nothing to see.”

“Darling, no one mentioned Y/N, and yet you jumped to the conclusion that we were talking about her. I’d say it’s all fairly obvious.”

My fingertips brushed the side of my nose in a nervous habit I’d had for years. It always seemed to make an appearance at the mention of one name in particular.

“And there’s the nervous tic,” Roger tapped the side of his own nose, and I hid my hand under the table.

“I was the same way around Veronica,” Deacy said with a smile, stirring his tea. “Any mention of her and my legs turned to custard.”

Roger snorted.

“We know, Deacy,” said Fred. “We were there.”

“Mmyes. I seem to quite forget the world around me when I’m around her.”

The conversation seemed to refocus on more unpleasant matters as all three of them stared me down.

“So did you tell her?” said Roger.

I sighed again. “Tell her what.”

“Not moping, bollocks to that,” Roger muttered. “Did you tell her how you feel?”

“No.” That was all I would allow myself. One word on which to dwell. No more. I would not dwell.

“We’re leaving, and you asked her to come with us, but you didn’t tell her?” Freddie leaned toward outrage.

I set down my coffee cup, a sudden anger slipping into my hands as the porcelain smacked the tabletop just a little too hard. The coffee sloshed over the cup’s sides.

“She said no, in what fucking world would I tell her?”

“In a better one,” remarked John.

“Oh, shut up,” I seethed. “You all act so superior, like you’d have done any better in my place.”

Freddie’s expression had turned sour. “You’re the one who’s acting superior!” he cried. “All moody and ooh, poor me, I’m the only one who’s ever had to cope with such a terrible thing as this.”

“Piss off, Fred,” I growled. “You’re dramatic enough for the four of us.”

“Says you! Pull yourself together, Brian. We wouldn’t be here arguing if you had.”

“Both of you, pull yourselves together,” Deacy berated. “We haven’t even begun recording yet and you’re already neck and neck!”

“Oh that’ll be fun,” I muttered.

“Not really, if you’ll be pining after some girl the whole time,” said Roger. “Should’ve tried that when you were writing songs instead.”

At that I stood up. “Some girl?” I scoffed. “Oh, don’t be so fucking ridiculous! Roger, she’s the only reason we’ve got our manager, she’s the only reason we’ve had this place to clear out heads and write our songs, and she’s the only reason I’ve written nearly four songs for the bloody album and not just two and a half.”

Not one of them said anything.

Then Freddie shook his head slowly. “You’ve got to tell her,” he said. “I’ve never seen you like this before.”

Drained of energy, I sank back into my chair. “And yet, it’s been going on for years.”

“Years?” said Roger disbelievingly.

I gave a rather pathetic shrug.

“Years?” he repeated. “You’ve been fucking pining for her, for years?”

“Yes, Roger, years,” I said mockingly. “Why do you think I wrote ‘White Queen’?”

Roger’s mouth fell open. “You— you wrote ‘White Queen’ for her?”

“Brian,” Freddie’s expression was contorted, “that was in ‘68.”

“Yes,” I said, feeling my chest tighten. “Why is that so hard for you all to understand?”

John shook his head. “Not for me, it isn’t.”

I looked over at him questioningly, a dull ache that made me wince spreading beneath my skin.

He glanced at us each in turn, then smiled pityingly.

“None of you have ever been in love, have you?”

⁺˚*·༓☾ ☽༓･*˚⁺

“I’m not in love,” I’d spat, my anger replenished.

Love, such a fickle thing. You expressed it too often and you were deemed careless, in-genuine. Too rarely, and every sign of sadness was dubbed heartache. Was it so wrong to simply be sad for the sake of being sad, to feel empty instead of restful when you closed your eyes, to feel your spirit leave you a little with each breath on a rainy day?

What am I going to tell my father?

That was what was bothering me at the moment, not her. Not Y/N.

I touched a hand to my cheek, feeling the warmth that flushed the skin there.

God, I couldn’t even think her name without my shoulders tensing or my face colouring. It was like I was back in the body of my fourteen year-old self, skinny and awkward and shy and riddled with holes of innocence that experience had yet to fill.

How was I going to tell my dad that I was giving up my perfectly good chance at a stable career for a full-time gig as the guitarist for a band that was barely known?

But there was no changing my mind now. Not because it was too late to re-register as an astrophysics student for the start of term in autumn, but because I was tired of neglecting my dream. Could I not have more than one dream? Why did everything always have to be so single-minded?

I loved music, I loved feeling the melodies form beneath my fingers, drawn from nothing by my imagination and the thin air. I loved working with Freddie and Roger and John, I loved what we became when we were Her Majesty, Queen.

I wasn’t willing to give that up. I realised that now.

And so I avoided Y/N for our final week at Ridge Farm, because she made me want to change my mind.

For the first time in months, I missed her Thursday night guitar lesson again.

Then the sun rose on our final day in Surrey, and as I opened my eyes to the sunlight despite having only just fallen asleep, a sickly feeling skittered about in my stomach, the wings of butterflies fluttering against my abdomen.

I’d spent the entire night thinking about the fact that after today, I would probably never see her again.

I sighed, closing my suitcase and sparing the room a final glance. I had not slept much here, but still I had dreamt, faraway sentiments that would never be requited.

I pulled on my jacket and smoothed down the velvet, squinting at my reflection in the small mirror that hung on the wall above a nondescript dresser.

I didn’t look particularly tired, though I might have felt it. Sure, there were smudges of shadow beneath my eyes and little bits of stubble clung to my jaw, but my shoulders did not sag, and tanned skin and rosy cheeks had replaced my usually pale complexion, my hair bore little streaks here and there that were lighter than the rest.

In a way, Ridge Farm had refreshed me. The quiet of the countryside had eased the tension etched into my muscles by the rush of city life, and I’d enjoyed being able to see the stars properly at night.

I’d enjoyed watching them with Y/N.

Who would watch the stars with me, and indulge my silly ramblings?

Who would stand up for me even when my opinion was ridiculous, or tease me when it was perfectly sound?

Who would leave me with a theory or a quip that would resurface in my memory when I felt uninspired or glum? Who would leave me with something to smile about when darkness hovered too close at the edge of my vision?

Who would be there to banish it all from my wretched mind?

With each thought, I felt dizzier at the prospect of just leaving, without… Well, without anything.

She deserved to know, didn’t she?

And yet, I deserved to keep my secrets, did I not?

I could allow myself a little dignity, at least.

What would I tell her anyway? That she both grounded me and made me feel like I was flying? That I would take her with me to space if I was to go alone, because I didn’t want to be alone if it wasn’t with her? That I felt my soul became made of stardust when she walked into a room?

People didn’t say such things, and without saying such things, I couldn’t tell her what it was— whatever it was— I felt for her, if I felt anything at all. It was hard to tell whether her presence terrified me or comforted me. I didn’t understand how I felt about her, really, and that was my problem.

“Brian!” Freddie shouted for me like it wasn’t the first time he’d called.

“Coming,” I muttered to no one but myself. I picked up my suitcase by its wooden handle and slipped my socked feet into my wooden shoes. I looked about once more, then went into the hall, closing behind me the door to this part of my life.

Mistress Melancholy settled herself into my bones, and she unpacked her bags, here to stay.

Down the stairs and into the living room, and there they were all standing.

Freddie and Roger and Deacy and Veronica and John Harris and Crystal and Heather and Mary, and… And Y/N.

Take my breath away, why don’t you?

But her parents and her brother were there too, and I squared my shoulders as I approached. Her dad had only warmed to me as of late, and if he took even a singular glance at the expression on his daughter’s face as I made my way toward her, he would have been right to throw me to the ground in a blind rage.

She did look tired. Beautiful, but tired. Mouth set grimly, her shoulders stiff.

Yet, the sparkle in her eyes had not dulled. And she shone, even in her weariness.

My evening star.

Our two roadies, Mary, Heather, and Veronica were the first to say their goodbyes and go outside to savour the last of the country air, Ronnie carrying little Robert in her arms. Roger would first ferry Crystal, Roadie-John, Freddie, and myself to the train station, then return to take himself and the others back to London via his beloved Alfa.

Hugs and kisses and generally well-placed sentiments of gratitude and affection were shared all around, between thanking Y/N’s parents for their hospitality and telling Y/N that she would be sorely missed in the days to come.

Freddie, Rog, Deacy, and I stuck around to say our own final goodbyes, with Y/N’s parents naming us family and welcome at any time, and everyone reminiscing about our time at Ridge Farm.

Y/N was mostly quiet, and I was silent altogether, my eyes only leaving her when her gaze flicked in my direction.

I wondered what she was thinking, if she would think of me, as I would think of her, when I was gone.

Roger excused himself to go to the car, no doubt fearing that the others would have trashed it in his absence.

“You’re in love with that car,” I said, sighing.

Roger shouted, “BETTER THAN WITH YOU, you nErD!”

Then Y/N laughed, and upon instinct, I smiled.

How lovely it felt, to smile. I should smile more often.

“I’m going to make sure he doesn’t get up to other things out there,” said Freddie, going after Roger. “Au revoir, darlings!”

“Au revoir,” Y/N’s parents responded.

Deacy left as well, offering a smile as a parting gift.

I cleared my throat.

“Thank you again for having us, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews,” I said, and when Mrs. Andrews held out her arms to me, I embraced her.

“Anna, dear. Please call me Anna,” she smiled as radiantly as her daughter. “It was so lovely to have you here.”

Then, to my surprise, Y/N’s father addressed me. “And I’m Sebastian to you, son. You’re in good company. No need for formalities.”

“Well, thank you Mr.— Sebastian,” I cringed.

“Brian,” Frank nodded to me, and I returned the gesture.

“Frank.”

Then, before I realised what was happening, the three eldest members of the Andrews family had left the room.

Y/N and I were alone.

I racked my mind for anything, for what to do, what to say, but I came up with nothing when she smiled at me.

She turned my mind to a puddle.

“Time to go, I suppose,” she said.

“Yeah,” I murmured, unable to take my eyes from hers, “I suppose.”

She felt so far away, as though I was already gone and it was too late to reach for her.

And still, I said nothing, for what could I say?

“You’re the reason why I play, you know,” she said.

I furrowed my brow. “What?”

“Guitar. I never would’ve kept going if I hadn’t seen you perform. I was so close to giving up. But, and sorry to be sappy,” here she gave a little laugh, “you inspired me.”

I inspired her? Now here was a reversal of roles. ‘White Queen’ was hers, and so was ‘‘39’. It was all hers.

“Did I really?”

She laughed again, and I had never heard a lovelier sound, even if she presently was laughing at me. “You’re too modest, Brian, and you’re insanely talented. I’ll never be that good, even if I were to practice every minute of every day.”

Her words tore at my heart. I had never felt so… so appreciated, so admired, so loved.

“If you keep playing,” I said, “I have no doubt you will be better than me. Easily, in fact. I’m not exactly the world’s most technical guitar player.”

She peered up at me beneath her eyelashes, her lips parted softly.

I couldn’t stand it.

I reached for her, tucked a piece of her hair behind her ear. My touch lingered on her skin, and I found myself drifting toward her. She held a pull over me that gravity could only have dreamt to replicate.

Then, realising the intimacy of what I’d just done, my fingers curled into my palm and I stepped back.

“Brian—”

I would not dwell. And I would not stay around to hear her ask me to leave.

“Until next time, Y/N.”

And that would have been that.

Except she just had to say my name again, didn’t she?

“Oh, dammit, Bri. Come here.” Her hand brushed my shoulder. I pulled her into my arms.

Her heartbeat fluttered against my chest, and I missed her already.

I didn’t— I couldn’t— hug her cautiously this time, the way I normally did, gentle and only just there, driven by the fear that she would disintegrate beneath my hands. This time, I embraced her as though it were the very last time, because it might very well have been.

And then words slipped from my lips, my heart in control of everything and my mind tossed out the window.

“I don’t think I can stand an entire summer without you,” I said. She nestled further into my embrace, and despite everything, my heart soared.

“Not an entire summer,” she replied. “Just half.”

“Y/N,” I hummed pathetically.

“Bri.” She too sounded anguished.

“May I come see you? Just me?”

She said nothing, only held on to me, and really, what more could I ask of her?

“Or let me take you out,” I murmured. “Somewhere. Anywhere. Anywhere you want to go.”

“Anywhere?” she whispered.

“Anywhere,” I whispered back.

“I’d love that,” she said, and my breath caught. She’d love it. “Soon?”

I drew back from her, to see if the expression on her face was as genuine as the sound of her voice.

It was.

“Soon,” I promised, and I did not lie. I was already planning my return.

And then I leaned down, the thrum of my pulse far too loud in my ears to listen to reason.

I kissed her cheek.

Briefly, but kiss her cheek I did.

“Bri,” she sighed, and her hands wound around mine.  

“It’s difficult.”

She looked puzzled, but I didn’t elaborate.

It’s difficult. To leave you. But I must.

Mustn’t I?

I took my hands from hers and made for the door.

It’s not too late. You can still turn back.

Can I?

Could I?

No. I would not take her life from her in this way.

“Goodbye, beautiful,” I said.

I will not take her life from her, I will not take her life from I will not take her life from her—

Oh, but I wanted to be selfish.

For once in my life, I wanted something so badly that I couldn’t let it go.

I wouldn’t let her go.

⁺˚*·༓☾ ☽༓･*˚⁺

You touched your cheek.

He was gone.

⁺˚*·༓☾ ☽༓･*˚⁺

And then he wasn’t.

In the doorway he was standing, the sun his backlight, a fallen angel who was still very much an angel.

“Come with us. Come with me,” he sighed wistfully, fingers wrapped around the doorframe so tightly that his knuckles turned to white.

You had rarely seen such raw emotion in your life, never known desperation so pure, outside of yourself.

But here was Brian, hanging onto the door as though it were his last hope to remain standing, and gazing at you like you were his only hope at all.

“You’re my best friend,” he breathed.

And then abruptly, it all became very clear to you. Utterly simple.

You wanted to go with Queen, with Brian, and staying behind would only mean once more sacrificing your own happiness in the pursuit of pleasing others.

Brian made you happy, damn it, and you were tired of hopelessness. You wanted to be happy, and for once, you wanted your own happiness enough to realise what it was you had to do.

“And you’re mine,” you said.

Mine. No more than a word, and yet it brought such a sense of belonging, a swell of warmth through you that could have outshone Sirius in all its glory.

Brian’s face broke into a smile, and involuntarily, so did yours.

He knew, even before you’d said it, that you were coming with him.

And when you returned to the living room ten rushed minutes later with your suitcase packed, your parents were there to kiss you goodbye, even if your dad did so reluctantly. But you explained hastily what it was you had to do, and promised that you would explain in further detail as soon as you could. You were an adult; this was your choice to make.

The truth was, you had no idea what came next, not in terms of school or residence or anything at all, but what did it matter? This was the adventure of a lifetime, to run away to god knew where with a rock and roll band, and if a little of spontaneity was to dictate your life for a while, then so much the better. After all, what was adventure without an element of spontaneity?

You ran out into the sunshine of the late afternoon, and Brian was there to take your hand.

The others gave a raucous cheer as the two of you appeared in the driveway, whoops and claps echoing around the courtyard to be met with recklessly happy laughter from you, from Brian.

It would seem you had always been part of the plan.

⁺˚*·༓☾ ☽༓･*˚⁺

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Masterpost / Part 13 / Part 15