#he's such a huge name in the field of linguistics

[waitineedaname]

the difference between different subfields of linguistics and their takes on Chomsky is so funny sometimes because my phonology and syntax textbooks are like "we're building on this foundational theory that Chomsky came up with in the 70s!" while my sociolinguistics textbook is like "Noam Chomsky should be addicted to shutting the fuck up"

[stephofromcabin12]

(🗣️) I'm trying to write a PJO fanfic and my oc is a daughter of Athena, so my question is how would you make the oc different enough from Annabeth to make her seem like her own charecter. I think I asked something like this before.

Good question!

Firstly consider what similarities they *don’t* share. Its fine to have similarities — they are half siblings after all — as long as you can balance it with some things that set them apart! It doesn’t have to be huge, and they don’t have to be polar opposites.

Examples:

- Appearance, age.

- Place of birth, family situation.

- Interests, skillsets (reading comic books and being into spelling bees is also a sign of intelligence + counts towards being a bookworm, just saying)

- Humor, cultural knowledge (im never going to let the show writers live down that they wrote Annabeth to have never seen a movie. Even before she ran away? Ur telling me Frederick Chase didn’t sit his baby daughter down for A land before time or Labyrinth? Winnie The Pooh? The dark crystal?? JURASSIC PARK????But he’s so nerdy???? Huh????)

On that note:

- There are many ways of being the same thing. Intelligence and strategising can play out in a million ways.

They might both be smart, but in what areas do they excell?

Where are their interests? Annabeth has her love of architechture, maybe your oc is super nerdy about geography and cartography (good for battle strategising) or even cooking (it is a science after all) — the list goes on!

Places that require intelligence, science and logic:

Art restoration and archival work

Cooking and baking (candy making is straight up wizardry, and Demeter kids are unlikely to be into that specific area of cooking)

Finances and business

Painting/sculpting (art in general)

Music, composition especially but also mixing and producing.

Film and stage managing (techies for theatres is a very Athena kid career)

Logistics in general. Every field ever needs people who can work a spreadsheet and calculate all the possible outcomes of a situation before it happens.

Cleaning (if you mix the wrong chemicals ur gonna poison yourself with mustard gas or something worse)

Teaching

Politics

Journalism

Law

Running a non-profit org/organizing events and protests

Archeology (Must be into: dirt and ugly shoes, sincerely, and lovingly, an archeology dropout)

Anthropology, Psychology, Linguistics

Learning languages in general

Vis dev and animation

I could go on but you get the point I think

Basically: Don’t focus on the core areas they have some overlap. If your oc isn’t named Annabeth, likes archaeology and wears a yankee’s cap, you’re probably good to go.

Remember that everything shapes a person (and character) so it’s not so much about the trait or skill itself but more the effects those things have on your character. Same goes for their relationships.

Lastly consider their purpose and goal (purpose is outside the story: You as a writer deciding what role the character will play. Goal is inside the story: The ‘thing’ your character strives for)

It’s probably not the same as Annabeth’s — so work from there until the venn diagram isn’t a flat circle; some overlaps are fine but they’re not one and the same.

I hope that helps!

[cloudbattrolls]

Hazard Ailaht

OVERVIEW:

HAZARD AILAHT is the head librarian of TAMPS (The Alternian Multicultural Preservation System), raised to the position since wrigglerhood. 

Introverted and conflict-shy, he is a studious academic and trained linguist, fairly prominent in his field despite his age. He is confident in his strengths and hesitant in his weaknesses, disliking the bustle of large groups and preferring to blend into crowds.

Cautious by nature, he nevertheless enjoys talking to those who share his interests or he can find other common ground with, and is often easy to fluster. 

Name: Hazard Ailaht (He’s trans, so one reason he chose his name is because of the etymology of the word ‘hazard’ in its unconventional use of ‘to hazard a guess’, because he is a huge nerd. Ailaht has no particular meaning).

Online Handles: hiraethVerbiage is his only handle.

Age: 12.5 sweeps (27 years)

Gender: Man (he/him pronouns)

Caste: Cerulean

Height: 6’2

Weight: 285 pounds. Hazard’s a big guy, rather fat and thick-limbed.

Lusus: A scorpion-lizard. Hazard doesn’t need it to look after him these nights, but he’s still fond of his dad and it’s usually either at his hive or at the library. Technically, it isn’t his original lusus, but he’s bonded with it regardless.

Psi: Vision fourfold, though flawed and basically useless as he is not pure Ailaht. He can sometimes catch glimpses of futures that would have been, if things had gone differently. He can’t control it very well, and doesn’t like using it, though once in a while a vision will strike him regardless. However, they are usually over quickly. 

Strife: A knife. Hazard is basically competent with it, but doesn’t like using it. 

Sylladex: Archive modus. Simple objects with short histories at the top, more complex ones with longer histories at the bottom.

Hive: A well-kept, somewhat spacious hive on the outskirts of Temasek, right where the suburbs begin and the city ends. Hazard enjoys it for the greenery around it and the peace and quiet, and keeps his own personal book collection there. 

Ancestor: Goh Tat Ailaht. His title is The Epigraph, but he never uses it and considers it stuffy and boring. He and Hazard don’t get along well, and while Hazard once kept (minimal) contact with him for library-related matters, the two have now permanently cut ties. Hazard is much happier since doing so.

Constellation: Scorpius

Interests: 

Reading - Naturally, as a librarian, Hazard loves to read, and enjoys a variety of fiction and nonfiction, willing to try most kinds of things at least once. The only books he doesn’t care for at all are ones that involve signmates as main characters, and he will avoid them entirely.

Languages - An enjoyer of many languages, Hazard studies them fervently and is always trying to learn more about them. He’s written a few books on the development of language families and the use of language in non-troll beings. 

Performance Enjoyer - While not a creative himself, Hazard enjoys the occasional performance - usually dance, drag, music or other such things. He is shy, though, and doesn’t like to be picked out for an audience volunteer if one is needed. 

[syb-ill-ah]

A bit of lore regarding Syb. Well, yes, her name's Sybila because she's really a big self-insert character, me pretty much.

She was born in Zaun and, just like Viktor, and fought her way up to become a scholar and pursue her studies of arts, linguistics and education. She grew up in the same part of Zaun as Viktor so they share the first language and the fact the toxic environment fucked up their health. Syb, however, has different issues with her health.

The very self-insert shit: Her first year at the Academy, at the age of 19 she discovered she had blood cancer. Luckily, she got treated due to her studies in Piltover and recovered. The chemotherapy affected her brain and now, she suffers from seizures despite being on heavy medication.

Didn't stop her from continuing her studies, though, and despite the chronic health issues, persisting depression and cognitive impairment, she went on and graduated.

She met Viktor (before Act 1) at a conference where she got into a very heated conversation about Zaunite culture with some scholar, calling Piltovan culture stuck up in comfort while it's Zaun that actually progresses in terms of art. That's something that eventually caused her and Viktor's paths to cross since it piqued his interest.

After graduation, she got into her own research (which took Viktor and Jayce some convincing) in the education field, promoting eclectic and enlightened approaches to both methodology and application of it. (Happening in the gap between Act 1 and 2).

She has very strong opinions about the treatment of Zaunites, especially the children. At one point, she comes up with an initiative that would provide kids from Zaun with free education. It got scolded and declined by the Council so she became even more bitter.

But Viktor is always the anchor of her life. He's the only person who can calm her down during any mental breakdown or lift her spirits when she crumbles under the pressure of living. Nobody can make her feel safe, at all, other than Viktor. That love is unbreakable, unconditional, unending.

Just like me, she's obsessive and sucks at peopling, usually ending up being claimed as the weirdo of any group she gets into. (My irl schoolmates call me "the weird auntie".) Somehow, she manages to have people want to spend time in her company and keep a few friends; she has no idea why. She can't accept compliments from anyone else but Viktor.

A bit of a hermit, she's the happiest when she can bury herself with her studies, books, art. Preferably in the vicinity of Viktor. She's not extremely into physical touch unless the mood and situation is proper, so she doesn't invade his workspace just like he doesn't invade hers. She can become a huge cuddle monster but time, mood and situation have to be proper. If Viktor wants to hold her, though, she can't say no.

She's obsessed with helping Viktor with anything and maybe gets a little too much in that regard, but there's nothing more rewarding than making him happy; taking care of Viktor is her therapy. Even though she's pretty shit at it, in her own opinion at least.

She's a perfectionist but gets overwhelmed fast. Nevertheless, she loves learning new things, researching anything of value, regardless of the field. She tends to forget things so she always takes extensive notes of everything, therefore apart from the dozens of sketchbooks, she has tons and tons of notebooks full of everything she's seen, heard, read, thought. There's zero order in it, though. (I'm staring at my own piles as I'm writing this, ehhh.)

Unlike Viktor, who when given a task will not go to sleep until it's done, Syb can't do that. She always studies early and works on every assignment early enough because it ends badly when she overworks her mind. When they started to share workspace with Viktor, her work ethic lured Viktor into taking breaks as well. Achievement unlocked. (⁠☞⁠ ⁠ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ⁠)⁠☞

Okaaay, Imma end the rambling about her/me because it's boring and shit. Frankly, it took me days to finish this and find the courage to actually post it. So, this is kinda a leap of faith for me.

I made an Arcane OC because. She's me. But prettier. Because I'm an ugly fuck.

[warrioreowynofrohan]

Fëanor as Craftsman and Scholar

The headcanons poll got me thinking about this.

Fëanor’s life as a young adult and during his kids’ childhood, travelling around Aman and exploring, is one of the things I find most compelling about him; it’s the kind of life I would like if I was in Valinor, rather than staying in Tirion all the time. The description in the Silm (assembled from a couple different places) is:

The wedding of his father was not pleasing to Fëanor; and he had no great love for Indis, nor for Fingolfin and Finarfin, her sons. He lived apart from them, exploring the land of Aman, or busying himself with the knowledge and the crafts in which he delighted.

…While still in his early youth he wedded Nerdanel, the daughter of a great smith named Mahtan, among those of the Noldor most dear to Aulë; and of Mahtan he learned much of the making of things in metal and in stone.

…Fëanor and his sons abode seldom in one place for long, but travelled far and wide upon the confines of Valinor, going even to the borders of the Dark and the cold shores of the Outer Sea, seeking the unknown. Often they were guests in the halls of Aulë; but Celegorm went rather to the house of Oromë, and there he got great knowledge of birds and beasts, and all their tongues he knew.

I think that during this time Fëanor and his family were happy, and he and Nerdanel were good parents on the whole. I think that “often they were guests in the halls of Aulë” is important - it indicates that during this time Fëanor was on close and friendly terms with at least some of the Valar, irrespective of how he felt about their ruling on Finwë’s remarriage. His estrangement from them came later, as a consequence of the lies spread by Melkor.

I don’t see any evidence for the fanon idea of Fëanor demanding that his sons pursue specific craft interests of smithing, gem-making, or linguistics, or being disappointed by Maglor’s talents and interests being drawn to music and Celegorm’s to nature. Fëanor strikes me above all as a polymath, someone who was interested in everything. He would want and expect his children to excel - and I believe they all did, very much so even though Maglor’s, Celegorm’s, and Curufin’s talents are the only ones the Silm gives us specifics on - but he wouldn’t have overridingly strong opinions on what they should be talented at and he’d be proud of and engaged in their skills.

(Additionally, there’s little evidence that smithcraft was one of Fëanor’s overriding passions at all, though he did study it with Mahtan so it was likely a prominent interest. His accomplishments in gemstones and in the creation of the tengwar, not in metalwork, are what’s highlighted in the Silm. Only later, after Melkor incites the Noldor to make weapons, is Fëanor mentioned as making swords and helms. And none of them get names and fame in the books like Glamdring or Orcrist or Eöl’s swords do.

So the very frequent fanon of Fëanor spending a ton of his time at the forge is strange to me. Especially in the context of a lot of travel across the length and breadth of Valinor in earlier family life - forges and raw metal aren’t very portable.)

Returning to the topic of Fëanor as a polymath - he strikes me as someone who is interested in a huge range of things. He’s probably tried every craft in Valinor and made some impressive contribution to all of them.

On the academic side (HoME says he considered himself to be the best scholar as well as the best craftman among the Eldar, and that he was very much wrong about the former assessment - but that means that he did engage in academic work as well was craft) it’s more scattershot. If elves have academic journals, he’ll submit papers to them when he has a brainwave, usually without have read anything else in the literature. Sometimes, he comes up with an independent breakthrough that shapes the field. Other times, he says something that relies on assumptions that were addressed and disproved years ago and everyone in the field groans because Explaining To Fëanor Why He Is Wrong is something that never goes over well, and the arguments can continue for months until he gets tired of it and switches frequencies to another topic.

[hhjs]

summary ➝ "I don't get it." You cock your head to the side and investigating the painting at your feet with an obstinate want to understand how it's supposed to depict love. "It just looks like they slapped on paint."

"Look here, dummy!" He slaps your pointer finger jokingly, grumbling under his breath.  Taking your palm and slowly splaying out the digits. Traces the rough pads against its silky texture, a map to somewhere, a blend of blue and pink, silhouettes reaching out for each other when the world intends to tear them apart.

You sigh, contentedly and think this must be it; because never was love meant to be understood.

It was meant to be felt.

word count ➝ 16.6k words.

alternatively➝ university premise.

genre ➝ angst, romance??? comedy??? a smidge of drama??? idk

pairings➝ han jisung. x fem reader.

warnings ➝ recreational drinking, use of profanity, suggestive.

note➝ i suspect that i have a vague emotional attachment to this. Please note that it used to be a jeonghan fic originally but is now rewritten.  i've been toying around with my writing style, idk if this has met what's expected :c but... this piece is a proper example of the idiots to lovers trope. 

a huge thanks to @emhpathy​ for beta-reading. 

 also i felt indolent and didn’t edit. :(

loosely based on the Coldplay song in question, ‘A Message’.

After. 

The air smells like seasalt. Like having a foamy blanket of  waves draped over your face until you let go, slowly, let all the air leave your lungs. 

In the distant rhythm of the rattling wind, you can barely hear the ring of childish laughter. It's an old bicycle Minho last rode when he was 13. Jisung's driving too fast. But you don't care, you don't care because you feel just so alive. You can feel your heart on your tongue. Under your fingertips. Inside your chest.

You can't believe it's true. Can't believe this is your life. Can't believe you're real.

The city is a haze of blue and yellow and red. Jisung slows down by the sidewalk, leaning into the wash of colours and it  stains the side of his face a little. The breeze is caressing his hair. Patting stubborn gelled strands out. His shoulders rise and fall with every little movement, upwards and downwards. When he breathes in and when he breathes out. Everything seems to slow down. Every second feels like a minute. Every minute like an hour.

 Then suddenly- and it surprises you a little - Jisung pauses, cranes his neck back to smile at you. It's lopsided, toothy. He looks so much younger. Suddenly, so utterly boyish. You commit the sight to memory, the sliver of his teeth, the glint in his eyes, the curl of his mouth -

You hope you never forget this.

 Because this is how you know. This is how you've always known.

You wouldn't change anything. Even if you could go back.  

Not for a second. Not when it hurt. Not when it was hard.

Not even once.

...

Bach's  Toccata & Fugue in D Minor. 

You're in your bedroom, you can hear the music in your head, the crescendos and diminuendos, the feather light piano, the strum of a guitar and the gargling of a trumpet, fingers buzzing with an intense desire to write it all down. But then the sound of an organ rips through the air, the curtains pull apart. Your bedroom floor gives away from under your feet. There is a stage, there is an audience impatiently staring up at you, watching you, measuring you and you don't know what to say.

So you run, run, run home.

You remember standing in front of your mum's bedroom. Knocking. When she lets you crawl back under the covers and she runs a caressing hand down your back, you say nothing. (There seems to be a gaping hole in your chest. And you don't understand it. Like something's missing.) . When she traces the shape of your jaw and says trouble sleeping? you say nothing. Then the rain pelts the windows, the curtains are  pulled; suddenly it's so much darker, so much colder, you place a hand over your heart and then look up at her, up to her large, concerned eyes and say, "It hurts."

 But it's okay. It's okay. You'll forget all about it by tomorrow morning.  Because your mum smells like home, like the earth after it rains. It's okay because the world is less scary when you're a kid. When you don't understand.

 Then you're on a train, it skids against its tracks and your hand hurts from holding onto the handle for too long. You hold your draft against your ribs.There are too many people. Shoulders. Heads. Standing. Sitting. Their lives are different. Even when they're together. 

From here, you can make out a woman stroking her toddler's cheek, a teenager with a copy of A Tale Of Two Cities in hand, a tall man, with his head hung low. He is smiling down at his lover. His fingers splay against her throat. She is looking at him. They say nothing. 

 She stands on her toes and kisses him. And something inside you suddenly comes alive, an absence, tries to gnaw its way out of your ribcage. Tries to tell you I've never left. 

The train finds itself in the belly of a tunnel. Outside, it's so much darker. So much colder. There's a blinking streetlight ahead. Yellow and lime green. It must have been raining. You don't know your stop.     

All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players. This is a stage. 

The passengers are impatiently staring up at you, watching you, measuring you and you don't know what to say. You can't run this time.

(You need to get out of here. You need to get out of here. You need to get out of here. This city. Something is missing. Something is wrong. You need to get away.)

Now you wait for a room. A door. A bed. And miss your mother with an intensity that's akin to taking a punch to the gut. You don't remember what the earth smells like anymore. Everything in the city is platform and concrete. And soot rising from tall  chimneys.

Suddenly, you can't believe childhood is over.

Spurts of light found themselves against the hallway ceiling, you wondered how long you'd been thinking about that nightmare for it to take so much of your attention. A mic involuntarily roars to life, reminding you that you were still at the varsity and you had to find Jisung. 

Which sounds easy, had it not been for your history with him. Avoiding him was getting progressively hard a task to maintain because you were in the same department, sharing minor courses that prompts you to think that nothing much had changed and you'd be lying if you said you mind. He is a stubborn page which keened on flipping over in the youthful chapters of your life, refusing to be left behind and some part of you is too scared to know what would happen if you had.

You sigh, looking at the clock nailed to one of the pale yellow pillars and then close your eyes to try to ease the tension in your shoulders. Breathing in. Breathing out.  This morning, you put on a thin cotton dress but the humidity had somehow prompted it to appear somewhat translucent.

Summer brushes up against the back of your neck, you rub your eyes vigorously, placing your sweaty palms on them, dapples of light settled atop  the lids. Coating the little twists of purplish veins pink and white, becoming brighter and brighter and brighter. Any minute now and you would muster up the courage to face him.

You push the field door open.

Football players for the born-again team are loitering about in the heavily populated room, expectants look on most of their faces. You begin to feel twice as much nervous than you did before. 

See, the possibility of stuttering nonsensical sentences and potentially embarrassing yourself in front of Jisung and nameless strangers, again, wasn't the most thrilling idea for you but if you don't make the deadline this time on this group assignment, you'll fail your linguistics course, so it  would be tough to bounce back from for the both of you.

The coach, who is a lanky man, with an alarmingly ruddy face and tufts of snow white hair spiralling out of his head, experienced a lot of difficulty blowing it away from his line of sight. With the  door held back, pressing a curious looking opaque board to his chest, he scans the entirety of the team with an owlish stare, when he was satisfied with the number of persons attending, he stepped in.

"Game starts in 10 minutes." he pauses, allowing the candidates to settle in. A feet away from you, Changbin produces a series of garbled profanities before going back greedily guzzling down the rest of his gatorade.

Once the coach clears his throat, his beady eyes travelling from one curious face to another, flitting between each person, it finds you briefly then it darts curiously across the scenery behind you, as though an explanation for your presence is out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered.

You hold the assignment packet against your chest, feeling the weight of gel blue letters under the rough pad and then slowly fold it open.

Han jisung. You tell him, that's who I'm looking for. 

It takes you awhile to navigate your gaze to the owner of the name amidst the maze of students huffing and puffing about schedules and missing lectures and deadlines, some shouldering their way out in bored frowns, some smiling excited smiles, rushing to grab a suitable seat. Like a blur of faces you catch on the subway and eventually forget, the little snippets of another person's life. Glimpses of them from car windows pressed together in traffic, just a few seconds before the light turns green. One minute you think you know them, put yourself in their shoes and imagine their life for them and the next, you go back to being strangers. 

To you, Jisung's face is an unmistakable, unforgettable kind of face. 

Taunting you from posters of his many swim team accomplishments, under which his name stood in big bold yellow letters, plastered on the noticeboards, on the  walls where the paint was starting to crack. The search didn't prove to be very difficult even though he didn't stick out like a sore thumb without his signature bleached blonde hair.

A varsity jacket is discarded on his body. Under the blue and yellow fabric, Jisung's chest rises and falls with every breath, his lanky legs perched up on the bleachers.  You wonder how he managed to doze off in the face of all this tension about getting clocked in face with a football. 

Aside from by accident, you were positive he hadn't tried to speak to you ever since your previous, unspeakably embarrassing encounter. 

That was a long time ago. 

It was certain that had it not been for this assignment, things between you would remain that way. In spite of this, you've gathered, because people never stop fawning over this prominent character, that not much has changed since you were in school.

Jisung managed to secure an attention drawing position wherever he went and upperclassmen wanted to be his friend even though he mostly indulged only in his own company. 

His head rests on folded arms, his foot is propped up on his knee, which he keeps shaking.  Sunlight crawls up the expanse of his exposed cheek, allowing burnt orange to  bathe half of his face, ribbons of liquid light tapering to smudges down the side of his jaw and disappearing.

Jisung has a boyish face, his eyes are big and kiddish, paired with a sharp nose and a convenient, small, pinkish mouth inherently pouted out to accentuate his puffy squirrel like cheeks but slimming down around his jaw. His raven hair falls in sleek, wet tufts clinging to his forehead and grazing his rosy cheeks, giving him a strange resemblance to a cherub loitering around in the real world.

Come to think of it, Jisung looks, like he invariably does, just slightly out of place.

You drop your bag on the grass. The action makes an unexpected thump. His eyes stir  faster behind closed eyelids, as though he were stirring awake from an ardently produced dream, like a newborn baby, divorced from the worries of the world. Jisung opens one of his eyes, then another, glaring confusedly, his lips pursed in unspoken surprise.

What's the big deal, right? At best, he'll start cooperating with you. At worst, you imagine, he'll toss you across the field for disrupting his sleep.

Of course, no one in their right minds would opt for the latter option, the rational part of you reasons - but you show him the packet,  just for safety measures.

"I thought we ought to go over how we're going to work around this assignment and you weren't in class so..."  You explain. When Jisung just blinks up at you in a curious fashion, you consider that he might not recognise you at all, that, for some reason, bothers you. "You probably don't remember me I-"

"I remember." He interjects firmly, acknowledging you with a fluent utterance of your name that gives you enough evidence of his claim, followed by a watchful, stoic gaze, he motions for you to take a seat beside him. 

You hesitantly sit at the end of the row,  keeping a calculated distance between your bodies. You find that even after all this time looking him in the eye was just as unnerving as it had been the first time they shyly flickered back to yours from across a thick spined A levels Calculus textbook. There's still an intimidating air about him, something that seeks to be constantly impressed without asking to.

Jisung sits up straighter, setting both his legs on either side of the bench, he keeps his gaze trained on your face, not looking away once. "Go on." He suggests, his voice low, "What do we have to do?"

You perk up at this, taking the contents out of the packet. Setting them down before you, you reiterate the instructions rendered in class, trying to include every important detail which contributes to the making of the project.

"We have to attach a PowerPoint part too." You paused, "Let's do that bit today."

Jisung listens intently, never cutting you off, he nods occasionally, making suggestions when you were trying to look for suitable loops in your schedules to work on the scheme, you recommended  several premises, ranging from cafés to parks to libraries to food courts, even your place because it's the closest from Jisung's flat and he refuses go beyond the distance on a Sunday morning. You casually let in the fact that your flatmate would be there in order to insinuate that you hadn't made the offer because of your previous feelings for him.

 You sigh, taking a minute to stretch back and take a deep breath. The bench is cool under your thighs, soft caresses of a warm summer breeze brushing the hair from your face away, pale yellow pours from the canopies, staining the grass, football players prepping in the distance, their zealous partners egging them on with excited smiles, shouting encouragements from the other end of the court.  You imagine lying down on the grass, spreading your arms out and not having a care about anything.

"You still wear that bracelet." 

"What?" You yawn, brows furrowed in confusion. You look at him from the corner of your eyes,  finding that his brown orbs motion to the source of comment, they dart from your cheek to your wrist, where surely the platinum accessory is tied to its loosest hoop, it used to be your go-to add-on in school. 

Surprised, you touch the item briefly, before retracting your hand slowly. All you can think is he remembers, he really remembers,  "...Yeah."

...

Instead of running about playgrounds with a mouthful of kiddish laughter and building cartoonishly  architectured sandcastles, you remember spending most of your childhood with your nose dug deep inside a fairytale, splurging much time on committing the glide of milky pages to memory, eyes widening, face twisting with each vicissitudes of emotions that would come over you with each stage of exploring a story. It was your own little world, a catharsis for all that you were holding inside, a window you could crack open and when the real world felt stuffy. 

Fancying Jisung was, your younger self imagined, fantastical, like something out of those fairytales.

You don't know when you started liking him, maybe it was the first time you saw him. It was your last year in school and Jisung's unfamiliar face was a new sight against the fuzzy background of sleepy students pouring into the hallway, it was the kind that demanded to be noticed, even though he simply  looked bored with an enormous pair of headphones looped around his thin neck.

Jisung was born to go through life being the embodiment of an all rounder, now that you think about it, there's not a thing he wasn't good at, always  having a proclivity to outshine others.

 He was a transfer student with stellar grades in spite of mostly routing his interest  towards composing  obscure music you'd found floating about the net. In all honesty, he truly was the master of all trades and the jack of none and every room was a keeper of attention, enveloped in an intangible but unanimous, wordless veil of interest towards the new character.

But  maybe it wasn't as theatrical as you remembered; maybe it was the love at  first sight nonsense, maybe it wasn't something you realised overnight, out of the blue, maybe it all happened at a slow, infuriating pace, maybe you started liking him for the small, stupid and unimportant things, like when you dropped your pen, the thin stick rolling away between your desks and he picked it up, flicking it between his fingers curiously, carefully curling his fingers around the metal, observing it before putting it back on your desk, maybe it was in class, when he zoned out in class, not bothering to look apart until he realised it had caught your attention, he then blinked away, the rosy hue of his cheeks more prominent with each passing second,  maybe it was when you were sure you were about to flunk the history pop quiz and Jisung whispered the names of warriors and poets and the fallen while keeping his gaze firmly poised on his paper.

You were so shy, cloistered, intensely egregious and he kept seeking you out in some new manner, causing you to be an element of mild interest not only amongst your peers but also people who actively seeked his romantic interest.  Although, conversations  on your part never stretched beyond differentiation and stealing cautious glances at one another, (which wasn't a shocker because you didn't know how to compute a chat with him and Jisung was unusually timid for someone who acquainted himself with well known rambunctious personalities), you genuinely enjoyed his company.

So you obliged. Even though it was utterly improper and you were sure he liked someone on the cheer squad. It was just that you were a kid and you wanted to wear your heart on your sleeve just once before tucking it away forever.

He poked his head out from the water, wordlessly upon hearing his name, looking at you with a cocked brow and you were quick to say it, like you had to before you ended up changing your mind, it took a lot of courage to mutter a simple confession after all,  in spite of the fact you didn't at all picture him reciprocating, whisking you off of your feet with a wide grin, in a grand affirmation of all the rubbish pop culture has spoon fed you. 

It was a stereotypical teeth rotting, sweet crush that bound you to want to be around Jisung in a way he didn't, something lodged deep inside of you, the same thing that was childish and clung onto its fairy tales for dear life, hoped that he would share the same feelings, in spite of knowing it was undoubtedly unrequited. 

 Jisung had an indecipherable look on his face, he parted his mouth to say something but paused as if looking for the right words.  He simply settled with a sigh, before lowering his body down into the pool. You replayed the scene over and over again for the rest of senior year, until it drove you to a point of absolute insanity. You even considered googling what a sigh was supposed to convey, if fishing through dictionaries wasn't going to tell.

That was notably the last time you spoke in school.

But your strained relationship stayed with you like an embarrassing tattoo  and in trying desperately to  conceal it, afraid someone would see too much, know too much, you would only make it more apparent. 

You had to push him away to the farthest corner of your mind so you didn't have to wonder anymore, didn't have to interpret every action like your life depended on it - because love to you was so immense that it was overwhelming. You've wanted love to rescue you in some way, looked for it in the soft murmur of pages, in the chilling words to a song you can't seem to forget, you've waited for love like an impatient eagle anticipating its opportunity  to leap in and swoop up its shot at satisfying its undying hunger. You needed to uproot those budding feelings before they took abode inside your chest, grew stronger, into something massive, unignorable, something like love.

Avoiding Jisung in hallways, in class and really everywhere was some form of a habit you were developing - but that didn't stop him  from entangling himself with your ponderings; you thought of all the things he did without paying much attention to the act, like his petulant whining when he wanted something he wasn't getting, you thought of the way he tapped his pen against the wooden desk, silently eyeing chalky math problems on the board before uttering the answer with an ease only he could carry, you thought of his petulant front during arguments and how he always ended up winning, you just missed being around him without the added tension - which was funny because you're the one to blame for it. 

To your knowledge, Jisung didn't know to speak in puzzles, even when he didn't want to say something, he always found an agreeable way to deliver it,  often unknowingly wording them as they were, he didn't understand the complexities with which people conversed, needing everything to be black and white, as clear as the summer sky, so everyday felt like he owed you an example of his unintentional transparency, a explanation even though you knew he didn't.  

Maybe that's it, you thought, maybe that's all. 

(Sometimes you would sense his gaze searing into the side of your face, as if he was on the verge of uttering a greeting.

But graduation came along. And you never heard anything from him.)

You began to understand that all those tear jerking, unhappy endings were inevitable, like not being able to take your eyes off the stage during  Giacomo Puccini's Sono Andati, like being exposed to Mimi's excruciating death, losing something you can't put a finger on - and suddenly, the plays, the window, the catharsis wasn't enough, the child in you wanted to scream and  kick and throw, the child in you wanted to forge her own ending, the one that made sense, the one you could anticipate.

Running his palms along the cool glass, Jisung pauses from time to time to look at you, as if expecting you to address the elephant in the room, the same elephant that followed you all the way from campus, to his car, to the café downtown. It wasn't until the waiter went away in the pursuit of getting your order did he pose the inquiry. 

"Do you want to talk about it?" 

You shake your head slowly, a nervous laugh escaping your lips.

 "What's there to talk about? It was a long time ago and I'm over it."

 Saying it out loud like this feels weird, it feels so real and disappointing and embarrassing, you feel reduced to a child coming clean about that one time they tipped over a vase and dusted the debris under the rug he is about to step about on, hoping he wouldn't notice. 

The statement makes you feel guilty, like you're lying. You don't want to know if you really are.

"Well, does that mean we can be friends?" Mutters Jisung against the opening of his straw, sipping miserly as though not wanting to finish the rest of his Americano. He opens his mouth to say something but stops, looking blatantly confused, like that was the only explanation he had for your fallout. "I don't understand." 

Not having thought that far, you stop typing, the click clack of keys muting, Jisung's thick rimmed glasses rest atop the jut of his nose and he's peering over them to look right at you with big wide eyes, genuinely interested in being supplied an answer.  The sixteen year old you would be overwhelmed with bouts of fluster right now. But you stopped being that person a long time ago, in fact, that person is to you a bleary recollection of a mere stranger who you thought you saw somewhere but couldn't put a finger on the location.

Shrugging, unsure, the question comes after a lengthy pause, "I guess it does?"

You sit in temporary silence after the short conversation ends, never going off topic again and giving into irrelevant chats even though Jisung is actively trying to initiate conversation about things which had nothing to do with work. You wonder why, wordlessly admitting that it was getting harder to resist the urge to talk to him with every passing second.

His car was parked a few lanes away from the café so you were obliged to walk after getting through the first portion of the assignment.

"So." Jisung starts, biting the side of his cheek, "What have you been upto lately?"

Talking to Jisung isn't as difficult as your younger self made it to be, he could hold a conversation well, jumping from serious topics to lighter ones to keep the balance, making witty comments here and there that had you laughing without really meaning to and every time, you'd catch a look of satisfaction glinting in his eyes. 

 The pair of you walk by an ice-cream parlour where a short bald man with a perpetually happy  face is handing out samples. A mint green board is attached to the appendage of a stall, outstretching from the original store, it says La Petite Glacière. 

You raise your brows, literal nomenclature.

"Journalism could suit you." The comment is off-handed, a product of you thinking out loud, imagining Jisung running around with a recorder, with his big, friendly eyes, queries posed with an an easy jovial attitude; it's so befitting, you just couldn't help but notify him. Even if it was an involuntary notification. You left out the part where you always pegged his love for composing would eventually materialise instead, this was unexpected to say the least. But Jisung described music as a getaway, something he was willing to do out of passion and not duty.

It was to his credit that he didn't laugh in your face when you said you wanted to be a playwright, specialising solely in the field of fiction. That's one thing he doesn't have in common with your parents. (Who didn't hesitate to point out that it was an obsolete branch of writing.)

"Yeah?" Jisung grins archly, glancing at you, as insinuating the memory of you playing Iago when you were expecting to land Desdemona is still impressed on him. "I could say the same for you."

You only wave him off, rolling your eyes. Some things are better left forgotten.

It's hot and you're really thirsty. You're knee deep in lengthy conversations engineered to catch up with one another, which consisted of ping-ponging inquiries about everything and anything, like how it was moving away from your family and new hobbies and pet peeves and casual strolls down memory lane but then the tension would settle and you would grow awfully quiet, like you're doing something you aren't supposed to, like you're walking into the inviting mouth a ginormous tiger whilst convincing yourself that it won't gobble you up.

"Okay. I have one." you start, he's nodding in encouragement,  "Have you been dating a lot?" 

Jisung laughs at your obvious curiosity, wiping his sweaty forehead with a spare napkin, strolling really fast, long legs promoting his speedy gait, you have to jog from time to time to keep up.

"Why?" 

He tilts his head to you, the teasing spark in his eyes glinting knowingly, he becomes shorter and grows taller walking up and down the slopes of the bumpy road.

  Your eyes widen. You were curious! You haven't spoken to him for a long time and you're just catching up. Exactly, you tell yourself,  that's believable, that, you think, makes sense. The other explanation, the one you're deigning to not look in the eye, that a part of you would be disappointed if he had said yes doesn't.

You flounder for a response, something, just a word or even an awkward noise, anything to formulate a proper retort. When that proves to be delayed and difficult, heat begins to pool into your cheeks, shooting up to the back of your ears and budding under the skin of your neck.

"Just asking."

 He hums, ghosting his fingers along the small of your back, careful not to touch you as he shoulders his way to your side without bumping you off of your feet, the gesture prompts something inside your gut to twist and twist and twist. "Well...yeah, but it's never been serious."

You're waiting for the red light so you can cross the road to the parking area. Jisung is towering over a sea of the heads, he's not much taller than the average person, hands tucked in his pockets. The wind is messing his hair up to the side, he keeps running his fingers through the stubborn strand to get it to sit right but when the endeavour proves to be futile so he just scoffs, as if berating the strand whilst stubbornly repeating the action. 

Looking at him like this, you imagine falling in love with Jisung is easy. Like gliding a hot knife through butter. It must feel just right, even if it doesn't last long, like holding fire in between your palms and pretending you own it, feeling the warmth kissing your skin before it nips and burns, like speeding across comets, stars and the moon, waging wars in the name of romance and producing litanies about love and then - finally, inevitably, unwillingly - letting go, like you always knew you would.

 You imagine the aged memories of blurry faces behind cobwebs of raindrops and curtains of mist, the faces of people who he could've loved but hadn't.

And it scares you for some unknown reason.

There's something inexplicably lovable about Jisung, his babyish features have always possessed the tendency to catch you off guard, even though you've known him for a long time; it's gobsmacking and too winning to be real, like something out of a dream, the milky planes of an acrylic face. The smooth buttery texture of his skin, the subtle, narrow jut of his nose, the pouted shape of his mouth and pearly teeth. You think he doesn't know this, doesn't see himself the way you do even when he pretends to be confident with his boastful jokes, they are just jokes after all. Only further evidence of how he doesn't want to believe any compliment rendered his way.

"What about you?" He poses, looking over from the hood of his car while unlocking it from the driver side, "Dating anyone?" 

The truth is, you've tried the atrocities of blind dating and online dating and casual dating but they all have been deficient and you're too tired to go through the never ending cycle  of being on disappointing dates again: your expectations are too high, some might even say, for the way you seek familiarity with absolute strangers; you're stubborn, awkward and sometimes, simply unapproachable,  but for the sake of not deflating your ego, you decide that Jisung doesn't need to know this. 

You shake your head, failing to understand why Jisung is grinning through the cracked window, whilst you're pulling the door open and plopping down on the passenger seat.

"Why are you smiling?" You furrow your brows, watching as the lopsided grin grows bigger. 

"Because." He shrugs, tucking his hands in his pockets.  

"Because?" You look at him expectantly, but he just looks back at you without expanding the brief explanation. You're so close that you can make out the thin layer of mist collecting on his eyelashes, his arched cupid's bow, his eyes have so much brown in them. You'd liken the colour to that of a muddy lake, like the bare earth, they catch sunlight and turn golden, just for a second, for just one second, it looks like what magic must be like. Realising that you have been staring at him for quite long, you tear your abashed gaze away. Piloting it to shift from the buskers to the other cars, buses, pedestrians, traffic lights, looking for a sight distracting enough.

"I'm not telling you!" Jisung mocks your tone like a child with a violent shake of his head, putting his keys in ignition. The engine roars to life, wheezing like a kettle. Why he drives a Comet Convertible when he could've gotten any other alternative is a wonder; not that you mind, you like it, it’s  like sitting  inside a giant jewelry box, the inside is smooth red leather, velvety smooth black paint on the outside.

"Why not?" You frown.

Jisung rolls the steering wheel with one hand, keeping his eyes trained to the approaching traffic while turning lanes, he giggles, "Because."

...

You'll have to admit that it's quite... challenging coming to terms with being friends with Jisung. Not because he's practically everywhere but  just since Jisung tends to demand your attention when he realises he's not getting it.

When you try to dodge him on mornings after he cheats at UNO, scurrying away behind swathes of sleep deprived university students, hoping you don't catch his eye, he calls your name in that  loud, clear and intentional way that he does, dragging a heavy arm around your shoulder to squeeze it against the back of your neck before tousling your hair or some other action to effectively ruin your get up. When you zone out in class, musing absently about something that has nothing to do with scale efficiency and accidentally catch his gaze, he winks at you, snapping you right back into attention. 

Your friendship is, to say the least, interesting, for everyone around you.  It's like everyone is always on the edge of their seats, waiting for a chance to poke fun at your apparent chemistry. It means nothing, you're just friends, you remind yourself over and over again, defensively, succumbing to the urge to grow closer and closer to him without paying mind to the annoying voice in your head.

Jisung texts you in the middle of the night, when he's parked out front, to meet him for a midnight drive out that you're sure no one knows about and you tell yourself you're getting away with it - only to be confronted by a smirking Sunwoo in the morning, likening the situation to a teenager  caught red handed sneaking in through the window after a clandestine night of partying.

 But you're not spared the teasing even out in the open. Though while you squirm awkwardly, sink into your seat and refute offendedly, Jisung doesn't have a lick of such knowledge or care, he easily slumps against you, resting his head on your shoulder in class and dozing off, indifferent to the multiple pairs of eyes zeroing in on you.

Even though the bartenders smile their coquettish smiles, offering drinks on the house and people laughed a little more than necessary, twirling their hair around their fingers at anything and everything he said, thence offering proper chances to ditch you completely, he remains close to you at pubs, putting his long fingers on your shoulders and resting his chin on your head, shooting some creepy guy who just wouldn't stop insisting on buying you a drink a look that said he wouldn't mind taking a stronger stance, had the creep not backed off. It was what anyone would have done, you tell yourself, ignoring the underlying pang of a gut feeling that begged to differ.

You envy the obvious charm Jisung holds over everyone, easing his way out of the jokes to do whatever he wants, you wonder what he would do if someone asked him if you were just friends, if he would dismiss them with a wave or provide a positive response, if it would hurt, if it would matter.

"Hey!" 

You jump at the tone. It's breezy, light and followed by a scoff at the end, you recognise it, sighing once the initial surprise oozes out of you to be replaced with familiarity, Renjun is halfway through a complaint about acrylic paint, his mouth half open while his eyes travel over your head, where you're certain the owner of the voice is jogging up to the pair of you. 

"I'll er...catch you later." Renjun purses his lips, while you turn your gaze back to Jisung, he's coming from practice, so his hair is wet, cheeks flushed red, he looks younger like this, completely barefaced. He's wearing a  plain white t-shirt and light wash jeans, even in such an ordinary attire, a few bypassers' attention latch solely onto him.

The sun has long laid on a cotton soft sheet of clouds, letting a blue evening straighten its back against the dark firmament, the crowd at campus is reducing dramatically, you were walking to the metro, deciding to rest by the park bench as he mimics the pose, sliding from the opposite end when you try to keep a distance.

Jisung nudges you with his shoulder. "We’re having a party at our new place. You should come."

It wasn't willingness that took you to loud premises. You aren't exactly a party animal, far from it, maybe an animal that blends into the background, wordlessly observing  masses of sweaty people who will wake up with horrible hangovers the next morning, wishing the night before had never happened. If such an animal exists. 

 But you're genuinely curious about meeting Minho, who seems to have assumed the position of  one of Jisung's best friends while you were absent from his life. You found yourself wondering if he was different from Bang Chan, who in spite of being the former's friend, is someone you could deem yourself more similar to than he is to Jisung; shaking your heads and groaning into your palms, Chan would pinch the bridge of his nose and cautiously glance at you as though to convey You get me, right? while Jisung showered the karaoke bar manager with grandiloquent blandishments into giving extra minutes for a lower price.

Despite this, it is the undeniable but sheer adoration for your fun-loving mutual friend that binds you two together the best, the shared looks of appreciation when Jisung  scolds you for neglecting your health, when he surprisingly remembers a minor detail about you or when he indulges in appreciative chats about crayon drawings with loquacious kids who would come running to display their paintings when you were looking to take an indolent walk in the local park, he would listen attentively, moving to a sitting position, nodding his head like he understood what the kiddish gibberish meant; one thing is certain -  there was certainly more to Jisung than people pegged and if anything, those undiscovered traits only made him more endearing.

"Okay….but make sure we don't end up playing strip poker or something." You shudder at that thought, grimacing exaggeratedly to make your point.

"Why?" He raises his brows, a small simper playing on his lips to give away that he was only teasing you, "I like that game."

But under all that banter, it was well received that Jisung would never put you to the obligation of doing anything you're not comfortable with, so you just play along, narrowing your eyes, "That's because you're a pervert." You say, stifling a laugh whilst his grin dissolves to drop to a blank face.

 Jisung glares at you, nudging you with his knee, effectively putting you on the verge of falling.

"Hey!"  You scoff, repeating the action but Jisung doesn't roll across the grass like you wanted, he doesn't even budge. Instead, he laughs at your frustration, shaking his head and glancing back at you with an entertained look in his eyes. 

(Something inside your chest is growing, like an epiphany, its vines pushing up against your lungs, your heart, its thornes prickling, injuring the flesh, something that tells you this is so much more to you than you'd admit, you press it down, ignore it; just a little longer, you think, just a little longer before you start to see this for what it is. )

"Why are you staring at me?" Jisung questions, you can't help but notice how he tilts his head, moving his curious face closer to yours, inspecting, like just before he makes his final move and mutters Checkmate but he doesn't actually know what he's doing, doesn't realise the weight of his actions.  "Do I have something on my face?" He tilts his cheek to you, as though offering you to examine it and then, immediately his mouth lowers down to form a deep set frown. Is he really that goddamned clueless? Doesn't this affect him at all? 

"No." You clear your throat and lean back, moving your weight on your palms,  "It's getting late. We should get going." 

...

The earliest memory you have is from when you were five, your parents had taken you to the beach and that day, while the sun shone brightly and the sand was warm, like home under your feet, with big curious eyes, you gazed off into the brilliant blue water. 

It was just so beautiful. 

And you so badly, wanted to wade into the welcoming foamy arms of the sea. If only the immensity of the water hadn't scared you as much as it did, you thought. It was like a blue giant that was reaching to steal the sun off of the sky and if you  dared to test the waters, the liquid Goliath could whisk you right off of your tiny feet and drag you into its mouth.

 That, you think, is what you're really afraid of, that deep down inside , you never really stopped holding back. That you'll never muster up the courage to do anything you really want.

In the midst of the chaos of an alcohol induced party, your head feels like it's about to explode.

It stopped raining. And you haven't had the luxury of running into Jisung ever since he went off to get a drink for himself.

The windows are open. Though there's not a flutter of a cool breeze or anything. But there are assortments of crisps, juices and other suspicious looking snacks. The cool curve of the stair railing pressing up against your side. It's unspeakably loud. The frat house, as typical as it sounds, welcomes an obnoxiously large crowd, it isn't surprising, considering people here have a reputation for social adeptness, the house being big enough to capacitate a crowd twice as big as its guests is just a plus point.

 Once the majority of the crowd  had  long thinned out to participate in a curious sounding game of  beer pong, the aftermath is that everything smells like sweat, vomit or both. You're tipsy, tired and alone. It's been an hour since you arrived. Your patience is wearing thin. 

 You down the remainder of the watered down scotch, even though the liquid could secure a horrible case of nausea if you couldn't hold your liquor well tonight.

In the mess of too many heads, too many hands and too many bodies, pushing, pulling, dancing and kissing  with shocking hostility, suddenly, the view starts to shift, from left to right, from upwards and downwards, like you're on a rollercoaster but without the lap bar. It's certainly a symptom of  the  splitting migraine you're sporting. It's too loud downstairs for you to summon anyone and besides, the search for a familiar face seems futile.  

You fish out your phone, wondering if you should send Jisung a text, squinting at the glaring blue screen but decide against it - hoping to God that you don't walk in on anyone shagging while looking for one of the rooms to crash in. 

Now, that...would put them in an awkward position. You mentally high five yourself for the joke. 

Though the amusement is  mostly transient, soon replaced by a rapid jerk of pain. Wincing in an attempt to stand with little control over balance, you try to ease the pain from your briefly twisted foot. 

When you've made it to your desired destination, an inconspicuous looking room at the end of the long hall, you kick off the death traps for heels off of your feet and all but fling yourself on the mattress.

Stacks of comics are carefully  placed on the top most shelf of the bookshelf pushed against the wall, their polished spines sticking out.

 The rest are overflowing with vinyls, set in alphabetical order. You can tell because each row has a tag taped over its head.

Everything is surprisingly clean, the walls are crisp white, there's a single black wall on which a large painting sits. A night light glows dimly, perched up on the bedside table. Whoever's bedroom this is, has the blandest taste in interior design. Or a lack of it since they moved in not long ago as Jisung informed.

 You stare owlishly at the blue ceiling, following the undulating spines of bricks, stacked in. Upwards and downwards. Like a map. Like a  staircase to nowhere. Then you close your eyes. 

Imagining that you're staring up at the sky at dawn, when it's  a swirl of milk tea. Golden. Buttery white. Autumnal Yellow. And pumpkin spice. Brown curls against the background of a milky white firmament and if one bothered to look closer, they'd catch stars peeking from behind slowly darkening clouds, waiting to come out. 

When you were a child, you liked to stick a curious index into filled tea cups, as if to study the khaki liquid , not quite grasping the connoisseurship of hot beverages just yet. The experience would always end with a mouthful of biscuits and your grandmum's tickles engendering your stomach to ache a good kind of ache.

Now, the memory prompts you to raise a finger to the air, as if you were dipping your digits into the whirlpool of maroon. For a moment, you feel as if you're still that little girl stuck in someone else's body, like you hadn't grown up at all. 

But in the hurtful manner that reality often made itself known, yanking you right back from your dreams, the door creaks noisily and then closes.

Out of the corner of your eye, the character looks more like a funny sketch on a chalkboard than he does a person. All blurry and messy. Like someone tried to rub him out. 

The flash of light radiating from his phone, a sliver of neon, silver, you recognise his face, you've seen the same expression right before he's about to choose between  his favourite ice cream flavour; eyebrows knitted in concentration, lips pursed, emerging from the shadows.  He's typing really fast. You blink, adjusting your vision. The unobstructed sight of his face broadens. "Jisung?" 

 He looks at you, positioning his phone towards your face to get a good in the barely there light. 

"Yeah?"

You furrow your brows in confusion, "What are you doing here?" 

"That's a good question."  He snorts.  "Indeed, what business might I have in my room?"

You jump, sitting straighter, then stand up. Just in case he thinks you're a fucking creep. He probably doesn't even want to be friends with you anymore and you understand, you wouldn't want to be friends with you either. "I...I didn't know."

Jisung laughs loudly at your fluster, rolling his eyes,  he plops down, the mattress dipping under his weight, groaning noisily. He pats the spot beside him. "Relax..."

You wear a doubtful look, under the impression that he'd break into a laughing fit with a quip about you caving in so easily.  You narrow your eyes even though you're quite tempted to take his offer. 

He tuts, yanking you by the arm so you sink down beside him.  

"I just saw you coming upstairs, wanted to make sure some asshole wasn't picking on you." He explains, his face contorting to momentary peevishness just at the fleeting thought. 

A crappy pop song is buzzing in the background, you can hear it, you can smell the salted popcorn in the air. His fringe is brushed forward, cheeks smoothed over, moisturised, in this intimidating proximity, you pick up that Jisung always smells really good. Like aftershave and something strong, woody, earthy — but just the right amount, not overpowering.

 "Have you considered trying something more...erm... colourful?" You  scan his room, deciding to change the subject, attempting to dodge the heavy feeling of fluster in your chest; you guess it was showing on your face because the corners of Jisung's mouth begin to quirk upwards. If there’s anyone more awkward than Jisung, it /s definitely you. "This isn't really you."

 With his mouth lopsided, his nose scrunching upwards, his teeth showing, his eyes turning to crescents, Jisung chuckles, as if perceiving your attempt to digress but choosing to let it slide.

 "Then what is?" He raises a brow.

"I don't know." You pause, trying to picture a suitable tint, "Something bright."

Someone starts blasting Ed Sheeran outside, putting the volume all the way. It creates a proper distraction from the conversation to go beyond simple suggestions, it was a sudden reminder of just how badly you wanted the party to be over.

 "You know the more I think about it, the more I come to acknowledge that this is really not my scene."  You confess absentmindedly, backing up on the mattress so your feet dangle, your headache kicks back, beating inside  your ears, knocking against your skull. You lie back on the mattress, curiously blinking up at Jisung's frowning face.

 "Why didn't you tell me that before?" He says, a pinch in his brows pushing the shape up in utter concern. 

"Because I wanted to come." You say honestly, prompting Jisung to heave a deep sigh, relief gradually washing over his rigid features, "I don't know, maybe I'm just not fun enough."

"Yeah. That's probably it." He jokes, grinning from ear to ear. But the shape drops immediately when you jut your lip out instead of mirroring the mirthful action. "You really think so?"

 He blinks at you, not expecting the forwardness, "No." He says, and you note that this is the most serious Jisung has ever sounded around you.

Your face is growing increasingly hot as the weight of his remark started to kick in. It’s so unfair, isn't it? He has no idea how every little thing he said to you meant so much more than it ought. It hurt when you found yourself automatically deducing his trivial actions, all the while knowing it hadn't meant anything to him.  To him, you're just a friend. And you aren't going to let your emotions ruin that, not again. 

 "What's the party for anyway?"

You furrow your eyebrows in genuine curiosity when the silence has become unbearable. Constantly needing to be disrupted. 

 "It's a stupid frat house tradition, they do it every time we move."

“Sounds like a cult activity to me."

You hear him hum, as if feigning contemplation, then open your eyes.

 "Well, that...That's because it is."

It's very typical of Jisung to try to make jokes whilst trying to keep a straight face. In most cases, he doesn't fool anyone. His voice rises  to a cartoonish volume, his mouth pouted out when he speaks as though to hold back a laugh, it’s his eyes, widened, twinkling with a notorious spark in them that ultimately gave it away. In rare instances, however, they deluded strangers into thinking he was being serious when he really wasn't; like that time he told Chan the pool was pre-heated just for the latter, who trustingly dove into the water, to swim up with clattering teeth and ice cold skin to the surface finding that Jisung was grinning deviously. It was an obvious payback for the time the older male hogged Jisung's share of cheesecake as a daring attempt at pranking.

Maybe, you guess, you just knew him too well.

  "Interesting." you raise your brows, playing along, "I'm surprised there isn't any nude dancing involved."

 "Wow...you sound so disappointed.” 

 Jisung laughs, his chest heaving upwards and downwards with every laboured breath.  It's a pleasant sight, knowing you get to have this moment to yourself. For reasons you'd like to ignore, something inside your chest begins to ache, thrumming against your ribs. It isn't until you put your hands over your face in an attempt to get rid of a thin layer of sweat, do you realise that you were smiling.

When he calms down, he keeps looking at you. "I take that you made the submission?" He presses, knowing well that you were intending to put off the matter from the dodgy look in your eyes. "Right?"

 Before, Jisung stubbornly pressed on the matter, it was unheard of for you to allow your writings to be read by anyone other than yourself; it was only fiction, your little secret, you reason, even though you knew the underlying cause of your unwillingness was that you simply cannot take rejection well, it is truly terrifying but an automatic reaction to think that your work is boring and somehow unworthy of praise every time  you are on the verge of sharing it. Your parents never showed any particular interest in it and you assumed that was a universal desire. 

But Jisung is incredibly obdurate when he wants to be.

 Sometimes, you think he's the only person in your life who's truly honest with you, he doesn't shower you in false accolades, not hesitating to rip the band-aid, to point out the less likable bits from the likable ones even if he knew it would make you unhappy. It was interesting prying your wounds open around him, he wouldn't suppress his thoughts and blurt euphemisms like it's going to be okay, he would grimace and gag and then he'd clean them, he would sit patiently with them and try to dress them up for better - and somewhere along the way, while you may have cared about other people's opinions, your concern for what he thinks of you is starting to become far more significant. And it petrifies you.  "No." 

Jisung shoots you a look of annoyance, staring at you like he's awaiting an explanation. You can sense the lengthy talk coming from the back of his throat, something which surpassed the regular limits of you should do this and you shouldn't do this, he relentlessly pushed you towards your career which you claimed you were passionate about but needed his stern berating often when you would stagger back in indolence and you'd be lying if you said it isn't effective - albeit, the scoldings sometimes led to the two of you bickering back and forth, giving each other the silent treatment until one of you would cave - whatever it was, you know you could never turn down Jisung, even if he was bruising your ego to ask you to get your shit together.  "Why not?"

 "It's just a stupid draft, Sungie..." You laugh nervously but he doesn't give into the fit like you imagined, instead, he just dons a solemn look on his face, something that seems to show that he'd been peeved by your response.

  "No it’s not." He shakes his head slowly and there's sort of a firmness in his retort that surprises you, far from how he usually jokes on about,  that tells you there's no room for argument, "It's not stupid at all."

Jisung tears his gaze away, his expression softening once he notes the worried look on your face, it's as though he had suddenly changed his mind about the lecture he was surely planning  to give you,

 "Look I don’t want to fight.” He sighs, “You’re always talking about how much this means to you and if it’s something that you really want, don't put it off. I'm your friend, I can only encourage you — but at the end of the day, it's your job to pull yourself up. Goes without saying that it’ll be a complete waste if you don’t pursue play writing because you - and I don't care if you don't agree with me -  really do have a lot of potential.”

You blink in wonder, ”You think so?"

 "I know so."

 You don't remember the last time someone said something like that to you, if at all. Tearing your gaze away from him, you’re met with the inability to shake the feeling of craving something you don't want to understand, mired in your own musings and for no particular reason but to avoid the desperation of confessing to yourself of the warm tight feeling inside your belly - you give into the temptation of placing your palm over the nightlight, watching the light turn from bright yellow to muted blue, it stings slightly. 

Too cheesy, you would groan out under any other circumstance where you hadn’t been so fazed.

Instead, you just gulp, eyes wide at his forward comment, his praise is the equivalent of being splashed with ice cold water when one is half asleep, now you're all wide eyed and incognisant of what's real and what isn't, it prompts a jolting sensation to traverse all throughout your body, "Thanks." 

This scene was no exception, Jisung tips his head back against his palms when he's thinking about something, while keeping his calm gaze posed on you, he smiles, rolling his eyes. “You’re too hard on yourself, loosen up just a little. I'm not always gonna be around.”

You muse that your mum said the exact same thing when you moved away for university but chose not to mention it, it's not true though, you want to say. Because Jisung is always there for you.

 See, the universe exists on this dreadful thread of balance  and you've been hanging on by your last finger for as long as you remember, taking every step on the basis of a fear of tumbling off to be greeted by the gasps and complaints of an imaginary audience, for the longest time, picturing  your play to be dissected like a lab rat, for a delirious critic to point their scalpel and announce, the misshapen heart is here, that's the pudgy head.

But nowadays and you'll never tell him this, when Jisung talks about you  like that, you almost believe it, believe in yourself and don't think he understands what it means to you, how grand that is  -  to imagine seeing your play come to life, something severely intimidating about watching it, spotlight gingerly kissing up the actors' newborn faces as the audience spews quiet comments, critics' expressions morphing with  nuanced understanding, the anticipation is tangible, the walls closing in by the second, tension squeezing the air out of their lungs -  until the curtains part and a story draws them into another world. Then everything falls into a formidable silence.The inexplicable feeling of being one wrapping its limbs around everyone and cradling them to its chest like a loving mother, awestruck strangers listening in on the heart wrenching dialogues, the belter of a riveting tragedy prompting their hearts to lurch forward and sit on their tongues, then they'll look around, spot bits of you in your characters and think I'm not alone. I never was.   (The people you've both never known but known your entire life.)

It's better to slip, to put everything on the line for the sake of making way to what you want on a feeling rooted deep inside your gut than to cower behind the fear of disapproval and have nothing at all. Being brave enough to tell your story is not the absence of that fear which keeps you, but it is telling the tale despite, toppling that fear.

There's something relieving about that theory.

 "I want to lie down..." You mewl, in spite of already lying down. It's a sign of how the constant toiling through exams was finally taking a toll on you, the sleepiness coupled with hours long lethargy from the party seemed to be weighing your body down, making your eyelids heavier by the second. He moves your hand, leaning into the light. A wash of colour is spreading  across his face for a brief moment, exposing the skin to scrutiny, all veins, curves and crinkles around his eyes. Jisung smiles at you. Your eyes dart all over his face, resting on the curve of his mouth briefly, then his eyes, you catch the yellow flickering in them , the brown turning to dark copper. 

Your heart drops to your stomach when he blinks away slowly, the disappointment assuaged by something foreign, dumb and utterly clichéd stirs in the pit of your stomach as his thumb briefly swipes across your knuckles,  "You don't say, sleepy girl!" Jisung scoffs, bringing his arm under his head.  

Unconsciously, entertaining the thought of staying alone in his room, you find yourself feeling safer because of his presence instead, divorced from prying eyes, "Thanks for staying." You say, wanting to talk to him more and more,  contemplating fashions  to contribute to the conversation again and again just to cut the silence.

"Well, you had a lot to drink." 

He reminds, as if the reason for his staying is that obvious;  worry laced in his voice and you understood why -   even though you aren't completely doused in a state of inebriation, you kept swaying all the way upstairs.

"But you missed out on.." you drag the consonant unintentionally, "all the fun, though."

"Do I look like I care?" Jisung snorts, staring up at the ceiling, leaning back on his hands and dropping down against the bed, he laces his fingers together over his chest, digging into his pocket and fishing out his phone. It isn’t a question.

His wallpaper is of a kid gazing up from the water, he peers up at the camera, grinning ear to ear. This is definitely Jisung. Because even with his front teeth missing, his smile is all too familiar. His cheeks were chubbier back then, face rounder, softer around the edges. Subconsciously, you rose a finger to poke at his cheek, as if to examine it. Jisung shoots you a glare.

"You were cute."

You coo, leaning onto his shoulder, the closeness should not intimidate you, given the amount of time you spend like this. But it does anyway.

"What do you mean were?” Jisung scoffs, “Nu-uh, still am. I'm the resident cutie pie, if you will."  He sings, narrowing his eyes briefly, thereon chuckling at the look of sheer disgust on your face. 

You wrinkle your nose, "I can't believe you just said that..." 

The rest of the night is spent in a comfortable quietude, except for the times when either of you perk up to initiate conversation and Jisung gives you aspirin for the throbbing migraine. 

Your shoulders are touching. Jisung breathes. Slowly. Then fast. Then slow. And then he tucks an earphone into your ear, it was an unspoken ritual you two practised when you were alone, oft in a different venue, sitting languidly about campus, while you read and he winked through the glaring sun to get a distant view of the landscape.

Jisung yawns, the grapple on his speech loosening and loosening.

You remain quiet, closing your eyes again. Words feel liquid in your mouth, letters wobbling on your tongue until you feel like you've lost complete control over what you're thinking of saying.

You can see the scene unfolding inside your head, can feel the earth under your skin, can hear birds chirping, can feel the dusty orange, morning glow kissing your faces. As if you're the only two people there. "Coldplay, right?" 

"Uh-huh..." Jisung replies, he sounds unsurprised by your aligned tastes. You look at him and find that he's mirroring you. His long lashes casting shadows on the apples of his cheeks, eyes clamped shut. 

"It's beautiful..." You murmur, dropping your head back against the mattress, you think Jisung hums in response but you can't be too sure. It's like you're slowly, slowly and slowly drifting far, far away. Letting slumber wrap its welcoming arms around you. 

For a second, you feel the weight on your shoulders lighten, you imagine that you're soaring, soaring, soaring, like you could look down and see the rivers and seas and lakes pulsing against the  Earth's body, as though they were a bundle of nerves belonging to a round, green vessel of a body, and somehow - then immediately, you're being pulled to your feet, at great speed, you're falling, falling, falling - so fast that you feel like there's a fire budding inside your lungs, budding under your fingertips, inside your heart. 

Then it begins.  This must be a dream, this must be a dream, this must be a dream. The soft murmur of scripted words. Parted curtains, an open window allowing you to stare in wonder, dusk stretching across the entirety of the landscape, blue, then pink. You think of the big sapphire sea, the warm sand and someone waiting for you before it.  You think, this is it. This is it. This is it. And run, run, run. Sprinting to the broadening view. You recognise the back of his head, the curve of his neck, tufts of raven hair fluttering about, his white cuffed shirt, his footsteps like a trail of breadcrumbs, feet dipped in frothy water, You call his name, surprised  but think I knew it, I knew it, I knew it all along. He looks back and smiles at you, offering you his hand. (You're not over him. You don't think you ever were. And this is what you want, you want it so bad, after all this time, are you going to hold back? Are you going to hold back? Are you going to hold back?)

Just for a moment, in the split of a second, just now,  just once, you aren't afraid. 

You jolt awake, the earphone straining against the sudden movement, "Hey." You whisper, looking up at him. His Adam's apple drops with a slow gulp, the rosy colour of his parted lips. The slope of his nose. You don't know when you  nuzzled your face into his chest, his long arm is draped around your waist, pulling you flush against his body.  Your heart is beating noisily in your ears, on your tongue. 

To your surprise, Jisung hums in response, eyes still clamped shut. You're so close, just so close, he brushes his slender fingers against the back of your neck, the touch feather light, as though reminding you that he had heard you. Your breath hitches inaudibly.

"Let's..." You say, with your tongue starting to limp inside your mouth, "go to the beach sometime."

...

A shower is running, loud, water gushing down and thumping against the tiles, the sound echoing and growing thinner by the second. 

You sit up on the empty bed, the recollection of last night lodged deep inside your head like a butcher knife. 

The realisation that you aren't at home isn't startling as you momentarily grow distracted in examining the room, the photos, the turntable, the white paint, the portraits, a light adjusted above, bits and pieces of a person scattered around.

Jisung's t-shirt is discarded carelessly on his reading table, your eyes widen when you acknowledge the occupant in the shower to be him, leaping up with a haste, everything comes back to you  with a force equivalent of pulling the butcher knife out and slamming it right back into your skull.

"It's you!" You gasp, partially  because the cheerful exclamation sends pangs of pain to your head, having made all the way to the kitchen to grab a glass of water, only to find Minho whipping up pancake batter in a bowl. As opposed to his old Instagram photos, with the new complementing pink hair, his feline like features are even more staggering, eyes narrowed to amused slits, behind which beady black orbs stare you down in absolute curiosity.

"Right, we met last night." He reminds you, uttering your name quickly, finding that you already recognise him. He holds the spatula up, paused in surprise as if he really wasn't expecting to see you right now, the position only eases when you wave your hands dismissively and say it's not what you think.

  He smiles, there's a strange disappointed quality to the demand."Sit down, let's have breakfast."

It's awkward, Minho spares you a few interrogating stares while you silently dig at your meal, the sound of cutlery and ceramic sounding through the open kitchen. You wish Jisung would come down already if the floor beneath your feet isn't going to open up and swallow you whole to save you from this discomfiture.

"They're really good." You nod, shoveling more of the unevenly cut portions of the pancake into your mouth.

"Do you still have feelings for him?" 

You choke, coughing on the gigantic bite, patting your chest as you slowly as you begin to regain your composure. Minho's eyebrows are weaved upwards, hinting that he expected an answer despite offering you water. God, he cut right to the chase, you aren't used to people as blunt as that. When you don't say anything, he blinks at you, tilting his head to examine the evasive expression on your face.

"He talks about you a lot..." He notifies, as though it was an explanation for something.  Minho's arms are crossed over his chest, proudly before announcing, "I think I practically know everything about you."

Funny, you could say the exact same thing about him. Jisung likes to babble on about people he cares about, which albeit is a handful, you are just as special as any of them. And that reminder as a consequence of his constant prodding makes you a little angry. 

"Look, he doesn't like me if that's what you're trying to say." You blurt out, you don't want to get your hopes up.  It's weird saying something so grave to someone you only recently  came to know. Having already accepted your one sided feelings even though you struggle to try to suppress them and the hopeful part of you reasons that Jisung probably didn’t initiate a kiss because you weren’t exactly sober — but the real reason, and you know this, is that his withdrawal last night was just cherry on top of the  big fat I-don't-feel-the-same-way cake. 

You made the mistake of ruining your friendship because of a stupid confession in the past and you aren't going to make it again, not when you're closer than ever now.

"That's not what I asked."  Minho comments. He is pretty great at appearing intimidating. Or rather, he sees right through you. You can't tell. But he's practically cornered you with his witty questions whilst his perceptive eyes keep an intent watch on you.  Minho had a curious  quality to him when he looked at things, he seemed to notice everything.

You laugh nervously, rubbing your nape when his gaze is practically unblinking in anticipating a reaction. 

"How was your Gimpo trip?" You digress.

 Minho's ears perk up, his eyes blown to big, happy circles, he nods his head excitedly, properly distracted from pressing the previous topic further. 

The conversation fizzles away in a haze, Minho rambles on in a cheerful tone, his eyes glossed over in enthusiasm. He speaks  of his three cats and asks you to commit their names to memory with a dead serious face, moving onto ramble on about his childhood, an entanglement of being the only child who dreamed laboriously of pursuing a career in ballet and succeeded. You listen attentively, not breaking your focus even when he gets up to do the dishes. 

By the time Jisung lazily drapes a towel around his neck, all the while hopping down the stairs, you feel like you've overstayed, digging your feet into the heels from last night while Minho holds the door open for you. 

"Need a ride?" Jisung asks, standing on his toe to look at you from behind Minho. 

 You shake your head, suggesting that you were to take the subway instead, keeping your eyes fixated on your sore feet as a reminder that you're opting for the alternative not by choice but because you don't have the energy to render Sunwoo an explanation of where you'd spent the night at with his constant teasing, Tightening the strap around your leg, while balancing yourself with the free arm, Jisung's long fingers quickly grab onto the underside of your arm, letting you balance your weight whilst posing the question, "You’re coming tomorrow for the group study, right?" You ask.

 It was an uncharacteristic gesture, outright surprising, because of his renowned proficiency in that class, when Jisung suggested that he didn’t understand the volume of topics you were going over.

Jisung glances cautiously at his best friend, who has a stupid smirk on his face for some reason, like he knows something you don't, “Yeah, yeah...” He says, reaching out to pinch your cheek despite your complaint. 

“Are you an alligator?” he calls out, prompting you to shoot a confused look over your shoulder.  "What?"

It's just one of those things Jisung says instinctively, his eccentric humour getting the best of him in silences and you, well, you walked right into this one. 

 "You know...cause I'll see you later!" 

In your peripheral vision, you spot Minho pinching the bridge of his nose at the quip, muttering a quick Jesus Christ.

...

During the day, the portrait is much more confusing. 

It's carefully placed on the paper covered floor, the room smells like fresh paint and sweat. Jisung suggested that you go paint shopping in the  pursuit of looking for a suitable colour to liven up his walls and the end of the semester meant you had enough time to put the purchased product to use. 

There is a blob of red on Jisung's jaw and the colour gets smudged all the way to his cheekbone when he makes an unsuccessful attempt to itch the skin with the back of his palm. You don't tell him this. 

"I bought it from the local display." He breathes out exasperatedly, the paint roller is placed on the paper, "The artist said it was about an unlikely romance or something like that. Looked pretty dope to me too and—"

 "I don't get it." You cock your head to the side and investigate the painting at your feet with an obstinate want to understand how it's supposed to depict love. Or anything that bears semblance to it, you never did have a good eye for art,  "It just looks like they slapped on paint."

 "Look here, dummy!" He slaps your pointer finger jokingly, grumbling under his breath.  Taking your palm and slowly splaying out the digits. Traces the rough pads against its silky texture, a map to somewhere, a blend of blue and pink, silhouettes reaching out for each other when the world intends to tear them apart. 

You sigh, contentedly and think this must be it; because never was love  meant to be understood. 

It was meant to be felt. 

...

"Why do you have that dumb look on your face?"

 Sunwoo speaks, chewing through his snack, his fringe is glued to his forehead in a thick layer of sweat. You aren't surprised. The humidity is skyrocketing. A cut in your salaries have made you compromise the use of your obsolete air conditioner. It's a terribly humid Sunday morning and you're getting ready for a trip to Minho's beach house.

It wasn't hard to convince you. Such was possible because Minho's offer was reiterated through a number of ways and people over the span of last week. Even from Sunwoo. 

He and the rest of the boys have started  to get along pretty well, so well that you often end up acting as an amused spectator, simply watching the boys cosying up to one another while you're effectively camouflaging in the background of utter silence. Your friends  teamed up to produce quips here and there, stopping to chuckle into their napkins, cheeks rubicund like ripe apples whenever you went out for dinner. It was becoming a regular occurrence, at this point. Not that you minded; you genuinely enjoy the time you spend together.

As a final move, Jisung reminded you of your slurred request of wanting to go to the beach, beating the purpose of you claiming you wanted to stay home doing nothing when really you were just looking to avoid encouraging how you felt for him. You constantly found yourself suppressing the desire to want more and the last few weeks had been the toughest because you had trouble ignoring how you felt although you were careful not to show it. Jisung was spending more time with you than usual since you were on summer break and were relieved of your studies for a short while. You couldn't forget that night at his place, the memory made your gut wrench in a desire you couldn't fulfill. 

But  while it was hard being around him, you just knew you couldn't help it.

The trip was, nonetheless, a reminder of how Jisung always gets what he wants, even if it is as easy as snagging his favourite items off of the super store shelf or something which demands  more patience to be possessed, something that needs to be drawn out with unwavering persistence.  

Come to think of it, you never really understood what it means to live like that. 

"What dumb look?" You ask, averting your gaze from your phone, twiddling your thumbs for a response to Jisung's text notifying that they were taking the lead on the journey by setting off earlier than you to set up the place.

 It won't take them as long as it will for you because it's a familiar premise for them. Your arm is starting to hurt from holding up your suitcase.

Sunwoo mimics a grin, stretching the corners of his lips awkwardly and flattening his lips like that of a frog, a string of dried milk sits on his chin to finish off the impression. He points to his face, "This one."

 "I don't know what you're talking about." You roll your eyes, "Hurry up. Jisung messaged me the location." 

Sunwoo nods, then pauses, then his eyes widen, a teasing grin making  its way on his face, insinuating that he finally understood why you packed chocolate cake last minute in spite of you not having a particular preference for the item. "Does he know you have a big puppy crush on him?"

Sunwoo makes up for your social ineptness, amongst other things, and there are times when you don't understand what you'd do without him, times when you're relieved he's your friend even though you're essentially opposites - now is, certainly, not one of those times, now you wish he wasn't so close to you  to have access to this information without telling. 

"Are you hearing yourself? I don't have a crush on him." You lie, glaring at him, when your flatmate ducks his head to display that he didn't quite agree, you groan, 

"I don't!"

…

"Do you take me for an idiot?"

Sunwoo pulls his sunglasses down to pretend to study you, his big brown eyes scrutinising you from head to toe.  The  strong stink of diesel is still emanating  in the air in spite of the image of the gas station being wiped out long ago in your peripheral vision. You kind of like it, it contributes to boosting the anticipation of what was to happen when you reach your destination .

"Oh absolutely..." Sunwoo says, driving in the direction of the beach house the GPS pilots him to, Lauv hums faintly from the dusty speakers, the familiar lyrics filling the air  whilst you unconsciously bobbed your head. The vague distraction allowed Sunwoo to buy time to gather his thoughts, 

 "You need to tell him how you feel before someone else does. You need to tell him how you feel, period."

“I'm not doing that again.” you warn him, he speeds down the highway, your beach hat threatening to fly about under the weight of your hands at the sudden gush of wind. "Need I remind you how it went last time?" 

"Last time was different." 

"How?" 

"You barely even spoke to each other!" He exclaims frustratedly, pointing out the obvious, "Now you're good friends and he seems to feel the same way considering he always puts up with you...like...voluntarily." Sunwoo mocks, looking at the corner of his eye to note that you're rolling your eyes in annoyance, "Maybe Jisung's out of his mind."

"I'm not that bad!" You defend, quieting down once again when the memory of your admission flashes before your eyes in vivid details - the years of distance and silence that stretched between you because of it was hard - if that were to repeat itself now, when you're more used to him that you were before, you don't think you could bear it.  Or maybe you could but you don't want to.

It's enough to just have Jisung around and not be yours than to lose him by admitting.

"I'm not putting us in that position again just because of how I feel. It's kinda selfish, don't you think?" Your statement has a touch of finality to it that shuts Sunwoo right up, he wordlessly pulls up in front of the huge beach house, another jeep and the Comet Convertible is parked; before which far off near the shore, you couldn't help but notice the two unfamiliar figures by the boys, one of them is wearing a bikini, standing incredibly close to Minho, who's setting up their small grill, the other (and it makes your stomach turn) is talking animatedly to Jisung, he nods and smiles in that way that makes you think you'll never quite stop loving him. Chan is holding up his phone to take a picture. 

 Sunwoo honks loudly,  pulling you out of your trance. You can hear the I told you so sitting on the tip of his tongue when he shoots you a look of pity. You don't like it. The way that makes you feel like a toddler who can't keep herself from sticking her fingers into electric sockets in spite of being precisely instructed not to. Now, you think, the ‘I told you’ so would've been much more agreeable to your pathetic but injured emotions.

Jisung snaps his head around fast, raising his lithe digits to the air, waving at you languidly.  The girl spectates the exchange in an engrossed fashion, slowly routing her inquiring  gaze to yours in thought. Not all that seemed black and white is black and white between you.

"Are you coming?" Jisung screams over the noise and distance, away from the spot you're completely frozen in.  

(A pang in your chest tightens. Tightens. Tightens.  And you don't want it to mean something. But it does. It does and it always will.)

...

Minho once learned to set up tepee fires in scout camp, with twigs, a small heap of leaves, wood shavings and loosely screwed newspaper in the centre. Now, he only prides his younger self for setting up the fire once in their backyard and decides roasting marshmallows on the grill demands less of the expertise that he's lost overtime.

"I've actually heard a lot about you before we met." Sunwoo garbles out, clearing his throat.

You've been ignoring Jisung ever since you arrived. Now the group is sat down on the sand, in a misshapen circle, the two girls, now you know their names and the root of their invitation - Junhee and Shoshanna are merely bypassers the boys met when they arrived this morning. They're on a weekend trip like you and their visiting resident is a few houses away from yours. You wanted to act on your peevishness  and groan out a loud What are they still doing here?  everytime Shoshanna took the seat beside Jisung or asked him to set her marshmallows but that would, amongst other things, make you look like a crazy jealous idiot who has no right to step into a situation of that sort, even though Jisung seemed hesitant, cautiously looking at you every now and then. 

Jisung's brows rise and fall, gaze darting between you and your flatmate, surprised, "Is that right?"

Sunwoo laughs, "Yeah."  He chews carefully, trying not to choke, as if the source of his knowledge doesn't need to be pointed out. 

"Only good things I hope."

Skeptical, Jisung glances at you with a cocked brow, in case you oppose but you avoid his gaze, glaring down at charred marshmallow on the tip of the stick and thinking of ways to strangle Sunwoo, who chuckles at the former's apparent doubt, furrowing his eyebrows in bemusement, "Only good things."

"You're on the varsity swim team, right?" 

 With a mouthful of food, Sunwoo poses the question, the grin only widens when Jisung replies with an equally enthusiastic nod. 

"Did you know that this one can't swim?" He points his marshmallow stick at you, keeping his eyes trained on Jisung's surprised face. "I tried to  provide assistance." Sunwoo insists, "But when someone is really bad around water, like screaming at the top of their lungs-I'm going to drown in a kid's pool- bad, it's quite a challenging task."

Minho produces an animalistic laugh at this, patting his thigh like he's rendered a vivid image of your embarrassing experience while Chan shoots you a concerned look, as if sensing an underlying tension in the air that the others can't. You don’t know which one you dislike more.

"I can hear you, you know!"  You scowl, crossing your arms over your chest. Suddenly having lost your appetite. 

Sunwoo widens his eyes, with a hand atop his chest, mocking you,  "Really?"

You open your mouth to continue bickering with him because it was the only way you could hold yourself back from jumping across the sand and grabbing him by his collar in case that should stop him from further embarrassing you, but Jisung  interjects, blinking inquisitively at you.

 Jisung pouts. "It isn't that bad, you'll see, we can go for a swim anytime. That's what's the pool for anyway."

"Sungie,  I could use a swim now. Can we go, please?"  Shoshanna piped up jutting her lip in a way that made her more attractive, she hooked her arm with Jisung, pulling him to her side and he simply blinked at her, surprised by the gesture. Only you called him that  —  when did she pick that up? Why doesn't Jisung seem to mind at all? Are you seriously seeing what you are definitely seeing?

 Without meaning to, you imagine them floating about in the water, while she curled her arms around his neck to keep balance and him leaning down to grin invitingly.  And it feels like you're losing something.

You feel yourself jumping up to your feet. The sudden movement gains the attention of all your friends except Sunwoo, who keens on sparing you the smug grin which insinuates that he sparked the entire conversation intentionally.  You hope the universe would miraculously  render you telepathic powers so he'd start to choke on the stupid marshmallow. 

"Uh...I mean...I gotta." You gulp, "I'm going to go grab a beer."

"Wait."

Jisung frees his arm to get to his feet, powdery sand dusted off of his sweats.

"I'll come with you."

You walk in silence, wrapping your arms around yourself. In your peripheral, you catch the sight of his pockets swelled around the area he stuck his fingers in, you don't think Jisung's ever been that quiet. It makes you feel guilty. You're acting out because you simply can't get a grip and it seems to have taken a toll on him. You want to punch yourself in the face.

 It's not like you desire to stand in the way of his merry-making, it had to happen eventually, right? Jisung is free to get involved with whoever he pleases. He doesn't know how you feel and even if he did, you don't think he would reciprocate. 

And despite everything, your heart still aches for him. 

"Why are you avoiding me?" Jisung  tells you. There's a sadness to his voice that supplies that you can't escape this conversation because you simply cannot stand it when something prevents him from being his happy-go-lucky self. But you can delay it. 

You pull the fridge open slowly, scanning the items, alcohol, milk and a few other things that are necessary to spend the weekend. They definitely were newly bought. 

 Jisung pushes the fridge door wider, sighing, he pulls a can and hands it to you. "If this is about the girls, I'm not-"

"You don't have to explain it to me, Sungi—I mean, Jisung." You stare down at the perspiration collecting between your fingers and  the can, then set it down immediately in fear of it slipping out of your hands. Jisung stiffens at the transition, a faint look of pain flashing in his eyes. What did he do that is so wrong? 

You feel horrible for making him feel bad, aren't you supposed to be an adult? Aren't you supposed to have a strong grapple on your emotions? This isn't good for the two of you, you don't want to hurt him because of how you feel, Jisung needs you to be his friend and you can't accept, even after so long, that that's all you are to him. 

 "I don't think we should be friends anymore."

"What?" He purses his lips, furrowing his eyebrows. "Why?" He provides, raking a frustrated hand through his hair when your mouth parted instead of giving him an answer. "Did I do something? You could have just talked to me about it but..." He muttered shakily, repeating, "Why...this?"

Jisung glares at you, he looks so clueless, angry, blatantly hurt and  it's such a selfish thing to ask of him, the least you can do is be honest with him, though you couldn't fight the annoyance from seeping into your tone because he apparently had not a clue. 

"God, don't you see it?!" You placed a warm hand against your forehead, "I'm...in love with you...I love you, okay?"

You start to panic when the tense expression melts into his  features, replaced by something you couldn't put a finger on, "Don't get me wrong, I don't expect you to reciprocate or anything. It's stupid, I thought I was over you but I'm…I'm not. And I can't...I can't watch you get on with someone who isn't me, especially when…" you trail, preparing to admit the truth to yourself once and for all, "...you don't already love me back. I can't...It'll hurt too much…" 

"So...I think...it's better for the two of us to not continue this friendship anymore." You gulp, your palms shaking by your sides, those words have been taking refuge inside you for too long and saying them makes you feel empty, like you've lost something that keeps you grounded and you'd be aimlessly floating about for the rest of your life. 

"I know I'm asking for too much…"

Jisung interrupts you with a wry laugh, the sound startling you. He never spoke to you that way, not even when you argued before.

"Yeah, you're right, you are."

"Well, I'm sorry."  You breath out. 

He leans closer so your hip presses against the cool counter. He drags his fingers from the exposed skin of your collarbone to your neck, tilting your chin up with his thumb while the remaining digits splay against  your throat, "Sorry doesn't cut it." 

 The kiss sends a chill down your spine, prompting you to straighten up from your slumped position. Your knees feel like jelly, like they could collapse any minute. Jisung deepens the kiss, grazing his teeth along your bottom lip, he props you up on the counter and you sense yourself wrapping your legs around his waist, tugging on to his hair to draw out a groan from him; touching him feels so surreal, even though it's a reminder of just how real everything that's happening is. 

"I…" he breathes heavily, "I love you. I'm in love with you. I didn't know what to do with how I felt and seeing you again...it just made me realise that I couldn't ignore it anymore. There were times when I couldn't help myself, I felt like I needed to see you when I couldn't, so I did, even if it meant I had to lie. I love taking care of you. I love our dumb inside jokes and I love the way we can't go long without talking. Hell, I love everything we do together." He chuckles, "But I didn't say anything because you told me you were over it. I... just assumed you were only interested in being friends with me." You don't think you've properly registered the sentences, maybe it's the suddenness of it all, maybe it's because you've never actually pictured this. You told yourself, this is how it's supposed to be, that Jisung was never supposed to feel the same. Just with that alone, you had axed your own foot, screwed yourself over more than anyone else did.

Jisung's face breaks into a sudden grin, he pecks your pouted mouth. "But I'm glad I was wrong." 

"Did you just kiss me?" You joke, touching his face, tracing your fingers against his cheeks, the skin glossy and pinkish under the touch, his pupils are blown to large black circles, the brown in them barely visible. 

"I don't know, did I?" Jisung deadpans, narrowing his eyes jovially. 

 He eases into the embrace when you slump against him in a tight hug. The chuckle comes out all muffled against the fabric of his t-shirt.

"Hmmm, can't be too sure."

You wrap your arms around his neck, it's like you just can't stop smiling. When you think about it, that's what being around Jisung was like, really. Your digits traverse from the side of his jaw to cup his cheeks, eyes peering into his. You watch as he blinks incredulously, there's something impatient about the way you look at him. Then you tilt your head and kiss him, gathering a faint taste of chapstick whilst your tongue prodded at his bottom lip. 

A low moan thrums against his chest, his mind failing to produce a single coherent thought. Because, God, he knows exactly what you're doing. 

This time the gesture is needy, desperate, as though to convey a strong desire to be completely consumed by him,  to be ruined by him. You raise your hips to brush against his lower abdomen, eliciting a low groan from his throat. 

"Baby not here." He breathes out, gauging your intention whilst resting his forehead atop yours. His palm traces the skin of your thighs, travelling up your sides, a free hand which rests at your neck coming to rest at your jaw. His delicate thumb journeys upwards, tugging your bottom lip out and then slowly retracting the digit. Somehow, the gesture makes his eyes darken even more, if that's possible. "Let's go upstairs."

You're so breathless and shocked and have your head stuck way  so far up  up in the clouds that the statement sounds imperceivable. "What?" You blink dumbly, with your hands on his shoulders.

A husky laugh made reverberates inside his chest, "We can’t...here."

As if on cue, you whimper needily at the weight of the implication. The thought of what is to unfold upstairs making your throat close up. You understood the purpose of his statement, the rest of the boys would soon gather into the beach house because it was getting dark soon, the sky was gargling its throat in the distance too, it would rain and neither of you were keen on PDA.

Jisung's teeth graze along your throat, his fingers around it to keep your head pressed to the door while your thighs are snuggly bracketed around his lithe waist. His need is apparent when he grinds up into your body. You're all but putty under his touch.

It's dark. But you can still make out how absent the room's paraphernalia is, just a bed which is stripped to the bare essentials of a white blanket and scratchy sheet, giving away the fact that visits aren't made too often. You don't care about all that though, Jisung pushes you back against the mattress, pulling his shirt over his head before resuming his position on top of you. 

You can't understand how you kept away from him for so long. 

...

Between your short, bitten and misshapen fingernails, the word Premiere reads on the tickets  in bold red slanted letters. 

You can't believe what was once a figment of your imagination, a rubbish script you wrote whimsically on too much caffeine and too little sleep was going to unfold right before your eyes.

It's crowded inside the subway, you stare at the heads, faces, shirts, jackets, arms and legs and your heart is beating too loud, like you ran a marathon or drove a sports car way past its speed limit, rammed it into a tree and flipped it over.

 All the world's a stage and all men and women merely players.

(You should be scared, you should be scared, you should be scared.)

 Delicate, lithe fingers quickly travel down your palm to squeeze the tense digits at the end, his free hand is rubbing circles on the back of your neck; you stare into those brown eyes and without really thinking, press a quick kiss to his pouting lips, it's difficult, he keeps grinning against your mouth but you pay little attention to those things now. 

"That was a good move, champ." Jisung winks briefly, tracing his thumb along your cheek as he nuzzles his nose against yours, "You always kiss people on the subway?"

You grin, with a slow shake of your head, "Just the hot ones."

(This is a stage. And the passengers are waiting. The Tale Of Two Cities. The couple. The mother. Like that nightmare you used to have. 

But, you think, it doesn't matter now. It doesn't matter anymore. 

Because you've got your silver lining.)

[demivampirew]

So We Meet Again Chapter 8 (final chapter)

Henry x Reader x Chris

Summary: A recent college graduate recounters someone from her past with who things did not exactly ended up in great terms. She holds a grudge on him for that and still has unanswered questions about what happened. And someone new walks into her life.

You can find the rest of the story in the Masterlist

Triggers: Smuff (smut + fluff); drinking; breakup; homesick.

Tag list: @lunedelorient​ @angelofthorr  @henrythickcavill​ @mary-ann84​ @desperate-and-broken​ @peakygroupie @summersong69​ @ivvitm1109​  @peakygroupie @madbaddic7ed​ @iloveyouyen​ @the-soot-sprite @hell1129-blog​

A/N: Sorry for taking so long to update the final chapter. I hope you enjoy it!

When you started college, writing a book became your biggest dream and after much hard work, that ambition turned a reality. As much as you desired to be a success, you never expected, not even in your wildest dreams, that it would reach that level of recognition among the linguistics field. Now, after a long journey, here you are, getting ready to walk to the stage of the conference room of Havard College to talk about your book and then to have a discussion about it with none other than Steven Pinker, a well-known name in the community. Being able to speak about your work and the subject you're passionate about is breath-taking.  People listened to you and seemed engaged in your lecture. Dr Pinker was a delight; he had an interesting personality while being a total professional he still was funny and made the exchange of views much more fascinating. After the conversation ended, the audience started clapping. Your boyfriend started to cheer very loudly and clapping very excited. As you chuckled for Chris' childish reaction, you noticed that there was another person there, looking you with a huge grin as he clapped. It was Henry. What was he doing there? Have you told him about the event? You didn't think so, so how did he find out? As you were caught on your thoughts, a lady approach to you to show you the way of the stage for the event came to its eventual end. Many linguistic professors were waiting to have a moment to talk about your work, but you were interrupted by the same woman who told you that someone needed a word with you.

- Henry? - asked Chris surprised and confused to see the fellow actor on the audience of the event honouring his girlfriend. - Oh, hi!- he replied as if he had not seen him.- How are you? - Great! How about you? - I'm alright.- he smiled in a friendly manner. - I must say that I'm surprised to see you here.- your boyfriend admitted. - Mark mentioned it a few days ago and I had to go to New York and since I was close I decided to pop up to see the event. - the British man explained- I've known her for a long time so I know how important this book was to her and how special this moment must be, so I thought I'd be cool to be here. -I'm sure she'll appreciate it. Unfortunately, now she's busy but if you want we can find something to drink and have a little chat. - I'd love to but I can't, I'm running late. I've to go back to New York and then catch a flight to London. Would you please let her know that I'm happy for her and her success?- Henners friendly required. - Absolutely! I'll let her know you were here. Sad that you can't stay, we could have gone to eat afterwards. - Maybe next time.- he replied and smiled as they shook hands.

Chris offered to take you out for dinner but you asked him to go directly to the hotel and order something to the room. Taking off your high heels and your pencil skirt dress was relieving. After changing, you sat with your man on the couch and started to make out. - You know, Henry was there. He had to leave early because he was in a hurry but he asked me to tell you that he's happy for you and your success- Chris said. By his tone, you could tell that he didn't suspect anything about your past with the other man. - Yes, I saw him. I was surprised to see him, I wasn't expecting him to be there.- you admitted. - He told me Mark told him a few days ago and since he was in NYC he decided to come. - That's was really nice of him.- you replied, feeling strange: on one side, you still had some feelings for Henry, but on the other side, you were falling in love with Chris and happy with him. -Yep. So tell me, why did you disappear for so long after the talking. You didn't mention anything on the ride to the hotel and I'm curious about what was the important talk you were having.- he questioned. - I was offered a position as a professor in the linguistics department at the University.- you informed him. - That's fantastic! - he replied astonished.- What did you say? - I told them I was going to think about it.- you confessed. - Well, let's think about it, shall we? - he offered. - The money and the job would not be much different than the one I have in London: both pay well, both are in prestigious universities.- you compared - But, there's a perk of teaching at Harvard. - What? - Chris wanted to know. - I'd live in the US and I'd be much closer to you.- you told him and he smiled from ear to ear - Well, that and the fact that I'd have working experience in two prestigious colleges and that would benefit my curriculum.- you added. - It'd be amazing if you would live closer to me, but at the end of the day, you should do what you hearts tell you to do.- he advised as he took your hand and kissed it.

2 years later

- Hi, Mark. Could I have a Guinness? - Henry requested to the bartender. As he waited for his drink, he looked around and saw you sitting on one of the tables. His heart started to beat uncontrollably as he took in your beauty. Gosh, he'd missed you terribly. - Here's your drink.- Mark said handled him a beer and a soda. He looked at your friend confused - She's currently working on a second book, so she doesn't drink alcohol. - Thank you.- he replied smirking and paid for the drinks and then walked towards you.

- Hi, stranger.- he greeted you. - Henry! How are you? - you replied surprised as you stood up to hug him.

It's been a while since the last time you saw each other. You thanked him for going to your even and let him know that you were moving to the US to teach at Harvard University. At the same time, you completely crushed his heart by confessing him your feelings for Chris. For some time he remained hopeful that you were going to return and you would finally be together, but soon enough he had to let you go for his own good. He wanted you to be happy, as hard as that was for him and he knew Chris was a good guy. - Thank you!- you said as he gave you the soda. - No worries! So, how it's Chris? - he asked nicely as he sat on the other side of the table. - We broke up.- you confessed after a moment, taking a deep sigh. - I'm terribly sorry.- he assured you. - It's ok. It's been a few months since our breakup so I'm much better now. At first, it was hard, I'm not going to lie, but eventually, I moved on. - Did something happen between you two? - he questioned - Sorry if I don't seem polite, it's just that you two seem to be doing fine. - Nothing happened. We ended up in good terms. It just that I was homesick; time would past and I never got used to living there. Teaching at Harvard was great, but I prefer to be at home with my friends and family. Moving to London would have been the same thing for him. He's a family man and being so far away from his family it would have been overwhelming for him. So, we realized that as much as we cared for each other, this wasn't meant to be. - I'm sorry to hear that.- he said as he sympathetically reached for your hand. - How about you? Are you dating anyone? - you asked curiously as you took a sip of soda. - I dated someone for a few months last year, but it didn't work.- Henry imitated you, drinking his beer. You starred at each other in silence for a long time. Probably you were sharing the same thought: after so long, you were finally aware of the feelings that you had for one another and you were both single.

Life seemed to like to play with your feelings, but now it was the time: after so long, now your path was clear so you could live your happy ending with the man of your dreams.

He picked you up by your thighs after opening the door to his house. He carried you inside as your lips were glued to his and your tongues collied with one another. Fortunately, he left Kal on his assistant's house because she was going to take him to the vet the next morning, so the house was empty. He took you directly to the bedroom. This was a type of need you haven't had before in your entire life. You always dreamt about this but never would've thought that it'd become a reality. For a long time, it seemed as if you weren't mean to be together, but it was all matter of time. Apparently, he was as desperate for you as you were for him. After putting you on his bed, he ripped your dress and bra - his animalistic side came out: he waited way too long for that moment to care about a dress, he'd buy you a new one later as an apology. He put your breasts on his mouth. Then, he left a trail of kisses all the way down. He pleasured you with his mouth and tongue into ecstasy. You returned the favour, making him moan loudly due to the pleasure. The moment he was inside of you was indescribable. It hurt but in a good way; you felt things that you never knew they were possible. He kissed you over and over, repeating "stay with me forever".

Epilogue

And you would do that.

After just four months of dating, he proposed to you. For most people, that'd be an impulsive decision and a wrong one. For your two, on the other hand, it was the happy ending you always wished. You married seven months after that and welcome your first child a year and a half after the wedding.

[unsettlingshortstories]

The Cold Equations

Tom Godwin (1954)

He was not alone.

There was nothing to indicate the fact but the white hand of the tiny gauge on the board before him. The control room was empty but for himself; there was no sound other than the murmur of the drives — but the white hand had moved. It had been on zero when the little ship was launched from the Stardust; now, an hour later, it had crept up. There was something in the supply closet across the room, it was saying, some kind of a body that radiated heat.

It could be but one kind of a body — a living, human body.

He leaned back in the pilot’s chair and drew a deep, slow breath, considering what he would have to do. He was an EDS pilot, inured to the sight of death, long since accustomed to it and to viewing the dying of another man with an objective lack of emotion, and he had no choice in what he must do. There could be no alternative — but it required a few moments of conditioning for even an EDS pilot to prepare himself to walk across the room and coldly, deliberately, take the life of a man he had yet to meet.

He would, of course, do it. It was the law, stated very bluntly and definitely in grim Paragraph L, Section 8, of Interstellar Regulations: “Any stowaway discovered in an EDS shall be jettisoned immediately following discovery.”

It was the law, and there could be no appeal.

It was a law not of men’s choosing but made imperative by the circumstances of the space frontier. Galactic expansion had followed the development of the hyperspace drive, and as men scattered wide across the frontier, there had come the problem of contact with the isolated first colonies and exploration parties. The huge hyperspace cruisers were the product of the combined genius and effort of Earth and were long and expensive in the building. They were not available in such numbers that small colonies could possess them. The cruisers carried the colonists to their new worlds and made periodic visits, running on tight schedules, but they could not stop and turn aside to visit colonies scheduled to be visited at another time; such a delay would destroy their schedule and produce a confusion and uncertainty that would wreck the complex interdependence between old Earth and the new worlds of the frontier.

Some method of delivering supplies or assistance when an emergency occurred on a world not scheduled for a visit had been needed, and the Emergency Dispatch Ships had been the answer. Small and collapsible, they occupied little room in the hold of the cruiser; made of light metal and plastics, they were driven by a small rocket drive that consumed relatively little fuel. Each cruiser carried four EDSs, and when a call for aid was received, the nearest cruiser would drop into normal space long enough to launch an EDS with the needed supplies or personnel, then vanish again as it continued on its course.

The cruisers, powered by nuclear converters, did not use the liquid rocket fuel, but nuclear converters were far too large and complex to permit their installation in the EDSs. The cruisers were forced by necessity to carry a limited amount of bulky rocket fuel, and the fuel was rationed with care, the cruiser’s computers determining the exact amount of fuel each EDS would require for its mission. The computers considered the course coordinates, the mass of the EDS, the mass of pilot and cargo; they were very precise and accurate and omitted nothing from their calculations. They could not, however, foresee and allow for the added mass of a stowaway.

The Stardust had received the request from one of the exploration parties stationed on Woden, the six men of the party already being stricken with the fever carried by the green kala midges and their own supply of serum destroyed by the tornado that had torn through their camp. The Stardust had gone through the usual procedure, dropping into normal space to launch the EDS with the fever serum, then vanishing again in hyperspace. Now, an hour later, the gauge was saying there was something more than the small carton of serum in the supply closet.

He let his eyes rest on the narrow white door of the closet. There, just inside, another man lived and breathed and was beginning to feel assured that discovery of his presence would now be too late for the pilot to alter the situation. It was too late; for the man behind the door it was far later than he thought and in a way he would find it terrible to believe.

There could be no alternative. Additional fuel would be used during the hours of deceleration to compensate for the added mass of the stowaway, infinitesimal increments of fuel that would not be missed until the ship had almost reached its destination. Then, at some distance above the ground that might be as near as a thousand feet or as far as tens of thousands of feet, depending upon the mass of ship and cargo and the preceding period of deceleration, the unmissed increments of fuel would make their absence known; the EDS would expend its last drops of fuel with a sputter and go into whistling free fall. Ship and pilot and stowaway would merge together upon impact as a wreckage of metal and plastic, flesh and blood, driven deep into the soil. The stowaway had signed his own death warrant when he concealed himself on the ship; he could not be permitted to take seven others with him.

He looked again at the telltale white hand, then rose to his feet. What he must do would be unpleasant for both of them; the sooner it was over, the better. He stepped across the control room to stand by the white door.

“Come out!” His command was harsh and abrupt above the murmur of the drive.

It seemed he could hear the whisper of a furtive movement inside the closet, then nothing. He visualized the stowaway cowering closer into one corner, suddenly worried by the possible consequences of his act, his self-assurance evaporating.

“I said out!”

He heard the stowaway move to obey, and he waited with his eyes alert on the door and his hand near the blaster at his side.

The door opened and the stowaway stepped through it, smiling. “All right — I give up. Now what?”

It was a girl.

He stared without speaking, his hand dropping away from the blaster, and acceptance of what he saw coming like a heavy and unexpected physical blow. The stowaway was not a man — she was a girl in her teens, standing before him in little white gypsy sandals, with the top of her brown, curly head hardly higher than his shoulder, with a faint, sweet scent of perfume coming from her, and her smiling face tilted up so her eyes could look unknowing and unafraid into his as she waited for his answer.

Now what? Had it been asked in the deep, defiant voice of a man, he would have answered it with action, quick and efficient. He would have taken the stowaway’s identification disk and ordered him into the air lock. Had the stowaway refused to obey, he would have used the blaster. It would not have taken long; within a minute the body would have been ejected into space — had the stowaway been a man.

He returned to the pilot’s chair and motioned her to seat herself on the boxlike bulk of the drive-control units that were set against the wall beside him. She obeyed, his silence making the smile fade into the meek and guilty expression of a pup that has been caught in mischief and knows it must be punished.

“You still haven’t told me,” she said. “I’m guilty, so what happens to me now? Do I pay a fine, or what?”

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Why did you stow away on this EDS?”

“I wanted to see my brother. He’s with the government survey crew on Woden and I haven’t seen him for ten years, not since he left Earth to go into government survey work.”

“What was your destination on the Stardust?”

“Mimir. I have a position waiting for me there. My brother has been sending money home all the time to us — my father and mother and me — and he paid for a special course in linguistics I was taking. I graduated sooner than expected and I was offered this job in Mimir. I knew it would be almost a year before Gerry’s job was done on Woden so he could come on to Mimir, and that’s why I hid in the closet there. There was plenty of room for me and I was willing to pay the fine. There were only the two of us kids — Gerry and I — and I haven’t seen him for so long, and I didn’t want to wait another year when I could see him now, even though I knew I would be breaking some kind of a regulation when I did it.”

I knew I would be breaking some kind of a regulation. In a way, she could not be blamed for her ignorance of the law; she was of Earth and had not realized that the laws of the space frontier must, of necessity, be as hard and relentless as the environment that gave them birth. Yet, to protect such as her from the results of their own ignorance of the frontier, there had been a sign over the door that led to the section of the Stardust that housed the EDSs, a sign that was plain for all to see and heed: UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL KEEP OUT!

“Does your brother know that you took passage on the Stardust for Mimir?”

“Oh, yes. I sent him a spacegram telling him about my graduation and about going to Mimir on the Stardust a month before I left Earth. I already knew Mimir was where he would be stationed in a little over a year. He gets a promotion then, and he’ll be based on Mimir and not have to stay out a year at a time on field trips, like he does now.”

There were two different survey groups on Woden, and he asked, “What is his name?”

“Cross — Gerry Cross. He’s in Group Two — that was the way his address read. Do you know him?”

Group One had requested the serum: Group Two was eight thousand miles away, across the Western Sea.

“No, I’ve never met him,” he said, then turned to the control board and cut the deceleration to a fraction of a gravity, knowing as he did so that it could not avert the ultimate end, yet doing the only thing he could do to prolong that ultimate end. The sensation was like that of the ship suddenly dropping, and the girls involuntary movement of surprise half lifted her from her seat. “We’re going faster now, aren’t we?” she asked. “Why are we doing that?”

He told her the truth. “To save fuel for a little while.”

“You mean we don’t have very much?”

He delayed the answer he must give her so soon to ask, “How did you manage to stow away?”

“I just sort of walked in when no one was looking my way,” she said. “I was practicing my Gelanese on the native girl who does the cleaning in the Ship’s Supply office when someone came in with an order for supplies for the survey crew on Woden. I slipped into the closet there after the ship was ready to go just before you came in. It was an impulse of the moment to stow away, so I could get to see Gerry — and from the way you keep looking at me so grim, I’m not sure it was a very wise impulse. But I’ll be a model criminal — or do I mean prisoner?” She smiled at him again. “I intended to pay for my keep on top of paying the fine. I can cook and I can patch clothes for everyone and I know how to do all kinds of useful things, even a little bit about nursing.” There was one more question to ask:

“Did you know what the supplies were that the survey crew ordered?”

“Why, no. Equipment they needed in their work, I supposed.”

Why couldn’t she have been a man with some ulterior motive? A fugitive from justice hoping to lose himself on a raw new world; an opportunist seeking transportation to the new colonies where he might find golden fleece for the taking; a crackpot with a mission. Perhaps once in his lifetime an EDS pilot would find such a stowaway on his ship — warped men, mean and selfish men, brutal and dangerous men — but never before a smiling, blue-eyed girl who was willing to pay her fine and work for her keep that she might see her brother.

He turned to the board and turned the switch that would signal the Stardust. The call would be futile, but he could not, until he had exhausted that one vain hope, seize her and thrust her into the air lock as he would an animal — or a man. The delay, in the meantime, would not be dangerous with the EDS decelerating at fractional gravity.

A voice spoke from the communicator. “Stardust. Identify yourself and proceed.”

“Barton, EDS 34GII. Emergency. Give me Commander Delhart.”

There was a faint confusion of noises as the request went through the proper channels. The girl was watching him, no longer smiling.

“Are you going to order them to come back after me?” she asked.

The communicator clicked and there was the sound of a distant voice saying, “Commander, the EDS requests...”

“Are they coming back after me?” she asked again. “Won’t I get to see my brother after all?”

“Barton?” The blunt, gruff voice of Commander Delhart came from the communicator. “What’s this about an emergency?”

“A stowaway,” he answered.

“A stowaway?” There was a slight surprise to the question. “That’s rather unusual — but why the ‘emergency’ call? You discovered him in time, so there should be no appreciable danger, and I presume you’ve informed Ship’s Records so his nearest relatives can be notified.”

“That’s why I had to call you, first. The stowaway is still aboard and the circumstances are so different—”

“Different?” the commander interrupted, impatience in his voice. “How can they be different? You know you have a limited supply of fuel; you also know the law as well as I do: ‘Any stowaway discovered in an EDS shall be jettisoned immediately following discovery.’”

There was the sound of a sharply indrawn breath from the girl. “What does he mean?”

“The stowaway is a girl.”

“What?”

“She wanted to see her brother. She’s only a kid and she didn’t know what she was really doing.” “I see.” All the curtness was gone from the commander’s voice. “So you called me in the hope I could do something?” Without waiting for an answer he went on, “I’m sorry — I can do nothing. This cruiser must maintain its schedule; the life of not one person but the lives of many depend on it. I know how you feel but I’m powerless to help you. You’ll have to go through with it. I’ll have you connected with Ship’s Records.” The communicator faded to a faint rustle of sound, and he turned back to the girl. She was leaning forward on the bench, almost rigid, her eyes fixed wide and frightened.

“What did he mean, to go through with it? To jettison me... to go through with it — what did he mean? Not the way it sounded... he couldn’t have. What did he mean — what did he really mean?”

Her time was too short for the comfort of a lie to be more than a cruelly fleeting delusion. “He meant it the way it sounded.” “No!” She recoiled from him as though he had struck her, one hand half raised as though to fend him off and stark unwillingness to believe in her eyes. “It will have to be.” “No! You’re joking — you’re insane! You can’t mean it!” “I’m sorry.” He spoke slowly to her, gently. “I should have told you before — I should have, but I had to do what I could first; I had to call the Stardust. You heard what the commander said.” “But you can’t — if you make me leave the ship, I’ll die.”

“I know.”

She searched his face, and the unwillingness to believe left her eyes, giving way slowly to a look of dazed horror. “You know?” She spoke the words far apart, numbly and wonderingly. “I know. It has to be like that.”

“You mean it — you really mean it.” She sagged back against the wall, small and limp like a little rag doll, and all the protesting and disbelief gone. “You’re going to do it — you’re going to make me die?” “I’m sorry,” he said again. “You’ll never know how sorry I am. It has to be that way and no human in the universe can change it.”

“You’re going to make me die and I didn’t do anything to die for — I didn’t do anything—” He sighed, deep and weary. “I know you didn’t, child. I know you didn’t.” “EDS.” The communicator rapped brisk and metallic. “This is Ship’s Records. Give us all information on subject’s identification disk.” He got out of his chair to stand over her. She clutched the edge of the seat, her upturned face white under the brown hair and the lipstick standing out like a blood-red cupid's bow.

“Now?”

“I want your identification disk,” he said. She released the edge of the seat and fumbled at the chain that suspended the plastic disk from her neck with fingers that were trembling and awkward. He reached down and unfastened the clasp for her, then returned with the disk to his chair. “Here’s your data, Records: Identification Number T837—” “One moment,” Records interrupted. “This is to be filed on the gray card, of course?” “Yes.” “And the time of execution?” “I’ll tell you later.” “Later? This is highly irregular; the time of the subject’s death is required before—” He kept the thickness out of his voice with an effort. “Then we’ll do it in a highly irregular manner — you’ll hear the disk read first. The subject is a girl and she’s listening to everything that’s said. Are you capable of understanding that?”

There was a brief, almost shocked silence; then Records said meekly, “Sorry. Go ahead.”

He began to read the disk, reading it slowly to delay the inevitable for as long as possible, trying to help her by giving her what little time he could to recover from her first horror and let it resolve into the calm of acceptance and resignation.

“Number T8374 dash Y54. Name, Marilyn Lee Cross. Sex, female. Born July 7, 2160.” She was only eighteen. “Height, five-three. Weight, a hundred and ten.” Such a slight weight, yet enough to add fatally to the mass of the shell-thin bubble that was an EDS. “Hair, brown. Eyes, blue. Complexion, light. Blood type O.” Irrelevant data. “Destination, Port City, Mimir.” Invalid data.

He finished and said, “I’ll call you later,” then turned once again to the girl. She was huddled back against the wall, watching him with a look of numb and wondering fascination.

“They’re waiting for you to kill me, aren’t they? They want me dead, don’t they? You and everybody on the cruiser want me dead, don’t you?” Then the numbness broke and her voice was that of a frightened and bewildered child. “Everybody wants me dead and I didn’t do anything. I didn’t hurt anyone — I only wanted to see my brother.” “It’s not the way you think — it isn’t that way at all,” he said. “Nobody wants it this way; nobody would ever let it be this way if it was humanly possible to change it.”

“Then why is it? I don’t understand. Why is it?” “This ship is carrying kala fever serum to Group One on Woden. Their own supply was destroyed by a tornado. Group Two — the crew your brother is in — is eight thousand miles away across the Western Sea, and their helicopters can’t cross it to help Group One. The fever is invariably fatal unless the serum can be had in time, and the six men in Group One will die unless this ship reaches them on schedule. These little ships are always given barely enough fuel to reach their destination, and if you stay aboard, your added weight will cause it to use up all its fuel before it reaches the ground. It will crash then, and you and I will die and so will the six men waiting for the fever serum.”

It was a full minute before she spoke, and as she considered his words, the expression of numbness left her eyes. “Is that it?” she asked at last. “Just that the ship doesn’t have enough fuel?” “Yes.” “I can go alone or I can take seven others with me — is that the way it is?” “That’s the way it is.”

“And nobody wants me to have to die?” “Nobody.”

“Then maybe — Are you sure nothing can be done about it? Wouldn’t people help me if they could?” “Everyone would like to help you, but there is nothing anyone can do. I did the only thing I could do when I called the Stardust.”

“And it won’t come back — but there might be other cruisers, mightn’t there? Isn’t there any hope at all that there might be someone, somewhere, who could do something to help me?” She was leaning forward a little in her eagerness as she waited for his answer.

“No.” The word was like the drop of a cold stone and she again leaned back against the wall, the hope and eagerness leaving her face. “You’re sure — you know you’re sure?”

“I’m sure. There are no other cruisers within forty light-years; there is nothing and no one to change things.” She dropped her gaze to her lap and began twisting a pleat of her skirt between her fingers, saying no more as her mind began to adapt itself to the grim knowledge.

It was better so; with the going of all hope would go the fear; with the going of all hope would come resignation. She needed time and she could have so little of it. How much?

The EDSs were not equipped with hull-cooling units; their speed had to be reduced to a moderate level before they entered the atmosphere. They were decelerating at .10 gravity, approaching their destination at a far higher speed than the computers had calculated on. The Stardust had been quite near Woden when she launched the EDS; their present velocity was putting them nearer by the second. There would be a critical point, soon to be reached, when he would have to resume deceleration. When he did so, the girls weight would be multiplied by the gravities of deceleration, would become, suddenly, a factor of paramount importance, the factor the computers had been ignorant of when they determined the amount of fuel the EDS should have. She would have to go when deceleration began; it could be no other way. When would that be — how long could he let her stay?

“How long can I stay?”

He winced involuntarily from the words that were so like an echo of his own thoughts. How long? He didn’t know; he would have to ask the ship’s computers. Each EDS was given a meager surplus of fuel to compensate for unfavorable conditions within the atmosphere, and relatively little fuel was being consumed for the time being. The memory banks of the computers would still contain all data pertaining to the course set for the EDS; such data would not be erased until the EDS reached its destination. He had only to give the computers the new data — the girl's weight and the exact time at which he had reduced the deceleration to .10.

“Barton.” Commander Delhart’s voice came abruptly from the communicator as he opened his mouth to call the Stardust. “A check with Records shows me you haven’t completed your report. Did you reduce the deceleration?”

So the commander knew what he was trying to do.

“I’m decelerating at point ten,” he answered. “I cut the deceleration at seventeen fifty and the weight is a hundred and ten. I would like to stay at point ten as long as the computers say I can. Will you give them the question?”

It was contrary to regulations for an EDS pilot to make any changes in the course or degree of deceleration the computers had set for him, but the commander made no mention of the violation. Neither did he ask the reason for it. It was not necessary for him to ask; he had not become commander of an interstellar cruiser without both intelligence and an understanding of human nature. He said only,

“I’ll have that given to the computers.”

The communicator fell silent and he and the girl waited, neither of them speaking. They would not have to wait long; the computers would give the answer within moments of the asking. The new factors would be fed into the steel maw of the first bank, and the electrical impulses would go through the complex circuits. Here and there a relay might click, a tiny cog turn over, but it would be essentially the electrical impulses that found the answer; formless, mindless, invisible, determining with utter precision how long the pale girl beside him might live. Then five little segments of metal in the second bank would trip in rapid succession against an inked ribbon and a second steel maw would spit out the slip of paper that bore the answer.

The chronometer on the instrument board read 18:10 when the commander spoke again.

“You will resume deceleration at nineteen ten.”

She looked toward the chronometer, then quickly away from it. “Is that when... when I go?” she asked. He nodded and she dropped her eyes to her lap again.

“I’ll have the course correction given to you,” the commander said. “Ordinarily I would never permit anything like this, but I understand your position. There is nothing I can do, other than what I’ve just done, and you will not deviate from these new instructions. You will complete your report at nineteen ten. Now — here are the course corrections.”

The voice of some unknown technician read them to him, and he wrote them down on the pad clipped to the edge of the control board. There would, he saw, be periods of deceleration when he neared the atmosphere when the deceleration would be five gravities — and at five gravities, one hundred ten pounds would become five hundred fifty pounds.

The technician finished and he terminated the contact with a brief acknowledgment. Then, hesitating a moment, he reached out and shut off the communicator. It was 18:13 and he would have nothing to report until 19:10. In the meantime, it somehow seemed indecent to permit others to hear what she might say in her last hour.

He began to check the instrument readings, going over them with unnecessary slowness. She would have to accept the circumstances, and there was nothing he could do to help her into acceptance; words of sympathy would only delay it.

It was 18:20 when she stirred from her motionlessness and spoke.

“So that’s the way it has to be with me?”

He swung around to face her. “You understand now, don’t you? No one would ever let it be like this if it could be changed.”

“I understand,” she said. Some of the color had returned to her face and the lipstick no longer stood out so vividly red. “There isn’t enough fuel for me to stay. When I hid on this ship, I got into something I didn’t know anything about and now I have to pay for it.”

She had violated a man-made law that said KEEP OUT, but the penalty was not for men’s making or desire and it was a penalty men could not revoke. A physical law had decreed: h amount of fuel will power an EDS with a mass of m safely to its destination; and a second physical law had decreed: h amount of fuel will not power an EDS with a mass of m plus x safely to its destination.

EDSs obeyed only physical laws, and no amount of human sympathy for her could alter the second law.

“But I’m afraid. I don’t want to die — not now. I want to live, and nobody is doing anything to help me; everybody is letting me go ahead and acting just like nothing was going to happen to me. I’m going to die and nobody cares.”

“We all do,” he said. “I do and the commander does and the clerk in Ship’s Records; we all care and each of us did what little he could to help you. It wasn’t enough — it was almost nothing — but it was all we could do.”

“Not enough fuel — I can understand that,” she said, as though she had not heard his own words. “But to have to die for it. Me alone...”

How hard it must be for her to accept the fact. She had never known danger of death, had never known the environments where the lives of men could be as fragile and fleeting as sea foam tossed against a rocky shore. She belonged on gentle Earth, in that secure and peaceful society where she could be young and gay and laughing with the others of her kind, where life was precious and well guarded and there was always the assurance that tomorrow would come. She belonged in that world of soft winds and a warm sun, music and moonlight and gracious manners, and not on the hard, bleak frontier.

“How did it happen to me so terribly quickly? An hour ago I was on the Stardust, going to Mimir. Now the Stardust is going on without me and I’m going to die and I’ll never see Gerry and Mama and Daddy again — I’ll never see anything again.”

He hesitated, wondering how he could explain it to her so she would really understand and not feel she had somehow been the victim of a reasonlessly cruel injustice. She did not know what the frontier was like; she thought in terms of safe, secure Earth. Pretty girls were not jettisoned on Earth; there was a law against it. On Earth her plight would have filled the newscasts and a fast black patrol ship would have been racing to her rescue. Everyone, everywhere, would have known of Marilyn Lee Cross, and no effort would have been spared to save her life. But this was not Earth and there were no patrol ships; only the Stardust, leaving them behind at many times the speed of light. There was no one to help her; there would be no Marilyn Lee Cross smiling from the newscasts tomorrow. Marilyn Lee Cross would be but a poignant memory for an EDS pilot and a name on a gray card in Ship’s Records.

“It’s different here; it’s not like back on Earth,” he said. “It isn’t that no one cares; it’s that no one can do anything to help. The frontier is big, and here along its rim the colonies and exploration parties are scattered so thin and far between. On Woden, for example, there are only sixteen men — sixteen men on an entire world. The exploration parties, the survey crews, the little first colonies — they’re all fighting alien environments, trying to make a way for those who will follow after. The environments fight back, and those who go first usually make mistakes only once. There is no margin of safety along the rim of the frontier; there can’t be until the way is made for the others who will come later, until the new worlds are tamed and settled. Until then men will have to pay the penalty for making mistakes, with no one to help them, because there is no one to help them.”

“I was going to Mimir,” she said. “I didn’t know about the frontier; I was only going to Mimir and it’s safe.”

“Mimir is safe, but you left the cruiser that was taking you there.”

She was silent for a little while. “It was all so wonderful at first; there was plenty of room for me on this ship and I would be seeing Gerry so soon. I didn’t know about the fuel, didn’t know what would happen to me...”

Her words trailed away, and he turned his attention to the viewscreen, not wanting to stare at her as she fought her way through the black horror of fear toward the calm gray of acceptance.

Woden was a ball, enshrouded in the blue haze of its atmosphere, swimming in space against the background of star-sprinkled dead blackness. The great mass of Manning’s Continent sprawled like a gigantic hourglass in the Eastern Sea, with the western half of the Eastern Continent still visible. There was a thin line of shadow along the right–hand edge of the globe, and the Eastern Continent was disappearing into it as the planet turned on its axis. An hour before, the entire continent had been in view; now a thousand miles of it had gone into the thin edge of shadow and around to the night that lay on the other side of the world. The dark blue spot that was Lotus Lake was approaching the shadow. It was somewhere near the southern edge of the lake that Group Two had their camp. It would be night there soon, and quick behind the coming of night the rotation of Woden on its axis would put Group Two beyond the reach of the ship’s radio.

He would have to tell her before it was too late for her to talk to her brother. In a way, it would be better for both of them should they not do so, but it was not for him to decide. To each of them the last words would be something to hold and cherish, something that would cut like the blade of a knife yet would be infinitely precious to remember, she for her own brief moments to live and he for the rest of his life.

He held down the button that would flash the grid lines on the viewscreen and used the known diameter of the planet to estimate the distance the southern tip of Lotus Lake had yet to go until it passed beyond radio range. It was approximately five hundred miles. Five hundred miles; thirty minutes — and the chronometer read 18:30. Allowing for error in estimating, it would not be later than 19:05 that the turning of Woden would cut off her brother’s voice.

The first border of the Western continent was already in sight along the left side of the world. Four thousand miles across it lay the shore of the Western Sea and the camp of Group One. It had been in the Western Sea that the tornado had originated, to strike with such fury at the camp and destroy half their prefabricated buildings, including the one that housed the medical supplies. Two days before, the tornado had not existed; it had been no more than great gentle masses of air over the calm Western Sea. Group One had gone about their routine survey work, unaware of the meeting of air masses out at sea, unaware of the force the union was spawning. It had struck their camp without warning — a thundering, roaring destruction that sought to annihilate all that lay before it. It had passed on, leaving the wreckage in its wake. It had destroyed the labor of months and had doomed six men to die and then, as though its task was accomplished, it once more began to resolve into gentle masses of air. But, for all its deadliness, it had destroyed with neither malice nor intent. It had been a blind and mindless force, obeying the laws of nature, and it would have followed the same course with the same fury had men never existed.

Existence required order, and there was order; the laws of nature, irrevocable and immutable. Men could learn to use them, but men could not change them. The circumference of a circle was always pi times the diameter, and no science of man would ever make it otherwise. The combination of chemical A with chemical B under condition C invariably produced reaction D. The law of gravitation was a rigid equation, and it made no distinction between the fall of a leaf and the ponderous circling of a binary star system. The nuclear conversion process powered the cruisers that carried men to the stars; the same process in the form of a nova would destroy a world with equal efficiency. The laws were, and the universe moved in obedience to them. Along the frontier were arrayed all the forces of nature, and sometimes they destroyed those who were fighting their way outward from Earth. The men of the frontier had long ago learned the bitter futility of cursing the forces that would destroy them, for the forces were blind and deaf; the futility of looking to the heavens for mercy, for the stars of the galaxy swung in their long, long sweep of two hundred million years, as inexorably controlled as they by the laws that knew neither hatred nor compassion. The men of the frontier knew — but how was a girl from Earth to fully understand? h amount of fuel will not power an EDS with a mass of m plus x safely to its destination. To him and her brother and parents she was a sweet-faced girl in her teens; to the laws of nature she was x, the unwanted factor in a cold equation.

She stirred again on the seat. “Could I write a letter? I want to write to Mama and Daddy. And I’d like to talk to Gerry. Could you let me talk to him over your radio there?” “I’ll try to get him,” he said.

He switched on the normal-space transmitter and pressed the signal button. Someone answered the buzzer almost immediately.

“Hello. How’s it going with you fellows now — is the EDS on its way?”

“This isn’t Group One; this is the EDS,” he said. “Is Gerry Cross there?”

“Gerry? He and two others went out in the helicopter this morning and aren’t back yet. It’s almost sundown, though, and he ought to be back right away — in less than an hour at the most.”

“Can you connect me through to the radio in his copter?”

“Huh-uh. It’s been out of commission for two months — some printed circuits went haywire and we can’t get any more until the next cruiser stops by. Is it something important — bad news for him, or something?”

“Yes — it’s very important. When he comes in, get him to the transmitter as soon as you possibly can.”

“I’ll do that; I’ll have one of the boys waiting at the field with a truck. Is there anything else I can do?”

“No, I guess that’s all. Get him there as soon as you can and signal me.”

He turned the volume to an inaudible minimum, an act that would not affect the functioning of the signal buzzer, and unclipped the pad of paper from the control board. He tore off the sheet containing his flight instructions and handed the pad to her, together with pencil.

“I’d better write to Gerry too,” she said as she took them. “He might not get back to camp in time.”

She began to write, her fingers still clumsy and uncertain in the way they handled the pencil, and the top of it trembling a little as she poised it between words. He turned back to the viewscreen, to stare at it without seeing it.

She was a lonely little child trying to say her last goodbye, and she would lay out her heart to them. She would tell them how much she loved them and she would tell them to not feel bad about it, that it was only something that must happen eventually to everyone and she was not afraid. The last would be a lie and it would be there to read between the sprawling, uneven lines: a valiant little lie that would make the hurt all the greater for them.

Her brother was of the frontier and he would understand. He would not hate the EDS pilot for doing nothing to prevent her going; he would know there had been nothing the pilot could do. He would understand, though the understanding would not soften the shock and pain when he learned his sister was gone. But the others, her father and mother — they would not understand. They were of Earth and they would think in the manner of those who had never lived where the safety margin of life was a thin, thin line — and sometimes nothing at all. What would they think of the faceless, unknown pilot who had sent her to her death?

They would hate him with cold and terrible intensity, but it really didn’t matter. He would never see them, never know them. He would have only the memories to remind him; only the nights of fear, when a blue-eyed girl in gypsy sandals would come in his dreams to die again...

He scowled at the viewscreen and tried to force his thoughts into less emotional channels. There was nothing he could do to help her. She had unknowingly subjected herself to the penalty of a law that recognized neither innocence nor youth nor beauty, that was incapable of sympathy or leniency. Regret was illogical — and yet, could knowing it to be illogical ever keep it away?

She stopped occasionally, as though trying to find the right words to tell them what she wanted them to know; then the pencil would resume its whispering to the paper. It was 18:37 when she folded the letter in a square and wrote a name on it. She began writing another, twice looking up at the chronometer, as though she feared the black hand might reach its rendezvous before she had finished. It was 18:45 when she folded it as she had done the first letter and wrote a name and address on it.

She held the letters out to him. “Will you take care of these and see that they’re enveloped and mailed?”

“Of course.” He took them from her hand and placed them in a pocket of his gray uniform shirt.

“These can’t be sent off until the next cruiser stops by, and the Stardust will have long since told them about me, won’t it?” she asked. He nodded and she went on: “That makes the letters not important in one way, but in another way they’re very important — to me, and to them.”

“I know. I understand, and I’ll take care of them.”

She glanced at the chronometer, then back to him. “It seems to move faster all the time, doesn’t it?”

He said nothing, unable to think of anything to say, and she asked, “Do you think Gerry will come back to camp in time?”

“I think so. They said he should be in right away.”

She began to roll the pencil back and forth between her palms. “I hope he does. I feel sick and scared and I want to hear his voice again and maybe I won’t feel so alone. I’m a coward and I can’t help it.”

“No,” he said, “you’re not a coward. You’re afraid, but you’re not a coward.”

“Is there a difference?”

He nodded. “A lot of difference.”

“I feel so alone. I never did feel like this before; like I was all by myself and there was nobody to care what happened to me. Always, before, there were Mama and Daddy there and my friends around me. I had lots of friends, and they had a going-away party for me the night before I left.”

Friends and music and laughter for her to remember — and on the viewscreen Lotus Lake was going into the shadow.

“Is it the same with Gerry?” she asked. “I mean, if he should make a mistake, would he have to die for it, all alone and with no one to help him?”

“It’s the same with all, along the frontier; it will always be like that so long as there is a frontier.”

“Gerry didn’t tell us. He said the pay was good, and he sent money home all the time because Daddy’s little shop just brought in a bare living, but he didn’t tell us it was like this.”

“He didn’t tell you his work was dangerous?”

“Well — yes. He mentioned that, but we didn’t understand. I always thought danger along the frontier was something that was a lot of fun; an exciting adventure, like in the three-D shows.” A wan smile touched her face for a moment. “Only it’s not, is it? It’s not the same at all, because when it’s real you can’t go home after the show is over.”

“No,” he said. “No, you can’t.”

Her glance flicked from the chronometer to the door of the air lock, then down to the pad and pencil she still held. She shifted her position slightly to lay them on the bench beside her, moving one foot out a little. For the first time he saw that she was not wearing Vegan gypsy sandals, but only cheap imitations; the expensive Vegan leather was some kind of grained plastic, the silver buckle was gilded iron, the jewels were colored glass. Daddy’s little shop just brought in a bare living... She must have left college in her second year, to take the course in linguistics that would enable her to make her own way and help her brother provide for her parents, earning what she could by part-time work after classes were over. Her personal possessions on the Stardust would be taken back to her parents — they would neither be of much value nor occupy much storage space on the return voyage.

“Isn’t it—” She stopped, and he looked at her questioningly. “Isn’t it cold in here?” she asked, almost apologetically. “Doesn’t it seem cold to you?”

“Why, yes,” he said. He saw by the main temperature gauge that the room was at precisely normal temperature. “Yes, it’s colder than it should be.”

“I wish Gerry would get back before it’s too late. Do you really think he will, and you didn’t just say so to make me feel better?”

“I think he will — they said he would be in pretty soon.” On the viewscreen Lotus Lake had gone into the shadow but for the thin blue line of its western edge, and it was apparent he had overestimated the time she would have in which to talk to her brother. Reluctantly, he said to her, “His camp will be out of radio range in a few minutes; he’s on that part of Woden that’s in the shadow” — he indicated the viewscreen — “and the turning of Woden will put him beyond contact. There may not be much time left when he comes in — not much time to talk to him before he fades out. I wish I could do something about it — I would call him right now if I could.”

“Not even as much time as I will have to stay?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Then—” She straightened and looked toward the air lock with pale resolution. “Then I’ll go when Gerry passes beyond range. I won’t wait any longer after that — I won’t have anything to wait for.”

Again there was nothing he could say.

“Maybe I shouldn’t wait at all. Maybe I’m selfish — maybe it would be better for Gerry if you just told him about it afterward.”

There was an unconscious pleading for denial in the way she spoke and he said, “He wouldn’t want you to do that, to not wait for him.”

“It’s already coming dark where he is, isn’t it? There will be all the long night before him, and Mama and Daddy don’t know yet that I won’t ever be coming back like I promised them I would. I’ve caused everyone I love to be hurt, haven’t I? I didn’t want to — I didn’t intend to.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault at all. They’ll know that. They’ll understand.”

“At first I was so afraid to die that I was a coward and thought only of myself. Now I see how selfish I was. The terrible thing about dying like this is not that I’ll be gone but that I’ll never see them again; never be able to tell them that I didn’t take them for granted; never be able to tell them I knew of the sacrifices they made to make my life happier, that I knew all the things they did for me and that I loved them so much more than I ever told them. I’ve never told them any of those things. You don’t tell them such things when you’re young and your life is all before you — you’re so afraid of sounding sentimental and silly. But it’s so different when you have to die — you wish you had told them while you could, and you wish you could tell them you’re sorry for all the little mean things you ever did or said to them. You wish you could tell them that you didn’t really mean to ever hurt their feelings and for them to only remember that you always loved them far more than you ever let them know.”

“You don’t have to tell them that,” he said. “They will know — they’ve always known it.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “How can you be sure? My people are strangers to you.”

“Wherever you go, human nature and human hearts are the same.”

“And they will know what I want them to know — that I love them?”

“They’ve always known it, in a way far better than you could ever put in words for them.”

“I keep remembering the things they did for me, and it’s the little things they did that seem to be the most important to me, now. Like Gerry — he sent me a bracelet of fire rubies on my sixteenth birthday. It was beautiful — it must have cost him a month’s pay. Yet I remember him more for what he did the night my kitten got run over in the street. I was only six years old and he held me in his arms and wiped away my tears and told me not to cry, that Flossy was gone for just a little while, for just long enough to get herself a new fur coat, and she would be on the foot of my bed the very next morning. I believed him and quit crying and went to sleep dreaming about my kitten coming back. When I woke up the next morning, there was Flossy on the foot of my bed in a brand-new white fur coat, just like he had said she would be. It wasn’t until a long time later that Mama told me Gerry had got the pet-shop owner out of bed at four in the morning and, when the man got mad about it, Gerry told him he was either going to go down and sell him the white kitten right then or he’d break his neck.”

“It’s always the little things you remember people by, all the little things they did because they wanted to do them for you. You’ve done the same for Gerry and your father and mother; all kinds of things that you’ve forgotten about, but that they will never forget.”

“I hope I have. I would like for them to remember me like that.”

“They will.”

“I wish—” She swallowed. “The way I’ll die — I wish they wouldn’t ever think of that. I’ve read how people look who die in space — their insides all ruptured and exploded and their lungs out between their teeth and then, a few seconds later, they’re all dry and shapeless and horribly ugly. I don’t want them to ever think of me as something dead and horrible like that.”

“You’re their own, their child and their sister. They could never think of you other than the way you would want them to, the way you looked the last time they saw you.”

“I’m still afraid,” she said. “I can’t help it, but I don’t want Gerry to know it. If he gets back in time, I’m going to act like I’m not afraid at all and—”

The signal buzzer interrupted her, quick and imperative.

“Gerry!” She came to her feet. “It’s Gerry now!”

He spun the volume control knob and asked, “Gerry Cross?”

“Yes,” her brother answered, an undertone of tenseness to his reply. “The bad news — what is it?”

She answered for him, standing close behind him and leaning down a little toward the communicator, her hand resting small and cold on his shoulder.

“Hello, Gerry.” There was only a faint quaver to betray the careful casualness of her voice. “I wanted to see you—” “Marilyn!” There was sudden and terrible apprehension in the way he spoke her name. “What are you doing on that EDS?”

“I wanted to see you,” she said again. “I wanted to see you, so I hid on this ship—”

“You hid on it?”

“I’m a stowaway... I didn’t know what it would mean—”

“Marilyn!” It was the cry of a man who calls, hopeless and desperate, to someone already and forever gone from him. “What have you done?”

“I... it’s not—” Then her own composure broke and the cold little hand gripped his shoulder convulsively. “Don’t, Gerry — I only wanted to see you; I didn’t intend to hurt you. Please, Gerry, don’t feel like that—”

Something warm and wet splashed on his wrist, and he slid out of the chair to help her into it and swing the microphone down to her level.

“Don’t feel like that. Don’t let me go knowing you feel like that—”

The sob she had tried to hold back choked in her throat, and her brother spoke to her. “Don’t cry, Marilyn.” His voice was suddenly deep and infinitely gentle, with all the pain held out of it. “Don’t cry, Sis — you mustn’t do that. It’s all right, honey — everything is all right.”

“I—” Her lower lip quivered and she bit into it. “I didn’t want you to feel that way — I just wanted us to say goodbye, because I have to go in a minute.”

“Sure — sure. That’s the way it’ll be, Sis. I didn’t mean to sound the way I did.” Then his voice changed to a tone of quick and urgent demand. “EDS — have you called the Stardust? Did you check with the computers?”

“I called the Stardust almost an hour ago. It can’t turn back; there are no other cruisers within forty light-years, and there isn’t enough fuel.”

“Are you sure that the computers had the correct data — sure of everything?”

“Yes — do you think I could ever let it happen if I wasn’t sure? I did everything I could do. If there was anything at all I could do now, I would do it.”

“He tried to help me, Gerry.” Her lower lip was no longer trembling and the short sleeves of her blouse were wet where she had dried her tears. “No one can help me and I’m not going to cry anymore and everything will be all right with you and Daddy and Mama, won’t it?”

“Sure — sure it will. We’ll make out fine.”

Her brother’s words were beginning to come in more faintly, and he turned the volume control to maximum. “He’s going out of range,” he said to her. “He’ll be gone within another minute.”

“You’re fading out, Gerry,” she said. “You’re going out of range. I wanted to tell you — but I can’t now. We must say goodbye so soon — but maybe I’ll see you again. Maybe I’ll come to you in your dreams with my hair in braids and crying because the kitten in my arms is dead; maybe I’ll be the touch of a breeze that whispers to you as it goes by; maybe I’ll be one of those gold-winged larks you told me about, singing my silly head off to you; maybe, at times, I’ll be nothing you can see, but you will know I’m there beside you. Think of me like that, Gerry; always like that and not — the other way.”

Dimmed to a whisper by the turning of Woden, the answer came back: “Always like that, Marilyn — always like that and never any other way.” “Our time is up, Gerry — I have to go now. Good—” Her voice broke in midword and her mouth tried to twist into crying. She pressed her hand hard against it and when she spoke again the words came clear and true: “Goodbye, Gerry.” Faint and ineffably poignant and tender, the last words came from the cold metal of the communicator: “Goodbye, little sister...”

She sat motionless in the hush that followed, as though listening to the shadow-echoes of the words as they died away; then she turned away from the communicator, toward the air lock, and he pulled down the black lever beside him. The inner door of the air lock slid swiftly open to reveal the bare little cell that was waiting for her, and she walked to it.

She walked with her head up and the brown curls brushing her shoulders, with the white sandals stepping as sure and steady as the fractional gravity would permit and the gilded buckles twinkling with little lights of blue and red and crystal. He let her walk alone and made no move to help her, knowing she would not want it that way. She stepped into the air lock and turned to face him, only the pulse in her throat to betray the wild beating of her heart.

“I’m ready,” she said.

He pushed the lever up and the door slid its quick barrier between them, enclosing her in black and utter darkness for her last moments of life. It clicked as it locked in place and he jerked down the red lever. There was a slight waver of the ship as the air gushed from the lock, a vibration to the wall as though something had bumped the outer door in passing; then there was nothing and the ship was dropping true and steady again. He shoved the red lever back to close the door on the empty air lock and turned away, to walk to the pilot’s chair with the slow steps of a man old and weary.

Back in the pilot’s chair he pressed the signal button of the normal-space transmitter. There was no response; he had expected none. Her brother would have to wait through the night until the turning of Woden permitted contact through Group One.

It was not yet time to resume deceleration, and he waited while the ship dropped endlessly downward with him and the drives purred softly. He saw that the white hand of the supply-closet temperature gauge was on zero. A cold equation had been balanced and he was alone on the ship. Something shapeless and ugly was hurrying ahead of him, going to Woden, where her brother was waiting through the night, but the empty ship still lived for a little while with the presence of the girl who had not known about the forces that killed with neither hatred nor malice. It seemed, almost, that she still sat, small and bewildered and frightened, on the metal box beside him, her words echoing hauntingly clear in the void she had left behind her:

I didn’t do anything to die for... I didn’t do anything...

[midnight-aether]

Why Vox by Christina Dalcher is not a good novel: Review & Analysis

The premise of this novel is incredibly interesting, don’t get me wrong: Vox (2018) is about a dystopian future, in which US American women are only allowed to speak 100 words per day and must wear a bracelet that shocks them if they go over that limit. Women also aren’t allowed to write, read or use sign language. The main character is a genius linguist called Jean who hates every man in her life, including her husband Patrick and her own sons.

The first sentence already tells us three things about this novel: (1) it’s told from a first-person perspective, which means the reader will be aware of the protagonist’s every thought, (2) the oppressive regime in the novel goes by the name of Pure Movement, so it’s probably going to have something to do with religion, and (3) the action takes place in the span of a week, which I feel like it’s a huge spoiler for the fact that I won’t care for any of the characters at the end of the book, since there’s only so much character development that can happen in that time.

If anyone told me I could bring down the President, and the Pure Movement, and that incompetent little shit Morgan LeBron in a week’s time, I wouldn’t believe them.

There will be spoilers from this point on.

The Setting and the Protagonist

The main character in Vox, Dr. Jean McClellan, is a specialist researcher in the field of aphasia, that is, according to Wikipedia, “an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions”. At some point in the novel we are made aware that a colleague of Jean’s, with her help, has discovered a cure for aphasia, even though they are both linguists and neither a chemist nor a medical researcher. However, she was unable to publish this discovery, due to the conveniently timed sexist apocalypse that stripped her of all her academic titles, as the reader is often reminded.

Jean is married to her husband Patrick and has four children with him:  three boys and a girl. Jean evidently resents every man in her family,  especially Patrick and their 17-year-old son, Steven. Apparently they’ve  all been very quickly indoctrinated to believe women shouldn’t be  allowed to speak, so they treat Jean and Sonia, the daughter,  accordingly.

There is a whole subplot about Steven, but it’s so plain and uninteresting that there isn’t much to say about it. Basically, he is all for the Pure Movement and their ideals of purity for women, but then still sleeps with his high school girlfriend and proceeds to tattle on her. When she is taken away to a camp, he realizes his mistake a leaves to save her. At some point he is captured by the Movement and ridiculed on TV. Jean doesn’t really care that he’s gone, but is pleasantly surprised when he reappears at the end safe and sound.

At this point, the Pure Movement has only been in power for less  than a year and a half. This movement is very overtly described as a Christian uprising that originated within the bible belt  and had spread to the entirety of the USA. The followers of the  Movement also adopt overly conservative views on gender roles, marriage  and sex, leaving very little doubt about the roots of the oppressive regime in Vox.

The Plot

The main intrigue in Vox begins when the brother of the US president starts suffering from aphasia after a “skiing accident” and the government comes to Jean for help, despite her being a woman in a society that literally won’t let women speak. Why do they come to her instead of going to any other male scientist? Because apparently Jean is the best linguist in the whole country... even though, as far as the government (and the reader) knows, she’s only been researching aphasia for a couple of years and hasn’t found a cure yet. Well, the author herself has a doctorate in linguistics (not in the field of aphasia), which brings me to my first problem with this novel: the blatant and, quite frankly conceited, self-insert.

You may have noticed that I wrote “skiing accident” in quotation marks on the last paragraph. That’s because it’s hinted a couple of times throughout the novel that the president’s brother was actually injured on purpose by the government, but this turns out to be false. Later it seems like he was never even injured in the first place, but this is never clearly resolved, as the character himself never appears “onscreen”; however, it’s not a cliffhanger that perpetually haunts the reader.

Back to the story: Jean agrees to help because, by taking the job, she and her daughter get to remove the shock bracelets for the duration of the research. The government then proceeds to give Jean one week (remember the novel’s first sentence) to produce a cure that, to the best of their knowledge, hasn’t even been found yet. If that sounds like a stretch, they even let her work with her old research team of three people, which is supposed to fully convince the reader that a week is a completely plausible time frame to discover, produce, test and approve a cure for an illness.

The Side Characters

This team is composed of Jean, her former colleagues Lin and Lorenzo, and their supervisor Morgan, who you might remember from the novel’s opening sentence. Morgan is apparently an idiot linguist who is very unfit for his position, which is supposed to show how twisted the society in Vox is, as they put the dumb people in charge just because they’re men, and silence the smart women. What it actually does is show that this version of the USA apparently only has a handful of linguists and no other skilled scientists.

This is the novel’s description of Lin:

Lin Kwan is a small woman. I often told Patrick she could fit in one of my pant legs – and I’m only five and a half feet and 120 soaking wet, thanks to the stress diet I’ve been on for the past several months. Everything about her is small: her voice, her almond eyes, the sleek bob that barely reaches below her ears. Lin’s breasts and ass make me look like a Peter Paul Rubens model. But her brain – her brain is a leviathan of gray matter. It would have to be; MIT doesn’t hand out dual PhDs for nothing.

Here we learn that Lin is small, not conventionally attractive (read: small boobs and ass), and finally that she is incredibly intelligent. For some reason, Jean finds it important to describe Lin’s curves, as well as her own, before mentioning Lin’s intelligence. No, this novel was not written by Michael Bay. Also, for representation’s sake, Lin is Asian and a lesbian, yet every other major character in this novel is a white straight person.

Well, there is another lesbian in this story, actually. Jean’s old college roommate, Jackie Juarez, who Jean hasn’t seen since before the machocalypse. We get to know Jackie through flashbacks: the novel tries to portray her as this loud, over-the-top feminist who often tries to make Jean join the rallies and protests against the growing Pure Movement. Alas, Jean chooses to focus on school instead of going to protests and forever regrets this, thinking that if only she had fought, she might have changed history.

I don’t know how to feel about this novel’s depiction of Jackie. She is made out to be a stereotypical feminist lesbian, who actively protests against the uprising of the Pure Movement, and yet whose efforts are in vain. Here is an excerpt that characterizes how Jean sees Jackie, and therefore how the reader is supposed to see her:

“You have to vote, Jean,” [Jackie] said, throwing down the stack of campaign leaflets she’d been running around campus with while I was prepping for what I knew would be a monster of an oral exam. “You have to.”

“The only things I have to do are pay taxes and die,” I said, not holding back the sneer in my voice. That semester was the beginning of the end for Jackie an me. I’d started dating Patrick and preferred our nightly discussions about cognitive processes to Jackie’s rants about whatever new thing she had found to protest.

Here you can see that Jean clearly dismisses Jackie and “whatever new thing she had found to protest”, and instead muses about what an intellectual she is. I understand that this is a flashback, and it’s supposed to show that Jean was wrong not to care about protesting the Pure Movement, but this is told from present Jean’s perspective, so it’s clear she still rolls her eyes at Jackie’s activism in general. It feels like Vox is trying to say that actively expressing your ideas and concerns is useless, since Jean eventually overthrows the government with science and not through activism – and it even takes her no longer than a week to do it, as we learn at the beginning of this novel. There is a lot to unpack here,  but I still wouldn’t recommend thinking too hard about the ideas in this book.  

Jackie only becomes relevant to the plot towards the end. At some point she is held hostage by the government, so that Jean is forced to finish her work. Why the government chose to kidnap Jean’s old college roommate who she hasn’t seen or spoken about in years instead of, say, her daughter, we will never know. In the end, Jackie is only there so that Jean can save her and “redeem” herself for not having been there for Jackie in the past.

Lorenzo, the last member of the team, is Jean’s love affair since way before the Pure Movement effectively took over. The novel likes to remind the reader that Jean is with the Italian hunk Lorenzo because she despises her husband Patrick, so that makes cheating okay. Eventually we learn that Jean is pregnant with Lorenzo’s child, so he offers to let her escape with him to Italy as his wife. Yet Jean can’t allow herself to leave without her daughter Sonia – she’s fine with never seeing any of her sons again, though. She considers this for a while as she works on the cure for aphasia.

The Ending

At some point during the week, Lin disappears (we later learn she was imprisoned due to big gay activity). Jean and Lorenzo announce that they’ve discovered the cure and even test the serum on a random neighbour of Jean’s who happens to have aphasia as well. Also, Jean’s mother had an aneurysm earlier that week and also started suffering from aphasia. The government is pleased with the results and take the serum away.

Later, Morgan, the supervisor, takes Jean and Lorenzo to a strange lab underground to have them further develop the cure. There they walk through a hallway full of chimpanzees in cages, and there is a bizarre scene in which Jean gets too close to a cage and is attacked by a chimpanzee. There is no purpose to this scene other than to shock the reader, honestly. Here, the novel briefly, yet disrespectfully brings up a very real woman who was mauled by a chimpanzee in 2009 and managed to survive (Wikipedia link, no pictures), by having Jean think something along the lines of “oh no, I don’t want to end up like her!” during the attack.

Jean is fine, obviously. We’re over 200 pages in and nearing the end of the novel when the first interesting development happens in the form of a plot twist: the government has been using their cure in order to create an anti-serum that gives people aphasia. Their plan is to create a more effective means to silence women, of course, since they  wouldn’t be able to comprehend or formulate language any more. When Jean discovers this, she wants to quit, but is forced to stay when they reveal they’ve been keeping Jackie, Lin and Lin’s girlfriend hostage in the same building for this very occasion. And maybe also Steven back at that camp, but we don’t even care about him at this point.

The climax of the story arrives, and everything happens so quickly the reader doesn’t have time to digest it. I had to reread what actually happened at the end, because I couldn’t remeber it anymore. I’ll try to recreate the pacing of the ending in the following paragraph, so you can understand what I mean:

Jean and Lorenzo save the lesbians (who are the only likeable characters, so that made me happy), Morgan dies, I think, and they escape with the anti-serum. Patrick appears and decides to help, so they send him to the White House with an anti-serum bomb that suceeds, giving the president and all evil politicians aphasia. Patrick is killed during this, freeing Jean from their marriage and allowing her to escape with Lorenzo and all of her children, whom she suddenly stopped resenting. The Pure Movement collapses and all is well, thanks to... well, thanks to Patrick and Lorenzo.

Conclusion

Vox is a mess of a novel. The characters are unlikeable, the plot is badly paced and the ending is too sudden. I really didn’t care about what happened to any character at any point, which is incredibly disappointing. Additionally, there are many things wrong with the political message in Vox, namely the idea that all religious people are inherently evil and that men generally wish to control and silence women. The premise was good, the writing was fine, but the performance was terrible, unfortunately. Vox feels like it was rushed to come out in time for the dystopian fiction craze of 2017-18 caused by the release of The Handmaid’s Tale TV series. Hopefully we’ll see better work from the author in the future.

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[thelostnymphaeum]

“A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time.”

Entry: 006 // Literature // Title: Rizal Without the Overcoat Author: Ambeth R. Ocampo Year: 1990 (first publication)

_____

HOPELESS CRUSH

Even prior to entering my second year in college (when we have to take our mandatory Rizal course), I already have a “crush” on Rizal. If I’m not mistaken, I started to study about him for a contest that I was chosen to partake in when I was a college freshman. I was picked as a delegate for the annual National Rizal Youth Leadership Institute held in Baguio City, and I could still remember my most adored quote from Rizal, it was this:

“A life which is not dedicated to a great ideal is useless. It is a pebble lost in the field, not being part of an edifice.”

Growing up with a love for literature, I learned about Rizal’s talent and career as a writer, which fascinated me more than the fact that he was a doctor, sculptor, linguist and many more others that he was. I fell in love with his poetry and I truly believe that had I lived in the same timeline as him, I would have fallen head over heels for him. I am not even exaggerating. I would be helpless.

During this quarantine, a certain sweet friend of mine gifted me this book because she knew how much I adored Rizal and was burning my eyes by reading e-books (she also gave me my first manga, which was also about the life of Rizal – highly recommended). I credit her for the re-ignition of my love for the man, this book was able to show me the sides of Rizal that will never be talked about in classrooms, asked in examinations or written in textbooks.

FASCINATION, INFATUATION, ERUDITION

Being a Renaissance man who represented both the art and science of life, Rizal truly was salt to the earth. A huge chunk of my admiration for him was that he was a quintessential scholar. He studied every day about everything. He studied medicine, botany, interior design, art, agriculture and so much more. Somehow, a life like his is what I find ideal – the continuous pursuit of knowing. He loves his books dearly and was stingy about them – which made me realize that it’s not odd for me to be sensitive about my books. Haha. He was a bookworm and learned foreign languages to widen his education. He spoke at least five languages – Spanish, Tagalog, English, French and German. How will I be able to do that? If his sentiments weren’t so anti-clerical, he could have qualified to be the Pope with all the languages he knew. In this book, Guillermo Tolentino had a séance with the spirit of Rizal, and although we cannot prove that it truly was him – it certainly had his flavor.  

The book also talked about Rizal’s popularity and how it was more of a disadvantage rather than an advantage, because he never asked to be glorified. In my opinion, one of the most remarkable detriment of his colossal popularity is that the other heroes are overshadowed. Rarely do Filipinos know that Bonifacio strived to be literate on his own, learned English because of his job and even has a beautiful handwriting. The now well-known Heneral Luna studied pharmacy, chemistry and was an active writer during his time (I find his pen name in La Solidaridad utterly adorable: “Taga-ilog”; in comparison to Rizal’s “Laong Laan” or del Pilar’s “Plaridel” that seemed as if hard thoughts were given to lol). Imagine how many more of our heroes would be admired as polymaths because of their talents? If only we gave time to study and appreciate each of them.

SI ANDRÉS O SI JOSÉ?

For as long as I could remember, Rizal could never be brought up in a conversation without Bonifacio’s name getting dragged in. It seems that a lot of people think that Bonifacio deserves the title of pambansang bayani better than Rizal because he was the one who fought the fight with flesh and blood.

Obviously, my opinion would be biased since I have a crush on Rizal. All I can say is that: they fought the fight they knew how to fight. If Rizal did not write those novels, who else would? He was an ilustrado, and was one of the few who was brave enough to write about the politics of the Philippines under the Spaniards. It was a fight he was well-equipped to fight. It was the fight he was built and trained to fight. 

Another subject of dispute is that Rizal was not even well-versed in Tagalog (Filipino), he wrote the best in Spanish. Yet if you examine it closely, the irony is still present today: the book that I read was in English, the formal language in our country is English and this blog post that I’m writing is in English. Can we call him out on that without being hypocrites? The unfortunate truth is that this crevice remains open in our society. This colonial mentality still exists, just like how someone is labeled as “jologs” when she/he can speak better in Filipino than in English. 

On the other hand, did Bonifacio need to write those novels? No. He did not need to – because he lived out those struggles every single day of his life in the Philippines. He was a born warrior. He fought the battles. It was the fight he knew how to fight. It was the fight he was made and meant to fight. 

In my eyes, they had their own battles – both of which were within the grasp of their aptitude and proclivity.

THE TIMES OF TODAY

It’s such a shame that majority of the youth barely care for the Rizal course, often finding it taxing and tedious because it’s history. Admittedly, including me, know very little of our own national heroes and of our own history.

Filipinos admire the culture of other countries instead of our own. With K-pop, Hollywood or Anime, our (yes, I’m also a victim) eyes are set on looking on other countries - not on our own. It’s heartbreaking. For a third world country, economy is put first before arts, culture or sports. Our country has so much potential, as evident in the natural resources, creativity, culture, agriculture, tribes and so much more. If only these will be focused upon, our country will be unstoppable. I have no doubt. But we cannot work with fixing these ideals if the basic problems are still existent.

Yesterday, I watched “Heneral Luna”. Such a beautiful film (how I wish more historical Filipino films would be produced, rather than cheesy predictable ones that are made just because they make money). What I find the most disturbing is that centuries and fifteen presidents later, the same problem of Heneral Luna still exists. The country is still fighting within itself; with Filipinos still putting their own desires rather than of the country. I wonder what the La Solidaridad and Katipunan members would think of our country today.

[canuckianhawkbi]

the Star Wars / LotR crossover / side-story I didn’t know I wanted

Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas are members of the Pathfinder commandos

Aragorn is a tracker, survivalist, and linguist (“who needs droids?”)

Gimli specializes in heavy weapons

Legolas is a sharpshooter (obvs)

the hobbits are from a little known world in the Outer Rim, and joined the Rebellion after the TIE Interceptor “Wraith Squadron” carried out a reconnaissance mission in their system. They are constantly mistaken for Ugnauts and Jawas everywhere they go

Merry and Pippin are Rebel Fleet Troopers

Frodo flies an X-wing, Sam flies a Y-wing (the potato of the Rebel fleet)

Boromir and Faramir are Rebel shocktroopers (like Cara Dune), Boromir was killed by an Imperial sniper

Denethor is an Imperial Governor from the Core

Éomer and Éowyn are Alderaanian survivors; Théoden escorted them out of the system but his ship was shot down by the Empire

Gandalf, Saruman, and Radagast are ancient Force wielders, similar to the Mortis Gods

Elrond is old enough that he witnessed the fall of the Sith Empire 1000 years BBY

Sauron is some kind of powerful Dark Side entity being studied by the Emperor

Gollum is the sole inhabitant of a desolate planet in the Unknown Regions

Barliman Butterbur works at Maz Kanata’s castle

story ideas below the cut

after the Battle of Hoth, Palpatine discovers a palantír ancient Sith artefact through which he can commune with a Dark Side entity calling itself Sauron – the entity sends a servant, Saruman, to the Emperor, to guide him to a forgotten kyber weapon called the One Ring

Sheev dispatches Saruman and the star destroyer Nazgúl to deliver Wraith Squadron to a remote Outer Rim world on a covert reconnaissance mission to locate an ancient temple containing clues to the Ring’s whereabouts

Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin leave their homeworld following the Empire’s arrival, joining the Rebel Fleet shortly before the Millennium Falcon arrives from Cloud City

having witnessed Wraith Squadron’s operation firsthand, they provide the Alliance with valuable intel, but Rebel leadership cannot divert any significant resources to investigating their claims, so a special strike team is formed, including three Pathfinders (Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli) and two shocktroopers (Boromir and Faramir). Frodo and Sam transfer from their fighter escort detail to join Merry and Pippin

the CR90 Corvette Fellowship under Captain Elrond delivers the unit to Maz Kanata’s castle, where a Rebel contact named Gandalf will assist them in finding a suitable transport

Gandalf introduces the strike team to a pair of Alderaanians, Éomer and Éowyn, co-captains of the VCX-100 Rohirric, who are sympathetic to their cause; the Nazgûl arrives in the system and Imperial forces touch down in the forest outside the castle

Boromir is shot by a scout trooper while providing covering fire for the rest of the team to board the ship, which has to flee while under fire by Wraith Squadron

Rohirric becomes damaged in a similar manner that allowed Vader’s ISD Devastator to track the Tantive IV years earlier; with Nazgûl is in pursuit, the captains decide to make a jump to the Unknown Regions in hopes of throwing the destroyer off their scent

Frodo has a premonition in the Force that leads him to sneak out in Rohirric’s attack shuttle Gwaihir, with Sam stowed away on board. Gandalf realizes what has happened, and urges the team to continue with the mission as planned, lest they lead the Empire to whatever the pair might find

Wraith Squadron are deployed to pursue Rohirric into an asteroid field before its hyperdrive can be repaired; with Faramir manning the nose gun and Éowyn in the turret, they manage to cripple the Imperial fighter wing, destroying five Interceptors before the remaining TIEs break off

the Force leads Frodo and Sam to an unknown planet, where they meet a bizarre alien called Gollum who is cursed with knowledge and obsession with the ancient Ring; at Frodo’s urging, Sam reluctantly agrees to let Gollum lead them to the weapon

Saruman learns of the pair’s location through Dark Side divination; Nazgûl and the remaining half of Wraith Squadron are diverted to pursue

while work on the Rohirric’s hyperdrive is being finished by Gimli, Aragorn figures out how to locate the freighter’s shuttle, using the similar energy signature shared by the linked ships; the strike team reach out to Elrond on the Fellowship, urging him to appeal to Rebel command for support on their behalf

Frodo and Sam arrive on the planet where the Ring’s control matrix is located on a mountaintop; but the Nazgûl is not far behind, and scrambles its full compliment of ground forces and fighters, including Wraith Squadron, to comb the planet for the Gwaihir

the Rohirric enters the system, and is able to avoid Imperial detection long enough for Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, and Gandalf to disembark in search of Frodo and Sam, leaving Éomer and Éowyn, Faramir, Merry and Pippin to run interference against the Imperials in the lone freighter

Gandalf goes off alone and locates the abandoned shuttle, which he uses to seemingly surrender himself to the Nazgûl, when in reality his plan is to confront Saruman; meanwhile, the Pathfinders take down an AT-AT (mostly thanks to Legolas) and manage to hijack another

the mountain Gollum leads Frodo and Sam to is really an active volcano and a place strong in the Dark Side, where beings strong in the Force can remotely control the Ring; Frodo and Gollum grapple in the Force for the kyber weapon, which Sam can only watch

though impossibly outnumbered by the star destroyer’s security, Gandalf mind-tricks his way to the bridge where Saruman is waiting

with Imperial forces surrounding the mountain, everything seems hopeless, but Fellowship arrives with the rest of the Rebel fleet to take on the Nazgûl and its swarm of TIEs; Éowyn manages to personally shoot down Wraith Leader from the turret of the Rohirric

the Pathfinders manage to cut off Imperial ground forces on their way up a narrow mountain pass, and use the terrain and their captured walker to hold off the pursuit of Frodo and Sam

as the Rebel fleet cripple the Nazgûl with sheer numbers, Gandalf and Saruman duel on the bridge of the destroyer; the reactor of the huge ship is ruptured, and it careens into the Ring, sending both objects on a collision course with the planet below

the Nazgul and One Ring make impact dangerously close to the increasingly violent volcano, and the resulting tremors break Gollum’s mental link with Frodo, sending the alien creature falling to his death; miraculously, Gandalf survives the crash landing, and evacuates Frodo and Sam in the shuttle, picking up Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli on the way to regrouping with the Rohirric and the Rebel fleet

having strangely lost contact with Sauron, Palpatine shrugs the whole thing off, since he was building the second Death Star anyway

after Endor a year later, Faramir and Éowyn settle on Yavin IV next door to Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli’s fellow Pathfinder Kes Dameron and his wife Shara Bey, because shut up

[kyliwrites]

the exit's the other way

ship: davekat (no quadrant/all quadrants; established relationship)

prompt: "you know what!? fuck you. i'm out of here."

"*name.*"

"WHAT?!"

"the exit's the other way."

setting: earth c (canon universe/post-canon, no epilogues)

Your name is Dave Strider, and you are just the absolute god damned best at riling loud, insufferable aliens up to the brink of delirious rage. Because the way their gray cheeks flush and their eyes darken is so perfectly entertaining, you take it upon yourself to annoy them into paradox space and back.

Karkat, for example. All it takes is the bare minimum of poking and prodding at his favorite romcom actor and SHABAM. Little guy's all fuming and everything; you can see the puffs of smoke coming out his ears and the attractive way his fangs slide out over his lips. He's glaring in that wide-eyed furious way of his, anger hot enough to brand you right on the asscheek like a motherfucking cow. Moo, bitch.

You hardly insulted him, but Karkat's like that: hypersensitive, petty, an asshole, totally adorable when he's mad. He's got his flaws (who doesn't?), but with you, he doesn't try so hard to cover them up. You love him all the more for that.

Presently, he's ranting about the flaws and inaccuracies of some human film you alchemized into existence for him, and he's been doing so for approximately four minutes and twenty-seven seconds. You haven't been paying much attention, if you're being honest, because you've been too busy mentally recounting everything else about those four minutes and twenty-seven seconds. Why? Narrative reasons, yo.

You tune in at the last second and catch his metaphorical hands instead of the hilariously unironic picking apart of whichever movie you picked for him (you can't even remember at this point; you've spent all three years since the game ended finding progressively shittier films, if only so you can experience the pleasure that is Karkat's ranting).

"-and are you even FUCKING listening, douchenozzle!?" Comes Karkat's infuriated, raspy interjection. It throws you bodily from your thoughts, and you blink from behind your shades in an effort to clear your head.

"Nah," you answer honestly once you've regained your bearing. "Shit got more boring than watching American football with the boys on a rainy Saturday night. Dude goes in for a tackle and skids across the field tragically. Eight jocks in a row go flying and it's like a god damn bowling alley up in this bitch. The boys start swearing like some motherfuckers, but you, a renowned Football Connoisseur, shake your head solemnly rather than go batshit insane over the slip-n-slide conga line like, you know, a normal person. Football people, bro. No humor. No sense of irony."

"I understood approximately FUCKALL OF THAT, asshole. Speak English or Alternian, thanks a whole fucking lot. What gog damn language was that!?" Karkat looks you up and down with a scrunched up expression, as if deciding where to maim you first. You straighten involuntarily underneath his gaze.

"...S'called Texan, m'dude."

He recoils melodramatically. "Texan!? Is that a joke or some bullshit? Some kind of dead language you somehow learned? Where the fuck is the TEXAN and who came up with a name that hideous and disgusting?"

"No, Karks," you wheeze. "Texas. The people from Texas are Texans."

"Why do I care about your overcomplicated alien linguistics!? Answer my question, Strider," he demands, crossing his arms. His nails, bitten down yet still sharp and threatening, dig into his sweater.

"I'm from Texas, dude. You know how there were, like, different dialects on y'all's murderplanet? English is kind of like that. Texans have huge accents and are famous for being racists, people from Jersey are famous for being the shittiest people, Alabamians marry their relatives, etcetera etcetera."

After a moment of thought, Karkat nods seriously and says, "That explains why you're such a xenophobe."

You choke. Of all the things you'd been expecting him to say, it definitely wasn't that. You reply eloquently:

"W-what!?"

"You heard me. You fucking space racist."

"Oh my jesus shit, rude," you protest vehemently. "I am not space racist." Not anymore, at least.

Karkat flashes a rare fanged grin at you, his eyebrows lifted, and you realize he's only joking. The smile is gone as soon as it came, one of those blink-and-you-miss-it gifts. "Space racist." He nudges you with one elbow. You nudge him back.

"Dude," you say, "don't make this a thing."

He pushes you forcefully, hard enough for you to have to grip the arm of the sofa you're sitting atop to remain seated, in response. Oh, it is on.

You tackle him and he lets out a paralyzed squawk when you roll off the couch and into the floor. He lands on his back with an "oof," and you pin him down by the shoulders. He bares his teeth, but the smile breaking out over his face ruins the effect.

"Get off me, asshat, I'll fucking kneecap you," he barks, still grinning like an idiot.

"You won't." You're grinning like an idiot, too, to be fair, except yours is more fond than shit-eating. Dave Strider, maximum sap. Whod've thunk.

He surges forward suddenly, without warning, and uses his legs to flip you onto your back; it knocks all the air out of you, but you manage a cackle and a "fuck you" anyway. He pins your arms above your head and sits on your chest.

"Say fucking uncle, Strider."

"That's not how that game works!" You wheeze. "You don't even know what an uncle is!" He smirks—the sight makes your heart flutter like the cat getting showered in affection meme. The thought distracts you and you briefly ponder making a Karkat version, but you aren't given the reins to think very long because he flicks your nose.

"Ow! Dickhead, that hurt—"

"Dickhead yourself! Your fucking bony ribs are digging into my ass!" He wrinkles his nose and shifts, trying to find a more comfortable way to sit.

"What ass?" You demand in jest, which is the worst thing someone pinned beneath the person they are making fun of could possibly say. He narrows his eyes and you manage a "shit wait no" before he snatches his hands away.

You've lived together for all of three years, four months, and seventeen days. He knows your weaknesses as well as he knows his own, your fears, your discomforts. He knows what you like, love, and hate. He knows when to push and when not to push. He gets you better than anyone, even your own psychoanalytic twin sister (you'll have to blame that one on the fact that she and her wife don't leave their house unless they're going to the alien procreation cave).

So, that's why he decides to tickle you. Because he knows you throw an absolute shitfit when it comes to being tickled.

You hunch your shoulders when his hands descend upon you and try to roll yourself into a tight, impenetrable ball to escape his fingers, but he's fucking relentless. He knows how sensitive you are; it's the perfect revenge.

In between your wheezing laughs, you can barely manage words, but you cough out a "dude," "bro," and "dudebro," then, finally, "Karkat," before he pauses, rasps, "You did this to yourself," and raises his hands threateningly again.

You blurt, "Uncle! I'll say uncle just don't do it please dude I have never done anything wrong ever you know this right? I—"

He leans forward, silencing you. "Take that bullshit you said first back, Strider, or your plea to your human familial figure is null."

"Fine! Fine, I take it back. Listen, bro. You definitely don't not have an ass. Like, in fact, that ass is so ripe I can't believe anyone would ever accuse you of not having one. That's so fucking disrespectful. How dare those blind motherfuckers? I'm waving my fists at them right now. I will singlehandedly smite all Karkat's assphobes, my man. I'll raise my assphobe smiting trident and pulverize all these thotass sons of bitches right here, right now. I'll do it, I will. I'm no coward. I'll protect that magnificent rear with everything I have, dude. Those glorious buns. The assnihilator—"

"Shut the fuck up oh my gog I can't believe I fucking brought this upon myself." Karkat rolls off of you and clutches said glorious buns. Apparently your ribs really did hurt his ass. Huh.

"You did bring it upon yourself," you agree. And then, because you still aren't done pushing his buttons and want to be an insufferable piece of shit, "So, you didn't say what you thought of the movie."

He opens his mouth, clamps it shut hard enough for his teeth to clank together, repeats the motion a couple of times. "I—Dave—You fucking—No. You know what? Fuck you. I'm out of here."

You burst into the horrid laughter of a hyena when he scrambles to his feet in one furious motion; he's back to grumpy scowling and cussing you out in the amount of time it takes for the underpaid McDonald's employee working the back of the store to flip a shitty one hundred percent not-beef burger patty.

He stomps heavily away—in the direction of the kitchen, you note, which only makes you cackle harder when you realize he didn't do it on purpose.

"Oh my fucking jesus god. Karkat!"

"WHAT!?" He yells without facing you.

"The exit's the other way."

He comes to an abrupt halt, slowly turns around, and begins marching back, in the right direction this time.

You're too busy flailing on the couch (you can't even remember pulling yourself back onto it) to give a shit when he throws himself down beside you. You do, however, give tons of shits when he pulls you into a very exasperated smooch that simply screams "shut the FUCK up you absolute godless heathen of a space monkey."

You are not opposed to "shut the FUCK up you absolute godless heathen of a space monkey" smooches.

He draws back and rolls his eyes. "Are you done yet, bulgemuncher?"

You are, as established many times, an insufferable piece of shit, so you say, "Dunno. Do I get to kiss you again?"

"Not with that attitude you don't."

You kiss him anyway, because god dammit he's your boyfriend and you demand kissing rights. He doesn't protest; instead, he wraps his arms around your neck and relaxes, just a little.

You could stay in his arms forever, you think.

[omoi-no-hoka]

My Experience Working in Japan

Fear not--it’s not all gloom and doom.

Today I thought I’d talk a bit about what it’s been like working in Japan for half a decade. I imagine that my experience is probably different from someone who lives in a more metropolitan area like Tokyo. 

Why did you choose Hokkaido?

Hokkaido is the northernmost island/prefecture of Japan. It’s the biggest prefecture and plays a huge role in Japan’s agriculture. Since it’s a separate island from Honshu (the island with Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and pretty much everywhere else of note), not too many foreigners choose to live here. However, there is a small but ever-growing community of winter sports lovers who move here long-term. 

I studied abroad in Hokkaido when I was in uni and fell in love with it. What can I say? I grew up on a farm in a county that had a grand total of three traffic lights, and I just hate the hustle and bustle and endless concrete of big cities. I’d go crazy if I had to live somewhere like Tokyo. I need to see green, I need to hear birds instead of sirens. 

What was your first job, and how did you get it?

I knew by about my third or fourth year of uni that I wanted to go to Japan for a while, so I double majored in the two areas that I knew would help get me a decent job there: Japanese, and English with a focus on linguistics, second language acquisition, and English as a Second Language (ESL). I also obtained a CELTA (Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from Cambridge. There are many different TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificates out there, but the CELTA is the most esteemed and recognized worldwide, so that was what I got. 

I ended up looking for teaching jobs in Sapporo, even though it was a much bigger city than I wanted to live in. It has a population of 2 million, and the city I had my eyes on was less than 1/4 of Sapporo’s size. But I couldn’t find any teaching jobs in the smaller city. The job-hunting was difficult, because unless you have a spousal visa or something, the employer has to be able to sponsor a work visa. But sponsoring work visas is very expensive for the company, so many smaller businesses can’t give you a work visa. 

There are many 英会話 (Eikaiwa) English Conversation schools in Japan. Basically, the entire English education curriculum and its implementation in Japanese public schools is...atrocious. Absolutely worthless. The vast majority of students study English for all 6 years of middle and high school and can’t have a simple conversation by the end of it, though they can read and write it somewhat decently. So the Eikaiwa industry was born, and these schools promise parents that their children can have native-like pronunciation and get jobs in fields where English is necessary if they pay outrageous costs for weekly 50-minute lessons. 

There are many big-name Eikaiwas in operation throughout the country, but many of these are so-called ブラック企業 (black kigyou, a.k.a. black businesses) which means that they commit various labor law violations. Most foreigners they hire don’t speak Japanese and aren’t aware of their legal rights, or what they can do when they are violated. A quick google search will show you tons of horror stories from foreigners hired by eikaiwas who didn’t receive pay, were screamed at for calling in sick to work, etc. Basically, most corporate eikaiwas don’t care who is teaching the kids, as long as they are white. You are a piece of meat to them. 

So I avoided all the big-name places and found a small, privately owned Eikaiwa in Sapporo, run by a fellow foreigner. I had a skype interview with her from my living room in America, she hired me, and I moved to Sapporo. I worked there for three years. Despite having a fellow ex-pat as a boss, I was still subjected to the mistreatment of the corporate eikaiwas. No matter how sick I was, despite the fact that we were forbidden from wearing masks (kids need to see our mouths for pronunciation), and despite the fact that I was constantly around infants, I was ordered to “take an aspirin and get to work.” I was under the impression I was enrolled in the Japanese pension, but after two years of working there I learned that we were not, in fact, enrolled in the pension. This is illegal, and I was forced to pay about $4,000 USD in backpay to the pension. My employers refused to provide assistance paying this even though by law the employer is required to pay 50% of an employee’s pension. 

So yeah. Not too fun really. The kids were really cute, though, and I didn’t hate teaching English. But after 3 years, I was ready to move on.

What’s your current job, and how did you get it?

The three years I worked at the Eikaiwa, I studied Japanese at least one hour every night, and at least 8-10 hours on the weekends. I had the conversation and grammar down, but my kanji and vocabulary was lacking so all I did was read, read, read. Thanks to that, I passed the JLPT N1 and my Japanese reached a level that I could survive in a Japanese workplace. 

Fed up with my current job and jaded of teaching, I looked for translation jobs in companies in Hokkaido. But there were absolutely zilch. I realized that (in Hokkaido), there were no jobs for foreigners other than teaching English. The situation was so hopeless that I actually looked for jobs back in the United States and applied for a couple. Moving back home after only 3 years of living abroad felt like defeat and I didn’t want to leave Japan, but I just couldn’t take the eikaiwa industry anymore, and I knew that I would only spiral further into depression in a metropolis like Tokyo. 

In June of 2017, I sent out some applications and applied to headhunting agencies in America. And in August, a friend here in Hokkaido called me with some incredible news. A student of hers was working as a temp translator for a company in the city I had originally wanted to live in. He needed a replacement, and would I be interested?

I couldn’t believe it. Translation was my dream job, and it was in my dream city. I immediately called to find out more, and I looked up how to make a Japanese resume. Did you know that resumes are printed on A3 paper and hand written?! Good lord, I spent about 9 hours writing and re-writing it because I don’t have good handwriting in Japanese. I went in for an interview. They said they would match the pay of my current job and then some, that I would have business trips to Tokyo, that there was a very likely chance I would get to see other parts of Japan due to this job, that I would be able to build experience in multiple fields at once, that they would give me all the benefits that they are legally obligated to give (lol), and they would let me go home to America for extended periods as long as I took my work laptop and didn’t mind doing a bit of work while I was there. It was everything I dreamed of, so of course I accepted the position. 

And the cherry on top? The guy who gave me the interview had a very unusual last name, which I’ll say is K___. At the end of the interview, he asked, “By the way, do you know anyone else named K___?”

Me: “Well, actually I do have a student whose last name is K___.”

And he smiles and says, “Yeah, that’s my daughter.”

In a city of 2 million people, about 700 children aged 0-18 were enrolled in my Eikaiwa. Out of those 700, I taught about 120. And out of all of those kids, one of them turned out to be the daughter of the man who gave me my interview and would become my boss! WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?! It still blows my mind to think about. 

Later, after I was hired and we went for drinks after work, he told me that the moment he had seen my resume and the name of the Eikaiwa, he had gone to his daughter and asked, “Hey, do you know omoi-no-hoka-sensei? What’s she like?” His daughter said a bunch of really nice things about me, and he decided that if his daughter liked me, then I must be a good addition to the company. Before the interview he had already decided to hire me. 

It just goes to show that you should always be your best because you never know who’s watching!

So yeah, I quit my job at the eikaiwa, moved to my dream city, and started my dream job two years ago. My coworkers are all really, really nice. My bosses are all great. I’m the only person in my whole office that speaks English though, so sometimes I get a bit lonely in that regard. But because I’m the only one who speaks English and this is a global company with headquarters in America, I get asked to do a bunch of miscellaneous tasks, so I’m never bored! Sometimes this means I have a lot of overtime, though. It’s not uncommon to have a 12 hour work-day. But in my downtime between translation requests, I make most of these Tumblr posts. 

[neni-has-ascended]

You Can(Not) UnGay Kaworu Nagisa - An Essay

This is a text-version of my video-essay on the recent Netflix/Evangelion translation controversy. To see the video version, please click here!

I make no secret of the fact that the linguistics involved in Anime and Game translation are one of my primary fields of interest as a Japanologist. Compared to translation between Germanic and Romanic Languages, as the west is used to it, translating from Japanese to English is filled with a plethora of pitfalls, the likes of which can be very difficult to imagine unless you’re fluent in both languages.  

It’s because of this that my interest in any given AniManga controversy immediately skyrockets as soon as the matter of translation issues is brought up. Which brings us to June 21st’s release of Netflix’ Redub of Studio Gainax’ internationally infamous existential creator meltdown disguised as a Mecha Anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion.

1.)    Neon Genesis ADVangelion

For those among you who haven’t yet heard of this inherently controversial work – what rock do you live under and does it still have vacancies? In all seriousness though, enough videos attempting to summarize the plot of NGE exist on the internet to make giving the rundown here an exercise in redundancy. All you need to know is that the protagonist’ name is Shinji and that he’s a mental-wreck with Daddy Issues who pilots a giant cyborg infused with the soul of his dead Mom to fight surrealist alien abominations and gains an increasingly screwed up social life doing so, all while his already fragile psyche gradually declines to world-ending consequences. For far less fatalistic takes on some of these concepts, please see RahXephon and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Good? Good. Let’s move on.

The original ADV Films dub of Neon Genesis Evangelion and its sequels and spin-offs is… not really flawless, to say the least, but it did a good job in introducing the series to a western audience while staying entirely true to the themes and intentions of the original version. This is definitely at least partially thanks to the fact that director and auteur of the series, Hideaki Anno, personally oversaw the translation and dubbing process, and while the guy in all honesty doesn’t really know the first thing about voice acting – his performance as Jiro in The Wind Rises is one of the reasons it’s my least favorite Ghibli movie – what he does understand is his own work, and what it should convey to the audience in order to be authentic to his vision. So while I do have my issues with the ADV dub, such as poor audio-quality and hopeless cases of overacting caused by poor voice direction in certain parts, the translated script of the series was as stellar as could be expected from something created with the original author’s input, and to the very end of the original 26 episodes run, one can definitely feel the deep, emotional investment every single member of the English cast had in these characters and their journey. (I mean. Just listen to Spike Spencer’s secret rant in the end of the last episode. The dude clearly cares about what happens to Shinji.) In any case, this is probably one of the most influential, iconic dubs to all of the English-speaking Anime Fandom.

Then Netflix decided to license NGE. Not the ADV Dub. Just the show.

People were not happy.

2.)    The Rebuild of Netflixgelion

Please do not mistake what I’m saying for pedantic. The iconic nature of the original ADV dub of NGE cannot be understated, and plays a huge role in the current lack of acceptance for the Redub, even though previous similar redubbing efforts, such as in the case of Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, where welcomed by the community wholeheartedly. The new dub cast is absolutely stellar, including voice acting veterans such as Carrie Keranen and Erica Lindbeck, and Casey Mongillo’s amazing vocal range goes a long way to replicate and convey the emotional depth of Shinji Ikari in a way previously only seen in Megumi Ogata’s original Japanese performance.However, while the Netflix dub has a wonderful cast and voice direction, what it does not have is the original dub’s Hideaki Anno-approved script.

…Aaaaand, this is where the real troubles start.

To be totally clear, the redub always meant trouble. The original voice cast were reportedly never given a real chance to reprise their roles- despite efforts made by the main trio, Spike Spencer, Amanda Winn Lee and Tifanny Grant to at least be given a chance to audition – which is a surefire recipe for upsetting a lot of fans. However, this is a problem that could have at least been partially smoothed over after allowing the performances of the new cast to shine in their own right. I mean, even if it is incredibly scummy to not even inform the old cast of the auditions for the redub, if the new version proves to contain superior performances and direction in comparison to the, honestly badly-aged ADV dub, then Netflix’s decision to make an entirely new dub is entirely understandable, right?

No such arguments can be applied to the retranslation of the show’s script.

3.)    The End of Authorial Intent

I haven’t rewatched the entire show in the new dub, just two key episodes. That said, I wouldn’t dream of calling the new script ‘bad’. It’s, for the most part, natural and faithful to the original Japanese source text in much the same way the ADV dub was, to the point that some stray lines received identical translation in both versions. What gives the new script away as entirely unrelated to that of the ADV dub, however, are some rather…  baffling localization choices. 

All of those decisions are rooted in the original Japanese script. They’re not incorrect translations. If the Japanese were to be your only point of reference, there would be no reason to complain about these choices.

But we do have a point of reference. The ADV script. Which was overseen and approved by Hideaki Anno. The original director.

In the making of this video, I have since learned that Anno’s animation company, Khara, was most likely involved in the translation of the script for the Redub. However, as I can’t find any evidence that he himself was involved, the point I am about to make still stands:

Back in the 90s, very shortly after the show concluded its original run, Anno personally signed off on every single choice the ADV dub made. The respective pronunciations of Nerv, Seele and Gehirn, calling the EVA pilots by the correct singular “Child”, rather than the awkward Engrish singular “Children” the original Japanese featured, and referring to the enemies consistently as Angels, even in parts where the original Japanese mixed up the terminology for the sake of a pun with Kaworu’s name. 

So, all of the ADV localization changes are within the intent of the original author. They are part of how the show is meant to be consumed by a western audience. Not carrying over this terminology, despite it being faithful to the Japanese script, thus ironically makes the Netflix script LESS faithful to Anno’s authorial intent than the ADV dub. But those are only terminology changes, right? They’re not a big deal. They don’t alter the context of the narrative itself.

…

Kaworu Nagisa.

4.)    Kaworu Nagisa

Remember how I mentioned that I only really watched two episodes of the Netflix dub all the way through so far? Well, one of those two episodes happens to be one of the series’ most infamous, right after the two-part finale: Episode 24. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, or “The Final Messenger” – Let’s not get hung up on which it is, Evangelion has ALWAYS been weird with titles.

This Episode introduces Kaworu Nagisa, the fifth of the EVA pilots and long-time fangirl-favorite for not-so-subtle reasons. Kaworu appears as Shinji is at his lowest point, our main protagonist’s already pretty much non-existent self-esteem in shambles. The two boys bond immediately over… the fact that Kaworu can sing ‘Ode to Joy’? Yeah, let’s go with that – And the majority of the episode consists of showcasing the growing relationship between Kaworu and Shinji, beginning with simple conversations, but quickly progressing into some more… serious territory.

I won’t sugarcoat things, in terms of narrative structure, the episode is a mess, rushing from scene to scene with reckless abandon, attempting to successfully tell a story in under 25 minutes, that some Disney Movies don’t tell right in 90+ minutes. This is doubtlessly due to the overall mess that NGE’s production process had become at this point in its original run for reasons too complicated to talk about in this video, but let me assure you that there’s pretty solid evidence that Kaworu was definitely originally meant to appear for much more than a single episode. As it stands, however, he dies in the same episode he is introduced, begging Shinji to assist him in his suicide after revealing himself to him as the final Angel. His effect on Shinji, however, is profound and comparable to the effect Nia Teppelin of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has on that show’s protagonist, Simon Giha. In that way, just as with Nia later, it is plain as day that Kaworu is intended to be one of Shinji’s love interests. And the episode is NOT subtle at all in portraying him as such.

A lot can be said about the exact nature of Kaworu’s affection for Shinji, from Kaworu clearly seeing Shinji as some sort of avatar for humanity as a whole on which he projects his admiration for the species, to Shinji seemingly falling victim to an idealized Oedipus Complex in regards to his perception of Kaworu, the fact remains that their interactions with one another in Episode 24 are in places obviously romantic to even sexual in not only the dialogue, but also the visuals. Even with Hideaki Anno’s profession that Shinji’s romantic feelings for Kaworu aren’t “carnal”, they’re still obviously there. Projected and skewed by their unusual psyches as aspects of it may be, the relationship between them is clearly portrayed in a way that transcends the platonic and becomes intimate more quickly than your seafood friends can start singing ‘kiss the guy’ on a romantic boat ride – It’s not subtext, you guys. Towards Shinji Ikari, Kaworu Nagisa acts and speaks quite openly like one would speak to a lover. And even if Kaworu and his ambiguous humanity are somehow not gay enough for you, well, resident violently blushing and stuttering smitten wreck Shinji Ikari will put your doubts to rest. The visual homosexual (homoromantic?) tension in these scenes is so tangible, you can cut it with a knife. The dialogue, at certain points, doesn’t even really matter. Kaworu could quite literally be reading off the grocery list, and these scenes would STILL be gay.

That doesn’t mean the dialogue is not important, and that one shouldn’t really, really pay attention to what’s on screen when translating.

5.)    The Final Angel is in the Detail

The translation of Kaworu’s words to Shinji in the Netflix dub is not wrong. But it ignores the context of the scene, as well as authorial intent. And that’s why I understand why people are angry at it.

The lines in question are these : 

(Scene 1)

Kaworu: そう、好意に値することよ。

Shinji: 好意？

Kaworu:「好き」ってこと、さ

(Scene 2)

Shinji: カヲル君が「好きだ」って言ってくれたんだ。僕のこと。初めて…初めて人から「好きだ」って言われたんだ。

In the ADV dub, these lines were translated like this: 

(Scene 1)

Kaworu: This is worth earning my empathy.

Shinji: Empathy?

Kaworu: I’m saying “I love you.”  

(Scene 2)

Shinji: Kaworu said that he loved me. I’ve never... felt such kindness before.

In the Netflix dub, however, they were translated like this: 

(Scene 1)

Kaworu: Yes, you’re worthy of my grace.

Shinji: Your grace?

Kaworu: I’m saying “I like you.”  

(Scene 2)

Shinji: Kaworu said I was worthy of his grace. That was the first time... someone told me they liked me.

Which one of these is right? The fact is… both are.

The Japanese term “ 好き ” doesn’t really have a direct equivalent in English. It holds a connotation that is meant to convey very personal, but broadly defined affection. It doesn’t simply mean “to like something”. It means to feel a strong, positive, emotional connection to that person of thing. For that reason, this term can be used to profess affection to your friends, your family, your favorite item… Or as a love-confession. 

In Japan, love-confessions using “ 好き ” are a lot, lot more common than the much, much stronger term “愛する”, let alone the implicitly sexual term “恋する”. In most romance Manga, “ 好き ” will be the term of choice the heroine uses to confess her love to her object of affection. And though, via character analysis, a strong argument can be made that when Kaworu uses “ 好き ” to express his affection for Shinji, he means general affection towards Shinji’s humanity more than personal, romantic affection, this is clearly not how Shinji takes Kaworu’s words. To Shinji, what Kaworu said in that moment, definitely sounded like a confession of romantic devotion, which becomes very, very clear when Shinji later tells Misato: 

Shinji: 初めて人から「好きだ」って言われたんだ。

With the line being translates as “I like you”, this statement of Shinji sounds like pure delusion, which wouldn’t be out of character for him, of course, but isn’t at all what the episode is trying to get across. Of course people have told Shinji before they ‘like’ something about him! That’s a big part of the reason he started defining himself through his status as pilot of EVA Unit 01; his efforts earned him praise from those around him. He had friends for most of the series, at least implicitly, these people have definitely expressed a ‘liking’ for him. So by translating “好き” as “like” in this context, a whole layer of the statement is lost, and Shinji professing that this was the first time anybody has ever said that they “like” him sounds less like a serious revelation about his character, and more like his typical, delusional whining about how the world hates him.

And I think that’s why Anno signed off on the ADV dub translating the line as “I love you” rather than “I like you”. Because the point of this line is not Shinji thinking that Kaworu is the only person who’s ever tolerated his presence. It’s that Shinji feels like Kaworu was the first person to ever have a genuine, emotional connection to him. Something he’s never allowed himself to have, due to the series’ often cited theme of Hedgehog’s Dilemma.

And, as correct as translating “ 好き ” as “like” is,  a whole dimension of Episode 24 of NGE is entirely lost if you choose to translate Kaworu’s lines that way. As much sense as it technically makes.

The Netflix dub of NGE, by all measures known to me, is a very well-acted, well-directed, well-translated version of a classic piece of Animation History. I am not telling anyone that it is in any way bad or even inferior to the original, and I am not telling anyone to avoid it.

All I am saying is, that if you, as a translator, have access to references regarding authorial intent you should probably use them.

[fragiledewdrop]

High school Newspaper Shenanigans

I don't have a lot of good memories about high school, but today I found a dusty copy of what passed for a "newspaper" in my school and it brought me back to when I was 16.

The girl who had been running the school newspaper for as long as I could remember was graduating that year, so she had to prepare for the final exam and university and she did not have time to edit anymore. My friends B., C., and I, in what was probably a fit of madness, decided to try our hand at it. And so I found myself co-editor of a newspaper. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but it would be one hell of an adventure.

The paper was called "Up!", after the Disney movie, for...some very creative reason I cannot remember. The first thing we did was change the title to "Up patriots to arms!"

One of the first things we had to cover was a very important, popular, yearly student strike,which would have been fairly easy, if not for the freaking tension between the two student organizations in our city. The biggest one, the "Rete" , was basically left wing - although many people didn't know or care about their affiliations- and they constantly butted heads with the student block, a group of self proclaimed neofascists who dressed in all black, used smoke bombs during protests and were always surrounded by the police.

We decided it would be a grand idea to interview the respective leaders to get both opinions on the matter.

The president of the "Rete" came to meet us after school. The highlight of the interview was when he said that his was a "non political organization", at which point we looked at each other in disbelief and asked him:"Really?"

The answer was "Yeas, although of course many of us are registered in different parties along the whole spectrum, such as..." and he started listing all left wing parties in the country, from communists to centrists, because apparently that's what he meant by "variety". Anyway.

It was time to interview the leader of the Block. He told us to wait in a square until someone would come get us.

B. and I were getting very nervous.

A guy with a shaved head and a black leather jacket came towards us. "You the journalists? Follow me"

We followed him to the lair. I mean headquarters.

(By the way, we realized we knew this guy. He was a lamb. I had no clue what he was doing there.)

The headquarters' walls were legit covered in swastikas and pictures of Mussolini. Yikes.

The leader was also very nice. Didn't stop me wanting to throttle him when he said that poor Mussolini was just misunderstood.

I had to ACTUALLY stop B. from doing something rash. No picking fights with the fascist dudes in he fascists's lair, please.

They straight up told us, I shit you not, that they were a brotherhood and, as a very effective bonding experience, they put on music and danced in a circle while whipping each other with leather belts. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. Maybe they were, but it didn't seem so. That didn't make it into the article, but it's forever etched into my brain.

I was shaken, but the double interview turned out great. #journalism

A while later we were sitting at a school assembly in the local movie theater. Everybody was complaining about the fact that our gym's roof had collapsed the year before and nobody was doing anything about it. We were taking the bus every week to a public gym, but we had to pay for it and were Officially Not Happy About It.

It was then that B. went : "You know what would be great? If we could interview the mayor about this"

I lit up. "Oh my god! We could ask him so many things! And not just about our school, but about the Linguistic High school that had to be evacuated and about [all the other schools that were literally falling to pieces. You know, Italian things]"

But the consensus was that, while we could try, it would be almost impossible for us to get an interview. So we sighed and sat back.

C.cleared her throat. "Guys." "Yes?" "You know how the mayor is a lawyer?" ".... Yes?" "Well, my dad is a lawyer. He knows him."

We dragged her to the bathroom

"We are not leaving here until your dad gets us an appointment" (poor guy)

He did

For that same night. At the town hall. At 8 pm.

We cleared our afternoon to come up with pertinent questions and practice and freak out.

At 8 we were at the town hall.

There was a red banner on the balcony with a slogan on it, that would be there for months afterwards, because...

... that same night a group of workers had occupied the town hall to demand better pay and better working conditions

Good for them

Bad for us

We were about to leave, but they assured us the mayor would be with us shortly

We waited three whole hours

During which, obviously, an old council member came to talk to us about how, if we wanted to do some real journalism, we should investigate the presence of the Illuminati in our town

Not gonna lie, we were kinda interested at that point

Around 11, the mayor called us in

I am going to concede that he must have been tired

But he was still a slimy son of a bitch

Extremely condescending

When we brought up our problems, he told us our schools were the Province's responsibility

(the Province would of course later tell us we were the Mayor's responsibility)

It was a train wreck

But eye opening

The article we wrote was extremely passive aggressive

He told C.'s father that he really liked it

I don't know if he was impermeable to sarcasm or just a politician.

Fast forward a few months. While our math teacher was talking, a giant piece of plaster fell from the ceiling, missed her by millimeters and crashed on the floor. We went on, business as usual, but that was kinda scary. And it was not the first incident of that kind to happen in our school.

We decided to do a reportage

Armed with notebooks and a camera, we went from classroom to classroom, asking students and teachers about problems with the building.

It was like opening a can of worms.

We got everything from "Oh yes, don't you see those huge holes in the ceiling and in the floor?" to "Yes, every time it rains the classroom gets flooded" to "See this giant wooden piece of tent rod? It fell on my shoulder last week. We don’t even have tents!"

Everyone had something to complain about. The teachers. The janitors. It was scary, to be honest. Especially considering we were repeatedly told ours was the safest school structure in town (what with having been standing since the end of WWI and all)

One day, while we were trying to get on the roof to evaluate its conditions, the headmistress called us in her office.

She said that she had gotten wind of what we were doing (duh)

And she hoped that we wouldn't give a bad impression of her "to parents and important people"

Because after all her hands were tied

It was the responsibility of the Mayor and the Province

(Just who the fuck was responsible for us?)

She smiled sweetly, leaned in towards us and whispered "You'll be careful now, won't you?"

She looked at me and said my name

Hoping I'd be the responsible/most easily intimidated one

(I had beef with that woman, mmmkay? But that's a story for another day)

I smiled and I told her: "Of course. We are just taking pictures of what we see. We'll let the truth speak for itself"

We did

No commentary

Just very objective descriptions and pictures

We really felt like heroes of the free press and free speech, at the service of the people despite the threat of power. (Yes, it sounds dramatic. It's because we were teenagers)

And then there were the other, less momentous adventures:

That one time when, after days of editing, we had to fill a little blank space at the bottom of the last page and nothing fit. We were frantically searching through our notes, the articles other students had sent us, drawings, everything, and we were slowly losing hope, until B. unearthed one of my notebooks and said : "What is this? 'Requiem. In memoriam termosifoni malati, ego ista verba pronuntio..." I was horrified. "NO" I yelled. "That's just a joke. We are NOT publishing that. NO WAY!" It was really a silly thing, you see. There was a radiator in our classroom that didn't work very well. Sometimes it was scorching hot, sometimes (on the coldest days, obviously) it was icy. So my friend E. and I had decided that the radiator was "sick", and we wrote its last will, its epitaph, parodies of famous poems like "La fontana malata" (The sick fountain) by Palazzeschi or "All'amica risanata" (To the healed friend) by Foscolo (can't find translations, sorry). It was fun. B.had found my silly attempt to write a "Requiem" in...kinda dog Latin I guess? But the grammar was correct. In any case, IT WAS NOT MEANT TO SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY. But we were desperate, so I relented. On one condition: it had to be ANONYMOUS. And that was the best decision I ever made in my entire life, because when we distributed the newspaper I saw a bunch of Latin teachers analising the fucking thing in front of their classes. "Mmmmhhh I am not sure an accusative was the best choice here. I would have gone with a dative." Then write your own pastiche poem, Marta! One of them had even copied it on the blackboard and was trying to figure out the metric! That was the equivalent of a 3am shitpost, not fucking Catullus, people! I have never been so embarrassed in my life! At least my friends were having a field day with it. Oh, and my Latin and Greek teacher figured it out. She read it and told me : "This was you, wasn't it?" I wanted to disappear. But she said it was funny, and that was the end of it.

All the times we had to edit what other students gave us and it was WILD, you guys. The grammar alone...The choice of topics....We got quite a few articles about UFO sightings over our town, so that was a thing. (We got to see a lot of really interesting and creative stuff, though)

The times we absolutely lost our cool, because it was hard work, okay? "Federica, your Isabel Allende analysis is a bit too long. Maybe if we cut the Scheherazade comparison..." "YOU ARE NOT CUTTING THE SCHEHERAZADE COMPARISON, B." "But.." "That is the backbone of the whole thing. The structure would collapse without it." "It's only a metaphor!" "No! I won't sell myself and my principles for a chance to be published" "Guys! CALM DOWN! It's just...essentially a book report." "SHUT UP C."[........] "I think we need to eat something" "Yeah. Should I make pancakes? With chocolate chips or without, B.? "

The time we got stuck at school because it was snowing, and C. wrote a beautiful piece called "The agonizing mesmerism of snow", and our friend P.,who was a wizard with a pencil, made an earie and amazing drawing for it that almost made me cry. Coincidentally, it was the day pope Ratzinger resigned. We thought it was a joke while still at school, then later on agreed that it was the reason it had been snowing in the first place. None of us wanted to write about the pope, so we asked the guy who was always sending us articles about the occult and arcane symbols hidden in churches. It turned out great.

The time a bunch of our more "troublesome" classmates started making hilarious dirty jokes based on Catullus' double entendres and B. promised them we would publish them (anonymously) if they wrote them down. They did, and the result was a page titled "Surrealism" full of the dirtiest "poetic" stuff in existence that made everybody laugh themselves unconscious, with the exception of some teachers who somehow didn't get the jokes.

The time we interviewed our student representative (a classmate of ours), whom B. had always thought was too full of himself and needed to be brought down a notch. So we "accidentally" misspelled his name in the article. Nobody noticed except him. He was fuming and it was glorious (not my proudest moment, but what can you do)

The time another brilliant classmate wrote a piece called "The pathologic mysoginist" that absolutely enraged some of the guys in our school. I stan her to this day.

That time I wrote a long article for Woman's day about the abuse and mistreatment of women in our country and across the world. I thought it was nothing special, really, but then Maria the janitor (the sweetest lady in existence) stopped me in the corridor and teared up a bit and said that she hadn't known about a lot of the things I had discussed, but she thought it was important to talk about them and that she felt represented as a woman and that she wanted to bring the paper home to read it to her husband. It touched me so deeply I still get emotional when I think about it.

Anyway, all of this and more happened in one year. Then we, too, had to worry about university admissions and exams and we passed the burden on to "aliens and occult" guy (who was amazing too)

But I remember the passion we poured into it, the willingness to take risks, the feeling of defying authority for the "greater good". We were idealists, all of us, and so full of hope and a will to change things in every way we could. Maybe a high school newspaper means nothing in the great scheme of things, but it meant something to us. It made us brave when we didn't think we were. It made us defiant. I wonder if that part of me is still sleeping, somewhere deep inside.

[definitionofaroadgame]

The Magicians: Star Trek Remix

Someone asked on Twitter what positions the Magicians characters would have if they were in Star Trek and my hand slipped…

Captain/1st Officer: Eliot & Margo. Eliot starts as Captain with Margo as 1st Officer, but he gets emotionally compromised on a mission that accidentally ends up with them on Talos IV and Margo takes over as High King Captain, with Eliot returning to duty as 1st officer. He’s much happier with this arrangement, if he’s being honest. He gets to be the social, friendly one of the command team now and Margo gets to be the stern HBIC; it works for them both.

Navigator: Quentin. He’s always the one trying to figure out their path, be it questing through Fillory or figuring out a way to save Eliot. He’d been dating Alice until just before the Talos fiasco, then the talosians gave him visions of an alternate life raising a family with Captain Eliot. His relationship with Alice is over, he’s desperately in love with Eliot (who rejected his offer to give it a shot because of fraternization rules, but that’s not gonna last #queliot), and for the first time he’s lost his direction…

Science Officer: Alice. She was always the smartest in the room and literally went Niffin so she could learn all the secrets of magic. There is no questioning this, don’t @ me. After her relationship with Quentin ends (B/c of reasons. What are they? IDK!), she loses herself in science and knowledge to distract herself. She’s kinda the reason they end up on Talos IV, though it wasn’t her intention, and decides to stay with them because of their incredible knowledge and power. The crew drags her back to the ship because it’s a huge Starfleet no-no for any outsiders to go to the planet and she’s decidedly NOT. HAPPY. About the situation.

Helmsman: Penny. The obvious reasoning is that he’s a traveler, but beyond that, he’s also the driving force of much of the movement of the show. He’s the one pushing Kady to move towards her future, he often badgers and berates Quentin into acting. He just gets shit done (while professing not to care about any of it). Penny is a cinnamon roll who I can’t stand to see have issues, so we’re gonna pretend he’s married to a nice woman who works down in the soc/anthro side of the science department and her specialty is in textiles and clothing (yeah, I literally am writing Arjun’s actual wife into the show, it’s my headcannon, eat me. He was really nice to me on Twitter so he gets all the nice things.)

Tactical Officer: Kady. Battle. Magic. Y’all. She’s going to do whatever it takes to protect her crew from outsiders trying to hurt them and she’s going to do it while being underestimated by everyone that goes up against her.

Chief of Security: Fen. Everyone thinks she got the position just because of her father, but she’s deeply loyal to, and protective of, her crew. If you are stupid on her ship, you WILL be thrown in the brig, though she’ll come down to keep you company and try to help you learn to be better. She was on the away crew to Talos IV and the talosians really messed with her head. When she realized what they were doing, she tried to knife one of them. The crew sometimes thinks she’s a little “old school” (read backwards and naïve), but they’ve all seen her knife collection and aren’t going to mess with her.

Head of Linguistics: Josh. He debated going into the medical field (“Ha ha yes, because I like ‘medicating’. You’re all sooo original. Stop going for the low hanging fruit.”) but his ability to fit in with any group and not only get along, but thrive, in his environment really pushed him to xenolinguistics. He’s the go to guy for meeting with new civilizations, because he’s ace at figuring out how to connect with others, and if all else fails- parties are great for breaking the ice!

Chief Medical Officer: Julia. She started out in Engineering and was quickly rising through the ranks, but she got caught in a bad battle when she was stationed on another ship that left her with severe PTSD. She foundered for a while, but eventually figured out that she could heal people as well as she could heal machines and is realizing that being in medical is helping to heal and grow herself as well.

Chief of Operations: Tick. Lets be real, he keeps Fillory running and he keeps the ship running as well. There’s a lot that goes into his job behind the scenes and he chafes at the realization that he’s probably advanced as far as he’s going to. He had designs on a captaincy, but these academy kids keep showing up and jumping ahead of him. There may have been a mission involving inhibition lowering pollen where he throws a coup and takes over the ship, but after they throw him in the brig they kinda realize that they literally can’t run this ship without him, so they hash it out and he seems to be doing better with his position now that he’s being given recognition for his skills. His knowledge base has saved them more than once on a mission that went sideways and affected the ship.

Other Thoughts: Dean Fogg as Engineering Officer? Is highly skilled drunk character cast as highly skilled drunk character a little on the nose? Monster!Eliot is the Borg? The Library is the Klingon Empire; sometimes friend sometimes foe? Who is Harry Mudd??? Nevermind- editing this to say Poppy is Harry Mudd. IT’S PERFECT! What’s the name of the ship?