#i think ive seen magnolias before- they have such beautiful meanings

[amorenjun]

20 Q’s Tag!

20 Q’s Tag

i was tagged by @marks-cheek-freckle and @ohjanni when i was still @sannycai-latte

rules: answer 20 questions, then tag 20 bloggers you want to get to know better do i even know 20 people

name: Sandra 

nicknames: oh i have lots! san (parents, sometimes brothers, close friends, older cousins), sanny (friends!!), sandararara (my older brother used to call me this when i was younger), banandra (don’t ask.), chandra, churro fcking @cafemara  , ada, sandra san (bro again but he got my bby cousin to call me that too >>), uhh and the cooliest girl ever according to my older brother oof

height: 5′4! (164 cm??)

orientation: straight?

nationality: American?? my ethnicity is Chinese/Cambodian though or is it the other way around-

favorite season: winter! cuz cali can be a bitch with weather-

favorite flower: oh uhh jasmines? camellias, magnolias, roses, sunflowers, tiger lilies, lotuses

favorite scent: jasmines!! oolong tea, the scent of coffee, green tea, my ‘SOFT’ candle from bath and body works, peaches, my camellia shampoo, fresh laundry, lemons, chocolate, uhh i think thats it..

favorite color(s): i don’t think i have any?? but lately ive been into pairing certain colors together like brown and blue, yellows and pink, matcha and creme/white

favorite animal: rabbits, giraffes, and dogs!

coffee, tea, or hot chocolate: i like coffee, but i think imma have to go with tea overall

average sleep hours: not enough LOL seven hours?? its decent but i still fall asleep in class ;-;

dog or cat person: UHHHH DOGS??? i have three so-

favorite fictional character: i have lots :’) but i think the ones i obsess over most are Okita Souji from Gintama, Kurama from YYH, and Kurapika from HXH- i put those three because i have figures of the first two i’d have a figure of the last one if there were some actual NICE ones

number of blankets you sleep with: three! a biiiig green and white one, a flowery purple and white, and one smiley stars one!!

dream trip: oH I WANNA GO TO JAPAN TO SEE THE POKEMON TRAIN/ AIRPLANE, THE YUGIOH CAFES, AND THE LIFE SIZED UNICORN GUNDAM WITH MY OLDER BROTHERS!!! china is for when im with my parents :))) thailand, taiwan, korea, hawaii, and vancouver with amara! maaaaybe even Cambodia.. maybe. i just wanna tour all of asia with my best friend really heehee

blog created: uhhhh according to kakao, it was February 17th!! 2018

number of followers: 11 on this one! @sannycai-latte it’s 53!

random fact: i have a pencil scar on my right leg from when my younger brother stabbed me with my mechanical in third(??) grade :DD..

20 people to tag??? uhhhhh so, this looks kinda awkward since im not sure if i told anyone personally that i moved blogs, im sorry if you’re just now getting the memo, but imma tag: @cafemara @jenology @rxnjuns @lalajisung @chenleplanet @honeytaeyong @stormae @sweetalking @whatsoodo @jaeminsluv @reunjun @chittafont  that’s not even close to 20

ofc you don’t have to do it; if you want to be removed from this list, just dm me and i will! im sorry to be a bother and im also sorry for not really announcing it earlier/ obvious enough ;;

have a lovely day/night!! <3

[imagineclaireandjamie]

I NEED MORE HRH 😩 and Loss, obviously

Part I: The Crown Equerry | Part II: An Accidental Queen | Part III: Just Claire | Part IV: Foal | Part V: A Deal | Part VI: Vibrations | Part VII: Magnolias| Part VIII: Schoolmates | Part IX: A Queen’s Speech | Part X: Rare | Part XI: Watched | Part XII: A Day’s Anticipation | Part XIII: The Location | Part XV: Motorcycle | Part XV: Cabin | Part XVI: Market | Part XVII: Stables | Part XVIII: Alarms | Part XIX: Visitor | Part XX: Cuffed

Her Royal Highness (H.R.H.)Part XXI: A Woman’s Speech

Claire woke from a dream within a dream.

In the first, she was suspended in a dreamless trance against Fraser’s chest. It was warm. Too warm for Scotland. Perhaps there had been some noise (a crash or faraway disturbance) that roused them both at the same time. Silently, Claire traced a single gray hair in a sea of unruly auburn lightly breaking against the centerline shore of his chest. Cool air filtering through the window lifted curtains she had never seen before. Perhaps it was a honeymoon – a gauzy, bikini-clad getaway ensconced in the carefully-controlled bubble of one of the British Protectorates. The Maldives maybe? She had seen a postcard once (pressed into the pages of a scrapbook maintained by her sister, a memory of a beautiful holiday to trot out to make a younger royal grow emerald with jealousy), but she had never made it there before.

She curled closer to him, felt the burr of speech rumbling in his chest like an oncoming storm, realized she couldn’t hear him. Jerking up, she pressed a hand to the center of his chest, felt her facial features contort. His mouth was moving, curled into a lazy, slow smile. His hand was on her naked hip, urging her closer, but she had the sensation that she was being pulled backwards. It was as though she was being tugged by a lead threaded into her spine.

Then it was pitch black (like blindness itself, an endless blank slate of darkness upon darkness forever and ever).

In the second dream, Fraser was stripped bare to the waist and in a courtroom. Scars criss-crossed his back like the map of a chaotic, unplanned city center. Lined, bloody wrists were secured in fetters and chained behind his back. Scar tissue (his past) and fresh wounds (their future). Claire shouted for him (for her Fraser, for him to pay attention god dammit, that she would fix this), voice raw. He turned, calling to her and shaking his head. His mouth was frantic, needy. There was no trace of a smile. She tried to move, but she was bound to the spot (hip-deep in cement, locked in place). The courtroom lengthened, the lights dimmed. It was a corridor then, and he was getting further and further from her.

“Stop!” she attempted to scream, but no sound emerged. She scraped at the cement until her fingertips were bloodied; she touched her mouth. Only the narrowest indentation remained where her lips (appendages designed to kiss him, taste him, tell him the darkest parts of herself and hope she had for a future drenched in light with him) had been sealed together.

“Claire!” he bellowed, the single syllable bellowing from the deepest part of his belly.

Her fingers clawed at the indentation, her toes curling uselessly inside shoes entombed in cement.

He continued, “I’m doing this for you.”

She tried to call out, shook her head furiously, and refused to blink. She couldn’t bear the thought of tears falling as her lipless mouth screamed, “No. No. No.”

She woke, gasping and kicking through layers and layers of covers until her legs were free of the obstruction. The soles of her feet found solid ground.

Edinburgh. She was still in Edinburgh.

Her nightgown clung to the sweaty parts of her (lower back, breasts, armpits, lower stomach, thighs), made her feel like a thousand colonies of insects had taken residence under her flesh.

She launched herself from the mattress, tearing at her nightgown, ripping it off and over her head, leaving it in a puddle on the rug.

“Fraser,” she whispered, taking her robe from its resting place over the settee next to the window. “You bloody stubborn Scottish martyr.”

It had been nine hours since she had left him in that jail. Nine hours since he had declared himself a martyr, announced that he would take the fall without seeking her input. Nine hours from the moment she turned her back on him, left him alone with his mouth full of lies and his daft self-sacrificing nature.

It had been six hours since she had made clear her intentions to her staff. Three hours since she gathered three of her most trusted advisors and explained what she would do to head him off at the pass, to put an end to this (the media spectacle threatened by her ring, the hushed speculations about how it got there and why). She knew that her plan would start something else entirely (a cannibalistic feeding frenzy for information, which she would publicly respond to with a regal dismissiveness appropriate to her position), but she did not know what else to do.

And perhaps, most importantly, she had ceased to care.

She swallowed hard and went to the window. Crossing her arms across her waist, she squinted down at the stables (they were dark, lifeless, her stock transported to Balmoral ahead of her). Quietly, she shook her head and let her fingertips sink into her hips, an attempt to replicate Fraser’s touch. Her efforts failed miserably.

Then she said it aloud – the thought that had dwelled unspoken in her mind since she’d left him, since he’d vowed to take the fall for them both. “I hate you right now.”

She heard footsteps outside her door and turned, watched shadow interrupt the creamy sliver of dim light beneath the door.

“Come in,” she called, turning her attention back towards the stables before the corridor’s lurker could enter.

Mrs. Fitz.

Claire could tell. She knew the cadence of the woman’s step (the soft shuffle, the clank of a tea service on a tray), the gentle way she closed the door and flipped the lock into place.

Swallowing back the bitter taste of a fitful sleep in her mouth, she summoned the question that had roused her, replaced a dream within a dream. “Is Fraser still in the jail?”

“Aye, ma’am,” Mrs. Fitz confirmed quietly.

Without meaning to move from her vantage point at the window, Claire felt herself being pulled as if by gravity itself towards the table where Mrs. Fitz was pouring two cups of what smelled like perfectly-steeped Earl Grey.

How properly English, Claire mused. Fix it with tea.

Claire would have given anything for a taste of the cabin (jewels that were not hers to give, a title that only felt precious when she thought of giving it away). To have the gritty, smoky flavor of Fraser’s too-strong coffee in lieu of her usual morning tea (the concentration in his brow as he poured hers, dropped a single sugar cube into its depths, stirred it into a sparkling whirl before handing it to her with the smallest of smiles, a hand on a bare hip). To taste tinned peaches (to pluck the wiggling, gelatinous, too-sweet preserved stone fruit from the tines of a fork held by Jamie; to squeal as the juice dribbled onto a sheet wrapped around her breast; to let her noises magnify as she feigned a fight against his efforts to take the sheet from her.) To bite into a crumbly icebox biscuit (his fingers dusting the flakes of icing from her lower lip, kissing them from his finger, promising to teach her how to drive his motorcycle) or stovetop-charred sausages (his laugh as he promised her with sparkling, fibbing eyes that he actually preferred them cooked to charred, unrecognizable logs). To lick yogurt from the side of her thumb beneath the sheets (the warmth of their joining evaporating with the leisurely lack of urgency that seemed to define all things on a cool Scottish summer morning, and their tongues meeting to mingle clover honey and berries).

She blinked hard, turned, and offered what she could of a smile.

“How much longer?”

“The broadcast will be at 8 o’clock. Fraser will be escorted from the jail to his sister’s home three hours earlier… they are probably waking him right now.”

Claire nodded, her mind suddenly fixated on the sound of his name from her lips.

Fraser.

It was just a last name to Mrs. Fitz. To her it was something more, intimate syllables that tumbled from her mouth to represent someone to her that had defined love and sacrifice and lust and passion and hate (just a little). She focused her attention outside, feeling her cheeks redden at the thought of him believing he was doing her a favor by declaring himself a common thief.

She dried her palms on her robe, inhaled, let loose a cosmic question to which she did not have an answer. “Do you think that he will hate me for this?”

The cadence of Mrs. Fitz’s familiar plunk-shuffle-plunk step neared, and Claire closed her eyes as the woman’s hand closed around her shoulder. “I ken the man loves ye. I ken that solely from the look in his eyes when I slipped him a wee note, the way his shoulders squared when ye had to postpone a visit or two. The way a lad becomes a man, he looks when he’s longing for someone, not out of lust, ye ken. It’s no’ his cock–”

“Mrs. Fitz,” Claire gasped, tears burning along her lower lash line as she chuckled.

“Ye ken just fine that ye’re no’ some innocent doe-eyed girl. Ye’re a woman, and he loves ye. You’re ban-druidh. Ye conjure things for him, ye ken? He’s given himself over to ye, to yer spell, ma’am, just the way of ye enchants him. So no, he’s no’ thinkin’ wi’ the parts that make him a man, but from spiritual need.”

A dribble of tears tickled Claire’s chin and throat. She uselessly attempted to mop at them with the back of her hand.

“And what he needs now is for you to be strong. Stronger than he is.”

Claire nodded, her chin tilting up as she snuffled back a second round of tears.

“Strong enough to show him that he doesna need to take a fall for ye, that ye’re the bloody Queen. That ye’ll do this for that rare love that ye kent ye needed, that led ye into his arms in the first place. Now, wipe yer face and find yer smartest dress, and give the speech of yer life, ma’am.”

Claire intended to do just that.

[imagineclaireandjamie]

Can we have another chapter of HRH? It’s the business !!

Previously:

Part I: The Crown Equerry | Part II: An Accidental Queen | Part III: Just Claire | Part IV: Foal | Part V: A Deal | Part VI: Vibrations

Her Royal Highness (H.R.H.)

Part VII: Magnolias

Claire was not sure how she got to the stables or why she wandered down to them, but she had. And seeing him, there was no way she could turn back.

“Those are bonny,” he had remarked, nodding towards her fist full of blooms.

Raising her eyebrows, she looked down at her hands. “Caerhays Surprise. Magnolias.  These are late bloomers. Usually they bloom and die before May is over.”

She suddenly could not look at him, could not see him seeing her.  Her fingers and eyes worked over the velvety petals.   ‘I feel transparent when I am with you,’ she thought of saying, but let a small sigh stand in for the sentiment.

“Gardening, albeit in a very disconnected, assisted kind-of-way...” She wanted a garden, full of weeds to tackle and errant vines to hack away, a place of her own where dirt filled the curve of her fingernails and stained the skin of her knees. Not one that she planned, but not one that she neither planted nor tended to on her own. “It is still a passion of mine. It is calming. Like riding is. I mean, other people fertilize the flowers and other plants, but I try to get down there… to check on things.”

The silence between them took on its own atmosphere, exerting a gale force on the architecture they had constructed to maintain their well-calculated distance.  In the daylight she saw things she had never seen at night. The pale scar on his left hand’s third knuckle looked pink, almost like it was still healing. A narrow, single streak of silver broke the fiery crop of his hair. It was apparent that he had not slept the night before. (Neither had she.) He moved more cautiously, too, and his silence was disarming.

“These are beautiful.  They should have been thriving in May, but here we are…”

Her voice trailed off, the ends of her words pawing through static.

“Frank’s here. He is going to travel to Scotland with me. Tomorrow.”  There was a quiver in the architecture as his face shifted, the corners of his mouth quirking up. She wondered what it meant, whether it meant anything at all. “Are we alone?”

“Aye –– all of the men are having a lunch and cigarette break. They’ll be gone for a fair while.”  He looked down at his watch before settling his hands on his hips. “Why are ye here, ma’am?”

“I have no clue,” she said truthfully. He clicked his tongue. “I asked you before, Colonel Fraser. Do I need a reason to come down here?”

“The fountain… ye touched me.”

She fought the urge to roll her eyes, a petulant habit she had shed for iciness since her coronation.  “I touched you companionably. Does that accurately reflect your recollection?”

“It does, though it’s no’ quite complete.”

Blush flourished along her breast bone, creeping up and threatening to out itself under the neck of her blouse. “What details would you fill in to make it complete?”

“Och, weel, I’m no’ sure it’s my place to say.”

“Well, I can direct you to say.”

“That ye can.”  One of his eyebrows arched nearly to his hairline. “Ye asked me if we have a sound. I saw it in yer eyes. This isna… normal.”

In her heart, she ached at the naked truth of it.  Those thoughts of a life, the one she had wanted, made her want to travel to him and draw him close.  The thoughts of a life, the one she had never wanted but had, glued her to the spot.

“Ye’re wadin’ about in things that ye ken ye… no, that we have no business invading. Ye’re to be marrit to that Randall man.”

She refused to think of Frank, likely sleeping off his jetlag in a guest bed. “Invading, am I?”

“Ye pick one part, the insignificant part. This is no’ a word game.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “I canna do this.”

“Should I go?” she asked plainly. Her mind went to war with itself –– wishing his answer to be ‘yes’ (she had a life; she had Frank, an obligation to fulfill) and at the same time praying his answer would be ‘no’ (for him to have the nerve to say something, anything that would draw them together in this daylight)

“No.” He took a step forward and she took half of a step backwards. “Where would you go?”

His question was simple and she had no answer other than ‘upstairs… to him.’ Instead, she lied, “I do not know where I will go.”

The falsehood was bulky and wrong in the mouth that created it. It came too easily and they both knew it for what it was. A way to push the reality of the moment aside.

“You are giving me whiplash,” he muttered, both hands going to his hair.

He could not define what was happening, but it was keeping him up at night. When he slept, she rewrote his nightmares into dreams. (Curls that he imagined would be slippery under his fingers. Lips that would curve into a smile beneath his mouth. Whispers that would make turning back impossible. Someone to look at over the edge of the newspaper, to find that she was looking back at him.)

“I am going to go.”

She turned away.

‘Count to twenty,’ she schooled herself in her sternest internal voice.

There was no way that she would be able to walk away from him and not cry, to meet the daylight and see Frank again if she did not collect herself. Her hands fell, the bouquet of hastily-snipped magnolias falling with a near-soundless plop on the freshly-scrubbed concrete.  Needing to busy herself, she wound her newly freed fingers into the hem of her top and she closed her eyes.

The world dark, she silently recited her conclusion: ‘And then walk away.’

One.

The sigh that came from him was ragged, battle weary.  “I dinna ken if I can wait forever.”

Two.

When she opened her eyes she focused on the streaking glow of sunlight that peeked through the closed stable door.

“The waiting hurts.”

Three.

“Tell me, ma’am. Have ye figured it out yet? The tell. My tell. We had a deal.”

Four.

“I had it figured out when we made the deal,” she admitted, her voice quiet.  He was tuned in to her. She felt him in the very marrow of her bones. There was no way she could not have known then, when she agreed. “I knew it then.”

“And?”

Five.

A final blast knocked over what little remained of the architecture.  

For the first time in ages, she spoke freely, though with her eyes closed and back to him.

“I know what it means. Knowing this about you, watching closely enough to know you. It means there is something here that I want to explore. We would only have the summer.”

Her fingers curled into fists at her side, her fingernails sinking into her palm.

“I do not know if I can start something like that. Like this. I am marrying––”

“––him––” he supplied.

“Yes. I am marrying him in October.”

Six.

“Do ye love him? Yer Randall.”

The pain exploded in her chest, embedding shrapnel in each of her veins. She was not a crier, but her cheeks were wet.

‘Fuck,’ she thought at the question she attempted not even to ask herself.

Seven.

Her breath came out in a stream before she confessed, “It is significantly more complicated than love.”

She said the word almost with pain, as if she peeling back scar tissue on some of the darker places inside of her.

“These things are not easy, Colonel Fraser.”

“That’s no’ an answer to my question.”  He was nearer now. His voice was lower, close and wrapping around her. Vision blurring, she started to look over her shoulder just to gauge his nearness.

Eight.

He was right there.  She was close enough to see the way his pupils reacted when she turned –– dilating until his almost-navy irises were whisper thin.

“It is what I have for an answer to your question.”  

“No one grows up wishing, praying to marry someone they dinna love.”

Inhaling, she anticipated his touch deep in her belly. The longing for his fingers ached and burned. “There are a lot of things in my life that I never wished for when I was growing up.”

Nine.

His hands rose and he touched her, his fingers warm and firm on her shoulders. Her heart hammered (tapping tapping tapping under her breasts hard enough that she could feel its rhythm in her mouth).  Her breath caught (round and with a pulse of its own) in her throat.

On a journey, his hands moved from her shoulders, across her collar bones, and up to her throat.  When his thumb met her pulse point she vaguely wondered if he could hear her heart. His head tilted ever so slightly and his tongue darted out to wet his lips.

She had to say it.  Just to prove that she knew.  “Your tell. It is your hands, your fingers. You… drum things –– your leg, a desk, any surface –– when you are nervous or thinking.”

Ten.

“Astute observation.”

He had not asked permission, but she felt the need to give him a warning. “I want to touch you.”

“Claire––”

Her name on his tongue was sweet, low. It was too fast and she yearned to hear it again (and again and then a thousand, million times more). He cleared his throat, thinking through the permutations of how this moment could end.  The most realistic among the scenarios he imagined ended with a profound heartache. She started, “I am sorry, I––”

Eleven.

She fell silent when he shook his head. She turned her cheek into his palm.

“If ye want to touch me, do it.” Although she had not asked for permission to touch him, he granted it willingly, committing himself (he was sure) to some form of storied heartbreak of which he would never speak. (‘Ruin me forever,’ his mind implored.)  

And she did –– her hands rising up between their bodies.  His cheek was smooth and warm, freshly shaved. She wondered what he would feel like with some stubble to prickle her fingertips –– a little undone after a lazy weekend or on a morning without the thoughtless interruption of an alarm clock’s shuddering call to rise.  

Twelve.

His voice was trapped somewhere in his throat under the weight of ten thousand words.  Gaelic and English, languages that had not yet been invented and would consist of the sounds he could draw from her with his mouth and hands, hips and tongue. She smelled like summer at midnight –– floral (the magnolias she had dropped with their notes of tart lemon, spice, and verbena), musky (a delicate, feminine smell), and maybe immortal (far beyond her years, ethereal).

Thirteen.

Her tongue darted out expectantly before her teeth sank into the swell of her lower lip. As she drowned in him, she ached everywhere –– breasts, bones, ligaments, muscles, skin –– all the way down to her very core. She could taste his breath –– layers of bright apple and sharp peppermint.

Fourteen.

His eyes closed and he made ten thousand promises to himself.  (Do not fall in love with this woman. Do not make this harder. For either of you. Leave all of this here.)

She wondered if he knew that he visited her dreams. Dreams that left her with a trickle of sweat down her spine and tongue struck dumb. Dreams where he made love to her in a small apartment that she had never seen with well-worn furniture, with loaves of stale bread wrapped in wax paper resting on the kitchen counter. Dreams where in the minutes after he made love to her, she clung to him and felt human again. Dreams where he shielded her from things that she could not bear to face on her own –– with his body or through his mere existence. Dreams that left her waking with her fingers between her thighs, a touch that could not draw out from her even the narrowest approximation of what he did to her when her eyes were closed.

Fifteen.

When he opened his eyes, he broke every single one of the ten thousand promises he had made to himself in a single, slurring breath. “I’d verra much like to kiss ye.”

Nothing else in the world existed.

“May I? Kiss ye?”

Sixteen.

His thumbs were on her cheekbones, brushing away the few tears that had fallen there.  With only the slightest of nods, she released her lower lip from her teeth, pulling herself onto her toes until her calves burned. Her own fingers drifted from his face.  Her left hand curled behind his neck and roving fingers sinking into his hair. Her right hand went to his chest, resting flat over his heart.

One of his hands skated down the front of her body to rest against her belly.

“Do it properly,” she mumbled on an exhalation.

Seventeen.

His lips turned up at a challenge accepted. He pressed against her just a little so she started to move backwards.

“Do ye have any pointers, yer majesty?”

Swallowing, she felt the wall meet her spine. “This is a test, not a lecture, Colonel Fraser.”

He let loose a short laugh as he exhaled. “It’s Jamie, Claire. Jamie.”

Eighteen.

“You talk too much.”  She did not know where the flirtation came from, but it bubbled up from her in anticipation. “Far too much, Jamie.”

Nineteen.

“Ye’re one to complain about that,” he chuckled, feeling a pulsing, involuntary clench in her belly as he splayed his fingers over her. “Claire.”

She hummed, swallowing again as her eyes drifted shut.

His breath was on her mouth, the tips of his fingers working into her flesh. In a slow motion, draining kind of way, all sensation but those that lived within him and between them fell away. Everything was funneled through his touch.  

Twenty.

But then: “Claire?”

And Jamie was gone –– off of her, his back against the opposite wall. It took her a moment to open her eyes, to face the loss of their connection.

“Yer fiancé’s wondering where ye’ve gone off to.”

“Claire?” There it was again.  Him.

“Jamie…”

His hands were behind his back and he had one foot on the wall, watching her. He may as well have been a thousand miles away.

“You are shutting down,” she muttered accusatorily, pushing off of the wall and taking a step towards him.

“Ma’am, I––” She wanted to dive across the stable and take him by the shoulders, to finish what they had started and to silence anything other than her name from his lips for good.

“Claire?” Frank was getting closer now, the sound of his voice not hazy as though shouted across a great distance.

“Fuck,” she hissed, balling her hands into fists at her side.

“Ye should go––”

“Stop talking. I need to think. Fuck.”

“Ye asked earlier if ye should go. I’m tellin’ ye. Ye should leave before ye canna turn back.”

“I––”

“Go.”

She stared for a moment, incredulous, and then turned away from him again. This time, she committed herself to walking away.  She wondered if she would be walking away from him forever.

When she was gone, he put the magnolias in a coffee tin of water, arranging the blooms as carefully as possible.  He wondered how long they would live.