#ill retreat to my other account later

[rememberthelaughtermp3]

remembering why i stopped logging in to my main

[mllemaenad]

You know what else bugs me here? I'm stunned that what happened at Weisshaupt is being presented as a defeat.

Now, yes, to be clear: hundreds of Wardens died. I'm not expecting anyone to be happy about that, and of course Davrin should be allowed to grieve. But ...

In War, Victory. In Peace, Vigilance. In Death, Sacrifice.

This is very much the purpose of the Grey Wardens. And not-Varric there is fucking right. Is nobody grasping the magnitude of what we just accomplished here?

We just speed-ran a Blight.

Even if we count the start of the Sixth Blight from the moment the elven gods were released, we have now beaten the Hero of Ferelden's already impressive one year record by several months. And we took out the Archdemon at its first sighting.

What metric for success are we using here? The First Blight went on for nearly 200 years. It crippled the Tevinter Imperium! The dwarves lost almost their entire civilisation and got so desperate they started ripping out their people's souls to make golems!

For the first half, they didn't even have Grey Wardens! People kept stabbing the Archdemon and the damn thing kept popping up again like the world's worst game of whack-a-mole!

People today have little concept of the consequences of the second sin. Oh, believe me when I say that when asked, pious, Chantry-going folk will curse the use of foul magic, spitting and snapping their fingers—but none live today who actually remember the horror that was unleashed so very long ago. Whatever records might have existed regrettably did not survive the chaos and ignorance that was to follow. We have only the tales of survivors handed down through the murky ages and the dogma of the Chantry to instruct us, and that is precious little indeed. I believe I am not understating when I say that the second sin unleashed the bane of all life upon Thedas. The darkspawn are more virulent than the worst plague, a heartless force of nature that came into our world like an ill wind. We know from accounts of later Blights (as these darkspawn invasions came to be called—never has a more appropriate name existed) that the darkspawn spread disease and famine wherever they tread. The earth itself is corrupted by their presence, the sky roiling with angry black clouds. I do not exaggerate, my friends, when I say that a mass gathering of darkspawn is an omen of dread cataclysm. It is said that those cursed magisters who became the first darkspawn scratched at the very earth to find solace in the darkness of the dwarven Deep Roads, and there in the shadows they multiplied. Whether by intelligent design or by some last vestige of worship in their minds, they attempted to locate the Old Gods they had once served. They found what they sought: Dumat, first among the Old Gods, once known as the Dragon of Silence before the Maker imprisoned him and all his brethren beneath the earth for the first sin: usurping the Maker's place in mankind's heart. The slumbering dragon awoke, freed from the Maker's prison by his twisted followers, and became corrupted himself. Dumat was transformed into the first Archdemon, his great and terrible power given will by a rotting, unholy mind. With the darkspawn horde following, Dumat rose and took wing in the skies once again, bringing ruin to the world the Maker had created. The Old God had become the eye of a dark storm that would ravage the entire world. —From Tales of the Destruction of Thedas, by Brother Genitivi, Chantry Scholar – The First Blight: Chapter 2

Two hundred years! Of that!

And yet civilisation survived. The Tevinter Imperium survived! Much reduced, yes, but they're still there. Orzammar still stands, as does Kal-Sharok. This was arguably the worst apocalypse Thedas had ever seen (there are some other contenders, obviously), and they weathered it. Those people knew what a crushing defeat looked like. They knew what loss looked like. They knew what it was to retreat and ration and lose everything.

If you lot ever work out time travel properly, bring some exhausted dwarven or Tevene soldier forward from the First Blight and try telling them you're sad because defeating the Archdemon lost you a castle and a few hundred men.

No Blight since has lasted so long or been quite so destructive, but most have lasted decades, and left utter ruin in their wake. Why does the Western Approach look like that? A Blight!

Once these wastes were a land of plenty. Can you believe it? The rain came north over the Gamordan Peaks, turning the plains green and verdant for three months of the year. Eight hundred years ago, that changed. During the Second Blight, darkspawn spilled out of an enormous crack in the earth, corrupting it with their foul blood… and it never recovered, even after they were driven back underground. The Grey Wardens built Adamant Fortress to stand watch over that chasm, but eventually even they abandoned it to the wind and the biting sand. What few of us eke out a living in this Maker-forsaken place do so knowing that any number of deaths await us: darkspawn raids, dragons, bandits—not to mention starvation from the lack of water and game. If we stay, it is because we know there are treasures buried in the bones of this place, ruins from the time when Tevinter ruled, and even earlier. We pass tales around our campfires of the things we have seen shrouded in the dust storms. My favorites are the ones about relics that could restore the Western Approach once more… but I don't believe them. Truth be told, on nights when the wind is calm, I can stand on a hilltop and see for miles in the moonlight over a stark beauty of which no other Orlesian can claim to know the equal. On those nights, I hope it will never change. —From Lands of the Abyss by Magistrate Gilles de Sancriste – The Western Approach

Even Ostagar was a catastrophe. A short-term one, sure, but a massive loss of life for no appreciable gain.

What happened at Weisshaupt? Even with a commanding officer whose strategy apparently came down to "What if we just charged straight at them? Wouldn't that look cool?" the Wardens held back the darkspawn long enough for Davrin (the Warden in this scenario! Rook is a supporting role!) to get through. The dragon trap worked. And they killed the damn Archdemon.

Now, yes: I recognise the problem. As the elven gods are free they can immediately wake up another Archdemon, so we are rolling straight into the Seventh Blight. This is not ideal! And the Grey Wardens are undeniably weakened after their fight.

But. You cannot tell me that decades of warfare in earlier Blights did not produce even greater casualties, along with the fact that the mere presence of Blight reduces a Warden's lifespan – their Callings come sooner.

We just had the fastest Archdemon kill in history. It may not be the least bloody (it's hard to count the casualties in the south, so the Fifth may still be winning on that front), but it has to be close. And let's face it: they finished the Fifth Blight with (probably) no more than three Wardens on the field. It's been months, at most. We should barely be out of breath. This Blight was over so fast, if you're some kind of official on a diplomatic trip to Par Vollen you might have completely missed it!

What is it Blackwall said? What can one Grey Warden do?

"Save the fucking world if pressed."

One more to go. Do this one more time and we never, ever have to do it again. I don't know why we're moping. This is incredible.

[yr-obedt-cicero]

I know there’s a strong possibility that Laurens’ death may have been suicide but what about Ham’s? There is speculation that Ham’s death may have been suicide, especially since he has a history of feeling suicidal. I could be wrong though. I’m curious of your take.

Not likely. While depression and depressive thoughts did plague Hamilton throughout his life, he was only “suicidal” during his years of early/mid adulthood. Or at least that we know of, it is heavily likely Hamilton may have still had such thoughts later in life especially with all that he went through — but there's no indication of such, especially in regards to the duel.

Hamilton did seem to be going through a depressive phase throughout 1780, where he implies suicide twice, as he writes to confine in Laurens and Elizabeth;

“The truth is I am an unlucky honest man, that speak my sentiments to all and with emphasis. I say this to you because you know it and will not charge me with vanity. I hate Congress—I hate the army—I hate the world—I hate myself. The whole is a mass of fools and knaves; I could almost except you and Meade.”

(source — Alexander Hamilton to John Laurens, [September 12, 1780])

“I am chagrined and unhappy but I submit. In short Laurens I am disgusted with every thing in this world but yourself and very few more honest fellows and I have no other wish than as soon as possible to make a brilliant exit. ’Tis a weakness; but I feel I am not fit for this terrestreal Country”

(source — Alexander Hamilton to John Laurens, [January 8, 1780])

“What have we to do with any thing but love? Go the world as it will, in each others arms we cannot but be happy. If America were lost we should be happy in some other clime more favourable to human rights. What think you of Geneva as a retreat? ’Tis a charming place; where nature and society are in their greatest perfection. I was once determined to let my existence and American liberty end together. My Betsey has given me a motive to outlive my pride, I had almost said my honor; but America must not be witness to my disgrace. As it is always well to be prepared for the worst, I talk to you in this strain; not that I think it probable we shall fail in the contest; for notwithstanding all our perplexities, I think the chances are without comparison in our favour; and that my Aquileia and I will plant our turnips in her native land.”

(source — Alexander Hamilton to Elizabeth Schuyler, [September 6, 1780])

But after that he barely wrote like such again, and I don't think it ever reached to the same severity after that. After Philip's death, Hamilton found solace in religion, and the church. As it seemed to comfort the thought of death that he would one day reunite with all his loved ones in the afterlife. But in extension, he became a more pious person, and was more outspoken against dueling and the morals of it.

Hamilton even went as far as to write a whole statement of his reasoning before the duel because he was very reluctant to attend but found that he had to;

“1 My religious and moral principles are strongly opposed to the practice of Duelling, and it would even give me pain to be obliged to shed the blood of a fellow creature in a private combat forbidden by the laws.

2 My wife and Children are extremely dear to me, and my life is of the utmost importance to them, in various views.

3 I feel a sense of obligation towards my creditors; who in case of accident to me, by the forced sale of my property, may be in some degree sufferers. I did not think my self at liberty, as a man of probity, lightly to expose them to this hazard.

4 I am conscious of no ill-will to Col Burr, distinct from political opposition, which, as I trust, has proceeded from pure and upright motives.”

(source — Statement on Impending Duel with Aaron Burr, [28 June–10 July 1804])

He continues;

“To those, who with me abhorring the practice of Duelling may think that I ought on no account to have added to the number of bad examples—I answer that my relative situation, as well in public as private aspects, enforcing all the considerations which constitute what men of the world denominate honor, impressed on me (as I thought) a peculiar necessity not to decline the call. The ability to be in future useful, whether in resisting mischief or effecting good, in those crises of our public affairs, which seem likely to happen, would probably be inseparable from a conformity with public prejudice in this particular.”

Hamilton's consideration was prioritized for future matters, as he refused to decline the challenge because he was worried of being deemed a coward, and thus when a crisis or his public assistance would be needed, the country would refuse him due to his tainted name. Hamilton also had an appointment with Dirck Ten Broeck scheduled, where he was expecting to go over a legal case at his office later in morning on the day of the duel. Hamilton would not care for any of this if his intent was truly not to survive.

In fact, Hamilton was more prepared to die for other duels he partook in; he even had a will prepared during his confrontation with duel James Nicholson in 1795 after they went through a squabble. Five days later after he finalized that he would meet Nicholson in the field, Hamilton wrote a lengthy letter of instructions to Robert Troup;

“Confiding in your integrity and friendship to me, I have made you Executor of my Will. My concerns are not very extensive and of course will not give you much trouble. Indeed I might have dispensed with the ceremony of making a Will as to what I may myself leave had I not wished that my little property may be applied as readily and as fairly as may be to the benefit of my few Creditors. For after a life of labour, I leave my family to the benevolence of others, if my course shall happen to be terminated here.”

(source — Alexander Hamilton to Robert Troup, [July 25, 1795])

Of course though, he survived. Hamilton had been involved in several other duels prior to the one with Burr - none ever even actually occurred on the field, which was a case for many challenges back then - it is important to note that a majority of duels back then didn't even end in death. For instance, Burr had once dueled Hamilton's brother-in-law, John Barker Church, and the two didn't suffer from any injuries or death. I also don't even think Hamilton thought Burr would shoot him, and gave serious thought to what he would do if Burr insisted on exchanging more than one round of fire.

I also don't think he was that insensitive about how his death would affect his family, most importantly. After watching Angelica's mental well-being distort after Philip's death, and how Elizabeth would struggle terribly without his support — he would have obviously known what that would do for them all, and they seemed to be his highest concern from the minute he was shot to the last hour on his deathbed.

[post-cinema]

The 1970s love affair between Meryl Streep and John Cazale saw them both on new acting paths but their journey together ended in tragedy.

In 1978, a young Meryl Streep was on the verge of becoming the greatest actress of her generation. She was also about to lose the love of her life. Streep was 29 years old, a gosling in the New York theater world. She was living in a loft on Franklin Street with her boyfriend, actor John Cazale. He was 14 years her senior and a legend among his peers.

Streep and Cazale met in 1976, when they were cast opposite each other in Measure for Measure in Central Park. By then, Cazale was not quite a star — he lacked that ephemeral quality — but he was regarded, in the industry, as a rare talent, in demand among the great directors of the era.

He was Fredo in The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, and had lead roles in The Conversation and Dog Day Afternoon. Of the five movies he starred in, all would be nominated for Best Picture, and three would win.

“One of the things I loved about the casting of John Cazale,” said Dog Day director Sidney Lumet, “was that he had a tremendous sadness about him. I don’t know where it came from; I don’t believe in invading the privacy of the actors I work with or getting into their heads. But my God, it’s there — every shot of him.”

And then there were his unusual looks, so perfect for the misfits of ’70s cinema: attenuated frame, high forehead, prominent nose. Sad, black eyes. Streep fell for him instantly. He was equally knocked out.

In looks and manner, Cazale was completely foreign to the young Streep. “He wasn’t like anybody I’d ever met,” she said later. “It was the specificity of him, and his sort of humanity and his curiosity about people, his compassion.”

They were the envy of the New York theater world — she the most naturally gifted actress in generations, he the most naturally gifted actor, legendary director Joe Papp their patron — until one day in May 1977.

Cazale, who was in previews for Agamemnon uptown, had been feeling ill enough to miss performances. Papp was concerned enough to get Cazale an emergency appointment with his own doctor on the Upper East Side. Within days, Streep and Cazale were sitting in the doctor’s office with Joe and Gail Papp. The diagnosis: Cazale had terminal lung cancer. It had spread throughout his body. They sat there, Gail Papp said, feeling “like you’ve been struck dead on the spot.”

Streep and Cazale tried to keep the severity of his condition between them. Even Cazale’s brother, Stephen, didn’t realize how bad it was until one day, after the three of them had lunch in Chinatown, Cazale stopped on the sidewalk and spat up blood.

Streep was determined to help Cazale overcome his cancer, and the two confided in Pacino, who took the actor to his radiation treatments. Rober DeNiro would later confess that he’d never seen one human being as devoted to another as Streep was to Cazale. Streep spent the last five months of Cazale’s life by his side, putting her career on hold.

Meryl Streep later said that the time they had together, retreating into their cocoon, gave her a weird sort of protection. She confided in very few people, and wrote to her old drama teacher at Yale, Bobby Lewis, of her true emotional state.

“My beau is terribly ill and sometimes, as now, in the hospital,” Streep wrote. “He has very wonderful care and I try not to stand around wringing my hands, but I am worried all the time and pretending to be cheery all the time, which is more exhausting mentally physically emotionally than any work I’ve ever done.”

In early March 1978, Cazale entered Memorial Sloan Kettering. Streep never left his side. On March 12, 1978, at 3 a.m., Cazale’s doctor told Streep, “He’s gone.”

Meryl Streep wasn’t ready to hear it, much less believe it. What happened next, by some accounts, was the culmination of all the tenacious hope Meryl had kept alive for the past 10 months. She pounded on his chest, sobbing, and for a brief, alarming moment, John opened his eyes. “It’s all right, Meryl,” he said weakly. “It’s all right.” Then he closed his eyes and died. Streep’s first call was to Cazale’s brother, Stephen. She sobbed throughout.

“I tried,” she told him

[luckhound]

— heavy burdens.

pairing.  kaeya/gender neutral reader

genre.  angst

description.  on an important anniversary, kaeya gets drunk off his ass, bonds with a fellow captain, and realizes some burdens can’t ever be set back down.

warnings.  spoilers for kaeya and diluc’s character stories. mentions of alcohol and a character (kaeya) being under the influence.

note.  four months later and i’ve finally finished this fic after writing it on and off for that whole time mskfjdks a big thank you to sierra, miya, and grace for reading over the previous drafts of this and giving me their honest thoughts, love you ladies <3

He hadn’t expected to get shitfaced when he had first stepped foot in the tavern. Honest.

His plan for the evening was as follows: Go to Angel’s Share, chat with patrons, share some laughs, learn some secrets, and see where the night goes. Only the information he gleaned would tell how it ended; with him stumbling back to his quarters for a night’s rest, or ruminating on how to dismantle schemes that enemies of Mondstadt were concocting in the shadows.

So, the usual. Nothing too noteworthy.

Then he happened to overhear a conversation on the way there.

The two civilians spoke in low, somber tones about how it has been exactly one year since Master Crepus’s death and his son Diluc’s subsequent departure from Mondstadt. How terrible, they mused as they shook their heads, that the new winery master hasn’t been heard from since. He must still be in mourning over his father.

Kaeya nearly stopped in the middle of the crowded street. Was today really the one-year anniversary of Master Crepus’s death? How had it managed to slip his mind? He’s been busy lately with a promising lead, true, but to think that he would forget...

Which, long story cut ruthlessly short, leads him to where he is now. Tuning out his tumultuous thoughts with the help of alcohol and secrets.

Upon entering the tavern to raucous cheers, he had flitted from table to table like the social butterfly he's purported to be. The usual suspects greeted him with varying levels of warmth, inviting him to sit and keep them company. Stable hands and bandits alike shared a drink with him, words spilling from their lips like the fine wine they supped on.

After some time, though, he grew tired of their monotonous days and banal gripes. So he retreated to the bar counter. As he nursed a Death After Noon, he kept an ear out, listening carefully even as he chatted with Charles between customers.

Unfortunately, he hasn’t heard anything juicy yet. So and so is complaining about his wife, while someone else is haranguing her boss, and another is celebrating their birthday. Dull and uninteresting.

Can you blame him for getting so deep in his cups? There’s nothing else to do on such a slow night.

“So this is where you decided to hide out. Colour me surprised.”

Kaeya notes the shadow falling over the counter moments before a familiar drawl reaches his ears. He tilts his head up, blinking furiously when his vision blurs. The drinks he's downed thus far—how many has it been? He lost count after five, how unlike him—have certainly reached his bloodstream.

You stand beside his stool, your lips thinned into an unimpressed line. Despite how inebriated he is, the relevant information he has on you flashes through his mind. A Knight of Favonius. Captain of the Intelligence Team. Once a company grade officer, then sergeant, lieutenant, before ascending to captain upon the retirement of your superior.

As admired as he is by most of Mondstadt, you’re among the minority who are far from his biggest fans. For good reason, he supposes. During your first meeting, he had congratulated you on your promotion, before going on to flippantly insult your old captain. You’ve hated him ever since.

Which is why he’s puzzled by you approaching him first—outside of headquarters, at that. Such a phenomenon is rare, like catching a crystalfly in your hands.

“Captain! Fancy seeing you here,” he greets, adopting a jovial tone. Then your words register in his addled mind. “‘Hide out’, you said? Whatever would I do that for?”

You prop a hand on your hip. “You didn’t make an appearance at the meeting today. Needless to say, the Dandelion Knight isn’t too impressed with you at the moment.” You appraise him, looking underwhelmed by what you see. Ouch. “Strange. You don’t seem terribly ill to me.”

Ah. That. Kaeya had wanted to investigate some curious rumours he’d heard around the city, so he made up a flimsy excuse to dodge the captain’s meeting held this morning. Grand Master Varka likely hadn’t batted an eye over it, but not Jean. She’ll have concerns.

He hums noncommittally. The thought of annoying his oldest ally never fails to bring a smirk to his lips, but he isn’t quite in the mood right now. “Is that so. You must be here to sternly tell me to clean up my act then.”

You scoff. “Surely you don’t need a second babysitter. No, I’m off-duty, so I’m here for the same reason everyone else is: to drink.”

“Hear, hear.” He lifts his tankard as if to toast to you, but the sudden momentum causes him to sway dangerously in his seat.

“Careful!” Eyes widening in alarm, you reach out to steady him. “Geez, Alberich. How many drinks have you had?”

The palm of your hand is warm where it sits on his shoulder; he can tell that even with his furs in the way. He almost leans into the touch but catches himself at the last second. How mortifying. He can just picture your horrified reaction to him drunkenly nuzzling up against you.

Almost falling off his seat in a crowded tavern, instinctively seeking out your slightest touch... He needs to get a hold of himself. Or find a way to halt the conversation here, so he can resume drinking by his lonesome.

“Not nearly enough,” he answers airily, leaning an elbow on the bar counter. You drop your hand to your side; he makes a point to not stare at it as you do. “Where’s your entourage? I’m surprised they aren't following dutifully behind you.”

“They’re my subordinates, not my entourage.” You shift awkwardly. “And they aren’t here. It may surprise you, but they have lives outside of the Intelligence Team. They can enjoy one evening without their captain breathing down their necks.”

He eyes you in amusement. “In that case, you should join me. I would welcome the company.” He finishes off his tankard, then motions to Charles for another drink. The bartender doesn’t even ask which one as he takes the pewter mug. He knows him well by now, after all.

Kaeya expects you to turn him down and find a seat elsewhere. Usually, such an invitation is enough to send you running for the hills. You lean a hip against the counter instead, as if settling in. “If I am not mistaken, you’re needed at headquarters tomorrow. I strongly advise you to call it a night, Captain.”

“Aww, are you worried about me, Captain?” He manages a grin at the scowl his reply elicits. “Don’t be. It won’t be the first time I stumble into work hungover. Certainly won’t be the last either.”

“How reassuring,” you say dryly.

“I aim to please.”

He perks up when Charles returns with a full tankard. The delectable taste of Death After Noon still sits on his tongue, warm and heady. He very much wants to experience it again. When he lifts the mug to his mouth, however, he misses the rim. He steadies the tankard before it empties itself onto his lap, but some of the wine drips down his chin, ruining his vest.

Thank goodness he isn’t drinking red wine. Every adult in Mondstadt knows red wine stains are notoriously difficult to clean. Still, what a waste of a perfectly good sip.

“Oh, for Barbatos’s sake.” That’s all the warning he gets before his drink is rudely snatched from his hand. He protests but can only watch helplessly as you bring it to your lips.

Then you proceed to down it.

His brows raise higher and higher the longer your throat bobs. He's never seen you drink with such gusto before. Shouldn’t you be gasping for breath by now? But no, you empty the tankard in a single go, then slam it on the counter (Charles makes a face, but wisely says nothing) and meet his gaze without flinching.

Wow, is all that his intoxicated mind can conjure up at the feat.

“There, all done. Now let’s go. I am walking you back.” Your voice is firm, brooking no argument. How captain-like of you. “Wouldn’t want Mondstadt’s illustrious Cavalry Captain to be found passed out in an alleyway tomorrow.”

On any other day, he’d be mildly irked by your stubbornness. But he did just spill his drink down his front like a newborn babe. No wonder you brought up his rank. In your eyes, his conduct must not befit that of a high-ranking knight. He doesn’t care what assumptions people form about him, never has, but tonight has been a bust anyway. Maybe it's best to call it quits.

Sighing theatrically, he rises to his feet. “All right, I know when I have been beaten. But don’t change your plans on my account. I can head to the barracks by myself just fine.”

“I’m sure you can,” you say, “but letting you walk alone this late in your state would grate at my conscience. So would you stop talking for once, and let me take you home?”

You get what you want. Your words render him silent.

Home, you called the barracks. He supposes you consider that place your home. But is it his, truly?

He thinks of Khaenri’ah, nothing but a distant, bloody memory. He thinks of his father, and how in their final moments together, the man had stared through him like he wasn’t there. He thinks of the Dawn Winery, where he had spent several years causing mayhem. He thinks of Master Crepus, never dad, and a brother who doesn’t exist anymore.

No, the barracks aren’t his home. Maybe he’s never had one to begin with.

When he comes to, Kaeya registers you leading him in the direction of the tavern door, your hand on his shoulder blade. This quickly catches the attention of the patrons. They call out their goodbyes, some raising their tankards and others chuckling good-naturedly.

“Look at that! Our Cavalry Cap’n had too much to drink, eh?”

“What, are you tapping out already, Captain Kaeya?”

“Has to be escorted out by a fellow knight, no less!”

You wave over your shoulder. “Just doing my patriotic duty, that's all.”

Kaeya gives his audience an exaggerated wink (as well as he can with his one uncovered eye) followed by a lazy hand salute. His grin remains fixed in place until the door swings shut. The wooden barrier barely muffles the sounds of conversation and merriment coming from within.

Had it been that loud while he was inside? He hadn’t noticed.

He isn’t able to dwell on it for long, because you nudge him in the direction of headquarters. “Come on. We have a bit of a walk ahead of us. Let’s get to it.”

“Oh, very well. But only because you asked so nicely.”

“I wasn’t asking.”

“I know. I was being sarcastic.”

You nudge him harder, and he snickers under his breath as he walks.

This time of night, the cobblestone streets seem devoid of life. With the exception of Patton, who’s practically asleep standing up, the two of you don’t run into anyone. It's a stark change from how the city usually is, bright and bustling with crowds.

It suits him just fine, though. The crisp night air is sobering him up somewhat, the fog that had settled over his mind thinning. All too soon, he recalls everything he was trying to suppress.

Master Crepus. Diluc. His callousness and cruelty in forgetting them both.

In hindsight, he should have taken his mug back from you instead of just gaping like a fool. Sobriety is such a drag.

“You’re quiet,” you comment. You’re staring at him intently, your expression eerily similar to Timaeus’s when he is observing an alchemical reaction. It’s as if he is a specimen that you are keen on studying under a microscope.

He wants to scowl, to snap at you. “My apologies,” he says instead, as innocent as can be. “Were you waiting for me to strike up a conversation? Hold on a moment, let me think of a good topic...”

“That is not what I meant and you know it. It’s just, usually it’s impossible to get you to stop talking. The times I have seen you...indisposed”—buzzed as a bee, you undoubtedly mean—“that doesn’t change. You talk more, if anything.”

Curiously, your voice softens, an odd cadence colouring it. One he has not heard from you before, not directed at him at least. “I guess I’m just wondering if something is weighing on your mind. Is that what prompted you to drink so much tonight?”

By now, the two of you have walked down the stairway to the Knights of Favonius’s bulletin board. Of course, Hertha isn’t there this late to assign requests and bounties. The pieces of parchment pinned to the board flutter in the breeze. He stares at the sketch of a Ruin Guard, willing his sluggish mind to craft a suitable answer.

After a beat, his eye slides over to you. An impish grin curls at the corners of his mouth. “My, I had no idea that you watched my every move so closely. I’m flattered by the attention.”

Predictably, you sputter. “What even—that is not—you know what, if you want to dodge the question so badly, fine. We can just walk the rest of the way in silence.”

“As you wish, Captain.”

Although his words were said to fluster you into changing the subject, as you had correctly deduced, Kaeya means them. You have noticed him far more than he realized. As Captain of the Intelligence Team, it’s your job to be observant and keep tabs on others. He knows that. Still, it’s disconcerting to learn that you’ve had a close eye on him in particular.

He operates from the shadows for a reason; he can’t have you jeopardizing that by shining a light on him. Five months into your new position, and already you have proven yourself to be dangerous.

As you wished for, silence reigns as the two of you turn into an alley and approach two flights of stairs, leading to the center of the city. Kaeya resists pressing a hand against the nearest wall for balance. He had walked down a stairway unaided just moments ago, despite how unsteady he felt. Surely ascending some steps would prove to be easier.

Rather than focus on his feet, he looks up ahead. From his position, he can just barely glimpse the blades of a windmill, ever-turning against the dark backdrop of the night sky. He keeps his gaze there as he climbs, his boots scraping against stone.

He clears the first flight of stairs with little issue. See? Nothing to it.

Halfway up the second, Kaeya stumbles.

His surroundings tilt, blurring as he fumbles for balance. It’s a futile effort. Thanks to how inebriated he is, his limbs are too heavy and uncoordinated. The stone below rushes up to meet him.

Before his face can greet it, however, you catch him.

Your side moulds against his, a hand clasping his hip while the other carefully grasps at his spiked pauldron. His gloved hand covers yours reflexively as his racing heartbeat settles. He feels you stiffen at the touch, but you don't pull away. Neither does he.

For a moment, not a word is spoken between you both. The alley is filled only with the soft sound of breathing.

Then you click your tongue. “So much for heading back by yourself. You can barely keep your feet under you.” Your voice lilts with humour.

He knows this song and dance. It has been ingrained in him after all these months. You snark at him, he snarks back. Rinse and repeat. Although this is the first time he has heard levity in your tone; the first time it has been aimed at him, that is. He almost hadn’t thought you capable of it.

He straightens with a chuckle. “First at the tavern, and now in an alley. I just keep falling for you tonight, don’t I?”

You blink owlishly. It takes a moment for the words to sink in. Then a flustered expression crosses your features, before you compose yourself. “You are unbelievable.”

He grins. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

You roll your eyes, even as the corners of your lips twitch. “You would.”

Kaeya expects you to move away, so the two of you can resume walking, but you don’t. “Not that I mind having your hands on me, but...will you be letting go any time soon?”

“That depends.” A challenging glint appears in your eye. “Can you handle walking on your own? Or do you need me to cradle you the rest of the way to headquarters, like some damsel?”

He guffaws, taken off-guard by the retort. A reply escapes his loosened tongue before he can think better of it, “Archons, that sounded just like him.”

“Like who?”

“My brother.”

In the past, despite being underage, he was sometimes able to charm bartenders at Angel’s Share—new hires unaware of how to deal with him as of yet—into serving him drinks. Diluc would find him eventually, a disapproving twist to his mouth, and put a stop to it.

Back then, Kaeya was a lightweight and had to be supported back to headquarters. Diluc would scowl and roll his eyes the entire way, but there was still a softness in his gaze. His hands were strong, but careful; Kaeya knew that his brother would not let him fall. He could even be persuaded to join in when Kaeya began to sing, their off-key voices disturbing the silence of the night.

Come morning, while Kaeya nursed the inevitable headache and Jean nagged him about violating the Knights of Favonius Handbook, Diluc would snort. “Serves you right,” he’d say, then hand him a draught for curing hangovers.

Now Kaeya must weather the pain alone.

You tilt your head to the side, your gaze fixed on his. “I had no idea that you have a brother,” you say softly.

Had, he nearly corrects. But he has told you too much already.

This is why he is so careful when drinking in the company of others. Alcohol is a double-edged sword; as delectable as it is, it also loosens inhibitions. It’s what he relies on when charming information out of allies and adversaries alike, none of them the wiser of what they have given up.

How the tables have turned.

“Well, now you do.” A trace of bitterness enters his tone.

You eye him, quiet, before pulling back. You motion forward with your chin. “Let’s keep moving. We’ll never make it to headquarters at this pace.”

Relieved by the subject change, he listens. He makes a conscious effort to place one foot in front of the other, gaze trained on the remaining steps below. You stay at his side, closer than you were before. He can feel your hand hovering at the small of his back, ready to catch him should he trip once more, but he ignores it.

It won’t happen again. He’ll make sure of it.

The alley opens up to a view of the market district. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have long to enjoy the reprieve. The two of you turn right, away from the railing overlooking the main square, to climb two more flights of stairs. A left, and more stairways await.

By the time the Knights of Favonius Headquarters looms above you, Kaeya’s legs ache from the walk. He is very much looking forward to retiring to his quarters.

The knights stationed outside stiffen at the sight of you and Kaeya, standing at attention. They perform a salute in perfect unison. Do they rehearse that before every shift? Surely they must.

The guard on the left, with the glasses and unfortunate haircut, chirps, “Good evening, Captains! I hope you are doing well.” He appears wide awake despite the late hour.

At least the one on the right looks appropriately haggard. “Welcome back,” he grunts.

While Kaeya brushes past them with a nod of acknowledgement, eager to head inside, you stop. “Good evening, Athos, Porthos. Your shift ends soon, I hope? It can’t be terribly interesting, standing watch outside headquarters so late.”

“It’s no trouble at all, Captain!” Athos, as you had referred to him, says. “Guard duty may not be glamorous, but it is still important.”

“Much as I agree with the lad, I can’t bring myself to be so damn cheerful about it,” Porthos sighs, his words tinged with self-deprecation. “Must be ‘cause of these old bones.”

“That’s not true, Sir Porthos. Your bones aren’t that old!” the younger knight argues, prompting the older to shake his head with a chuckle.

“Athos isn’t wrong,” you add. “You are far more sprightly than most knights I know.”

“If that’s true, then Mondstadt is in trouble.”

Smiling and shaking your head, you finally pass by them, climbing the short steps to return to Kaeya's side. He lifts a brow as he pulls on one of the large oak doors, holding it open for you.

It’s almost comical how quickly your smile disappears. Your eyes narrow as you enter inside. “What’s that look for?”

“Nothing,” he says breezily, following after you. The door falls closed behind you both with a loud, echoing thud. “Just that I didn’t know you were so chummy with the guards.”

It is blindingly bright inside the Knights of Favonius Headquarters, as if it isn’t nearing midnight. The sconces on the walls are lit up, as is the chandelier hanging in the center of the main hall. The two of you make your way towards the—joy of all joys—staircase. The barracks for knights are located on the second floor, and on the floor above that, separate quarters for the captains.

“I am off-duty right now. It’s not unprofessional for me to speak informally with them.”

His eye widens. “Why, I never said it was unprofessional, Captain.”

You grind your teeth so hard he can practically hear the enamel wearing away. “You implied it.” No, he didn’t. Your distaste for him has you imagining mockery where there is none. As if Kaeya has any room to judge someone for acting unprofessional.

“I did? That’s news to me.” Privately, he marvels at how easily he can agitate you. Him, no one else—he has observed you long enough to know your prickliness is reserved for him alone. Maybe that’s why he annoys you further instead of clearing up the many miscommunications that tend to occur. Not that you’ll believe him, even if he’s being completely honest.

You huff. “How the Dandelion Knight manages to put up with you, I’ll never know,” you mutter.

“How rude, Captain! Jean doesn’t put up with me, she considers me indispensable.”

You cut a look at him. “Yes, I’m sure she thought the same when you failed to show up to today’s meeting.”

“Must you bring that up again? I shudder just thinking of the lecture she’ll have ready for me in the morning. Perhaps my mysterious ailment should plague me for a little while longer...”

“Prolonging the inevitable will do you no favours.” You pause briefly, then add, “Ah, I almost forgot to mention. After the meeting, I ran into Inspector Eroch. He was waiting outside and asked after you. He seemed irked when I informed him that you were absent today.”

If Kaeya was not so skilled at masking his reactions, he would’ve perked up at that. He might have even stopped in his tracks or whipped his head around to look at you. But he knows better than to give himself away so obviously. He leisurely climbs the steps, his features revealing only vague interest. “Oh? Somehow I doubt he was upset out of concern for my wellbeing.”

You glance over. “I wouldn’t know. He did not say anything when I asked why he wanted to see you, or if I could pass on a message. He just brushed me off and left.”

“Don’t be hurt by his shameful conduct, Captain. I for one enjoy your company immensely.”

You ignore his thoughtful statement. “I thought that he might have had a prior engagement with you, which you missed due to being terribly ill.”

He shrugs. “If we did, I don’t recall it.”

That earns him another look, longer than the one before. He doesn’t flinch away from it, his expression remaining serene. Privately, he wonders what you know. Are you merely intrigued by what Inspector Eroch might want with him? Or are you more aware than you’re letting on?

After all, Eroch is the one Kaeya has been secretly investigating for the past year.

Looks like the inspector has caught on. About time. No doubt he wants to figure out just how much Kaeya knows—which is not much, unfortunately. He knows that Eroch has more than just Mondstadt’s best interests in mind; a Fatui spy like him would have just the opposite. But he is unsure what the man is up to, or who he even is.

He does, however, have an inkling. Several, even.

Inspector Eroch had been insistent on covering up the details of Master Crepus’s death. For the good of Mondstadt, he claimed, not wanting the citizenry to lose faith in the Knights of Favonius. Grand Master Varka had ultimately sided with him. It resulted in Diluc resigning his position and leaving the city a year ago.

Kaeya had kept an eye on the inspector after that. He knew there was more to the situation than just preserving Mondstadt’s trust in the Knights, and it had everything to do with the dangerous and evil power Master Crepus had harnessed. It was only a matter of figuring out what. And once he has all of the information...

Well, he knows what Diluc would do, once upon a time. Blazing with righteous fury, he’d take his findings to Grand Master Varka, insisting on Eroch’s arrest and expulsion from the Knights of Favonius. He would see it as retribution for how poorly his father’s death had been handled.

But Kaeya suffers from no delusions. Maybe he looked into Eroch because of Master Crepus. Maybe he wanted some kind of revenge for what happened. Maybe he yearned to atone for his past inaction. None of that means he has any heroic intentions.

If it serves his interests better, he won’t expose the inspector immediately. He will hoard his knowledge instead, keeping his cards close to his chest until it’s the right time to play them.

That is how he has always operated. Master Crepus's death and Diluc's departure have not changed that. For a brief, nonsensical moment, he wishes they had. Then common sense returns to him. A foolhardy sense of justice is of no use to him. He’ll leave that to Diluc.

While he extricates himself from his wayward thoughts, you turn away to clear the last few steps. “If it is important, surely he will try to approach you again,” you say.

“I look forward to it with bated breath.”

You scoff, rightfully skeptical, but don’t respond. Clearly, you are content to leave it at that.

He wonders at how easily you let the subject drop. Had you suspected something, you would have pushed to learn more, wouldn’t you? Now is as opportune a time as any; it’s late, he’s tired and drunk, and the both of you are alone. Does that make you oblivious, or an idiot, or crafty?

Having made it to the third floor, the two of you make your way down the hallway. His quarters are before your own, three doors on the left. He stops in front of his door, reaching into one of many hidden coat pockets to produce his key.

He glances at you. You have yet to leave for own your room. “You don’t have to hover at my side, you know,” he says with a touch of amusement. “I may be tipsy, but I am no longer in any danger of being harassed by ruffians or passing out in the streets. Unless you're secretly harbouring nefarious intentions towards me, Captain.”

“You’ll just have to wait and find out,” is your unruffled response.

Chuckling under his breath, he unlocks his door and lets it swing open wide. It’s dark inside, faint moonlight shining through the small window above his desk. Coupled with the sconces out in the hallway, however, there is enough light for him to stumble to his bedside without stubbing a single toe. He doesn’t bother to close the door on you; he has nothing to hide.

Kaeya knows what his quarters must look like to a stranger. They’re a mess, as if someone had searched them in a haste and not bothered to clean up afterward. The walls are bare, save for a map of Mondstadt that he’d hung up ages ago. Tomes of all sizes and loose leaves of parchment litter his oak desk, pushed up against a wall. A quill lies abandoned atop a half-finished note with ink drying on its nib. His closet door is cracked open, a discarded boot dissuading anyone from forcing it shut.

Yes, his quarters are a mess. But he knows exactly where everything is. Should someone actually attempt to search his things, he would know immediately. Not that they would find anything particularly damning. He isn’t foolish enough to leave important documents or sensitive information lying about—nothing he is unwilling to part with, anyway.

“Horrifying, but unsurprising,” he hears you mutter to yourself.

Kaeya doesn’t even consider slipping out of his ruined clothes or engaging you in further conversation. Now that he has made it back to his quarters, all he can think about is the sweet embrace of sleep. He sinks into his unmade bed, draping an arm over his face.

You continue to linger in the doorway. “You should change before you fall asleep.”

“Mhm.”

“You'll regret not doing so in the morning.”

“Uh-huh.” He still doesn’t move.

“Alberich. You stink of booze.”

“You sure know how to compliment a guy, Captain. I’m impressed.”

You sigh, long and loud. He waits to hear the door close behind you, only for you to walk up to his bedside. Your steps are slow, hesitant yet purposeful. He stiffens, immediately on-guard, but fights his instincts in order to remain still. What are you planning?

He feels you grip his boot. Metal jingles as you undo the buckle. Then you pry it off.

He lifts his arm to peer up at you. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” You set his boot on the ground, then move on to the other one. “If you won’t change, you should at least take off your shoes. You’ll dirty your sheets otherwise.”

Oh, you make it so easy for him to twist everything you say into an innuendo. For once he resists the urge. “You forgot something,” he says instead. He wiggles his sock-clad foot at you. Just to see if you will do it.

You grimace, swatting his leg away. “Absolutely not. I don’t want to be anywhere near those.”

So you say. But you’re taking his boots off for him out of your own volition. There is no need for you to do any of this. It’s not your duty to stop him from drinking himself into a stupor, or walk him back to headquarters unharmed, or all but tuck him into bed. Yet here you are.

What is it that you want? There have been plenty of opportunities for you to try and take advantage of his drunken state, but you have sidestepped every one. Frustration brews in his sternum.

“Do you do this for everyone who you hate?” he finds himself asking, tone purposely lighthearted.

You pause in your ministrations to stare at him. “What? I don't hate you.” At his disbelieving look, you insist, “I don’t. You have always been a pain to deal with, sure, but I never once felt that way.”

He smiles, unconvinced. “Not even when I insulted your dear old captain?”

“Insulted my... That was months ago, when we first met.” Despite your bewilderment, you take a moment to contemplate his question. “I was upset with you, yes. But now that I’ve had this position for some time...maybe your assessment wasn’t off. When I was lieutenant, I didn’t always see eye-to-eye with my captain. They were too set in their ways and scorned most criticism. I respected them, and still do, but I shouldn’t be ignorant of their faults.”

Your gaze meets his once more. “In a way, what you said that day led me to realize that. You weren’t badmouthing my captain; you didn’t have a vendetta or want to get a rise out of me. At least, I don’t think you did. You must have legitimate issues with their leadership, as a captain yourself.”

He watches you shrewdly. Your tone was even, your expression clear. He cannot detect any deception from you. Of course, that means little. Still, perhaps you’re telling the truth. Perhaps you don’t hate him after all.

A headache, newly formed, pounds at his temple. If he were more sober, he would be better equipped to handle such a revelation. He’ll have to come to a proper conclusion later.

You fiddle with the buckle on his remaining boot. “And what about you?”

“Hmm? What about me?”

“You have ample reason to look down on me. Most of the knights know that you aren’t just Cavalry Captain and Quartermaster. Your role is more important than that. Surely you would make a better...” you trail off, your jaw working silently.

Kaeya knows how that sentence ends. Surely you would make a better Captain of the Intelligence Team than me. It doesn’t come as a surprise.

Up until now, he thought he knew you well. You made it no secret you loathed him. You have never said so explicitly, but he has a talent for reading people. It’s a classic case of envy. He has seen it many times before. You compare yourself to him and find yourself wanting. It colours the way you interact with him; your words brusque, your gaze narrowed.

Not only did he insult your captain, but you consider him more capable than you. Your hatred makes sense. It’s predictable.

Or so he believed, until tonight.

“You know what, never mind. Forget I asked.” Uh-oh. Seems he took too long to respond. You busy yourself with unbuckling his boot, avoiding his eye.

If he were to be honest, there are many ways he could answer you. He thinks you are a better captain than your superior could ever hope to have been. He thinks you are a leader capable of inspiring undying loyalty in your officers. He thinks you have a deep, unflinching love for Mondstadt and its people. He thinks you constantly push yourself to greater heights, to the point it lights a fire in him as well.

He admits to none of those things, in the end.

“Give yourself some credit, Captain,” he murmurs. You glance over in surprise. He meets your gaze. For perhaps the first time in a while, he hopes his words sound sincere—not because he doesn’t mean them, but because he does. “I know the officers under your supervision think you’re a good leader. They wouldn’t want anyone else to take your place.” Certainly not someone like me.

Instead of reassuring you, however, his answer seems to do the opposite. You look frustrated. “That isn’t what I...” you trail off. You search his features, silent, before your brow furrows. “I can’t tell if you mean what you just said. Sometimes I’m not sure I ever can.”

He takes care not to allow his features to visibly harden. Of course you would doubt him, the one time he tries to be honest with you. What else did he expect? Maybe you don't hate him, maybe you never have, but that means little. You won’t ever fully trust him. To be fair, the feeling is mutual.

His mouth tastes unbearably bitter. It must be the wine.

“At this point, I’m willing to say just about anything if it’ll mean I can get some shut-eye.” He feels no satisfaction upon seeing your shoulders stiffen. He still manages to grin. “Well, Captain? Any other requests?”

“No,” you say. Then you tug off his boot with a brisk motion.

He stifles a yelp. “Hey, now! No need to be so rough.”

“My sincere apologies.” You set the boot down next to his other one, your lips thinned. “I should go. Wouldn’t want you to lose more sleep than you already have. You have a long day ahead of you tomorrow, after all.”

Talk about vindictive. Despite his irritation, he has to fight a smile. Knowing you, you’ll see it and take it the wrong way, as you usually do.

Having finished removing his boots, you turn and walk for the door without another word.

He’s struck with the odd urge to stop you. To reach out, take your hand in his, and tug you back. Not because he wants something from you, or needs to tell you something. He wishes you would stay a little longer, that’s all. Wants the silence to be filled by your voice instead of his thoughts.

Now he knows he’s had too much to drink. He’s contemplating such ridiculous things.

Before his addled mind can catch up and he can say something, apologize perhaps, you shut the door behind you. Your footsteps travel down the hallway, slightly hurried. The door to your quarters creaks open then closed.

He’s too late. It’s for the best.

Kaeya lies back and stares up at the ceiling. His vision swims, as if he’s adrift at sea. Closing his eye only makes it worse.

His mind pores over the events of the day. Investigating Eroch, remembering Master Crepus and Diluc, visiting the tavern, running into you. He feels restless, pulled in several directions at once.

With a harsh exhale, he rises to his feet and locks his door. Then he begins his nightly ritual.

His pauldron is first to go. It hits the floor with a dull noise. Then he peels off his gloves and tosses them on the desk. The burns on his hands have long since healed, but he still deals with numbness now and then. Not many know they even exist; he doesn’t want anyone taking advantage of a potential weakness. His eyepatch follows closely after.

He removes the Cryo Vision from his belt last. He stares at it, its blue glow washing over his scarred palm and turning his skin a sickly brown hue. If it’s been a year since Master Crepus’s death, it has been about a year since he was gifted a Vision as well. The sight of it has been a hard reminder ever since. Of how he’d won a difficult battle. Of how he’d finally revealed the truth. Of how he can never speak it again.

He tucks the Vision under his pillow, then collapses back into bed. An odd sensation fills him, as it does every time he completes this ritual. It’s like he has taken off every scrap of armour he has and foolishly exposed himself to danger, despite being alone in the stillness of his quarters.

Ignoring the uncomfortable feeling, he closes his eyes and waits for sleep to take him under.

It never does.

[kinofanubis]

Greetings ✨️ Welcome to my blog!

You can call me Kin or Jasper, though I prefer Kin.

You may recognize the name "KinOfAnubis", and if you do....

Yep, I have a Tumblr now. Most of the things on here are CNC (Consensual Non Consensual) so if you're sensitive to that kind of stuff, please exit now.

I'm just gonna say this once. MINORS DNI. I'm 21 years old, and honestly, anyone under 20 gives me the heebie jeebies. I, myself, was groomed as a minor and exposed to SO MANY things I shouldn't have been exposed to that traumatized me. I refuse to be part of the problem. I will block you if you are under the age of 18. Absolutely no exceptions.

Now that that's over with, let's go over a little about me.

I am SO BAD at replying to messages. I see them, say I'll reply later, and then suddenly it's been a whole week and now I'm too embarrassed to say anything back. I am DEEPLY sorry for the way I am, and I'm working on it. If you message me a few times, chances are I'll be more likely to reply because I'll remember my messages exist 😅

I'm mentally ill and completely unmedicated, a part from smoking. Sometimes I retreat into myself and go silent. Please don't take this personal. If you've really offended me, you'll know.

PTSD, Psychosis, Depression, Anxiety, BPD.

Incase this account ever gets deleted, you can still find me on Pornhub, OnlyFans, Instagram, and Twitter under KinOfAnubis.

Some of my kinks/fetishes include, but are not limited to,

Kidnapping, knife play, cnc, blood, forced intoxication, fear play, Pet play, spanking, forced submission, bondage, water boarding, breeding, smoking, human ash tray, branding, and many more.

I'm willing to try ALMOST anything once. Once I have my own space, I'll be more active on my other platforms. But I'm tired of putting out half assed content just for the hell of it, so I'm taking a little break.

So now, if we're good, I hope you enjoy the content ✨️

[leviosally]

Stay….he says. It’s what he always says, as though Jaskier was a small child or a particularly wayward puppy. He was neither of these things, obviously, but as he opens his mouth to protest for the umpteenth time, knowing full-well the argument is absolutely fruitless and completely self-indulgent he finds himself dispelled abruptly with the witcher’s second favorite silencing mechanism; piercing golden death glare. But, Jaskier was a man of principle, and arguing with Geralt was just that…a matter of principle.

Stay, Geralt whisper hisses over his shoulder, handing him Roach’s reins before sneaking ahead into an abandoned cave or shack or fog shrouded thicket or other such likely place, securing the area like some sort of overgrown, witchery body-guard. And while Geralt playing the big, bad protector did indeed have a rather charming ‘knight-in-shining-armor’ ring to it, Jaskier wasn’t completely useless.

Stay, he growls as he bandages Jaskier’s wounds, obtained more oft than not by merely tripping over his own feet, but that was hardly the point.

Stay, he says through gritted teeth, grabbing a fistful of Jaskier’s doublet and hauling him quickly behind the edge of a building before stepping out to put himself between Jaskier and this week’s angry lord, which sends a blush blooming in his cheeks for entirely different reasons. But, he had succeeded in out-foxing many a past dalliance long before Geralt came along and was well practiced at looking out for himself, thankyouverymuch.

Stay, Geralt orders before he takes off on a hunt, leaving Jaskier behind in camp or at an Inn, and no matter how he huffs and puffs and complains that if Geralt describes one more monster as ‘He was one-hundred feet tall with rolling orange eyes and rows and rows of bard-crushing teeth’, the witcher merely quirks a smile at him, golden eyes effectively rooting him to the spot once more as he swings up into the saddle and takes off into the growing twilight…and Jaskier absolutely does not swoon at that.

“Stay.” Geralt repeats even now, like a bloody mantra, and Jaskier barely looks up from where he’s scratching various rhymes and lyrics into his notebook with his tongue caught between his teeth.

*

Jaskier knows Geralt’s been gone too long as he strides up to the front of the tavern he’s playing in for his second set of the evening and the dim, corner table near the back remains steadfastly empty.

He knows Geralt’s been gone far too long as he gathers his coin and tucks away his lute, turning toward the stair leading up to their room with a worrying twist in his gut.

He knows something must be absolutely wrong as the hour turns later and later, pushing well into the realm of the wee morning with still no Geralt. So, he makes like any good friend, and builds himself up with reassurances that Geralt’s condition that he ‘stay’ surely came with provisos like ‘In the event of a Griffin evisceration, send help…particularly a devastatingly handsome bard with eyes the color of the bluest sky, and lips as sweet as cherry pie…strong enough to bench an ox and hands I wish would wrap my c—’ Okay, okay perhaps the last part was a bit wishful, but a bard could dream. More importantly, Geralt could be in trouble, and that certainly wouldn’t do…for a variety of reasons.

With one dagger tucked safely in his boot and another hidden away inside his doublet, he grabs his cloak and sets off into the night. The mayor who had contracted Geralt in the first place was understandably disgruntled, brushing his valet aside as Jaskier’s incessant hammering of the door, practically fit to break it in, finally yields results. Jaskier draws himself up importantly, waving aside the poor man’s outrage at the late night interrruption and proceeds to interrogate him about the location of the latest big bad Wyvern Geralt has been commissioned to dispatch. After talking the poor mayor hoarse, and apologizing again for the late hour, he bows his way off the front stoop and heads off in the direction of the mayor’s half-lucid gesturing, hoping against hope that he’s made the right choice.

There’s surely no better recipe for worry than walking alone down a dark forest path in the middle of the night by one’s self, fretting in equal measure about A. whether he’s made the right decision about venturing out in the first place; he had seen Geralt in action before, and knew the witcher was more than capable of taking care of himself. He flushed richly just thinking about how Geralt’s muscles rippled and flexed in the midst of a battle, effectively obliterating any wonder of why there was even a fight in the first place upon more than one occasion, and B. Hoping against hope that Geralt wasn’t actually seriously hurt, and that the hunt was just taking longer than normal because Wyverns were, by all accounts, very flighty and unpredictable beasts…with rolling orange eyes and rows and rows of bard-crushing teeth…bloody hell.

It takes Jaskier a surprisingly shorter amount of time to find Geralt than he thought it would, which was both a blessing and a curse as the witcher lay propped against a boulder breathing raggedly with a hand pressed over what appeared, even at a distance, to be a rather sizeable gash across his lower abdomen.

“Geralt!” Jaskier gasps aloud, closing the remaining distance between them at a desperate stumble.

“Jaskier…” Geralt breathes, drawing a slow, pained breath, “I told you to…”

“…I know, I know…stay” Jaskier shoots back, skidding onto his knees at Geralt’s side and examining the wound. It’s deep, judging by the blood that’s seeping slowly over Geralt’s fingers, and Jaskier swallows thickly, forcing himself to keep a cool head as he turns instead to rummage in his pack. He withdraws a bottle of alcohol (definitely not the drinking kind) and yanks the cork out with his teeth.

“Right now, I need you to stay…stay still unless you want me to suture your elbow to your crotch.” He manages to muster a small, encouraging smile as Geralt’s eyes flicker to his, before emptying the bottle over the wound, eliciting a sharp hiss from the witcher that makes Jaskier’s chest clench. He squeezes his eyes shut in a tight grimace as Geralt swears aloud, but he pushes it desperately aside, holding a small needle and thread up to his eyes. Jasier can see Geralt’s jaw clench and unclench in his periphery as he sets the point of the needle to the witkcher’s flesh. He can feel that piercing golden gaze on his face as he closes the wound, nimble fingers making quick work of the suturing and trying not concentrate on the way Geralt’s chest shudders with each stitch.

*

Stay, Jaskier whispers, helping him up on to Roach before climbing up in front and clicking the mare to a brisk walk so as not to disturb Geralt’s wounds.

Stay, Jaskier says reassuringly, lowering Geralt onto the bed and squeezing his hand just briefly before crossing the room to retrieve bandages.

Stay, he says, trying on his best imitation of Geralt’s glare before disappearing downstairs to retrieve food and Geralt’s favorite drink just so he can see the rare but nonetheless genuine smile Geralt reserved for the things he holds dearest in life (Ale, Roach and…well perhaps Jaskier ranked in there somewhere even if Geralt wasn’t exactly forthcoming…)

“…and now you’re going to stay here and rest…and let me take care of you…” He croons reassuringly, sitting upon the edge of the bed and reaching up hesitantly to brush a stray strand of silver off of Geralt’s face as the witcher levels him an un-readable look.

No sooner were the words out of his mouth, than Jaskier’s suddenly leaping from the bed as though burned, a wide-eyed look of comprehension dawning on his face as he darts across the room to his bag, wherein he knew resided an old dictionary. Ignoring Geralt’s grunts of surprise that chase over his retreating shoulder, his fingers flip madly through the pages until he finds the one he’s looking for:

Stay; /sta/ To remain in a specified state or position. To delay harm or risk or hurt. To prevent the threat of danger, harm, or loss. Often to impose the protection or safe-guarding of something valuable.

With an effort, Jaskier un-sticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth and swallows the lump in his throat, a somewhat guilty sensation writhing in his chest….

…Geralt had been taking care of him all this time.

‘Safe-guarding something valuable’ loops on repeat in his head as he closes the old book and slides it back into his bag before rising slowly and turning back toward the bed. He finds Geralt’s inquisitive golden gaze, the hard lines of his brow drawn in a question, and Jaskier finds himself fumbling for the right words.

“Y’know, just…thought of a word for a song..” He murmurs, waving a hand dismissively when Geralt simply continues to stare at him with a look that is equal parts concern as though he had suddenly taken ill and something else that he could only describe as indifference…which Geralt could hardly be condemned for, as impulsively diving for his notebook was something Jaskier was indeed prone to doing, and often.

“You can uh…you should take the bed and I’ll kip on the floor here….” He produces awkwardly but Geralt’s penetrating gaze doesn’t falter.

Suddenly there’s a hand on his forearm as Geralt’s fingers close tentatively around it;

“Stay.” Geralt says in a low whisper.

[nordleuchten]

La Fayette and the Battle of Brandywine

On September 11, 1777, things were not looking well for the Continental Army. They were engaged in a battle that would later be known as the Battle of Brandywine. They faced the British army under the command of General Lord Cornwallis and soon the American troops were retreating in an unorderly fashion. Enter the youngest Continental general, the Marquis de La Fayette. He had just turned 20 a few days before the battle and had virtually no experience on the battlefield. He was determined though to do something and to rally the retreating soldiers. He was shot in the leg trying to achieve this and his injury was only one of the ways he would eventually cemented his place in the heart of a whole nation. Let us have a closer look at La Fayette’s wound on this anniversary of the battle.

La Fayette wrote in his Memoirs about his wound:

(…) the confusion became extreme; and it was whilst M. de Lafayette was rallying the troops that a ball passed through his leg; -- at that moment all those remaining on the field gave way. M. de Lafayette was indebted to Gimat, his aide-de-camp, for the happiness of getting upon his horse. General Washington arrived from a distance with fresh troops; M. de Lafayette was preparing to join him, when loss of blood obliged him to stop and have his wound bandaged; he was even very near being taken. Fugitives, cannon and baggage now crowded without order into the road leading to Chester. The general employed the remaining daylight in checking the enemy: some regiments behaved extremely well, but the disorder was complete. During that time the ford of Chad was forced, the cannon taken, and the Chester road became the common retreat of the whole army. In the midst of that dreadful confusion, and during the darkness of the night, it was impossible to recover; but at Chester, twelve miles from the field of battle, they met with a bridge which it was necessary to cross; M. de Lafayette occupied himself in arresting the fugitives; some degree of order was re-established; the generals and the commander-in-chief arrived, and he had leisure to have his wound dressed. (…) M. de Lafayette having been conveyed by water to Philadelphia, was carefully attended to by the citizens, who were all interested in his situation and extreme youth. That same evening the congress determined to quit the city: a vast number of the inhabitants deserted their own hearths -- whole families, abandoning their possessions, and uncertain of the future, took refuge in the mountains. M. de Lafayette was carried to Bristol; in a boat he there saw the fugitive congress, who only assembled again on the other side of the Susquehannah; he was himself conducted to Bethlehem a Moravian establishment, where the mild religion of the brotherhood, the community of fortune, education, and interests amongst that large and simple family formed a striking contrast to scenes of blood, and the convulsions occasioned by a civil war.

A few things to add to this little excerpt. La Fayette was quite lucky, because the musket ball had hit the fleshy part of the calf without damaging nerve or bone. In the medical world of the 18th century, especially a damaged bone would have led to a certain amputation of the limp. But La Fayette was indeed quite lucky. There is a bit of a discussion about the “true” extend of La Fayette’s injury because he tended to drastically downplay serious illnesses and injuries (while he would do the exact opposite with minor illnesses and injuries). Later in life, he also mentioned that without the good care of the Moravian sisters, he would have lost his leg - thus leading some people to believe that the injury was worse than he presented it. There is however no real evidence to support this theory, neither coming from La Fayette nor from anybody else.

Another interesting side note, the founders of the Moravian settlement came from the same region that La Fayette was later imprisoned in - from the region were Olmütz was at.

The sash that was used for the initial dressing of the wound has survived and is now displayed in the Fraunces Tavern Museum. I wrote about the sash here.

On the day of the battle, George Washington send some sort of “after action report” to John Hancock, who was then the President of the Continental Congress. In his letter, Washington also mentioned La Fayette:

The Marquis La Fayette was wounded in the leg, & General Woodford in the hand. Divers other officers were wounded, & some slain; but the numbers of either cannot now be ascertained.

But Washington was not the only one who wrote letters, La Fayette wrote letters as well that detailed his wound. He wrote his wife Adrienne a day after the battle on September 12, 1777:

While I was trying to rally them, the English honored me with a musket shot, which wounded me slightly in the leg. But the wound is nothing, dear heart; the ball hit neither bone nor nerve, and all I have to do for it to heal is to lie on my back for a while-which puts me in very bad humor. I hope, dear heart, that you will not worry; on the contrary, you should be even less worried than before, because I shall now be out of action for some time. I intend to take good care of myself; you may be sure of that, dear heart. This battle will, I fear, have unpleasant consequences for America; we must try to repair the damage, if we can. You must have received many letters from me, unless the English are as hostile to my letters as to my legs. I have received only one from you so far, and I long for news.

He wrote his wife again on October 1, 1777 from Bethlehem:

To put the best face on it, I could tell you that mature reflection had induced me to remain in my bed for several weeks, sheltered from all danger. But I must admit that I was invited to stay there because of a very slight wound in the leg. I do not know how I received it; in truth, I did not expose myself to enemy fire. It was my first battle, so you see how rare battles are. It is the last of this campaign, or at least the last big battle, it appears. If any other action occurs here, you see that I could not be present. Consequently, my dear heart, I take pleasure in reassuring you that you have no need to worry. While I tell you not to worry about me, I tell myself that you love me, and this little conversation with my heart pleases it very much, for it has never loved you more tenderly.

The day after that battle, my first thought was to write to you. I told you then that the wound was nothing, and I was right. The only thing I fear is that you have not received that letter, for if, when General Howe gives his master the king some slightly inflated details about his exploits in America, he reports me wounded, he could just as well report me killed. That would cost him nothing. I hope that my friends, and you especially, my dear heart, will never believe the reports of those people who last year even dared to print a story that General Washington and all his general officers were in a boat that capsized and all of them were drowned.

But we were speaking of my wound; the ball passed through the flesh and touched neither bone nor nerve. The surgeons are astonished by the rate at which it heals; they are in ecstasy every time they dress it, and maintain that it is the most beautiful thing in the world. I myself find it very foul, very tedious, and rather painful; there is no accounting for tastes. But, finally, if a man wished to be wounded just for his own amusement, he should come and see my wound and have one just like it. There, dear heart, you have the story of what I pompously call my wound, to give myself airs and to make myself interesting.

Now, since you are the wife of an American general officer, I must give you some instructions. People will say to you: “They have been beaten.” You will reply: “That is true, but between two armies of equal size, in open country, old soldiers have the advantage over new ones; besides, the Americans had the satisfaction of killing many more of the enemy than they lost.”

This letter is just so quintessential La Fayette! The way he wrote that he did not know how he even was injured in the first place, his statement that battles are oh so rarely and that he is perfectly safe, him getting completely side-tracked in the middle of the letter and finishing with his “instructions” to Adrienne (who still went on after that). But best of all is the opening line of the letter:

I wrote to you, dear heart, on the twelfth of September; the twelfth is the day after the eleventh

Yes La Fayette, that is true - but also very obvious, but thank you for pointing that out again :-)

He wrote his wife a last time regarding his injury on November 6, 1777. By that time he had actually already returned to the army (October) and had resumed active service.

You may receive this letter, my dear heart, in five or six years, for I am writing you by an indirect route, which I don't know much about. (…) All my other dispatches have informed you of the remaining events of the campaign. The Battle of Brandywine, where I cleverly left a little bit of my leg; the occupation of Philadelphia, which is so far from having the ill consequences of which they are persuaded in Europe; an unsuccessful attack on the camp at Germantown, in which I didn't participate because I had very recently been wounded (…)

I again included the opening sentence, not because it is of any merit for the topic, but because he is simply too good to be left out.

[logan-is-noggin]

One Thought- Chapter 5

chapter summary: Logan review the footage of his hidden camera, and decides to confront him with the help of the other sides.

Contains: spying, mentions of vomiting, Medical terminology, an intervention

Logan watched and roman and Patton exit into the imagination. roman was super excited to come up with a grand adventure for Patton to cheer him up. even if it was also a distraction, the fun would at least be real for them.

a week prior, when Logan had sent his plans in motion, he found a way to soothe virgils worries a bit. he was still using a camera but he had disguised it as one of the eyes of a stuffed animal. Logan chose a calico cat, since they happened to be pattons favorites.

the moral side was overjoyed when he received it, " whats the occasion?" he said as he gripped the cat to his chest

Logan was honest behind his reasoning " to lift your spirits, you had seemed a little down as of late, the cause is none of my business, but i just wanted you to know that we're all thinking of you." he said with a nod.

Patton smiled wide and gave Logan one of his hugs. this time, Logan didn't mind, because that hug told Logan that his hypothesis was closer to being right.

So now, a week later, with Patton away, Logan snuck into Patton's room, easily found his present sitting on pattons bed in between his pillows. he grabbed it and swiftly returned to his own room. he made his way through the door into his lab. Logan had his set up to extract the camera already set up. he turned the table lamp and clicked it on. peering through the magnifying glass, Logan used a seam ripper and tore the center stitches out, then pulled out the stuffing and set it in a bowl. he found the camera pack and lens in the eye socket. he unstuck the "eye" and removed the whole pack. Logan, having covered all of his steps, added a bag of beans to account for the missing weight along with a new identical eye. he sufficiently resewed the whole center seam and inspected the cat. satisfied that Patton wouldn't tell the difference, he hurried back and replaced the cat on Patton's bed.

He closed the door and then relieved Virgil of his watch, then sent a text off to roman informing him that the transfer was successful and they may return whenever they wished.

after that, Logan retreated into his lab, his work computer set up on a private browser, since he was about to witness something upmost personal, and more than likely disturbing, if his hunch was correct. and as much as he was sure he was correct, he hoped and wished to whatever higher power there was that there was some way there was another explanation.

he plugged in the camera's USB into the computer and the corresponding file that came on screen and waited for the video to load.

with a sigh, logan pressed play. and the video began: Patton carrying the animal to his bed, the black and white picture was a bit difficult to follow but logan managed, he pulled a notepad and pen to his side as he often did to take notes. he heard Patton talking to the new addition- which he had named patches. he spent a while just talking to the animal. logan pressed a key and the video fast forward. another click and the video resumed. Patton was now standing in front of the mirror, undressed to only his boxers and socks. his lips in the reflection were moving, but logan could not hear what was being said, he was focused more on Patton's appearance. the side was indeed thinner as logan had worried. the camera sped forward again, to a different datestamp. when it stopped logan had to pause it immediately due to the image on the screen. Patton could be seen through the cracked door and was on his knees, vomiting. logan removed the headphones to avoid hearing the wretching that was occurring. Logan considered that the camera had only been recording for about a week and from how many times the scenes repeated themselves, judging looks in the mirror, throwing up several times in one day, logans heart pulled at the times he saw Patton curled up somewhere crying.

when logan had decided he had seen enough to form a conclusion, he transported down into the commons, where thankfully, both roman and Virgil were currently. " how convenient that the two of you are here. I've gone over the footage."

" and?" roman asked expectantly

"I was correct. Patton has somehow developed an eating disorder, Bulimia Nervosa, possibly coupled with anorexia. avoiding eating and purging what is eaten in order to lose weight."

" well, doesn't Patton notice that he's lost the weight and stop? " Virgil asked from his perch on the stairs.

"that's where the disorder part comes in. something in the mind tricks their eyes to see that they still haven't lost weight and it spurs them to do so until... bad things happen. for a real person, such a drastic decrease in weight could cause a heart attack and even death. I am not sure how it would affect him since technically he's a part of Thomas."

" We need to do something." roman said, while logan nodded. "I suggest we confront him, if he doesn't know, or does, we need to help him in any way we can."

Virgil stood up and took the stairs two at a time. he got to Patton's door and knocked " hey pat, you got a second?"

after a moment of undoing the lock on his door, Patton opened it and gave the side a small smile " hey kiddo, what's up?"

" come downstairs for a minute, um, lo's got something for you."

Patton tilted his head, confused, " again? ill be right down then."

Virgil returned ahead of Patton and took a seat on the arm of the couch. everyone looked up when Patton came down the stairs.

" hiya, everyone." Patton greeted, trying to muster up some of his lost brightness. but feeling the sober emotion running throughout the room Patton asked "what's going on? is everything alright?"

Logan cut right to the chase and told the moral side to sit. he sat next to Virgil and logan fixed his glasses. " Patton, I'm going to be upfront about this. something about you has changed these past months and it's been very concerning."

" what do you mean logan?"

" you haven't been yourself, padre" roman agreed " I've seen so on our outing the other day.

" and you've lost a lot of weight" Virgil confessed" Patton frowned " what? this doesn't make any sense logan, I would know if I was losing enough weight to worry you all."

" ill explain anything you want to know about it, but morality, I believe you are suffering from an eating disorder."

Virgil gripped his friend's hand to comfort him. " we're all here for you pat, you're gonna be okay, we're going to help you."

Next Chapter ->

[unfortunatelysirius]

UNEXPECTED | Regulus Black, Marauders Era

「 ❁ 」PROMPT 「 ❁ 」

Request // Regulus finds something unexpected—at a Slug Club dinner party, with a girl named Y/N L/N.

「 ❁ 」AUTHOR’S NOTE 「 ❁ 」

Sorry if this sucked.

        LOVE.

                Even the word itself felt like a promise. It could come like a metaphor, as gentle as misted rain, or it was a broken idea, radiating animosity that maimed worse than misplaced surgical lesions. Some folks went their entire lives without knowing it, feeling it, getting the chance to embrace and relish it—while others did indeed get a taste only for it to scorch like too-hot coffee. A funny little thing, love was. As scary as it was delightful.

        Regulus Black didn’t know much about love. He only knew bleak sun—and a yearning that churned his stomach like butter. If he let his thoughts wander off too far, they’d explore territory too disturbingly foreign he’d have no choice but to retreat. His parents taught him discipline and obedience, but “love” was a rare occurrence; truthfully, the only person who ever even had an inkling of understanding for it was his brother Sirius, and the bastard left Regulus to bleed under the ripe moon. He knew what hatred felt like, same with spite, same with betrayal, same with repulsion.

        Then he descended on the path weary travelers couldn’t cross.

        It all started at the start of his fifth year, getting worse from there. He began noticing the Gryffindor who never stopped challenging professors and requested an extension on nearly every Charms essay. Who always wore an untidy uniform with the shirt untucked, cloak rumpled, and two different stockings. Who could be more quiet than a fairy’s whisper but the loudest personality in the room. Who once punched Giovanni Rivera, some snob in Hufflepuff, so hard in the nose he stayed slumped unconscious by a knight in the open dungeon corridor for an entire night.

        He noticed you.

        It was entirely accidental. Regulus was not someone to dive head-first, always treading the shallow end before walking into riptides that couldn’t be foreseen. He was caution in a world of chaos. He didn’t want to know the definition of “love,” even though he thought that was what he felt for Sirius. Brotherly love. The love someone had for another that protected them, provided for them in times of need. Then Sirius was labelled the family disgrace, shunned by Orion and Walburga; the perfect little Slytherin son, Regulus shunned him too. Regulus lost that feeling and failed to find it again, even in his circle of friends that mocked tainted blood and wanted more than meager lives. They aspired for a Wizarding World cleansed of impure magic; Regulus wasn’t sure what he wanted.

        He quickly became lonely. As the days turned to months then years, he preoccupied himself with his studies—working diligently to fabricate a living lie like he had any future outside of the Dark Lord’s bidding. He envied Sirius for breaking from the family so soon, forcing Regulus into a compromised position; their parents scrutinized him more carefully now and expected more than he would have had to provide if Sirius was the pride-and-joy firstborn they could have turned into a great ally, rather than an adversary.  Regulus hated it, hated that whatever he liked and the little joys he had in life were useless now that he had one reason to live. There was little to his life except growing up to be part of the Dark Lord’s army. Regardless of anything, he did know what he hoped for. The only thing that truly, truly belonged to him was his hope. It was different from his aspirations, as even those were polluted by conditioned hate.

        He watched you frequently. He watched you curse his own brother, Sirius, for calling you a suck-up. He admired your appearance, from your Y/H/L Y/H/C hair to your facial structure, the effortless way you stood and walked, the kindness in your expression when guiding none-the-wiser first years. You were the same year as him, fifth year, and an entire breed of your own. Regulus didn’t know when he began falling for you. Well, the idea of you. You encompassed freedom, and fuck if Regulus didn’t crave freedom. He wanted to see himself careless, able to act out and be himself inconsequentially. This was an impossibility he loved to consider, like a dreamer in a room of realists. His parents expected the most out of him and in his crystal ball, all that laid in wait was the Dark Mark etched in his skin. Death and destruction. His head dark and heavy. It wasn’t happiness that killers strived for—it was pleasure. Power, too. Regulus knew he was different from the others. He had to hide it and fight every inch of himself that wanted what Sirius had. Freedom.

        Regulus wanted to unleash every idea, every desire, every unspoken dislike. A brave heart scratched from under his skin, itching to have a say.

        Sirius was the courageous one, not him.

        He stuck to watching from afar.

-

        You hated Potions class. You hated parties. You hated Slughorn. Most of all, you hated Slug Club parties. Dammit, you hated your life.

        “Why did you drag me here, Lily?” you complained for the umpteenth time, fidgeting in your Gryffindor-red attire. You didn’t even like this shade of red. It was one of those colors you got tired of after seeing at every waking hour. All the assholes that prided themselves in the House the Sorting Hat bellowed, uniquely chosen for them… bleh! Dawning red and gold, parading around in Gryffindor scarfs bought for a bargain. You couldn’t be bothered. Lily had begged that the two of you go in a matching set, as one of your good friends. You never envisioned yourself agreeing. Fucking Lily, conniving you into wearing a dress like looked like it was sewn from a red Christmas stocking and attending a Slug Club party.

        Lily smiled innocently. “You owed me a favor!”

        A favor. You wracked your brain for any situation you’d been a part of where Lily offered her help. As your honorary big sister and a sixth-year prefect, she was the one calling for damage control whenever you did something warranting of punishment… and you didn’t want to fulfill your duties as a serious student. She chastised you at your worst but boosted you up too. Your best consisted of her praise and affection. You loved her, yes, but you didn’t love what owing her favors implied. It always wound you up in some unlikable predicament, such as this godforsaken party.

        “I don’t owe you shite,” you grumbled, pinning your eyes on a table of refreshments over by the door. You belatedly noticed a figure standing by it. The air went still and silent, your blood pulsating like a gushing river of red. Your eyes narrowed just the slightest bit. Regulus Black was sharply—no, impeccably dressed, standing with his glossy dark hair in a neat do and his gray eyes watching the floor indifferently. When he got too close to looking at you, you quickly turned away. Lily was already raising a brow. “What? I don’t.”

        “Yeah, okay,” Lily said amusedly. As she reopened her mouth to remind you of your every last unreturned favor and escaped week of detention, she spotted something over your head and a look of horror struck; you gauged this by the way her eyes bulged at the sockets. “Oh, Merlin—why the bloody Hell is he here? I’ll talk to you later, Y/N. Try to have some fun.”

        She retreated like a squirrel from a hound, her body launching at the occupied Slughorn over half a room away. As she was nearly there a bulk dressed in black dress robes followed, at a tame pace compared to Lily’s. You knew it was James only by the unruly mess of black hair you saw from his enrobed backside profile.

        You rolled your eyes and snuck another glance at Regulus. He wasn’t looking your way.

Try to have some fun, my arse.

-

You were here. Regulus didn’t know how, but you were. He hadn’t calculated what he’d do if you attended this party, not knowing you were a member. He assumed you weren’t, a rash assumption by all accounts, and that costed him. He didn’t want to be dogged by the thought of you all night, and now that your presence was mere feet from him, his mental duties seemed like lost causes. The burning urge to stare at you, consequences be damned, was incinerating—and control failed him left and right. Fucking hell.

Regulus filled a drink for himself. A punch of some kind. He drank it in one go, hoping the taste would eliminate you from his mind. If it were bad enough he could instead be hounded by his throbbing throat, gagging like no tomorrow. That would be better than this.

The punch didn’t work its magic. He looked again at you and calculated the inevitable penalty of making an approach.

        Cursing his luck or lack thereof, he felt less inclined to drown himself in the punch bowl upon the appearance of a bloke he had in Potions, Terrence something. He was a Ravenclaw know-it-all, but he was Pureblood. He could go overlooked conversing with the fellow. Regulus was a master of mimicry and had his haughty Slytherin performance down pat.

        The bloke asked too many questions and was evasive on topics Regulus had no interest in discoursing, but he was a well-welcomed distraction. Or ill-welcomed. Regardless of the reception, Regulus’s ambivalence towards you transitioned to an annoyance towards Terrence. Annoyance, that he could work with. He felt it most days. It was familiar territory. A stroke of olive on a canvas of emerald where you were lavender.

        It worked. It worked until Terrence bid a hasty farewell, trailing after some quiet, expressionless brunette from Slytherin.

        Regulus subtly scowled. Out of the corner of his eye he looked at you, surreptitious in a way he remembered from parties he went to hosted by well-known Pureblood families. You were in mid-conversation with some Gryffindor he knew from a mutual class the three of you shared. It was a bloke whose mouth seemed too keen on keeping a conversation going and hand was swaying too closely to your waist. Regulus’s eyes hardened without his meaning to, and before he knew it, his feet were in complete control; he walked to the two of you with renewed purpose.

-

        You were ready to unleash your inner ugly. Random people kept coming up and trying to talk to you, each of them more mentally-taxing than the last. First there was Cornelius, an absolute walking disaster, then there was Dave, who went on tangents without checking to see if you were listening. Then Kala, then Paisley, then Travis. Finally, there was Justin. Justin was a compulsive flirt. You politely tried to get him to fuck off, but he just wasn’t catching the hint or acknowledging your blatant apathy in what he had to say. He wouldn’t understand discomfort on the part of his conversational partner if it slapped him in the face.

        It was like a blessing and a nightmare when Regulus Black, wearing a cold expression and marginally more perfect up close than he was from a distance, appeared.

        “Can I borrow you for a moment, L/N?” he asked, something off about his voice. Your eyes narrowed. If you had to garner a guess, you’d say he was straining to maintain a calm disposition, truly angry. The cold in his expression was cracking, giving way to heat. Had he noticed your wandering eye and wanted to clarify with you that he had no interest except to exterminate your muddy self from the Wizarding World? You were unsure; it was a common ideology among extremists, the hatred of non-Purebloods, but Regulus didn’t give off that ambiance. He didn’t feel like a future monster.

        “Sure,” you said, sneaking a glance at Justin. Justin’s face wasn’t aggravated at the interruption, just confused that Regulus Black had been the one to interrupt. Regulus kept to himself usually… and he hated anyone who wasn’t pure of blood, supposedly. “Sorry to cut this chat short, Justin. I’m sure there’s plenty of other birds to talk into a stupor around here…”

        Justin’s eyes lit up, disregarding the annoyance in your voice. “You’re right! Thanks, Y/N.”

        You raised your eyebrows at him but bit back a less subtle remark, following Regulus when his hand prompted you at the shoulder.

        “So, what was that back there?” you boldly asked, trying to avoid smirking. It was almost adorable, the way he swooped in and rescued you from a dolt. He couldn’t have approached you just to chastise your invasive stare or threaten you with death. You were taking a chance in assuming he came to save you the burden of dealing with Justin Doley’s bland chatter, but you didn’t care. You really didn’t. It was a sweet gesture if that were his true intention, but a niggling suspicion refused to believe it was. “Thank you, by the way. I was ready to lock my knees just so I could escape.”

        Regulus’s face blanched, a tinge of hot pink flooding his cheeks. His brows made a cute little furrow that gave the impression of a natural unibrow. “Why would you lock your knees?”

        “When you lock your knees, the blood stops circulating and can lead to fainting,” you said. Now you smirked. “Trying to avoid an answer? I’m hurt.”

        He frowned at you. “I’m not trying to avoid anything. It was nothing. You looked uncomfortable…”

        “I was more annoyed than anything,” you said, a correction you weren’t obligated to make. Seeing Regulus squirm was a pleasure on its own. He would already squirm, caught willingly communicating with a Gryffindor, but you had a tendency to go over and beyond in putting others on the spot. It made you a childish shade of giddy both inside and out, not that he would be able to tell. “You don’t have to keep talking to me, you know.”

        “Oh,” Regulus said but didn’t move. He stayed rooted where he was, watching you with a piercing gaze. Now that you were close enough to reach a finger across the distance and graze those gaunt, knife-sharp cheekbones, you ogled him. You knew he was gorgeous from the brief times you interacted and the long, solitary moments you took to dissect him outside lessons, but being so close and with no time limit, you took a chance. Your chance was a rescue mission disguised as a private discussion.

        A smile tore at your lips. “You clean up nice,” you said, your ogling session finished. You could stare at Regulus much longer than you deemed appropriate and actually did, but he was a moment and moments had the ability to pass you swiftly by. In this case, he’d leave without you getting to properly know him. Opportunistic as you were, you wouldn’t let him leave without taking what you could.

        Why would you even want to know him? you asked yourself. He’s probably a Muggleborn-hater. The heart wanted what the heart wanted, try as you might to logicize.

        Regulus frowned. “Thanks,” he said. He hesitantly snaked his eyes up and down your figure, stopping on your neckline. A beautiful necklace with your favorite gemstone adorned it, a gift from a Muggle relative. He cleared his throat aggressively. “You do too.”

        He’s a shy bugger, isn’t he?

        You inched closer, moving on a whim and putting your hand on his arm. Your fingers tightened around the material of his sleeve. He drew closer, like it was instinctive, and your eyelids fluttered as you basked in his perfumed, intimate proximity. You’d regret advancing on a Slytherin, especially one as admired and esteemed yet dark and dangerous as Regulus, but he just had this air about him. Like going from an altitude that took your breath away to one that had enough air to burst you at the seams. Like a butterfly with clipped wings, a scorpion without its stinger. He was tempting, but beautifully broken.

        I know. I just know.

        “When you came over, I thought you were going to confront me on how I haven’t kept my eyes off you all night,” you murmured. You met his gaze evenly, ignoring your pounding heart and fluctuating nerves.

        Regulus froze immediately. “What?”

        “Oh, did you not notice? Silly me,” you said, flaPping a hand like it never mattered in the first place. Truth was, your thoughts were frozen and fixated on his ignorance—ignorance you had just given a reality check. There had been no point, absolutely no hidden objective, in admitting your inability to overlook Regulus. Yet you had—and now he was staring at you like you had turned the color orange and horns magically sprouted from your head.

        Then, like a switch went off that had full control over Regulus’s emotions and the way he expressed them, he smirked. It wasn’t a full smirk, just apparent enough you noticed it. All the tension contorting his face flattened, leaving him like he was relaxed, the opposite of how he looked mere seconds ago. Always the skeptic, you stared at him with narrowed eyes, scrutinizing him from head to toe. He didn’t lose the smirk, his arms crossing over his sleek robes in a devil-may-care fashion.

        “Presumptuous of you to think I ever notice you in the first place,” he said, in that pompous voice you were used to hearing from Sirius’s favorite Slytherin, Severus Snape.

        You laughed at his audacity and, hearing the music change tone and tempo, reached out a hand. You forgot your wit and lost all possible responses to give his arrogant retort. “Dance with me, Black,” you said softly, “before your brother comes to ruin my night, like the prick he is.”

        Regulus raised his eyebrows, but he didn’t deny you. He interlaced his fingers into yours and his free arm, moving at whim and ease, came quickly to your side, enveloping your waist in a delicate embrace. A formal embrace that bespoke of the distance between you, the invisible rift. The dance he swept you in was unfamiliar, but it was simple enough that you could match his pace without tumbling over your own feet.

        You felt everyone staring, but nothing mattered more to you than the feeling of his hand on your waist and the deep, unreadable waters of his foggy gray eyes. He was an enigma that swept coast to coast, tainting the sand with his attendance but leaving wild imaginations to run rampant wondering why he was there, what he did, who he was. Everyone knew of him, but no one knew him. You couldn’t deny you also didn’t know him. Really, you knew nothing about him except that he was a Slytherin in your year, the younger brother to Gryffindor’s infamous playboy, and a supposed Pureblood extremist. You were curious, though, and wanted to know all the dismissive facts that made up his mind and crafted a mental narrative even you found ambiguous. He had consciousness, and there was no way in Merlin’s sodding Hell he was a host to someone else’s thoughts, opinions, and interests the way so many other future killers seemed. Every now and then he showed you something unusual—a mannerism individual to him, words you recoiled back at hearing from his mouth. After he smirked at you and accepted your demand to dance, you lost yourself in the shock of his dismal composure cracking at the folds.

        You never really believed in love.

-

        Regulus never really believed in love.

-

        But if you wandered too far into the bittersweet fantasy of happy endings…

-

        Regulus could get lost.

-

        The song changed again; slow and calm it became. Pressing your cheek to Regulus’s chest, you let the soft fabric of his dress robes sway you into an admittedly false sense of security. The hawk eyes following your every move disappeared with every cyclic step Regulus took. You were hypersensitive to his heartbeat now. It pounded against your cheek like a drumstick, a vibrato of epic proportions. You felt delirious with delight, yet a piece of you was stuck to the path your half-conscious feet made through the slow dance. It’s like you left a trail, and you’d have to pick up the pieces once Regulus became sick of your pathetic antics.

        “Are you asleep?” he asked amusedly, his chest vibrating against you. It rattled you enough to awaken some semblance of nerves.

        “No,” you said, shaking yourself out of the daze. You pulled back from him, bridging enough space to look him in his eyes. He had beautiful eyes a silly girl like you could get lost in. Any girl really. They were pools of fog made of spring mornings and forest hues. You just wanted to kiss his eyelids. What a strange desire, but you felt it all the same…

        Regulus blinked and you were drawn back in the moment. He had said something.

        You hummed in question, your eyebrows raising.

        He shook his head, his face flattening until it was expressionless. “I have to go,” he said. You knew what lies looked like. He was a good liar, but you were a better observer. “I have a matter to discuss with Slughorn.”

        You laughed. “That’s too bad,” you said, voice coming out like a purr. Your hand rose until it settled on his chest; your fingers curled around his robe, until fabric was fisted and cupped into a swirl. “We could have had some fun.”

        “No,” Regulus said firmly. Almost too firmly. His hand jerked up to meet yours and his larger fingers interlaced yours, tugging in an attempt to prompt your release. Your refused to let go. “Y/N.”

        “I like it when you talk all authoritative,” you said teasingly.

        His face blanched and it was enough of a shock to make him lose all incentive to fight the good fight. You took this chance and drew him in, his feet stumbling in a clumsy attempt to regain balance. “Y/N, I—”

        “What are you so afraid of?”

-

        Regulus was afraid of a lot of things. He was afraid of what his parents would do if they figured out he didn’t despise tainted blood the way he was raised to. He was afraid of his peers shunning and scorning him for being caught dead with a Half-blood. He was afraid of losing himself in the moment just to sate his deadened hope and watching you get killed in the crossfire of his foolish, self-indulgent mistakes. He was afraid of many things.

        He would never dare utter those fears aloud.

-

        You watched the conflict flit across his face, erasing itself seconds after.

        “What?” you innocently asked, noting that he had gone stiff. You were unaware to how deep his issues ran. You knew from Sirius’s running mouth that Pureblood households were devoid of tender moments and affectionate caresses. You wanted to imagine an alternative for them, but Sirius was a hellish hailstorm when honest; his feelings were subjective, but his experience was likely to ring alarmingly true. Regulus was quiet and allowed things to fester, so no one would ever know how he felt.

        He looked at you now, a lock where his mouth was. No key in sight. His eyes were piercing and unquestionably inscrutable.

-

        He had to leave before he lost control of his mouth. He couldn’t afford to involve you in his mess. He was a hurricane and you were summer rains. He would destroy you.

-

        “I have somewhere to be,” Regulus said, no room left for an argument. His arms disappeared from around your waist and he tore his eyes away, like it was physically painful to do so.

        You grabbed his wrist before he could melt into the dancing crowd. “Regulus, wait,” you said. You hated the way you sounded. You didn’t know him, but you felt strongly anyway, like he mattered more to you than was plausible for a girl and boy from two separate worlds. You couldn’t explain why you cared; you just did. He hid himself under the pretense of a rich, spoiled Pureblood who stood above the rest. He was hypnotically beautiful and bathed in greens and silvers. He was brilliant in ways Gryffindor House could only aspire to be.

        Regulus didn’t respond to your plea. He stared at you, waiting briefly to hear what you had to say.

        You didn’t have anything to say. You had something to express—and words weren’t always the best at expression.

        You reached up to his face and palmed his cheeks, finding little skin and mostly bone. His cheekbones jerked underneath your grip. His eyes went slightly wide, like he disbelieved you had taken physical initiative with him. Your fingers didn’t dig or tear at his skin, nor did you impulsively decide that you had him in your grip and now was the time to hurt him. You didn’t want to hurt him. You wanted to show him that he didn’t have to be risk-aversive; he could fall clumsily into risk with you and the two of you would make it work. As long as he felt this bizarre, unnatural connection same as you did.

        You’d find out.

        You pressed yourself flush against him and drew your lips until you were a breath away. Then you kissed him.

        The room and its occupants disintegrated, leaving only Regulus and you. Regulus dissolved into putty. His arms went around you again, one of them circling your waist entirely and a hand gripping your hip tight like letting you go would mean you never came back. His lips were soft if slightly chapped, moving against yours like they belonged there; there was no hesitation, no anxious energy. Regulus had lost himself in the moment, same as you. He wasn’t a Pureblood and you weren’t some Half-blood Gryffindor who had spent half the night pinning after a Slytherin who would keel over dead before wanting you. Regulus was different, and you hadn’t failed to sense it.

-

        Regulus abruptly remembered his place and pulled from you. Your eyes were still fluttered shut, and it took several seconds before you noticed he was no longer wrestling with your lips.

        You stared. Regulus wiped all emotion from his face, refusing to let you know he wanted a second kiss. You were not a good deceiver and every emotion you felt showed on your face, from confusion to lust to apprehension.

        “That should not have happened,” Regulus murmured, glancing around. There were people staring; even some of your Gryffindor friends, like Lily Evans and Marlene Mckinnon, were aghast, eyeing the two of you like you had just committed a murder.

        “Why?” you said confrontationally. “Did you regret it?”

        Regulus glanced at you but didn’t say a word.

        You could feel your heart plummet to your gut. “Yeah, okay,” you said, shaking your head. You knew he was being dishonest, but that didn’t stop you from feeling hurt at his blatant favoring of his reputation over a chance at this… this relationship. You jerked out of his slackened grip.

      You fought tears as you walked away.

-

        Regulus watched you go.

        He knew what it felt like when towers crumbled and empires fell, as it happened frequently. His life fell apart more than it came together. He missed you the moment you left but he knew this was for the better. That kiss had meant more than Regulus would ever admit. He felt the connection and he knew there was a future that would happen if he allowed it, if he chose not to intervene. He was the inhibitor of a lot of good things, but he would rather see himself drown than another person swallow their breath underwater.

        So he stared at your retreating back, wishing things were different.

[davidmann95]

So... Morrison’s 10 part interview on All-Star Superman, along with all other older Newsarama articles, just seem to have ceased to exist. One does not simply live without having those interviews available to reread... Can I find them anywhere else?

Rejoice! I finally borrowed a computer I could put my flash drive into, and emailed myself my copy of the Morrison interview. Here it is below the cut, copied and pasted direct from the source way back when, available again at last:

Three years, 12 issues, Eisners and countless accolades later, All Star Superman is finally finished. The out-of-continuity look at Superman’s struggle with his inevitable death was widely embraced by fans and pros as one of the best stories to feature the Man of Steel, and was a showcase for the talents of the creative team of Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant.

Now, Newsarama is proud to present an exclusive look back with Morrison at the series that took Superman to, pun intended, new heights. We had a lot of questions about the series...and Morrison delivered with an in-depth look into the themes, characters and ideas throughout the 12 issues. In fact, there was so much that we’re running this as an unprecedented 10-part series over the next two weeks – sort of an unofficial All Star Superman companion. It’s everything about All Star Superman you ever wanted to know, but were afraid to ask.

And of course there’s plenty of SPOILERS, so back away if you haven’t read the entire series.

Newsarama: Grant, tell us a little about the origin of the project.

Grant Morrison: Some of it has its roots in the DC One Million project from 1999. So much so, that some readers have come to consider this a prequel to DC One Million, which is fine if it shifts a few more copies! I’ve tried to give my own DC books an overarching continuity intended to make them all read as a more coherent body of work when I’m done.

Luthor’s “enlightenment” – when he peaks on super–senses and sees the world as it appears through Superman’s eyes – was an element I’d included in the Superman Now pitch I prepared along with Mark Millar, Tom Peyer and Mark Waid back in 1999. There were one or two of ideas of mine that I wanted to preserve from Superman Now and Luthor’s heart–stopping moment of understanding was a favorite part of the original ending for that story, so I decided to use it again here.

My specific take on Superman’s physicality was inspired by the “shamanic” meeting my JLA editor Dan Raspler and I had in the wee hours of the morning outside the San Diego comic book convention in whenever it was, ‘98 or ‘99.

I’ve told this story in more detail elsewhere but basically, we were trying to figure out how to “reboot” Superman without splitting up his marriage to Lois, which seemed like a cop–out. It was the beginning of the conversations which ultimately led to Superman Now, with Dan and I restlessly pacing around trying to figure out a new way into the character of Superman and coming up short...

Until we looked up to see a guy dressed as Superman crossing the train tracks. Not just any skinny convention guy in an ill–fitting suit, this guy actually looked like Superman. It was too good a moment to let pass, so I ran over to him, told him what we’d been trying to do and asked if he wouldn’t mind indulging us by answering some questions about Superman, which he did...in the persona and voice of Superman!

We talked for an hour and a half and he walked off into the night with his friend (no, it wasn’t Jimmy Olsen, sadly). I sat up the rest of the night, scribbling page after page of Superman notes as the sun came up over the naval yards.

My entire approach to Superman had come from the way that guy had been sitting; so easy, so confident, as if, invulnerable to all physical harm, he could relax completely and be spontaneous and warm. That pose, sitting hunched on the bollard, with one knee up, the cape just hanging there, talking to us seemed to me to be the opposite of the clenched, muscle-bound look the character sometimes sports and that was the key to Superman for me.

I met the same Superman a couple of times afterwards but he wasn’t Superman, just a nice guy dressed as Superman, whose name I didn’t save but who has entered into my own personal mythology (a picture has from that time has survived showing me and Mark Waid posing alongside this guy and a couple of young readers dressed as Superboy and Supergirl – it’s in the “Gallery” section at my website for anybody who can be bothered looking. This is the guy who lit the fuse that led to All Star Superman).

After the 1999 pitch was rejected, I didn’t expect to be doing any further work on Superman but sometime in 2002, while I was going into my last year on New X–Men, Dan DiDio called and asked if I wanted to come back to DC to work on a Superman book with Jim Lee.

Jim was flexing his artistic muscles again to great effect, and he wanted to do 12 issues on Superman to complement the work he was doing with Jeph Loeb on “Batman: Hush.” At the time, I wasn’t able to make my own commitments dovetail with Jim’s availability, but by then I’d become obsessed with the idea of doing a big Superman story and I’d already started working out the details.

Jim, of course, went on to do his 12 Superman issues as “For Tomorrow” with Brian Azzarello, so I found myself looking for an artist for what was rapidly turning into my own Man of Steel magnum opus, and I already knew the book had to be drawn by my friend and collaborator, Frank Quitely.

We were already talking about We3 and Superman seemed like a good meaty project to get our teeth into when that was done. I completely scaled up my expectations of what might be possible once Frank was on board and decided to make this thing as ambitious as possible.

Usually, I prefer to write poppy, throwaway “live performance” type superhero books, but this time, I felt compelled to make something for the ages – a big definitive statement about superheroes and life and all that, not only drawn by my favorite artist but starring the first and greatest superhero of them all.

The fact that it could be a non–continuity recreation made the idea even more attractive and more achievable. I also felt ready for it, in a way I don’t think I would have been in 1999; I finally felt “grown–up” enough to do Superman justice.

I plotted the whole story in 2002 and drew tiny colored sketches for all 12 covers. The entire book was very tightly constructed before we started – except that I’d left the ending open for the inevitable better and more focused ideas I knew would arise as the project grew into its own shape...and I left an empty space for issue 10. That one was intended from the start to be the single issue of the 12–issue run that would condense and amplify the themes of all the others. #10 was set aside to be the one–off story that would sum up anything anyone needed to know about Superman in 22 pages.

Not quite as concise an origin as Superman’s, but that’s how we got started.

NRAMA: When you were devising the series, what challenges did you have in building up this version of the Superman universe?

GM: I couldn’t say there were any particular challenges. It was fun. Nobody was telling me what I could or couldn’t do with the characters. I didn’t have to worry about upsetting continuity or annoying people who care about stuff like that.

I don’t have a lot of old comics, so my knowledge of Superman was based on memory, some tattered “70s books from the remains of my teenage collection, a bunch of DC “Best Of...” reprint editions and two brilliant little handbooks – “Superman in Action Comics” Volumes 1 and 2 – which reprint every single Action Comics cover from 1938 to 1988.

I read various accounts of Superman’s creation and development as a brand. I read every Superman story and watched every Superman movie I could lay my hands on, from the Golden Age to the present day. From the Socialist scrapper Superman of the Depression years, through the Super–Cop of the 40s, the mythic Hyper–Dad of the 50s and 60s, the questioning, liberal Superman of the early 70s, the bland “superhero” of the late 70s, the confident yuppie of the 80s, the over–compensating Chippendale Superman of the 90s etc. I read takes on Superman by Mark Waid, Mark Millar, Geoff Johns, Denny O’Neil, Jeph Loeb, Alan Moore, Paul Dini and Alex Ross, Joe Casey, Steve Seagle, Garth Ennis, Jim Steranko and many others.

I looked at the Fleischer cartoons, the Chris Reeve movies and the animated series, and read Alvin Schwartz’s (he wrote the first ever Bizarro story among many others) fascinating book – “An Unlikely Prophet” – where he talks about his notion of Superman as a tulpa, (a Tibetan word for a living thought form which has an independent existence beyond its creator) and claims he actually met the Man of Steel in the back of a taxi.

I immersed myself in Superman and I tried to find in all of these very diverse approaches the essential “Superman–ness” that powered the engine. I then extracted, purified and refined that essence and drained it into All Star’s tank, recreating characters as my own dream versions, without the baggage of strict continuity.

In the end, I saw Superman not as a superhero or even a science fiction character, but as a story of Everyman. We’re all Superman in our own adventures. We have our own Fortresses of Solitude we retreat to, with our own special collections of valued stuff, our own super–pets, our own “Bottle Cities” that we feel guilty for neglecting. We have our own peers and rivals and bizarre emotional or moral tangles to deal with.

I felt I’d really grasped the concept when I saw him as Everyman, or rather as the dreamself of Everyman. That “S” is the radiant emblem of divinity we reveal when we rip off our stuffy shirts, our social masks, our neuroses, our constructed selves, and become who we truly are.

Batman is obviously much cooler, but that’s because he’s a very energetic and adolescent fantasy character: a handsome billionaire playboy in black leather with a butler at this beck and call, better cars and gadgetry than James Bond, a horde of fetish femme fatales baying around his heels and no boss. That guy’s Superman day and night.

Superman grew up baling hay on a farm. He goes to work, for a boss, in an office. He pines after a hard–working gal. Only when he tears off his shirt does that heroic, ideal inner self come to life. That’s actually a much more adult fantasy than the one Batman’s peddling but it also makes Superman a little harder to sell. He’s much more of a working class superhero, which is why we ended the whole book with the image of a laboring Superman.

He’s Everyman operating on a sci–fi Paul Bunyan scale. His worries and emotional problems are the same as ours... except that when he falls out with his girlfriend, the world trembles.

Newsarama: Grant, what are some of your favorite moments from the 12 issues?

Grant Morrison: The first shot of Superman flying over the sun. The Cosmic Anvil. Samson and Atlas. The kiss on the moon. The first three pages of the Olsen story which, I think, add up to the best character intro I’ve ever written.

Everything Lex Luthor says in issue #5. Everything Clark does. The whole says/does Luthor/Superman dynamic as played out through Frank Quitely’s absolute mastery and understanding of how space, movement and expression combine to tell a story.

Superboy and his dog on the moon – that perfect teenage moment of infinite possibility, introspection and hope for the future. He’s every young man on the verge of adulthood, Krypto is every dog with his boy (it seemed a shame to us that Krypto’s most memorable moment prior to this was his death scene in “Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow.” Quitely’s scampering, leaping, eager and alive little creature is how I’d prefer to imagine Krypto the Superdog and conjures finer and more subtle emotions).

Bizarro–Home, with all of Earth’s continental and ocean shapes but reversed. The page with the first appearance of Zibarro that Frank has designed so the eye is pulled down in a swirling motion into the drain at the heart of the image, to make us feel that we’re being flushed in a cloacal spiral down into a nihilistic, existential sink. Frank gave me that page as a gift, and it became weirdly emblematic of a strange, dark time in both our lives.

The story with Bar–El and Lilo has a genuine chill off ammonia and antiseptic off it, which makes it my least favorite issue of the series, although I know a lot of people who love it. It’s about dying relatives, obligations, the overlit overheated corridors between terminal wards, the thin metallic odors of chemicals, bad food and fear. Preparation for the Phantom Zone.

Superman hugging the poor, hopeless girl on the roof and telling us all we’re stronger than we think we are.

Joe Shuster drawing us all into the story forever and never–ending.

Nasthalthia Luthor. Frank and Jamie’s final tour of the Fortress, referencing every previous issue on the way, in two pages.

All of issue #10 (there’s a single typo in there where the time on the last page was screwed up – but when we fix that detail for the trade I’ll be able to regard this as the most perfectly composed superhero story I’ve ever written).

I don’t think I’ve ever had a smoother, more seamless collaborative process.

NRAMA: The story is very complete unto itself, but are there any new or classic characters you’d like to explore further? If so, which ones and why?

GM: I’d happily write more Atlas and Samson. I really like Krull, the Dino–Czar’s wayward son, and his Stalinist underground empire of “Subterranosauri.” I could write a Superman Squad comic forever. I’d love to write the “Son of Superman” sequel about Lois and Clark’s super test tube baby.

But...I think All Star is already complete, without sequels. You read that last issue and it works because you know you’re never going to see All Star Superman again. You’ll be able to pick up Superman books, but they won’t be about this guy and they won’t feel the same. He really is going away. Our Superman is actually “dying” in that sense, and that adds the whole series a deeper poignancy.

NRAMA: Aside from the Bizarro League, you never really introduce other DC superheroes into the story. Why did you make this choice?

GM: I wanted the story to be about the mythic Superman at the end of his time. It’s clear from the references that he has or more likely has had a few super–powered allies, but that they’re no longer around or relevant any more.

For the context of this story I wanted the super–friends to be peripheral, like they were in the old comics. The Flash? Green Lantern? They represent Superman’s “old army buddies,” or your dad’s school friends. Guys you’ve sort of heard of, who used to be more important in the old man’s life than they are now.

NRAMA: Some readers were confused as to how the “Twelve Labors” broke down, though others have pointed out that Superman’s actions are more reflective of the Stations of the Cross (I note there’s a “Station Café” in the background of issue #12). Could you break down the Twelve Labors, or, if the cross theory is true, how the storyline reflects the Stations?

GM: The 12 Labors of Superman were never intended as an isomorphic mapping onto the 12 Labors of Hercules, or for that matter, the specific Stations of the Cross, of which there are 14, I believe. I didn’t even want to do one Labor per issue, so it deliberately breaks down quite erratically through the series for reasons I’ll go into (later).

Yes, there are correspondences, but that’s mostly because we tried to create for our Superman the contemporary “superhero” version of an archetypal solar hero journey, which naturally echoes numerous myths, legends and religious parables.

At the same time, we didn’t want to do an update or a direct copy of any myth you’d seen before, so it won’t work if you try to find one specific mythological or religious “plan” to hang the series on; James Joyce’s honorable and heroic refutation of the rule aside, there’s nothing more dead and dull than an attempt to retell the Odyssey or the Norse sagas scene by scene, but in a modern and/or superhero setting.

For future historians and mythologizers, however, the 12 Labors of Superman may be enumerated as follows:

1. Superman saves the first manned mission to the sun.
2. Superman brews the Super–Elixir.
3. Superman answers the Unanswerable Question.
4. Superman chains the Chronovore. 
5. Superman saves Earth from Bizarro–Home.
6. Superman returns from the Underverse.
7. Superman creates Life.
8. Superman liberates Kandor/cures cancer.
9. Superman defeats Solaris.
10. Superman conquers Death.
11. Superman builds an artificial Heart for the Sun.
12.Superman leaves the recipe/formula to make Superman 2.

And one final feat, which typically no–one really notices, is that Lex Luthor delivers his own version of the unified field haiku – explaining the underlying principles of the universe in fourteen syllables – which the P.R.O.J.E.C.T. G–Type philosopher from issue 4 had dedicated his entire life to composing!

You may notice also that the Labors take place over a year – with the solar hero’s descent into the darkness and cold of the Underverse occurring at midwinter/Christmas time (that’s also the only point in the story where we ever see Metropolis at night).

It can also be seen as the sun’s journey over the course of a day – we open in blazing sunshine but halfway through the book, at the end of issue #5, in fact, the solar hero dips below the horizon and begins the night–journey through the hours of darkness and death, before his triumphant resurrection at dawn. That’s why issue 5 ends with the boat to the Underworld and 6 begins with the moon. Clark Kent is crossing the threshold into the subconscious world of memory, shadows, death and deep emotions.

Although they can often have bizarre resonances, specific elements, like the Station Café, are usually put there by Frank Quitely, and are not necessarily secret Dan Brown–style keys to unlocking the mysteries. I think there might be a Station Café opposite the studio where Frank Quitely works and the “SAPIEN” sign on another storefront is a reference to Frank’s studio mate, Dave Sapien. At least he’s not filling the background with dirty words like he used to, given any opportunity

NRAMA: For that matter, do the Twelve Labors matter at all? They seem so purposely ill–defined. They seem more like misdirection or a MacGuffin than anything that needs to be clearly delineated.

GM: They matter, of course, but the 12 Labors idea is there to show that, as with all myth, the systematic ordering of current events into stories, tales, or legends occurs after the fact.

I’m trying to suggest that only in the future will these particular 12 feats, out of all the others ever, be mythologized as 12 Labors. I suppose I was trying to say something about how people impose meaning upon events in retrospect, and that’s how myth is born. It’s hindsight that provides narrative, structure, meaning and significance to the simple unfolding of events. It’s the backward glance that adds all the capital letters to the list above.

Even Superman isn”t sure how many Labors he’s performed when we see him mulling it over in issue 10. 
When you watched it happening, it seemed to be Superman just doing his thing. In the future it’s become THE 12 LABORS OF SUPERMAN!

NRAMA: And on a completely ridiculous note: All–Star Superman is perhaps the most difficult–to–abbreviate comic title since Preacher: Tall in the Saddle. Did you realize this going in?

GM: Going into what? Going into ASS itself? In the sense of how did I feel as I slowly entered ASS for the first time?

It never crossed my mind...

Newsarama: I’d like to know a little more about Leo Quintum and his role in the story. He seems like a bit of an outgrowth of the likes of Project Cadmus and Emil Hamilton, but in a more fantastical, Willy Wonka sense.

Grant Morrison: Yeah, he was exactly as you say, my attempt to create an updated take on the character of “Superman’s scientist friend” – in the vein of Emil Hamilton from the animated show and the ‘90s stories. Science so often goes wrong in Superman stories, and I thought it was important to show the potential for science to go right or to be elevated by contact with Superman’s shining positive spirit.

I was thinking of Quintum as a kind of “Man Who Fell To Earth” character with a mysterious unearthly background. For a while I toyed with the notion that he was some kind of avatar of Lightray of the New Gods, but as All Star developed, that didn’t fit the tone, and he was allowed to simply be himself.

Eventually it just came down to simplicity. Leo Quintum represents the “good” scientific spirit – the rational, enlightened, progressive, utopian kind of scientist I figured Superman might inspire to greatness. It was interesting to me how so many people expected Quintum to turn out bad at the end. It shows how conditioned we are in our miserable, self–loathing, suspicious society to expect the worst of everyone, rather than hope for the best. Or maybe it’s just what we expect from stories.

Having said that, there is indeed a necessary whiff of Lucifer about Quintum. His name, Leo Quintum, conjures images of solar force, lions and lightbringers and he has elements of the classic Trickster figure about him. He even refers to himself as “The Devil Himself” in issue #10.

What he’s doing at the end of the story should, for all its gee–whiz futurity, feel slightly ambiguous, slightly fake, slightly “Hollywood.” Yes, he’s fulfilling Superman’s wishes by cloning an heir to Superman and Lois and inaugurating a Superman dynasty that will last until the end of time – but he’s also commodifying Superman, figuring out how it’s done, turning him into a brand, a franchise, a bigger–and–better “revamp,” the ultimate coming attraction, fresher than fresh, newer than new but familiar too. Quintum has figured out the “formula” for Superman and improved upon it.

And then you can go back to the start of All Star Superman issue #1 and read the “formula” for yourself, condensed into eight words on the first page and then expanded upon throughout the story! The solar journey is an endless circle naturally. A perfect puzzle that is its own solution.

In one way, Quintum could be seen to represent the creative team, simultaneously re–empowering a pure myth with the honest fire of Art...while at the same time shooting a jolt of juice through a concept that sells more “S” logo underpants and towels than it does comic books. All tastes catered!

I have to say that the Willy Wonka thing never crossed my mind until I saw people online make the comparison, which seems quite obvious now. Quintum dresses how I would dress if I was the world’s coolest super–scientist. What’s up with that?

NRAMA: Was Zibarro inspired by the Bizarro World story where the Bizarro–Neanderthal becomes this unappreciated Casanova–type?

GM: Don’t know that one, but it sounds like a scenario I could definitely endorse!

Zibarro started out as a daft name sicked–up by my subconscious mind, which flowered within moments into the must–write idea of an Imperfect Bizarro. What would an imperfect version of an already imperfect being be like?

Zibarro.

NRAMA: I’d like to know more about Zibarro – what’s the significance of his chronicling Bizarro World through poetry?

GM: It’s up to you. I see Zibarro partly as the sensitive teenager inside us all. He’s moody, horribly self–aware and uncomfortable, yet filled with thoughts of omnipotence and agency. He’s the absolute center of his tiny, disorganized universe. He’s playing the role of sensitive, empathic poet but at the same time, he’s completely self–absorbed.

When he says to Superman “Can you even imagine what it’s like to be so different. So unique. So unlike everyone else?” he doesn’t even wait for Superman’s reply. He doesn’t care about anyone’s feelings but his own, ultimately.

NRAMA: The character is very close to Superman, so what does it say that a nonpowered version on a savage world would focus his energy through that medium? Also, does Zibarro’s existence show how Superman is able to elevate even the backwards Bizarros through his very nature?

GM: All of the above. And maybe he writes his totally subjective poetry as a reflection of Clark Kent’s objective reporter role. The suppressed, lyrical, wounded side of Superman perhaps? The Super–Morrissey? Bizarro With The Thorn In His Side?

But he’s also Bizarro–Home’s “mistake” (or so it seems to him, even though he’s as natural an expression of the place as any of the other Bizarro creatures who grow like mold across the surface of their living planet). He feels excluded, a despised outsider, and yet that position is what defines his cherished self–image. He expresses himself through poetry because to him the regular Bizarro language is barbaric, barely articulate and guttural. And they all think he’s talking crap anyway.

It seemed to make sense that an interesting opposite of Bizarro speech might be flowery “woe is me” school Poetry Society odes to the sunset in a misunderstood heart. He’s still a Bizarro though, which makes him ineffectual. His tragedy is that he knows he’s fated to be useless and pointless but craves so much more.

NRAMA: Zibarro also represents a recurrent theme in the story, of Superman constantly facing alternate versions of himself – Bar–El, Samson and Atlas, the Superman Squad, even Luthor by the end. Notably, Hercules is absent, though Superman’s doing his Twelve Labors. With the mythological adventurers in particular, was this designed to equate Superman with their legend, to show how his character is greater than theirs, or both?

GM: In a way, I suppose. He did arm–wrestle them both, proving once and for all Superman’s stronger than anybody! And remember, these characters, along with Hercules, used to appear regularly in Superman books as his rivals. I thought they made better rivals than, say, Majestic or Ultraman because people who don’t read comics have heard of Hercules, Samson and Atlas and understand what they represent.

For that particular story, I wanted to see Superman doing tough guy shit again, like he did in the early days and then again in the 70s, when he was written as a supremely cocky macho bastard for a while. I thought a little bit of that would be an antidote to the slightly soppy, Super–Christ portrayal that was starting to gain ground.

Hence Samson’s broken arm, twisted in two directions beyond all repair. And Atlas in the hospital. And then Superman’s got his hot girlfriend dressed like a girl from Krypton and they’re making out on the moon (the original panel description was of something more like the famous shot of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kissing in the surf from “From Here To Eternity.” Frank’s final choice of composition is much more classically pulp–romantic and iconic than my down and dirty rumble in the moondirt would have been, I’m glad to say).

Newsarama: Tell us about some of the thinking behind the new antagonists you created for this series (at least the ones you want to talk about...): First up: Krull and the Subterranosaurs...

Grant Morrison: We wanted to create some throwaway new characters which would be designed to look as if they were convincing long–term elements of the Superman legend.

We were trying to create a few foes who had a classic feel and a solid backstory that could be explored again or in depth. Even if we never went back to these characters, we wanted them to seem rich enough to carry their own stories.

With Krull, we figured a superhuman character like Superman can always use a powerful “sub–human” opponent: a beast, a monster, a savage with the power to destroy civilization. For years I’ve had the idea that the familiar “gray aliens” might “actually” be evolved biped dinosaur descendants, the offspring of smart–thinking lizards which made their way to the warm regions at the Earth’s core.

I imagined these brutes developing their own technology, their own civilization, and then finally coming to the surface to declare bloody war on the mammalian usurpers! It seemed like we could develop this idea into the Krull backstory and suggest a whole epic conflict in a few panels.

Dom Regan, the Glasgow artist and DC colorist, saw the original green skin Jamie Grant had done for Krull, and suggested we make him red instead. Jamie reset his color filters and that was the moment Krull suddenly looked like a real Superman foe.

The red skin marked him out as unique, different and dangerous, even among his own species. It had echoes of Jack Kirby’s Devil Dinosaur that played right into the heart of the concept. A good design became a great design and the whole story of who Krull was – his twisted relationship with his father the Dino–Czar, his monstrous ambitions – came together in that first picture.

The society was fleshed out in the script even though we see only one panel of it – a gloomy, heavy, “Soviet” underworld of walled iron cities, cold blood and deadly intrigue. War–Barges that could sail on the oceans of heated steam at the center of the Earth. A Stalinist authoritarian lizard world where missing person cases were being taken to work and die as slaves in hellish underworld conditions.

NRAMA: Mechano–Man?

GM: An attempt to pre–imagine a classic, archetypal Superman foe, which started with another simple premise – how about a giant robot villain? But not just any giant robot – this is a rampaging machine with a raging little man inside.

Giving him a bitter, angry, scrawny loser as a pilot turned Mechano–Man into a much more extreme and pathological expression of the Man of Steel/Mild–Mannered Reporter dynamic, and added a few interesting layers onto an 8–panel appearance.

NRAMA: The Chronovore – a very disturbing creation, that one.

GM: The Chronovore was mentioned in passing in DC 1,000,000 and would have been the monster in my aborted Hypercrisis series idea. It took a long time to get the right design for the beast because it’s meant to be a 5–D being that we only ever see in 4–D sections. It had to work as a convincing representation of something much bigger that we’re seeing only where it interpenetrates our 4–D space-time continuum.

Imagine you’re walking along with a song in your teenage heart, then suddenly the Chronovore appears, takes bite out of your life, and you arrive at your girlfriend’s house aged 76, clutching a cell phone and a wilted bouquet.

NRAMA: One more obscure run that I was happy to see referenced in this was the use of Nasty from the old Mike Sekowsky Supergirl stories. What made you want to use this character?

GM: I remembered her from the old comics, and felt her fashion–y look could be updated very easily into the kind of fetish club thing I’ve always been partial to.

She seemed a cool and sexy addition to the Luthor plot. The set–up, where Lex has a fairly normal sister who hates how her wayward brother is such a bad influence on her brilliant daughter, is explosive with character potential.

They need to bring Nasty back to mainstream continuity. Geoff! They all want it and you know you never let them down!

NRAMA: Speaking of Mike Sekowsky, I’m curious about his influence on your work. I have an odd fascination with all the ideas and stories he was tossing around in the late 1960s and early 1970s – Jason’s Quest, Manhunter 2070, the I–Ching tales – and many of the characters he worked on, from the B”Wana Beast to the Inferior Five to Yankee Doodle (in Doom Patrol), have shown up in your work. The Bizarro Zoo in issue #10 is even slightly reminiscent of the Beast’s merged animals.

GM: Those were all comics that were around when I was a normal kid, prior to the obsessive collecting fan phase of my isolated teenage years. They clearly inspired me in some way, as you say, but certainly not consciously. I’d never have considered myself a particular fan of Mike Sekowsky’s work, but as you say, I’ve incorporated a lot of his ideas into the DC Universe work I’ve done. Hmm. Interesting.

While I’m at it, I should also say something about Samson and Atlas, halfway between old characters and new.

Samson, Atlas and Hercules were classical mainstays of old Superman covers, tangling with Superman in all those Silver Age stories that happened before he learned from his friends at Marvel that it was possible to fight other superheroes for fun and profit, so I decided to completely “re–vamp” the characters in the manner of superhero franchises. Marvel has the definitive Hercules for me, so I left him out of the mix and concentrated on Atlas and Samson.

Atlas was re–imagined as a mighty but restless and reckless young prince of the New Mythos – a society of mega–beings playing out their archetypal dramas between New Elysium and Hadia, with ordinary people caught in the middle – and Superman.

Essentially good–hearted, Atlas would have been the newbie in a “team” with Skyfather Xaoz!, Heroina, Marzak and the others. He has a bullish, adolescent approach to life. He drinks and plunges himself into ill–advised adventures to ease his naturally gloomy “weighed down by the world” temperament.

You can see it all now. The backstory suggested an unseen, Empyrean New Gods–type series from a parallel universe. What if, when Jack Kirby came to DC from Marvel in 1971, he’d followed up his sci–fi Viking Gods saga at Marvel, with a dimension–spanning epic rooted in Greek mythology? New Gods meets Eternals drawn by Curt Swan/Murphy Anderson? That was Atlas.

Samson, I decided would be a callback to the British newspaper strip “Garth.” Although you may already be imagining a daily strip about the exploits of time–tossed The Boys writer, Garth Ennis, it was actually about a blonde Adonis type who bounced around the ages having mildly horny, racy adventures.

(Go look him up then return the wiser before reading on, so I don’t have to explain anymore about this bastard – he’s often described as “the British Superman,” but oh...my arse! I hated meathead, personality–singularity Garth...but we all grew up with his meandering, inexplicable yet incredibly–drawn adventures and some of it was quite good when you were a little lad because he was always shagging ON PANEL with the likes of a bare–breasted cave girl or gauze–draped Helen of Troy.

(Unlike Superman, you see, the top British strongman liked to get naked. Lots naked. Naked in every time period he could get naked in, which was all of them thanks to the miracle of his bullshit powers.

(Imagine Doctor Who buff, dumb and naked all the time – Russell, I’ve had an idea!!!! – and that’s Garth in a nutshell.

(Sorry, I know I’m going on and the average attention span of anyone reading stuff on the Internet amounts to no more than a few paragraphs, but basically, Garth was always getting naked. In public, in family newspapers. Bollock naked. Let’s face it, patriotic Americans, have you ever seen Superman’s arse?

Newsarama Note: Well, there was Baby Kal-El in the 1978 film...

(Brits, hands up who still remember the man, and have you ever not seen Garth’s arse? Do you not, in fact, have a very clear image of it in your head, as drawn by Martin Asbury perhaps? In mine, Garth’s pulling aside a flimsy curtain to gaze at the pyramids with Cleopatra buck naked in foreground ogling his rock hard glutes...).

Anyway, Samson, I decided, was the Hebrew version of Garth and he would have his own mad comic that was like an American version of Garth. I saw the Bible hero plucked from the desert sands by time–travelling buffoons in search of a savior. Introduced to all the worst aspects of future culture and, using his stolen, erratic Chrono–Mobile, Samson became a time–(and space) traveling Soldier of Fortune, writing wrongs, humping princesses, accumulating and losing treasure etc. Like a science fiction Conan. Meets Garth.

Fortunately, you’ll never see any of these men ever again.

Newsarama: How have your perceptions of Superman and his supporting characters evolved since the Superman 2000 pitch you did with Mark Waid, Mark Millar and Tom Peyer? The Superman notions seem almost identical, but Luthor is very different here than in that pitch, and so is Clark Kent. Did you use some aspects of your original pitch, or have you just changed his mind on how to portray these characters since?

Grant Morrison: A little of both. I wanted to approach All Star Superman as something new, but there were a couple of specific aspects from the Superman 2000 pitch (as I mentioned earlier, it was actually called Superman Now, at least in my notebooks, which is where the bulk of the material came from) that I felt were definitely worth keeping and exploring.

I can’t remember much about Luthor from Superman Now, except for the ending. By the time I got to All Star Superman, I’d developed a few new insights into Luthor’s character that seemed to flesh him out more. Luthor’s really human and charismatic and hateful all the same time. He’s the brilliant, deluded egotist in all of us. The key for me was the idea that he draws his eyebrows on. The weird vanity of that told me everything I needed to know about Luthor.

I thought the real key to him was the fact that, brilliant as he is, Luthor is nowhere near as brilliant as he wants to be or thinks he is. For Luthor, no praise, no success, no achievement is ever enough, because there’s a big hungry hole in his soul. His need for acknowledgement and validation is superhuman in scale. Superman needs no thanks; he does what he does because he’s made that way. Luthor constantly rails against his own sense of failure and inadequacy...and Superman’s to blame, of course.

I’ve recently been re–thinking Luthor again for a different project, and there’s always a new aspect of the character to unearth and develop.

NRAMA: This story makes Superman and Lois’ relationship seem much more romantic and epic than usual, but this one also makes Superman more of the pursuer. Lois seems like more of an equal, but also more wary of his affections, particularly in the black–and–white sequence in issue #2.

She becomes this great beacon of support for him over the course of the series, but there is a sense that she’s a bit jaded from years of trickery and uncomfortable with letting him in now that he’s being honest. How, overall, do you see the relationship between Superman and Lois?

GM: The black-and-white panels shows Lois paranoid and under the influence of an alien chemical, but yes, she’s articulating many of her very real concerns in that scene.

I wanted her to finally respond to all those years of being tricked and duped and led to believe Superman and Clark Kent were two different people. I wanted her to get her revenge by finally refusing to accept the truth.

It also exposed that brilliant central paradox in the Superman/Lois relationship. The perfect man who never tells a lie has to lie to the woman he loves to keep her safe. And he lives with that every day. It’s that little human kink that really drives their relationship.

NRAMA: Jimmy Olsen is extremely cool in this series – it’s the old “Mr. Action” idea taken to a new level. It’s often easy to write Jimmy as a victim or sycophant, but in this series, he comes off as someone worthy of being “Superman’s Pal” – he implicitly trusts Superman, and will take any risk to get his story. Do you see this version of Jimmy as sort of a natural evolution of the version often seen in the comics?

GM: It was a total rethink based on the aspects of Olsen I liked, and playing down the whole wet–behind–the–ears “cub reporter” thing. I borrowed a little from the “Mr. Action” idea of a more daredevil, pro–active Jimmy, added a little bit of Nathan Barley, some Abercrombie & Fitch style, a bit of Tintin, and a cool Quitely haircut.

Jimmy was renowned for his “disguises” and bizarre transformations (my favorite is the transvestite Olsen epic “Miss Jimmy Olsen” from Jimmy Olsen #95, which gets a nod on the first page of our Jimmy story we did), so I wanted to take that aspect of his appeal and make it part of his job.

I don’t like victim Jimmy or dumb Jimmy, because those takes on the character don’t make any sense in their context. It seemed more interesting see what a young man would be like who could convincingly be Superman’s “pal.” Someone whose company a Superman might actually enjoy. That meant making Jimmy a much bigger character: swaggering but ingenuous. Innocent yet worldly. Enthusiastic but not stupid.

My favorite Jimmy moment is in issue #7 when he comes up with the way to defeat the Bizarro invasion by using the seas of the Bizarro planet itself as giant mirrors to reflect toxic – to Bizarros – sunlight onto the night side of the Earth. He knows Superman can actually take crazy lateral thinking like this and put it into practice.

NRAMA: Perry White has a few small–but–key scenes, particularly his address to his staff in issue #1 and standing up to Luthor in issue #12. I’d like to hear more about your thoughts on this character.

GM: As with the others, my feelings are there on the page. Perry is Clark’s boss and need only be that and not much more to play his role perfectly well within the stories. He’s a good reminder that Superman has a job and a boss, unlike that good–for–nothing work-shy bastard Batman. Perry’s another of the series’ older male role models of integrity and steadfastness, like Pa Kent.

NRAMA: There’s a sense in the Daily Planet scenes and with Lois’s spotlight issues that everyone knows Clark is Superman, but they play along to humor him. The Clark disguise comes off as very obvious in this story. Do you feel that the Planet staff knows the truth, or are just in a very deep case of denial, like Lex?

GM: If I had to say for sure, I think Jimmy Olsen worked it out a long time ago, and simply presumes that if Superman has a good reason for what he’s doing, that’s good enough for Jimmy.

Lois has guessed, but refuses to acknowledge it because it exposes her darkest flaw – she could never love Clark Kent the way she loves Superman.

NRAMA: Also, the Planet staff seems awfully nonchalant at Luthor’s threats. Are they simply used to being attacked by now?

GM: Yes. They’re a tough group. They also know that Superman makes a point of looking out for them, so they naturally try to keep Luthor talking. They know he loves to talk about himself and about Superman. In that scene, he’s almost forgotten he even has powers, he’s so busy arguing and making points. He keeps doing ordinary things instead of extraordinary things.

NRAMA: The running gag of Clark subtly using his powers to protect unknowing people is well done, but I have to admit I was confused by the sequence near the end of issue #1. Was that an el–train, and if so, why was it so close to the ground?

GM: It’s a MagLev hover–train. Look again, and you’ll see it’s not supported by anything. Hover–trains help ease congestion in busy city streets! Metropolis is the City of Tomorrow, after all.

NRAMA: And there’s the death of Pa Kent. Why do you feel it’s particularly important to have Pa and not both of the Kents pass away?

GM: I imagined they had both passed away fairly early in Superman’s career, but Ma went a few years after Pa. Also, because the book was about men or man, it seemed important to stress the father/son relationships. That circle of life, the king is dead, long live the king thing that Superman is ultimately too big and too timeless to succumb to.

NRAMA: There is a real touch of Elliott S! Maggin’s novels in your depiction of Luthor – someone who is just so obsessive–compulsive about showing up Superman that he accomplishes nothing in his own life. He comes across as a showman, from his rehearsed speech in issue #1 to his garish costume in the last two issues, and it becomes painfully apparent that he wants to usurp Superman because he just can’t be happy with himself. What defeats him is actually a beautiful gift, getting to see the world as Superman does, and finally understanding his enemy.

That’s all a lead–in to: What previous stories that defined Luthor for you, and how did you define his character? What appeals to you about writing him?

GM: The Marks Waid and Millar were big fans of the Maggin books, and may have persuaded me to read at least the first one but I’m ashamed to say can’t remember anything about it, other than the vague recollection of a very humane, humanist take on Superman that seemed in general accord with the pacifist, hedonistic, between–the–wars spirit of the ‘90s when I read it. It was the ‘90s; I had other things on my mind and in my mind.

I like Maggin’s “Must There Be A Superman?” from Superman #247, which ultimately poses questions traditional superhero comic books are not equipped to answer and is one of the first paving stones in the Yellow Brick Road that leads to Watchmen and beyond, to The Authority, The Ultimates etc. Everyone still awake, still reading this, should make themselves familiar with “Must There Be A Superman?” – it’s a milestone in the development of the superhero concept.

However, the story that most defines Luthor for me turns out to be, as usual, a Len Wein piece with Curt Swan/Murphy Anderson– Superman #248. This blew me away when I was a kid. Lex Luthor cares about humanity? He’s sorry we all got blown up? The villain loves us too? It’s only Superman he really hates? Genius. Big, cool adult stuff.

The divine Len makes Lex almost too human, but it was amazing to see this kind of depth in a character I’d taken for granted as a music hall villain.

I also love the brutish Satanic, Crowley–esque, Golden Age Luthor in the brilliant “Powerstone” Action Comics #47 (the opening of All Star #11 is a shameless lift from “Powerstone”, as I soon realised when I went back to look. Blame my...er...photographic memory...cough).

And I like the Silver Age Luthor who only hates Superman because he thinks it’s Superboy’s fault he went bald. That was the most genuinely human motivation for Luthor’s career of villainy of all; it was Superman’s fault he went bald! I can get behind that.

In the Silver Age, baldness, like obesity, old age and poverty, was seen quite rightly as a crippling disease and a challenge which Superman and his supporting cast would be compelled to overcome at every opportunity! Suburban “50s America versus Communist degeneracy? You tell me.

I like elements of the Marv Wolfman/John Byrne ultra–cruel and rapacious businessman, although he somewhat lacks the human dimension (ultimately there’s something brilliant about Luthor being a failed inventor, a product of Smallville/Dullsville – the genius who went unnoticed in his lifetime, and resorted to death robots in chilly basements and cellars. Luthor as geek versus world). I thought Alan Moore’s ruthlessly self–assured “consultant” Luthor in Swamp Thing was an inspired take on the character as was Mark Waid’s rage–driven prodigy from Birthright.

I tried to fold them all into one portrayal. I see him as a very human character – Superman is us at our best, Luthor is us when we’re being mean, vindictive, petty, deluded and angry. Among other things. It’s like a bipolar manic/depressive personality – with optimistic, loving Superman smiling at one end of the scale and paranoid, petty Luthor cringing on the other.

I think any writer of Superman has to love these two enemies equally. We have to recognize them both as potentials within ourselves. I think it’s important to find yourself agreeing with Luthor a bit about Superman’s “smug superiority” – we all of us, except for Superman, know what it’s like to have mean–spirited thoughts like that about someone else’s happiness. It’s essential to find yourself rooting for Lex, at least a little bit, when he goes up against a man–god armed only with his bloody–minded arrogance and cleverness.

Even if you just wish you could just give him a hug and help him channel his energies in the right direction, Luthor speaks for something in all of us, I like to think.

However he’s played, Luthor is the male power fantasy gone wrong and turned sour. You’ve got everything you want but it’s not enough because someone has more, someone is better, someone is cleverer or more handsome.

 Newsarama: Grant, a recurring theme throughout the book is the effect of small kindness – how even the likes of Steve Lombard are capable of decency. And Superman gets the key to saving himself by doing something that any human being could do, offering sympathy to a person about to end it all.

Grant Morrison: Completely...the person you help today could be the person who saves your life tomorrow.

NRAMA: The character actions that make the biggest difference, from Zibarro’s sacrifice to Pa’s influence on Superman, are really things that any normal, non-powered person could do if they embrace the best part of their humanity. The last page of issue #12 teases the idea that Superman’s powers could be given to all mankind, but it seems as though the greatest gift he has given them is his humanity. How do you view Superman’s fate in the context of where humanity could go as a species?

GM: I see Superman in this series as an Enlightenment figure, a Renaissance idea of the ideal man, perfect in mind, body and intention.

A key text in all of this is Pico’s ‘Oration On The Dignity of Man’ (15c), generally regarded as the ‘manifesto’ of Renaissance thought, in which Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola laid out the fundamentals of what we tend to refer to as ’Humanist’ thinking.

(The ‘Oratorio’ also turns up in my British superhero series Zenith from 1987, which may indicate how long I’ve been working towards a Pico/Superman team-up!)

At its most basic, the ‘Oratorio’ is telling us that human beings have the unique ability, even the responsibility, to live up to their ‘ideals’. It would be unusual for a dog to aspire to be a horse, a bird to bark like a dog, or a horse to want to wear a diving suit and explore the Barrier Reef, but people have a particular gift for and inclination towards imitation, mimicry and self-transformation. We fly by watching birds and then making metal carriers that can outdo birds, we travel underwater by imitating fish, we constantly look to role models and behavioral templates for guidance, even when those role models are fictional TV or, comic, novel or movie heroes, just like the soft, quick, shapeshifty little things we are. We can alter the clothes we wear, the temperature around us, and change even our own bodies, in order to colonize or occupy previously hostile environments. We are, in short, a distinctively malleable and adaptable bunch.

So, Pico is saying, if we live by imitation, does it not make sense that we might choose to imitate the angels, the gods, the very highest form of being that we can imagine? Instead of indulging the most brutish, vicious, greedy and ignorant aspects of the human experience, we can, with a little applied effort, elevate the better part of our natures and work to express those elements through our behavior. To do so would probably make us all feel a whole lot better too. Doing good deeds and making other people happy makes you feel totally brilliant, let’s face it.

So we can choose to the astronaut or the gangster. The superhero or the super villain. The angel or the devil. It’s entirely up to us, particularly in the privileged West, how we choose to imagine ourselves and conduct our lives.

We live in the stories we tell ourselves. It’s really simple. We can continue to tell ourselves and our children that the species we belong to is a crawling, diseased, viral cancer smear, only fit for extinction, and let’s see where that leads us.

We can continue to project our self-loathing and narcissistic terror of personal mortality onto our culture, our civilization, our planet, until we wreck the promise of the world for future generations in a fit of sheer self-induced panic...

...or we can own up to the scientific fact that we are all physically connected as parts of a single giant organism, imagine better ways to live and grow...and then put them into practice. We can stop pissing about, start building starships, and get on with the business of being adults.

The ’Oratorio’ is nothing less than the Shazam!, the Kimota! for Western Culture and we would do well to remember it in our currently trying times.

The key theme of the ‘Dark Age’ of comics was loss and recovery of wonder - McGregor’s Killraven trawling through the apocalyptic wreckage of culture in his search for poetry, meaning and fellowship, Captain Mantra, amnesiac in Robert Mayer’s Superfolks, Alan Moore’s Mike Maxwell trudging through the black and white streets of Thatcher’s Britain, with the magic word of transformation burning on the tip of his tongue.

My own work has been an ongoing attempt to repeat the magic word over and over until we all become the kind of superheroes we’d all like to be. Ha hah ha.

 Newsarama: The structure of the 12 issues involves both Superman’s 12 labors and his impending death. Do you feel the threat of his demise brings out the best in Superman’s already–high character, or did you intend it more as a window for the audience to understand how he sees the world?

Grant Morrison: In trying to do the “big,” ultimate Superman story, we wanted to hit on all the major beats that define the character – the “death of Superman” story has been told again and again and had to be incorporated into any definitive take. Superman’s death and rebirth fit the sun god myth we were establishing, and, as you say, it added a very terminal ticking clock to the story.

NRAMA: When we talked earlier this year, we discussed the neurotic quality of the Silver Age stories. Looking at the series as a whole, you consistently invert this formula. Superman is faced with all these crises that could be seen as personifying his neuroses, but for the most part he handles them with a level head and comes across as being very at peace with himself. You talked about your discussion with an in–character Superman fan at a convention years ago, but I am curious as to how you determined Superman’s mindset.

GM: I felt we had to live up to the big ideas behind Superman. I don’t take my daft job lightly. It’s all I’ve got.

As the project got going, I wasn’t thinking about Silver Ages or Dark Ages or anything about the comics I’d read, so much as the big shared idea of “Superman” and that “S” logo I see on T–shirts everywhere I go, on girls and boys. That communal Superman. I wanted us to get the precise energy of Platonic Superman down on the page.

The “S” hieroglyph, the super–sigil, stands for the very best kind of man we can imagine, so the subject dictated the methodical, perfectionist approach. As I’ve mentioned before, I keep this aspect of my job fresh for myself by changing my writing style to suit the project, the character or the artist.

With something like Batman R.I.P., I’m aiming for a frenzied Goth Pulp-Noir; punk-psych, expressionist shadows and jagged nightmare scene shifts, inspired by Batman’s roots and by the snapping, fluttering of his uncanny cape. Final Crisis was written, with the Norse Ragnarok and Biblical Revelations in mind, as a story about events more than characters. A doom-laden, Death Metal myth for the wonderful world of Fina(ncia)l Crisis/Eco-breakdown/Terror Trauma we all have to live in.

The subject matter drives the execution. And then, of course, the artists add their own vision and nuance. With All Star Superman, “Frank” and I were able to spend a lot of time together talking it through, and we agreed it had to be about grids, structure, storybook panel layouts, an elegance of form, a clarity of delivery. “Classical” in every sense of the word. The medium, the message, the story, the character, all working together as one simple equation.

Frank Quitely, a Glasgow Art School boy, completely understood without much explanation, the deep structural underpinnings of the series and how to embody them in his layouts. There’s a scene in issue # 8, set on the Bizarro world, where we see Le Roj handing Superman his rocket plans. Look at the arrangement of the figures of Zibarro, Le Roj, Superman and Bizaro–Superman and you’ll see one attempt to make us of Renaissance compositions.

The sense of sunlit Zen calm we tried to get into All Star is how I imagine it might feel to think the way Superman thinks all the time - a thought process that is direct, clean, precise, mathematical, ordered. A mind capable of fantastical imagination but grounded in the everyday of his farm upbringing with nice decent folks. Rich with humour and tears and deep human significance, yet tuned to a higher key. We tried to hum along for a little while, that’s all.

In honor of the character’s primal position in the development of the superhero narrative, I hoped we could create an “ultimate” hero story, starring the ultimate superhero.

Basically, I suppose I felt Superman deserved the utmost application of our craft and intelligence in order to truly do him justice.

Otherwise, I couldn’t have written this book if I hadn’t watched my big, brilliant dad decline into incoherence and death. I couldn’t have written it if I’d never had my heart broken, or mended. I couldn’t have written it if I hadn’t known what it felt like to be idolized, misunderstood, hated for no clear reason, loved for all my faults, forgotten, remembered...

Writing All Star Superman was, in retrospect, also a way of keeping my mind in the clean sunshine while plumbing the murkiest depths of the imagination with that old pair of c****s Darkseid and Doctor Hurt. Good riddance.

 Newsarama: This is touched on in other questions, but how much of the Silver/Bronze Age backstory matters here? What do you see as Superman's life prior to All-Star Superman? (What was going on with this Superman while the Byrne revamp took hold?)

Grant Morrison: When I introduced the series in an interview online, I suggested that All Star Superman could be read as the adventures of the ‘original’ Pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths Superman, returning after 20 plus years of adventures we never got to see because we were watching John Byrne‘s New Superman on the other channel. If ‘Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?’ and the Byrne reboot had never happened, where would that guy be now?

This was more to provide a sense, probably limited and ill-considered, of what the tone of the book might be like. I never intended All Star Superman as a direct continuation of the Weisinger or Julius Schwartz-era Superman stories. The idea was always to create another new version of Superman using all my favorite elements of past stories, not something ‘Age’ specific.

I didn’t collect Superman comics until the ‘70s and I’m not interested enough in pastiche or nostalgia to spend 6 years of my life playing post-modern games with Superman. All Star isn’t written, drawn or colored to look or read like a Silver Age comic book.

All Star Superman is not intended as arch commentary on continuity or how trends in storytelling have changed over the decades. It’s not retro or meta or anything other than its own simple self; a piece of drawing and writing that is intended by its makers to capture the spirit of its subject to the best of their capabilities, wisdom and talent.

Which is to say, we wanted our Superman story be about life, not about comics or superheroes, current events or politics. It’s about how it feels, specifically to be a man...in our dreams! Hopefully that means our 12 issues are also capable of wide interpretation.

So as much as we may have used a few recognizable Silver Age elements like Van-Zee and Sylv(i)a and the Bottle City of Kandor, the ensemble Daily Planet cast embodies all the generations of Superman. Perry White is from 1940, Steve Lombard is from the Schwartz-era ‘70s, Ron Troupe - the only black man in Metropolis - appeared in 1991. Cat Grant is from 1987 and so on.

P.R.O.J.E.C.T. refers back to Jack Kirby’s DNA Project from his ‘70s Jimmy Olsen stories, as well as to The Cadmus Project from ’90s Superboy and Superman stories. Doomsday is ‘90s. Kal Kent, Solaris and the Infant Universe of Qwewq all come from my own work on Superman in the same decade. Pa Kent’s heart attack is from ‘Superman the Movie‘. We didn’t use Brainiac because he’d been the big bad in Earth 2 but if we had, we’d have used Brainiac’s Kryptonian origin from the animated series and so on.

I also used quite a few elements of John Byrne’s approach. Byrne made a lot of good decisions when he rebooted the whole franchise in 1986 and I wanted to incorporate as much as I could of those too.

Our Superman in All Star was never Superboy, for instance. All Star Superman landed on Earth as a normal, if slightly stronger and fitter infant, and only began to manifest powers in adolescence when he’d finally soaked up enough yellow solar radiation to trigger his metamorphosis.

The Byrne logic seemed to me a better way to explain how his powers had developed across the decades, from the skyscraper leaps of the early days to the speed-of-light space flight of the high Silver Age. And more importantly, it made the Superman myth more poignant - the story of a farm boy who turned into an alien as he reached adolescence. I felt that was something that really enriched Superman. He grew away from his home, his family, his adopted species as he became Superman. His teenage years are a record of his transformation from normal boy to super-being.

As you say, there are more than just Silver Age influences in the book. Basically we tried to create a perfect synthesis of every Superman era. So much so, that it should just be taken as representative of an ‘age’ all its own.

In the end, however, I do think that the Silver Age type stories, with their focus on human problems and foibles, have a much wider appeal than a lot of the work which followed. They’re more like fables or folk tales than the later ‘comic book superhero’ stories of Superman when he became just another colorful costume in the crowd...and perhaps that’s why All Star seemed to resemble those books more than it does a typical modern Marvel or DC comic. It was our intention to present a more universal, mainstream Superman.

NRAMA: In your depiction of Krypton and the Kryptonians, you show the complexity of Superman’s relationship between humanity and Earth even further. Krypton has that scientific paradise quality to it, but the Kryptonians are also portrayed as slightly aloof and detached, even Jor-El. But from Bar-El to the people of Kandor, they’re touched by Superman’s goodness. What do you see as the fundamental difference between Kryptonians and Earthlings, and how has Superman’s character been shaped by each?

GM: My version of Krypton was, again, synthesized from a number of different approaches over the decades. 
In mythic terms, if Superman is the story of a young king, found and raised by common people, then Krypton is the far distant kingdom he lost. It’s the secret bloodline, the aristocratic heritage that makes him special, and a hero. At the same time, Krypton is something that must be left behind for Superman to become who he is - i.e. one of us. Krypton gives him his scientific clarity of mind, Earth makes his heart blaze.

I liked the very early Jerry Siegel descriptions where Krypton is a planet of advanced supermen and women (I already played with that a little in Marvel Boy where Noh-Varr was written to be the Marvel Superboy basically). To that, I added the rich, science fiction detailing of the Silver Age Krypton stories and the slightly detached coolness that characterized John Byrne’s Krypton, which I re-interpreted through the lens of Dzogchen Buddhist thought, probably the most pragmatic, chilly and rational philosophic system on the planet and the closest, I felt, to how Kryptonians might see things.

We also took some time to redesign the crazy, multicolored Kryptonian flag (you can see our version in Kandor in issue #10). The flag, as originally imagined, seemed like the last thing Kryptonians would endorse, so we took the multicolored-rays-around-a-circle design and recreated it - the central circle is now red, representing Krypton’s star, Rao, while the rays, rather than arbitrary colors, become representations of the spectrum of visible light pouring from Rao into the inky black of space. In this way, the flag, that bizarre emblem of nationalism becomes a scientific hieroglyph.

Showing Krypton and Kryptonians was also important as a way of stressing why Superman wears that costume and why it makes absolute sense that he looks the way he does. I don’t see the red and blue suit as a flag or as rewoven baby blankets. There’s no need for Superman to dress the way he does but it made sense to think of his outfit as his ‘national costume‘.

The way I see it, the standard superhero outfit, the familiar Superman suit with the pants on the outside, is what everyone wore on Krypton, give or take a few fashion accessories like hoods and headbands, chest crests and variant colors. In fact, all other superheroes are just copying the fashions on Krypton, lost planet of the super-people.

Superman wears his ’action-suit’ the way a patriotic Scotsman would wear a kilt. It’s a sign of his pride in his alien heritage.

 Newsarama: Although All–Star Superman ties in with DC One Million, you style of writing has changed dramatically since then.  How do you feel about One Million now?

Grant Morrison: I just read it again and liked it a lot. Comics were definitely happier, breezier and more confident in their own strengths before Hollywood and the Internet turned the business of writing superhero stories into the production of low budget storyboards or, worse, into conformist, fruitless attempts to impress or entertain a small group of people who appear to hate comics and their creators.

NRAMA: Obviously, this book is the most explicit SF–Christ story since Behold the Man, only...happy.  Superman/Christ parallels have existed for decades, but this story makes it absolutely explicit, from laying his hands on the sick and dying to...well, most of issue #12.  You’ve dealt with Christ themes before, particularly in The Mystery Play, but outside of the comics, how do you see Superman as a Christ figure for the “real” world?

GM: The “Superman as Christ” thing is a little too reductive for me, and tends to overlook the fact that Superman is by no means a pacifist in the Christ sense. Superman would never turn the other cheek; Superman punches out the bully. Superman is a fighter.

When did Christ ever batter the Devil through a mountain?

The thing I disliked about the Superman Returns movie was the American Christ angle, which reduced Superman to a sniveling, masochistic wreck, crawling around on the floor, taking a kicking from everyone. This approach had an odd and slightly disturbing S&M flavor, which didn’t play well to the character’s strengths at all and seemed to derive entirely from a kind of Catholic vision of the suffering, martyred Jesus.

It’s not that he’s based on Jesus, but simply that a lot of the mythical sun god elements that have been layered onto the Christ story also appear in the story of Superman. I suppose I see Superman more as pagan sci–fi. He’s a secular messiah, a science redeemer with tough guy muscles and a very direct and clear morality.

NRAMA: Continuing the religious themes, in issue #10, you have Superman literally giving birth to himself, both philosophically and as a character – a nice little meta–moment showing how Superman inspires a world where he is only fiction.  How did that idea come about?

GM: It came from the challenge we’d set ourselves: as I said, issue #10 had been left as a blank space into which the single most coherent condensation of all our ideas about Superman were destined to fit.

I wanted to do a “day in the life” story. So much of All Star had been about this threat to Superman himself, so we wanted to show him going about a typical day saving people and doing good.

Then came the title “Neverending,” which comes from the opening announcement – “Faster than a speeding bullet!...” of the Superman radio show from 1940, and seemed to me to be as good a title for a Superman story as any I could think of. It seemed to distil everything about Superman’s battle and his legend into a single word. And the story structure itself was designed to loop endlessly, so it went well with that.

 On top of that went the idea of the Last Will and Testament of Superman. A dying god writing his will seemed like an interesting structure to use. Then came the idea to fit all of human history into that single 24 hours. And then to show the development of the Superman idea through human culture from the earliest Australian Aboriginal notions of super–beings ‘descended” from the sky, through the complex philosophical system of Hinduism, onto the Renaissance concept of the ideal man, via the refinements of Nietzche and finally, down to that smiling, hopeful Joe Shuster sketch; the final embodiment of humanity’s glorious, uplifting notion of the superman become reduced to a drawing, a story for kids, a worthless comic book.

And also what that could mean in a holographic fractal universe, where the smallest part contains and reflects the whole.

Of course the next panel in that sequence is happening in the real world and would show you, the reader, sitting with the latest Superman issue in your hands, deep within the Infant Universe of Qwewq in the Fortress of Solitude, today, wherever you are. In “Neverending,” the reader becomes wrapped in a self–referential loop of story and reality. If you actually, seriously think about what is happening at this point in the story, if you meditate upon the curious entanglement of the real and the fictional, you will become enlightened in this life apparently. According to some texts.

NRAMA: On a personal level, you’ve explored all types of religions and philosophies in your work.  What is your take on religion and how it influences humanity, and the Christian take on Jesus Christ in particular?

GM: I think religion per se, is a ghastly blight on the progress of the human species towards the stars.  At the same time, it, or something like it, has been an undeniable source of comfort, meaning and hope for the majority of poor bastards who have ever lived on Earth, so I’m not trying to write it off completely. I just wish that more people were educated to a standard where they could understand what religion is and how it works. Yes, it got us through the night for a while, but ultimately, it’s one of those ugly, stupid arse–over–backwards things we could probably do without now, here on the Planet of the Apes.

Religion is to spirituality what porn is to sex. It’s what the Hollywood 3–act story template is to real creative writing.

Religion creates a structure which places “special,” privileged people (priests) between ordinary people and the divine, as if there could even be any separation: as if every moment, every thought, every action was not already an expression of dynamic ‘divinity” at work.

As I’ve said before, the solid world is just the part of heaven we’re privileged to touch and play with. You don’t need a priest or a holy man to talk to “god” on your behalf: just close your eyes and say hello. “God” is no more, no less, than the sum total of all matter, all energy, all consciousness, as experienced or conceptualized from a timeless perspective where everything ever seems to present all at once. “God” is in everything, all the time and can be found there by looking carefully. The entire universe, including the scary, evil bits, is a thought “God” is thinking, right now.

As far as I can figure it out from my own reading and my own experience of how the spiritual world works, Jesus was, as they say, way cool: a man who achieved a state of consciousness, which nowadays would get him a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy (in the days of the Emperor Tiberius, he was crucified for his ideas, today he’d be laughed at, mocked or medicated).

This “holistic” mode of consciousness (which Luthor experiences briefly at the end of All Star Superman) announces itself as a heartbreaking connection, a oneness, with everything that exists...but you don’t have to be Superman to know what that feeling is like. There are a ton of meditation techniques which can take you to this place. I don’t see it as anything supernatural or religious, in fact, I think it’s nothing more than a developmental level of human consciousness, like the ability to see perspective – which children of 4 cannot do but children of 6 can.

Everyone who’s familiar with this upgrade will tell you the same thing: it feels as if “alien” or “angelic” voices – far more intelligent, coherent and kindly than the voices you normally hear in your head – are explaining the structure of time and space and your place in it. 
This identification with a timeless supermind containing and resolving within itself all possible thoughts and contradictions, is what many people, unsurprisingly, mistake for an encounter with “God.”  However, given that this totality must logically include and resolve all possible thoughts and concepts, it can also be interpreted as an actual encounter with God, so I’m not here to give anyone a hard time over interpretation.

Some people have the experience and believe the God of their particular culture has chosen them personally to have a chat with. These people may become born–again Christians, fundamentalist Muslims, devotees of Shiva, or misunderstood lunatics. Some “contactees” interpret the voices they hear erroneously as communications from an otherworldly, alien intelligence, hence the proliferation of “abduction” accounts in recent decades, which share most of their basic details with similar accounts, from earlier centuries, of people being taken away by “fairies” or “little people”.

Some, who like to describe themselves as magicians, will recognize the “alien” voice as the “Holy Guardian Angel”.

In timeless, spaceless consciousness, the singular human mind blurs into a direct experience of the totality of all consciousness that has ever been or will ever be. It feels like talking with God but I see that as an aspect of science, not religion.

As Peter Barnes wrote in “The Ruling Class”, “I know I must be God because when I pray to Him, I find I’m talking to myself.”

 Newsarama: When we spoke earlier this year, you talked about some of your ideas for future All Star stories. Are you moving forward on those, or have you started working on different ideas since then?

Grant Morrison: I haven’t had time to think about them for a while. I did have the stories worked out, and I’d like to do more, but right now it feels like Frank and Jamie and I have said all there is to be said. I don’t know if I’m ready to do All Star Superman with anyone else right now. I have other plans.

NRAMA: You end the book with Superman having uplifted humanity – having inspired them through his sacrifice and great deeds, and with the potential to pass his powers on to humanity still there. Do you plan to explore this concept further, or would you prefer to leave it open–ended?

GM: I may go back to the Son of Superman in some way. At the same time, it’s best left open–ended. I like the idea that Superman gets to have his cake and eat it; he becomes golden and mythical and lives forever as a dream. Yet, he also is able to sire a child who will carry his legacy into the future. He kicks ass in both the spiritual and the temporal spheres!

 NRAMA: The notion of transcendence – always a big part of your work. But the debate about All Star Superman is whether or not it "transcends its genre." Superman becomes transcendent within the series itself, and inspires the beings on Qwewq, but does the work aspire to more than that? Is it simply the greatest version of a Superman story, and that’s enough?

GM: That would certainly be enough if it were true.

It’s a pretty high–level attempt by some smart people to do the Superman concept some justice, is all I can say. It’s intended to work as a set of sci–fi fables that can be read by children and adults alike. I’d like to think you can go to it if you’re feeling suicidal, if you miss your dad, if you’ve had to take care of a difficult, ailing relative, if you’ve ever lost control and needed a good friend to put you straight, if you love your pets, if you wish your partner could see the real you...All Star is about how Superman deals with all of that.

It’s a big old Paul Bunyan style mythologizing of human - and in particular male - experience. In that sense I’d like to think All Star Superman does transcend genre in that it’s intended to be read on its own terms and needs absolutely no understanding of genre conventions or history around it to grasp what’s going on.

In today’s world, in today’s media climate designed to foster the fear our leaders like us to feel because it makes us easier to push around. In a world where limp, wimpy men are forced to talk tough and act ‘badass’ even though we all know they’re shitting it inside. In a world where the measure of our moral strength has come to lie in the extremity of the images we’re able to look at and stomach. In a world, I’m reliably told, that’s going to the dogs, the real mischief, the real punk rock rebellion, is a snarling, ‘fuck you’ positivity and optimism. Violent optimism in the face of all evidence to the contrary is the Alpha form of outrage these days. It really freaks people out.

I have a desire not to see my culture and my fellow human beings fall helplessly into step with a middle class media narrative that promises only planetary catastrophe, as engineered by an intrinsically evil and corrupt species which, in fact, deserves everything it gets.

Is this relentless, downbeat insistence that the future has been cancelled really the best we can come up with? Are we so fucked up we get off on terrifying our children? It’s not funny or ironic anymore and that’s why we wrote All Star Superman the way we did. Everything has changed. ‘Dark’ entertainment now looks like hysterical, adolescent, ‘Zibarro’ crap. That’s what my Final Crisis series is about too.

NRAMA (aka Tim Callahan): Continuing with the theme of transcendence: The words "ineffectual" and "surrender" are repeated throughout the book. Discuss.

GM: Discuss yourself, Callahan! I know you have the facilities and I should think it’s all rather obvious. 


NRAMA: What was the inspiration for the image of Superman in the sun at the end? (I confess this question comes as the result of much unsuccessful Googling)

GM: I didn’t have any specific reference in mind - just that one we‘ve all sort of got in our heads. I drew the figure as a sketch, intended to be reminiscent of William Blake’s cosmic figures, Russian Constructivist Soviet Socialist Worker type posters, and Leonardo’s ‘Proportions of the Human Figure‘. The position of the legs hints at the Buddhist swastika, the clockwise sun symbol. It was to me, the essence of that working class superheroic ideal I mentioned, condensed into a final image of mythic Superman, - our eternal, internal, guiding, selfless, tireless, loving superstar. The daft All Star Superman title of the comic is literalized in this last picture. It’s the ‘fearful symmetry’ of the Enlightenment project - an image of genius, toil, and our need to make things, to fashion art and artifacts, as a form of superhuman, divine imitation.

It was Superman as this fusion of Renaissance/Enlightenment ideas about Man and Cosmos, an impossible union of Blake and Newton. A Pop Art ‘Vitruvian Man‘. The inspiration for the first letter of the new future alphabet!

As you can see, we spent a lot of time thinking about all this and purifying it down to our own version of the gold. I’m glad it’s over.

NRAMA: Finally: What, above all else, would you like people to take away from All Star Superman?

GM: That we spent a lot of time thinking about this!

No. What I hope is that people take from it the unlikelihood that a piece of paper, with little ink drawings of figures, with little written words, can make you cry, can make your heart soar, can make you scared, sad, or thrilled. How mental is that?

That piece of paper is inert material, the corpse of some tree, pulped and poured, then given new meaning and new life when the real hours and real emotions that the writer and the artist, the colorist, the letter the editor translated onto the physical page, meet with the real hours and emotions of a reader, of all readers at once, across time, generations and distance.

And think about how that experience, the simple experience of interacting with a paper comic book, along with hundreds of thousands of others across time and space, is an actual doorway onto the beating heart of the imminent, timeless world of “Myth” as defined above. Not just a drawing of it but an actual doorway into timelessness and the immortal world where we are all one together.

My grief over the loss of my dad can be Superman’s grief, can trigger your own grief, for your own dad, for all our dads. The timeless grief that’s felt by Muslims and Christians and Agnostics alike. My personal moments of great and romantic love, untainted by the everyday, can become Superman’s and may resonate with your own experience of these simple human feelings.

In the one Mythic moment we’re all united, kissing our Lover for the First time, the Last time, the Only time, honoring our dear Dad under a blood red sky, against a darkening backdrop, with Mum telling us it’ll all be okay in the end.

If we were able to capture even a hint of that place and share it with our readers, that would be good enough for me.

[wrctings]

Dick Winters x reader | The best way to recover

for all of my fellow soft dick winters stans 🧡

“Is being mess officer that horrible?” Nixon asked lightly, trying to get a smile out of his friend as he made his way through the kitchen, avoiding army cooks to join Winters.

As usual, the clinking melody of cutlery knocking together was reverberating through the room, bouncing off the walls and mingling with the voices of the men whom avidly scraped their ration of food off their plates, which had somehow led the atmosphere of dinnertime to become congenial over months. After the long hours of draining, at first even almost unbearable preparation that they endured daily, the soldiers of the 506th had started to form a bond that not only got them through the toughest of training sessions, but also manifested whenever they were bestowed a bit of free time. In between running to exhaustion, teasing and munching on flavourless beans together, camaraderie was growing day after day among Easy Company.

“I’d rather not be here right now,” Dick replied shortly, only giving the brunet officer a brief glance before his eyes drifted back toward the window pane. As a Lieutenant, the redhead was accustomed to watching over his men with care, even moved as he witness their efforts bear fruit and theirs friendships grow tighter, but on that evening his thoughts and attention were directed toward something else — someone else, rather. As the pouring rain drummed outside, accounting for the definite arrival of Autumn’s brisk weather and carpets of brown leaves, what Dick would have otherwise considered appeasing had now become the cause of his worry, distracting his diligence from the task that Sobel had given him when he designated him mess officer. 

“Dick, what’s happening?” Lewis frowned, sensing that the other man’s tone smacked of particular concern — he could tell that something was off by the hardened look on Winters’s face, the officer pacing up and down without truly acknowledging what was happening all around. 

“Sobel made Y/n run Currahee right before dinner. Guarnere and Toye went with them, but they’re not back yet.” 

“Shit, it’s pouring out there,” Nixon cursed under his breath, shaking his head at the news. He now understood his friend’s state of mind much better, knowing how much you meant to him. “How long?”

“Twenty minutes. They should be back soon,” Winters’s gaze was shifting from the window to the door, the man intensely hoping that you and your two companions in misfortune would finally show up at last. 

“They’ll be okay,” Nixon put a hand over Dick’s shoulder, giving him a few comforting pats. “They’ve run that mountain dozens of times.” 

“I know, Nix, but have you seen the weather? We don’t need soldiers falling ill now,” Winters added roughly, in sharp contrast with the composure of his usual behaviour. 

“Dick, Y/n is a good soldier,” Nixon spoke in a quieter voice, understanding that Dick was most of all worried about your well-being. “And they’re with Guarnere and Toye, the three of them can help each other out.” 

“Yeah.” The redhead eventually nodded, turning around to get a glimpse at the other officer. “Why did he made them run the forsaken mountain now...,” he muttered, jaw clenching as his eyes narrowed. 

Lewis’s lips parted, the man about to agree on the deplorable nature of Sobel’s methods, but before he had time to lash out at their Commending Officer the door finally swung open and ricocheted off the wall, revealing three panting figures. Soaked to the bone, Bill, Joe and you stepped inside, getting your helmets off as you took in the warmth of the room, shivering in your drenched gear. 

Soldiers cheered as you walked up to the kitchen, giving you pats on the back and congratulating you for getting through the task, to which Joe was bitterly swearing that he would “always hate that son of b*tch” and Bill grunted by your side, sharing your exhaustion. You couldn’t have been more grateful for your friends’ presence, Guarnere and Toye following you in solidarity after Sobel had commanded that you run Currahee, but you didn’t feel like you had enough remaining strength to join Toye in his breathless attacks against your CO. All you could strive for at that moment were a hot meal and a place to collapse in, your legs threatening to cave in with every additional step — while braving the downpour your equipment had felt heavier than ever, painfully weighing down on you for miles. 

When he saw you come in Dick’s first instinct was to rush up to you, attempting to help out best he could, but the interdiction to surrender his post in the kitchen left the ginger-haired man no choice but to helplessly watch you get a plate of beans and bread, then taking a seat alongside Toye and Guarnere with your uniform wet and hair sticking to your skin as you took a hasty mouthful of food. You hardly payed attention to anything around you, trying to stop yourself from shaking while filling your empty stomach with the lukewarm beans that you had been served, feeling Bill also quiver beside you.

The time to depart came after you had just finished eating, the company being ordered out of the canteen. Rushing out as fast as possible to find shelter without getting sodden in the rain, the men rapidly emptied the room, leaving no one but Dick, Nixon and the cooks behind; the First Lieutenant still having to face their CO before he was free to go, Lewis disappeared just in time for Lt. Sobel to march up to Winters, requiring his daily report. In the meantime, you headed back to the barracks, eager to get a change of clothes and finally be able to have a break — after this evening, you couldn’t wait to tumble upon your bed, your sore muscles sending you clear signals that they demanded to rest. 

However, an unexpected visit awaited you a short while later. As you were carried forward amidst the flood of soldiers — everybody willing to take refuge from the icy droplets of rain piercing their skin with coldness —, you caught a glimpse of a figure coming toward you from the side, making way among the company. Soon enough, the blurred lines turned into a familiar shape, then becoming clearer as the man got closer to you, and in a few seconds Lt. Winters stood at the side of the crowd you were part of. His dark green iris fixed upon you, he made a small movement of the head when you met his gaze, as though asking if you could join him. After quickly looking around to be certain that your retreat wouldn’t be noticed, you slowed down, letting men overtake you, and stepped to the side until you found yourself close enough to Dick.

You strode away from the barracks without a word, but you rapidly recognised the direction you were taking — it wasn’t long until you reached the officers’ lodgings, the building’s outline illuminated by a beam of light flickering through the windows. Opening the door, Dick let you in first before closing it behind the two of you, making sure that no one had seen you leave together; Nixon and Harry were visibly missing as well, probably enjoying a game of cards in the headquarters.

The redhead immediately went to his footlocker afterwards, not even bothering to take his side cap off as he rummaged through the piece of furniture, and only spoke after he handed you the blanket which he had retrieved. You took it gratefully, teeth still chattering in spite of the warmer temperature of the room.

“How are you? I learnt that Sobel sent you off after you had already left...” he let you know apologetically, helping you unbutton your wet uniform.

“Cold,” you gave him an honest answer, resting the blanket on the bed nearby while starting to get your soaked clothes off. “But Bill and Joe made it a lot easier.”

“Still, ordering you to run Currahee by yourself in that weather..” Dick harsh voice however broke off as he was about to enlarge upon his disapproval of Sobel, deciding at the last moment that it wasn’t worth it — he would much rather focus on you.

Kneeling, he unlaced your boots, your own fingers being too numb to get a firm grip on the shoelaces, and went back to his footlocker while you took off the shirt that you were wearing under your uniform; it hadn’t been spared from the rain, unpleasantly clinging onto your body and sending chills down your skin. Dick then handed you the sweater, trousers and socks that he had taken out while politely looking away — which you always found irresistibly sweet since you were in relationship and had been intimate before —, leaving you all the needed time to change into dry clothes. Only when you were done did he finally came close to you again, the worry that had been painted over his face slightly alleviated now that you were safely shut away from the rain and cold.

“Is it better now?” Winters inquired caringly, his heart swelling as he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the sight of you in his clothes, fitting too big for your smaller frame. It was as though he had given you a real part of him, aside from the discreet kisses and affectionate words that you had to find a way to exchange throughout the day.

Dick greatly admired your strength — the way you held your head up, kept your spirits firmly focused even though your first months in the army had been rough since you had to constantly prove your worth to the men —, but the intimacy that had developed between the two of you allowed him to see another side of you, just like you could access another side of him. With you, he was not afraid to be himself — he was not afraid to care, because you cared too, and understood. And you were not afraid to let your guard down — to let him help you, just like you also helped him.

“It’s so much better. Thank you, Dick.” You gave the redhead a touched smiled, deeply grateful for the trouble he put himself into just to make you feel better. “Hey, you haven’t even taken the time to take care of yourself,” you then added in soft indignation, it being your turn to look after him. You reached for his side cap, cautious not to wrinkle it, and folded it neatly while Dick took off his jacket.

The Lieutenant ran a hand through his hair, quickly fixing it, and gave you a smile that revealed the creases happiness shaped around his eyes. Although you ought not to be seen inside the officiers’ barracks, such an intrusion being formally forbidden, for once Dick couldn’t have payed less attention to the rules — if risk was the price to pay for spending time with you, he would assume it.

“You must be tired, I’m sorry if I’m cutting your hours of sleep shorter,” Winters still apologised, getting up to hang your wet uniform so it dries out overnight. “I didn’t want to let you go like that.” He sat back down, taking your cold hands into his, warming them up. “I’ve missed you.”

“Me too, Dick,” you squeezed his fingers, a strong, fuzzy feeling coating the inside your chest while you were peering into the man’s eyes, their pale greenness reminding you of everything safe and loving. At the end of the day, after bullets had miraculously flown by and spared your life, Winters was always whom you came back to — though so far away from home, you had found something in him that couldn’t be immured between four walls. 

“Come here,” the redhead added, gently inviting you into his embrace as he opened his arms, and you ensconced yourself right up against him, pecking his lips tenderly before you rested your head against his chest. In spite of the barrier of cloth that the Lieutenant’s uniform represented, you could hear the beating of Dick’s heart, each of its pulsions holding onto the frail life that you all tried to preserve from the brutal grasp of death. You tried to keep the thought of it away from your mind as much as possible, standing by the same principles as the ginger-haired officer. In the field, you didn’t have time to mourn; and outside of it, time was too precious to attempt predicting the breath that the following day would suck out out of one of your fellow soldiers. Although the both of you had at first tried to fight it, thinking ahead about what devastating consequences falling in love would bring be one of you killed in combat, you couldn’t have come as far as you had without each other. Even the most violent of human struggles hadn’t managed to turn your heart into the same steel that made up your bayonets. 

“Aren’t Nixon and Harry going to come back?” you whispered regretfully, your fingers mindlessly running through the slightly damp hair at the back of Dick’s head.

“I asked them to wait for a bit.” Winters gave you an implicit answer followed by a little smile, stroking your forearms as he kissed you on the cheek. “They’re busy playing games and gambling anyway.”

“I see,” you smiled back, closing your eyes as you let yourself go all against Dick, the regular rising of his torso lulling you as you felt much warmer, your preceding running of Currahee now already seeming like a distant memory. 

It was in each other’s arms that the two of you eventually dozed off, soothed by the fluttering rhythm of the rain pounding against the windows of the barracks and the cosiness that enfolded you, making you hope for many more evenings like this. Even on the chilliest and most straining of days, the space between Dick Winters’s arms was a place for your heart to rest in. 

[chaoticbluebirdconnoisseur]

Five Mineral Drug

Five mineral powder (or wushi), also known as cold food powder (or hanshi), was one of the most widely used drugs in medieval China.  I have read the paper Lebensstil und Drogen im chinesischen Mittelalter by Rudolf G. Wagner and thought that those who can’t speak German might want to know more about it as well. In this, I will explain how it was found and popularized, the people who took this, symptoms, side effects, etc.

So I picked out a few texts and translated the translations from German to English. Keep in mind that the translation had gone from being originally written in Middle Chinese to being translated to German by Wagner, and then being translated by me in English. This is not an official translation, and I don’t want it to be treated as such. I tried finding alternative translations but in the end, I had to resort to translating most of it myself. My translations (which are Wagners translations) are marked with a ・ .

And also for those not bright enough: DO NOT RECREATE THIS TRASH! DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CONSUME IT! Jesus

Five Mineral Drug Before He Yan

There is not much known about the History before He Yan’s lifetime, but we have the following statement by Qin Zhengzu in his work Hanshi san lun ・ :

Although the recipe for the cold food powder originates in the Han Dynasty, there were not many who used it. But when the shangshu (He Yan) achieved godly mental abilities (because of the drug), it spread immensely throughout the era.

In Chao Yuanfang’s work Chaoshi Zhubing Yuanhuo [1] which citates Huangfu Mi ・ :

Where the drug came from is not known. Some say Hua Tuo invented it, others say it was Zhang Ji. If one examines the truthfulness on these accounts, it was plausible for Hua Tuo’s talent to invent simple recipes (which does not apply to the five mineral powder). In a text written by Zhang Ji, there is a recipe called Houshi Hei (Black Powder by Sir Hou) and a Zushi Ying recipe, both of those, have a similar composition like the Five Mineral Powder, and the codes of conduct (for the ingestion) are more or less the same. According to those two recipes, the plant-based and the mineral-based, I deduce the origins stem from Zhang Ji and not Hua Tuo.

Remarkable is that Huangfu Mi had to speculate even though He Yan was dead for only 30 years. Rudolf G. Wagner comments that Huangfu’s explanation could ring true because Zhang Ji was known as a doctor specialized in Shanghan diseases (cold diseases). Summarized we know that the drug was probably invented in the Han Dynasty and that it was meant to be used as medicine.

He Yan and the Popularization of The Five Mineral Drug

He Yan (d. 249) was the grandson of He Jin and grandnephew of Empress Dowager He. His mother Lady Yin, who was formerly the wife of He Xian, became the concubine of Cao Cao. Although he was closely affiliated with the imperial clan (through his mother and his wife Princess Jinxiang), he was largely unrecognized by them, Wendi of Wei even calling him a ‘false son'. He stayed out of government until Mingdi of Wei’s death. He Yan cultivated a circle of friends of scholarly interests, on which he exerted influence. His contemporaries include Wang Bi, Xiahou Xuan, Deng Yang, Li Sheng, and Zhuge Dan.

At the regency of Cao Shuang, he and his circle would take great influence in the years from 240 to 249, which was known as the Zhengshi era. He and Wang Bi (226-249)achieved great scholarly achievements in Neo-Daoism, also known as Xuanxue. The cultural, scholarly, and scientific advancements were unparalleled and imitated in later years. But the regime by Cao Shuang and his co-regent Sima Yi (179-251) would prove to be highly unstable. Cao Shuang and his circle came to represent the new elites with Xuanxue as their philosophy, and Sima Yi represented the orthodox Confucian landholders, who would feel threatened by He Yan and his friends who represented in many the new powerholders. Internal strifes in Cao’s faction and Sima Yi’s short retreat from the court would result in a coup d'état against Cao. Cao Shuang, He Yan, his supporters, and their families were all executed.

For a more thorough analysis on He Yan, I highly recommend DaolunofShiji’s A Case For He Yan.

He Yan was described in the He Yan Biezhuan:” His figure and face were of outstanding beauty; when he went outside, for a walk, onlookers would fill the streets; many said he was a genius”. Further, the Weilüe states: “...in all activities white cosmetic powder did not leave his hands, when walking he looked back at his shadow.” As a dandy, outstanding debater, and philosopher, he would dictate the beauty and philosophical trends, of not only his day but for the next centuries. For example, the former standards of attractiveness were in the Late Han Dynasty a warriorlike appearance with great strength to accompany it. Because of He Yan, the standards changed to a more docile and graceful appearance.

As a trendsetter, with no doubt many admirers, he introduced the drug in the Wei elite with his description of the drug cited in the Shishuo Xinyu: “Whenever I take five-mineral powder, not only does it heal any illness I might have, but I am also aware of my spirit and intelligence becoming receptive and lucid.” It’s popularity rose in the Wei-Jin elite as following anecdotes describe:

Chao Yuanfang’s work which cites Huangfu Mi in Chaoshi Zhubing Yuanhuo・ :

In youngest times, the shangshu He Yan devoted himself to music and appreciated sex, when he took the drug for the first time, his consciousness gained more clarity and his physical strength increased. In the capital (of Wei), everyone passed the drug around... After the death of He Yan, those who took the drug multiplied, and it didn’t slow down with time.

The drug not only aids ‘spirit and intelligence’ but also increases the enjoyment of music and sex.

Cao Shuang’s biography in the Sanguozhi [2]:

Shuǎng’s drink and food and chariots and clothing, imitated the Imperial carriage; craftsmen treasures and toys, filled up his house; wives and concubines filled his Rear Courtyard, and he also secretly took the Former Emperor’s Talent concubines of seven to eight women, and his offices and officials, teachers and workers, drums and horns, elite family’s sons and daughters of thirty-three people, all became his performers and musicians. He forged Imperial Order documents, sending out Talent concubines of fifty seven women to Yè terrace, and having the Former Emperor’s Fair concubines teach and practice performance. He usurped the Grand Musician’s musical instruments, and the Military Store’s prohibited weapons. He made cavern residences, fine engraving all around, repeatedly with [Hé] Yàn and the rest meeting inside, drinking liquor and making merry. 

Rudolf G. Wagner analysis that this scene is also in correlation to the five mineral powder, mainly being in a ‘cavern residence’ which helps with the side effects of the powder (I will explain the side effects later on). Also, the ‘Talented Concubines’ (who are Mingdi’s concubines), the excessive wine drinking, and the musical instruments indicate that the circumstance has been applied to fit the positives of using the drug and to alleviate the side effects.

Of course, this lifestyle would take a toll on He Yan’s health, as the powder that could ‘heal any illness’ betrayed him. As Guan Lu observed, not only He Yan but also his colleague Deng Yang were greatly weakened. The anecdote is in the Guan Lu biezhuan which you can find in his Sanguozhi biography[3]:

Deng Yang's gait is that of one whose sinews are loosed from his bones, and his pulse is unsteady. When he would stand, he totters as a man without limbs. This is the aspect of a disembodied soul. He Yan looks as if his soul was about to quit its habitation. He is bloodless, and what should be solid in him is mere vapor. He looks like rotten wood. This is the aspect of a soul even now in the dark valley.

Also the He Yan Biezhuan further states:” He had such a weakened constitution, that he couldn’t wear heavy silk anymore.” It is plausible that it is attributed to the drugs, the heavy silk could either produce more heat than he could handle, or it could apply pressure to the ulcers, you get from this drug, (but then again we will talk about the side effects later). Hao Yicheng (1757-1825) commented that if Sima Yi didn’t killed him, that he would have passed away anyway, because of the consequences of his drug use.

He Yan’s Legacy in Relation to the Drug

He Yan was the most important person concerning the rise of the drug in Wei-Jin circles. He was blamed for the moral decay of the elite, and over the centuries, criticized regularly for it. The following memorials bear witness to it:

Pei Wei’s (267-300) (whose father Pei Xiu passed away because of the drug, we will get to that later) memorial, which can be found in the Jinshu 35, criticizes Wang Yan and others for their admiration and imitating the actions of He Yan and Ruan Ji. It is explicitly mentioned that their rolemodels like themselves ran around naked, being unable to follow the rites.

Fan Ning, in the reign of Emperor Jianwen (reg. 371-373), presented in a memorial, which you can find in the Jinshu 75, in which he criticized He Yan and Wang Bi ‘That the faults of He Yan and Wang Bi are greater than Jie’s and Zhou’s faults’. Those two ‘terrible last rulers’ were considered evil, but only corrupted their own generation. He Yan and Wang Bi, on the other hand, exceeded the faults of ‘barbarians’ because their negative influence in all areas, corrupted the elite, the execution of He Yan and the establishment of a new dynasty affecting nothing to the problem. He is also implying that because the Jin elite followed He Yan’s and Wang Bi’s teachings, they couldn’t defend the north from the ‘barbarians’.

Sun Simiao (581-682) wrote in his treatise ‘Declaration of the Toxicity of the Five Mineral Powder’ which is in the Qian Jin Yao Fang ・ :

The revival medicine cold food powder or five mineral powder, according to old reports, were not known to recipe specialists, but (its use) began with the Marquis He after the end of the Han.

Since Huangfu Mi among those, who were tricked by this temptation, there were none, whose back didn’t inflame, whose bones didn’t disintegrate and who didn’t subject themselves to destruction. Since I can remember, it hasn’t struck only one from those who I knew, who came from the capital.

Su Shi (1036-1101) wrote in his memorial ‘The Memorial of Shangyang’ Lun Shangyang the following ・ :

It began with He Yan, that the people took stalactites and wushi (different word for fuzi: aconite), and gave themselves uncontrolled to wine and sex, to prolong their life. (He) Yan was in his youth rich and honored, how should one be surprised, that he took the cold food powder, to satisfy his desires? What he caused with that (that the powder spread), was enough to kill people and to destroy families. Every single day. How awful it is to die from the cold food powder - But what can I alone do? Those who take the cold food powder and whose backs are decaying (are so numerous), that they step on each other's feet!

Yu Zhengxie (1775–1840) wrote in his work Guisi Cungao the following, comparing the five mineral powder to opium ・ :

The nobles and dignitaries haven’t asked themselves if they have an illness or not, but it became fashionable with He Yan to take this drug without reason. The people of Wei and Jin took this drug and were not able to come back to their senses until the end of their lives...

The powder of Wei and Jin and the ‘pill’ of Tang and Song are the worst and are comparable with today’s opium. Under the Jin, Tang, and Song the governments, however, haven’t banned (these drugs), whereas today opium is banned; That’s how one can see that only the present government is handling the problem correctly.

The Recipe

First, we examine He Yan’s Five Mineral Powder Recipe, referenced in Sun Simiao’s (581-682) work Qian Jin Yi Fang, where mentioned in a note that if two components (sulfur and red clay containing silicon) are removed from the Wushi Gengsheng San recipe, you are left with Sanshi Gengsheng, Marquis He’s original recipe. The ingredients are listed here:

Zhongru (stalactite) 2.5 liang

Baishi Ying (milky quartz) 2.5 liang

Haige (oyster shell) 2.5 liang

Zishiying (amethyst) 2.5 liang

Fangfeng (Siler divaricum) 2.5 liang

Gualou (Trichosanthes kirilowii) 2.5 liang

Ganjiang (Zingiber officinale) 1.5 liang

Baishu (Atractylis ovata) 1.5 liang

Jiegeng (Platycodon grandiflorum) 5 fen

Xixin (Asarum Sieboldi) 5 fen

Renshen (Panax ginseng) 3 fen

Fuzi (Aconitum L.) cooked, with the removed shell 3 fen

Guixin (cinnamon tree bark from a smaller branch)

And very important is expensive wine.

As Wagner points out, his list of ingredients isn’t exact, because of the many variables the identification of those ingredients has (pharmacological variables, terms describing the ingredients, the provenance of the plants, etc.). But we can establish the most important ingredients: stalactite, aconite, and herbs such as ginger, ginseng, etc..

In Xi Kang’s (223-262) biography in the Jinshu 49, we see that stalactite could be consumed on its own ・ :

Xi Kang also met with Wang Lie, and together they went to the mountains. Lie found a stone, with the form resembling a sugar hat. Lie took half of the stone and gave the other half to Xi Kang. Both froze and turned to stone.

Donald Holzman, in his book La vie et la pensée de Hi K’ang identifies the ‘stone resembling a sugar hat’[4] as a stalactite, which is in He Yan’s recipe.

Little side note ‘turned to stone’ is indeed comparable with the slang ‘getting stoned’.

Pharmacological Effects

Before we turn to the preparation of the drug, I’d like to point out the fact that we only vaguely know what components lead to the psychoactive effect. Wagner wrote in his paper that he tried to have people knowledgeable in these regards, research with him, but it didn’t work out. If you want to learn more in this regard, I can’t help you.

Preparation of the Drug and Codes of Conduct

According to Huangfu Mi the minerals have to be prepared (I assume grinding it into a powder) and then they have to rest for 30 days. The plants are prepared on the day of ingestion.

The following texts are in Chao Yuanfang’s work Chaoshi Zhubing Yuanhuo and in Sun Simiao’s work Qian Jin Yi Fang ・ :

Those who take the Hanshi powder, take the amount of 2 liang, this amount is divided into three pastes.

At sunrise, he takes with hot, excellent wine the first paste. When the sun has moved one chang (meaning two hours), in turn, he takes the other paste. When the sun has moved a second chang, he takes the last paste, having used up everything.

After a while, he should wash his hands and feet with cold water. When the energy of the drug is working, one will feel numb. Thereupon he undresses and bathes in cold water. When the power of the drug gets stronger and the body is cooled, the mind opens to clarity, and one recovers from the hardships, even for those who lie weakened and suffering in their bed, it will improve before the day ends.

There are people of weak or strong constitution, and there is different tolerability of the drug for many. If the person using the drug is emaciated and weak, he can eat a little before taking the drug. But when the person is strong, he doesn’t need to eat...

One always has to dress cold, drink cold, eat cold, and sleep cold. The colder the better. If the drug didn’t had an effect yet, one shouldn’t bathe cold yet; if one bathes in this situation, it will result in a painful cold, blocking the drug’s effect, leaving the person shivering. Rather (if the drug is blocked) one should drink warm wine, jump, dance, and rub themselves, to achieve the effect, if one starts to get warm, then they should bathe. If the (situation where the drug hasn’t reached the effect) has been dealt with, one should stop and not overdo (the cooling). Also one should eat cold multiple times (a day), not only in the morning and evening. If one refrains from eating and getting so hungry, then it’s causing the person, to get cold, and only if he eats he will warm up.

The ingredients suggest a high content of calcium, explaining the feverish symptoms. For those symptoms of heat, it was also common to just remove the clothes and go around naked.

Further we are informed that 2 liang isn’t an universal dosage, about that Huangfu Mi writes, which is cited in Chao Yuanfang’s work Chaoshi Zhubing Yuanhuo ・   :

As far as seniors and children are concerned, who can’t tolerate (the normal amount, 2 liang) - here you can set the dosage under 2 liang. When the person is robust, you can set the dosage above two liang... Even though this medicine is excellent and can double the strength and spirit, it is indeed difficult to correctly dosage it.

Cao Xi (Yes from the imperial family) wrote also an explanation on the correct codes of conduct, which could criticize Huangfu’s suggestions which is quoted in Tamba Yasuyori’s work Ishimpo [5] ・ :

In general, one has to, when someone is taking the cold food drug, when it becomes too strong, consistently (focus on the condition) of the one taking the drug, and administer (fitting) healing recipes.

The body and liquids of the human flesh are (for different people) differing like earth and wind (as they are different in other places)Although it is said (by Huangfu Mi?), that one should drink wine, there are people who can do that, and those who cannot.

Although it is said (by Huangfu Mi?), one always has to stay cool, there are bodies of people, there are ones who can bear the cold, and those who can’t.

Although it is said (by Huangfu Mi?), one should eat and drink a lot, there are for food and drink different amounts (of digestibility).

Although it is said (by Huangfu Mi?), one should always exercise, there are different stabilities of the bone, ones who are strong and ones who are weak.

Because the people are thick and thin, old and young, have in their bodies illnesses or not, those who have much warmth and those who have much coldness, one cannot treat (the side effects) them with the same method.

A strong rise of the drug has many aspects and produces hundreds of illnesses.

As those symptoms can be useful in identifying anecdotes where someone is ‘under the influence’, as we turn to the next section.

The Stoned Nobles

Yes, Huangfu Mi called them “The Nobles turned to Stone”.

As it is mentioned the drug spread in He Yan’s lifetime and long after that. In the Guan Lu biezhuan there is instance recorded where Pei Hui asked his subordinate Zhao Kongyao why he isn’t looking well, Zhao replied ・ :”I have the misfortune, that no drug-minerals are remaining in my body.”

As Qin Zhengzu writes in his work Hanshi san lun ・:”Those who took (the powder), searched each others company.” The nobles of that time met in ‘drugparties’ which were most of the time called ‘wineparties’. The language describing those gatherings resembled those of wineparties. For example it is mentioned in the Jinshu 35 that Shi Chong (249-300) once wanted to sue Sun Lishu for not having acted according to the rites at his wineparty, but Pei Kai admonished Shi Chong by saying ・ :”You gave someone a wild drug and expect correct ritual behavior - isn’t that wrong?”

Then we of course have the parties by Cao Shuang, being prime examples of drug use. Of course the one mentioned in the Sanguozhi but also the one mentioned in Zhong Hui’s biography for his mother ・ :

At this time the Great General Cao Shuang alone held the goverment; he gave himself daily to wine until he became heavily drunk. The elder brother of Hui, the shizhong (Zhong) Yu told what happened on these parties. My mother (Zhong Hui’s mother) said:’ When they are having their fun, they are just having their fun, but it won’t last long. When those of high rank, aren’t arrogant and follow the rules and regulations, then they aren’t getting themselves in trouble. If they overdo it, a tragedy will happen. (Those who are in the government) have an excessive wastefulness. This is not the way to keep wealth and high positions’.

The seven sages of the bamboo grove were also known to be fond of the drug. We know of course that Xi Kang took stalactites, the other members showed also similar symptoms described in the following texts:

Wang Yin’s Jinshu biography cited in the Shishuo Xinyu ・ :

At the end of Wei, Ruan Ji drank heavily, neglecting himself completely, showed his hair in an unkempt state in public, and sat naked with sprawled out legs.

Liu Ling’s love for wine is well recorded, but we see him naked here as well, indicating of course this is a incident of drug use, it’s cited in the Shishuo Xinyu [6] :

Liu Ling was an inveterate drinker and indulged himself to the full. Sometimes he stripped of his clothes and sat in his room naked. Some men saw him and rebuked him. Liu Ling said, “Heaven and earth are my dwelling, and my house is my trousers. Why are you all coming into my trousers?”

Not only in the nobility was the drug popular, but emperors also took this. Emperor Huidi of Jin once had a party with youths of the nobility, it’s cited in the Jinshu 27 ・ :

Huidi hosted in the Yuankang era (291-299) a wine party with the high ranking and entertainment seeking youths (of the elite), they let their hair down and undressed in front of the slaves serving as concubines. Those who wouldn’t participate in it fell from grace, those who rejected it were criticized. Only a few nobles wouldn’t participate in it because of embarrassment, and they were presented as they would lack reverence (towards their ruler).

Interesting to see that not only the use of the drug only had a small opposition, but those who refused to participate in those drug parties were put under pressure. It was not only Huidi of Jin who used the five mineral powder but also emperor Tuoba Gui who personally beat those to death who argued against his drug use and displayed their corpses in the ‘hall of heavenly peace’.

After the fall of Western Jin the nobles took their drug culture with them south, as it is described in an anecdote with ‘The Eight Da’ which is cited in the Jinshu 49 [7]:

Humu Fuzhi, Xie Kun, Ruan Fang, Bi Zhuo, Yang Man, Huan Yi and Ruan Fu were sitting together naked and with disheveled hair in a closed room; they had already been drinking for several days. (Guang) Yi (Humu Fuzhi’s protege whom they had not seen for years, arrived and) was about to push the door open and to enter, but the guardian did not allow him (to come in). He thereupon stripped himself outside the door, put off his hat, (crept) into the dog-hole and looked at them, shouting loudly. (Humu) Fuzhi was startled and said:’Other people definitely cannot do so. That must be our Mengzi (i.e. Guang Yi)’. He immediately called him in, and together with him they (went on) drinking day and night, without stopping. Their contemporaries called them ‘the Eight da’.

The Five Mineral Drug and Women

Wagner comments on the question if women took the drug as well, that they were only sexual objects or musicians. They were not members of the circle who took them for psychoactive purposes.

But that doesn’t mean they didn’t consume it. Certainly, they didn’t participate in parties like the scholar gentry, but they used it like most as medicine. In Chao Yuanfang’s work Chaoshi Zhubing Yuanhuo [8] it says:

When a pregnant woman catches cold and suffers from serious pain in her body, and she cannot be moved because of her condition, taking a dose of Cold Food Powder in warm wine and having a cold bath can do her good. After this, if she feels numbness somewhere on her body, the area should be washed with cold water, if she feels cold, drink some doses of wine...

Considering the fact that He Yan ignored the drug’s intended purposes, it is probable that not all women of that time weren’t so strict on using it purely as medicine either.

Also worth mentioning is that women took other substances like cinnabar, in the tomb of Wang Danhu 200 pills were found, which contained cinnabar. Cinnabar was mainly used in alchemy to either achieve immortality, or immortality of the corpse (to preserve it). But in the Tang dynasty, it replaced the five mineral powder, for it was also psychoactive.[9]

Five Mineral Drug and the Common People

To clarify, the five mineral powder was a luxury commodity. The powder itself wasn’t cheap and you had to mix it with expensive wine. There were no people who could profit from peasants getting addicted, there was no point in getting someone addicted to a substance he couldn’t even in the slightest afford. The five mineral powder was in every aspect a status symbol.

And because it was a status symbol people who couldn’t afford the powder would feign to suffer from the side effects of the powder. An anecdote from the Taiping Guangji 247 states ・ :

In the Northern Wei under Xiaowendi (reg. 471-500) the princes and high dignitaries, in high numbers, took the mineral drug, they were called the Shifa, for those ‘where the mineral drug is coming up strongly’. However, there were also people, who had a fever but were not rich and high standing, but also claimed they took minerals and that the fever derived from that. Contemporaries frequently suspected that those people imitated the looks from the rich and high standing.

There was once a man who lied down in front of the gates of the market and with all seriousness assured, that he had a fever so that the people congregated around him to take a look at him. When his companion wondered (about his simulation), he told him:’The drugs are coming up strongly (I am a Shifa).’ His companion asked:’When did the high lord take the minerals?’ The man replied:’Yesterday evening I bought rice, in it I found a mineral; That one I ate and now it is coming up too strongly.’ Everyone started laughing (because the effect of the powder starts immediately, exposing himself). Since then there were only a few, who pretended to suffer from the drug.

Effects of the Five Mineral Powder

As mentioned five mineral powder was originally used as a medicine, but through He Yan, it was used as a lifestyle drug. It was recommended to be used for everyone, literally everyone. Embryos, children, adults, seniors, healthy people, sick people, weak people, and strong people. And it seems that it was not just recommended in treating every disease you might have, but also to achieve godly abilities, good looks, a lucid mind, strength and of course using it per se was a sign of extreme wealth.

Shi Huiyi (372-444) wrote, which is cited in the Ishimpo by Tamba Yasuyori ・:

The five mineral powder is among the supreme drugs. One can excellently prolong their life, nourish life, and bring harmony to one's intellect. How could (one say) that the drug can only heal illnesses?

Cao Xi wrote, which is cited in Qin Zhengzu’s work Hanshi san lun ・ :

Those who are in today’s high rank, see the basic recipe of the drug and are calling out:’This is the divine powder, with which you can hold on to your life.’ And then comes the day, where they are taking it, undress, stand in the wind and pour cold water over them.

Side Effects of the Five Mineral Powder

Wudi sent an urgent message, in which he demanded that Huangfu Mi accepts a government post. Mi answered with a submittal, referring to himself as ‘the hidden one in the grass’: ‘Since I am weakened and emaciated, I am unclear about the direction of the way. Because of my illness, I removed my hairpins, my hair is (dense) like a forest... My humble self has nothing excellent about me, I cause catastrophe’s and seek my ruin, in fear of my serious illness. Half of my body is already numb, and my right leg couldn’t support myself for 19 years. I also take the cold food powder drug and missed and confused the codes of conduct; my pain (caused by this), my suffering, my bitterness, and my sorrows last for seven years. Even in the coldest weather, I undress and eat ice, and when summer comes, it is unbearably warm, and I am shaken by the coughing. At times I am exceedingly feverish, at times I have the coldest chills; Pus is running out my ulcers, and my arms and legs are heavy. In the meantime, my suffering only got worse, as I am gasping for my life...

In the Jinshu 51 ・ Huangfu Mi describes his ailings caused by the drug, in a submittal, hoping to avoid office. He took this drug in hopes to cure his old disease (most likely a stroke), but only worsened his overall condition. As Huangfu Mi describes further implications, cited in Chao Yuanfang’s work Chaoshi Zhubing Yuanhuo ・ :

At times hands and feet hurt, and all joints want to loosen(?). On the body ulcers, form and knots raise. One sits at the bed and sits for a long time, without moving. Extreme heat is everywhere on the body and collects on one point. At times there are hard sores. When it gets worse, they turn to ulcers. When one recognizes that, the person has to wash it with cold water and rub a cold stone (over the sores). In an easy case the sores disappear after a short time; In the worst case one has to pour water over it for a few days without pause, and then it will improve. When the person has been watered for a while, he will recover eventually. But when the bumps are getting bigger and there is no improvement, one should take a knife whetstone and hold it to fire until it glows, then throw the stone in bitter wine. When the stone is in the bitter wine the stone shatters. Thereon one should grind the stone, and apply the stone mixture to the ulcers; When it has been done three times it will improve. Then one takes big worms from the toilet, grind them, and warm them up and apply the mixture to the ulcers, also that is not necessary to do more than three times, and then the healing is improved.

Huangfu Mi doesn’t write where the ulcers form but it is highly likely that they form on the back. Su Shi writes of decaying backs and according to Huangfu Mi, a son of Wang Su (195–256), Wang Liangfu, died because ‘ulcers ate his back away’.

Of course, the well-known side effect is getting feverish but there are far more, according to Chao Yuanfang’s work Chaoshi Zhubing Yuanhuo other side effects include ・ :

Swelling of the stomach, until it wants to explode

Inflamed buttocks

Stabbing pain in the heart, like needles

Dizziness, frequent falling

Pain on all limbs

Difficulty to urinate

Difficulty to defecate

Stiffening of the joints, until one cannot move or stretch

Defecating without knowing

Pain in the eyes, like needles

Tinnitus and liquids exiting the ear

Pain in the mouth, tongue is tensing, and the mouth getting so dry you can’t eat

Rotting of the testicles

Sweating secretion under the arms and ulcers (on the lymph nodes?)

Hypersomnia without being capable to wake up oneself

Swallowing a cough up, leading to an injury to the throat and to bleeding

The feeling of cold and heat change for months

Screaming loudly with a wide openend mouth and with wide openend eyes

Blindness

Insomnia

Stiffening of muscles and skin, until they are dry and feel like wood

Tendency for the eyes to pop out

Some of them can be deadly. But next to the physiological side effects, there are also the psychological side effects. Huangfu Mi writes the following, cited in Chao Yuanfang’s work Chaoshi Zhubing Yuanhuo ・ :

In general, those who take these drugs, when it came up too strongly, even when they are usually intelligent, they are getting dumb. When they are abandoned, they won’t get better. The number of those who died isn’t comprehensible. In general speaking for the stoned nobles, there are ten wrong attitudes (before ingesting the drug): 1.That they are starring angrily; 2.That they have fears or worries; 3. That they cry; 4.That they suppress defecation; 5. That they suppress hunger; 6.That they suppress thirst; 7.That they suppress heat; 8.That they suppress cold; 9.That they overexert themselves; 10.That they are sitting stiff and don’t move When one is against these ten wrong attitudes, one has to, when one wants to raise the effect of the drug, but is already stiff, always has to relax and bring harmony to the limbs; also one cannot read bitter things and not think of something worrying. If one is capable of doing that, the drug won’t come up too strongly and everything will better

If you fail in getting relaxed, similar to LSD, you are getting a ‘bad trip’. Huangfu Mi writes, which is also cited in Chao Yuanfang’s work Chaoshi Zhubing Yuanhuo ・ :

One time I felt like that, when I was sitting in front of my food and tears just kept falling. I took a knife and wanted to kill myself, but was unable to go through with it because my family noticed and took the knife away. I retreated, checked myself, and forced myself to eat and to drink cold water, after that the (desperation) stopped. That it didn’t come to a tragedy, hang on a single thread.

Wang Wei (398-425) once treated his brother with the five mineral drug, but he passed away as a consequence. Wang Wei blamed himself and wrote in a letter which is cited in the Songshu ・ :

In the past year, the powder came up too strongly; on the climax tears came to my eyes, day and night without stopping

And of course, we have Tuoba Gui, when he started taking the five mineral drug his reign was considered ‘a bad trip’

Everyone was aware of the side effects, but they didn’t attribute that as an inevitable consequence but as a case of an overdosing. It was considered safe to use as long as it was used correctly. How it was considered safe to use knew no one.

First Aid In Case of Overdose

At times it can happen, that one falls unconscious and doesn’t recognize people or circumstances. If one (wants) to move its mouth, one can’t open it. The ill person doesn’t know himself and relies on the help of others. In this case, it is necessary that one takes hot wine, for it now depends on his life. But if he can’t drink (the hot wine because of the stiff mouth), one has to kick his teeth in and force the wine down his throat. When the throat is blocked, and the wine flows out, one should not stop (pouring it in). When (the wine) flows out again, one should pour it again and repeats it for perhaps half a day. When the wine gets down, he will regain conscience, but if one stops, without the person drinking the wine, one kills the person.

This is a recommendation by Huangfu Mi cited in Chao Yuanfang’s work Chaoshi Zhubing Yuanhuo ・, it is probably self-explanatory that kicking the teeth of another person while unconscious, will at least provoke animosity, especially when the person unconscious is of higher rank like Pei Xiu. Huangfu Mi writes about his death in Chao Yuanfang’s work ・ :

Pei Xiu from Hedong took the drug and missed the codes of conduct. But because he attained the rank of Sangong, no one dared to force him to treat the (side effects of the drug). He was already beyond the stage of confusion, so that he wasn’t able to realize (what should have been necessary to do), and no one in his entourage knew how to help him. The treatment they chose for him was (giving him instead of warm wine, which would have been correct), letting him drink cold water and rinse him with cold water. When they used hundreds of shi of water on him, the cold became too much and, he died in the water.[10]

If one takes ten shi of glowing coal and pours over them 200 shi of cold water, the glowing coal will go out. Although the heat (caused) by the drug was great, it isn’t as great as the fire stemming from 10 shi stone coal. If one pours the person without interruption, the cold will be enough to kill him.

Later his son Pei Wei wrote a memorial, which you can find in the Jinshu 35, urging to correct the scale of the imperial physicians to prevent overdosing. He didn’t explicitly mention the five mineral drugs, but his background and the massive prevalence of the drug should be good indicators.

Lethality of the Five Mineral Drug

Those who survive (the intake) the longest, live for a few decades; those who live the shortest, only for five to six years. Even though I myself still see and breathe, (is that what I say), only the laugh of a drowning man.

Huangfu Mi’s description of the lethality of the drug cited in the Chaoshi Zhubing Yuanhuo ・. He also lists people who died from the drug in the following:

More and more people took this powder and refused to stop, at time, including myself. Although violent effects were not common it could take a man’s life. One of my cousins named Changhu, suffered from atrophy of the tongue almost shrunk back into his throat; Wang Liangfu of Donghai country suffered from ulcerative carbuncles on his back; Xin Changxu in western Gansu Province suffered ulceration of his back muscles; Zhao Gonglie in Shu County of Sichuan lost six of his cousins to it. All these sufferings were caused by taking cold food powder. Among these, some were quite elderly and some still young, only 5-6 years old. Though I have seen this and sighed at it, I am just like a single drowning man, laughing at those drowning. Yet patients will not take a warning from this, and stop themselves.[11]

Notes

[1] All of Huangfu Mi’s works about the five mineral powder, are only existant in citations in the Chaoshi Zhubing Yuanhuo, the Hanshi san lun and the Ishimpo.

[2] The translation of Cao Shuang’s biography was made by @xuesanguo​. You can read it here.

[3] This translation I found in Guan Lu’s wikipedia page. It basically says everything Wagner has translated. But I only know for sure in this passage, I don’t know if the rest is correct.

[4] I couldn’t find a whole translation of this passage, but in Google Books the translation for Wagners ‘sugar hat’ (in German ‘Zuckerhut’), is in other versions ‘sweet meat’ or ‘cakelike stalagmite’. I personally think ‘sugar hat’ fits best.

[5] Cao Xi was the son of Cao Hui, Prince of Dongping. After the establishment of Jin he was made Duke of Linqiu. His works about the powder were also lost to time and ony citations in the Ishimpo and in the Hanshi san lun survive. Also to note the Ishimpo, which was written in around the year 984, was the first medical text in Japan.

[6]This translation is in the book World History, Volume 1

[7]This translation is in the book The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China by Erik Zürcher

[8]This translation is in the book History Of Medicine In Chinese Culture. Important to note is that Chao Yuanfang hasn’t quoted neither Huangfu Mi nor Cao Xi, so it could be his own recommendation, which was then followed in the Sui dynasty.

[9] For more info on Wang Danhu I recommend Entombed Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture in Early Medieval China by Timothy M. Davis, Landadel - Emigranten - Emporkömmlinge: Familienfriedhöfe des 3.-6. Jahrhunderts n. Chr. in Südchina by Annette Kieser, and Emigrantenfamilien der Östlichen Jin-Zeit  im Spiegel ihrer Gräber und Grabinschrifttafeln also by Annette Kieser.

[10]The Jinshu says he drank cold wine, not cold water. In this case the Jinshu is correct, he should have had warm wine, but he was given cold wine.

[11]This translation is in the book History Of Medicine In Chinese Culture.

[nekoabiwrites]

Theatre Technicians are basically Vampires

This was an idea that I had after many conversations about how being a vampire would be easy to hide if you were a techie. Also was inspired by a first draft of an old secret santa thing I was doing... but I like this a lot!

AU: Vampire/Human Pairing: Implied Pinning Logicality Words: 4228 Warnings: Vampires, talk of death, blood, mauling, suicide, illness, injury - all are backstories of how they turned. Anything else, please let me know!

Summary: Six men live under one roof. They seem to have nothing in common, besides their chosen career paths, but there is one thread that ties them all together...

--

Logan adjusted his glasses as he flicked through the prompt copy of the script he’d spent the last few days completing. He had a video up on the computer screen adjacent to him showing footage of the final rehearsals before tech week was to begin, allowing him to add the final blocking notes to scenes that were fine-tuned just before the deadline. It had taken him a long time, likely multiple days, but it was rewarding work to see such flawless execution. Logan turned the final page and sat back in his chair, sighing contently.

Then a loud shout, a shuffling of feet and a thump from outside the study. It had been going on for a while now, but that last noise was the final straw. Logan pushed himself up from the chair, stretching out his arms as he walked across the room. He rested a hand on the door handle and steeled himself with a deep breath before swiftly opening it, “What is going on?”

The regret was immediate as was the slight throbbing of his head.

On the floor directly before him were two men, utterly motionless as they looked up at the man in the doorway. Three more figures scattered the room; one nervously chewing at his bottom lip as he stood over the two on the ground, one sat at the dining table with a glass in hand and an expression of light amusement, and the final one perched up on the kitchen counter, a smug grin pulling at his lips.

Logan put a hand to his head, massaging his temple, “Patton, tell me what happened?”

“Why do you ask him?! He’s not even involved!”

“Because, Roman, I expect he shall provide me with the fairest outlook of the entire situation. Both you and Remus would attempt to argue that your side was not at fault.” Logan flatly responded, eyes shifting down to the one pinned to the ground.

Roman, still entangled with Remus’ limbs, pouted harshly but quickly relaxed, “Alright, fair enough.”

“Well, Patton?” Logan absent-mindedly adjusted his glasses as he locked eyes with the other.

Patton stood up to full height and rocked back and forth on his feet, his own glasses slipping down his nose a little, “I’m not really sure of everything, but I did see Remus sneaking into the sewing room again and then I heard a crash before I could say anything or even try to stop him. Then he ran out and Roman followed.  They kinda circled around the couch a few times, I tried to stop them! Honest, I did! But, Remus kinda got caught on the edge of the mat and tripped and fell down, and Roman couldn’t stop in time so he fell on top and then they started fighting and rolling around!” Patton clapped his hands together and put on his most innocent face, “I tried to separate them, Logan! But you know… they’re stronger than me…” His gaze fell to the side, as if he were ashamed of his ability.

“Patton, it’s alright. I didn’t expect you to stop it, but your attempt is very much appreciated. Thank you for telling me everything.” Logan couldn’t help the twitch his lips gave when his compliment made Patton’s sunny grin return full force. He quickly turned his attention to the two still on the floor, eyes narrowing, “You two. Up.”

The twins fought to scramble to their feet quicker than the other. Remus may have pushed Roman back onto the floor and Roman may have used Remus as a hand hold and squashed him down, but who could really say.

“If the floor is damaged yet again, you are the ones who are repairing it. It’ll be a fine use for your skills, I’m sure.” Logan offered a falsely pleasant smile as the two gaped at him.

A loud bark of laughter had everyone’s attention turning across the room over to the kitchen. “That’s the best awful idea you’ve had, L. Good thing I’ve got work for a while. Wish I could see the shit show from a safe distance though. Dee, take notes for me?” The glass holder nodded before taking another drink, “Sweet.”

Logan pulled the glasses from his face and cleaned them, “Virgil, have you received the file from the designer yet? I was told there were some issues in getting it to you.”

Virgil hopped down off the counter, holding his phone out towards Logan as he exited into the main body of the room, “Got it today, thank god. Or else I may have actually had a heart attack or something.”

“You say that as though it’s possible.” Dee pointed out smoothly, only watching Virgil out of the corner of his eye.

The standing man seemed to retreat into himself at the comment, “It’s just an expression, geez.” Virgil shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie, eyes cast downward in embarrassment, “Can’t say anything around here anymore… I’ll be in my room. Call me when it’s time to go.” With that, Virgil stalked off.

Just after the door shut behind him, Patton turned sharply to Dee and purposely crossed the room to stand in front of the still-indifferent man, “Dorian! You know not to provoke Virgil like that. That was mean and we’ve already had the talk about being mean! When you see him next, you will apologise, right?”

Dorian shrugged, but after he caught sight of Patton’s harsh father-like glare, he gently smiled and nodded his head in a bow, “Of course I will. I promise.”

Patton narrowed his eyes suspiciously but seemed content enough to leave Dorian alone for now. He took a seat on the couch and stared at the dent in the floor.

Both Roman and Remus had vacated the room and headed into their own workspace once Virgil had begun to leave. It gave the remaining three a good look at the large dent in the floor. “Boy, it’s a good thing we own this place, huh? Imagine if we didn’t! Like what if we were on a floor above someone else! We’d be found for sure…” Patton blew out a breath, puffing his cheeks in the process, and cradling his chin in his hands. It bounced along with the alternating bouncing of his legs as his elbows rested atop his knees. Logan crossed to join him, seating himself alongside Patton.

“How is the script coming along? I saw you were up for a really long time.” Patton attempted to ask casually, trying his best to not to sound concerned.

“Patton. You are aware that none of us require sleep.” Patton went in for a rebuttal, but Logan continued, “To answer your question, the prompt copy is completed as much as it can be at this moment in time. Noting down every aspect of blocking takes a long time, but it is extremely satisfying to see the finished product.”

“As long as you’re happy with it, Lo. You are the one who needs it after all!” Patton giggled and grinned widely. “I hope to not have to give you too many things to add, but I’m not the designer so I can’t really promise anything! Though, from what I read, I can’t imagine there being that many cues, not like that one time where there were over 800. That was so crazy! I feel bad that you had to call all of those!”

Logan snorted lightly as he smiled, “You still surprise me, Patton. Your empathy and concern seems to have no limit, which is admirable…”

Dorian downed the final part of his drink and placed the glass back onto the table almost soundlessly. “I would just love to stay here and watch the two of you. Unfortunately, I have to prepare myself for the day’s work ahead. I shall see you later.” He headed into his own room, leaving the two spectacled men alone.

“I almost can’t believe it’s been so long… I mean, 689 years is a really long time! I wonder how they feel…” Patton’s eyes drifted towards the twins’ doors.

“I am confident in saying that they are more than accustomed to their lives now. There is nothing to be worried about.”

“But… why do they fight? Even after what happened?”

“Uh, well… likely because they are siblings. It is a common thing, to fight.”

Patton hummed, “I guess… Still, I would think that Remus would be more careful with him… I mean, he did save him and all…”

Logan had no response to Patton’s musings. The twins had been turned years ago in a horrific incident. They had been living normal, unassuming lives when the tragedy struck.

Two creatures of the night infiltrated their home and found Roman sleeping soundly. They seized the opportunity and attacked but hadn’t accounted for there being another presence in the home. Remus had heard a bone-chilling screech of pain and fear followed by more screams of agony, so he rushed from his room to the source of the noise. Upon throwing the door open and calling for his brother, Remus was also attacked by one of the figures in an instant. Somehow, he managed to fend it off and it fled the scene once the mortal had swung a broken leg of a stool that was propped up nearby at it. Roman’s cries were no more, and Remus was having a hard time keeping his balance as he felt far too woozy to do much more than stumble over to the creature still looming over his brother.

Unbeknownst to Remus, the creature he’d scared off had been cut in the initial attack with the leg and a few droplets of blood had fallen between the man’s lips. It was quickly passing through his system, though he had no reason to be suspicious of a few small droplets of blood. It remained dormant until he was within reach of the second creature.

Remus doubled over in pain, feeling something changing about himself. He didn’t know what, but he did notice that his jaw was in pure agony for what felt like forever before dulling to a gentle throb. New instincts kicked in and Remus was reenergised. He knew immediately what he had become. Before taking a second longer to think, he threw himself at the other creature, tackling it to the ground with surprising strength. It quickly fled after its companion and Remus scrambled to his feet.

“Roman! Roman! Hey, say something!” Remus shook his brother roughly, trying in vain to get any kind of response out of him, but it was useless. Roman was fading fast, getting close to succumbing to death. His new instincts told Remus what to do. He used his sharp fangs to slice a cut on his finger and drip some of his blood into Roman’s open mouth.

Seconds felt like minutes as Remus waited to see if he had managed to act in time. He was about to try a second time when Roman coughed violently and curled up in pain, grasping as his mouth. A tear of relief slid down Remus’ cheek before he dived on top of Roman, cuddling him tightly as he wept. The brothers hadn’t moved for the rest of the night, both figuring out what they were going to do.

They were both years ahead of them all. At least they’d never been alone. A sad reality that faces most vampires.

“Logan? You still with me?”

“Huh?” Logan snapped back to the present, seeing Patton’s concerned face mere inches from his own. If he’d been able, he likely would have flushed at the closeness. Instead, Logan cleared his throat awkwardly, “Oh, yes. I apologise. It seems I got a little caught up in my thoughts, Patton.”

“No problem, Lo! Just wanted to make sure I hadn’t lost you is all.” Patton smiled warmly, settling back on the couch, turning his attention to the TV that sat directly opposite.

Time crawled on by, with the normal daily sounds filtering under the doors of the bedrooms all around them and the sounds of people beginning their days outside the window, mixed with the varying audio from the television. Eventually, Patton stretched out his limbs in front of him and made a loud noise to accompany it. He then stood, “It’s almost time to get going! I’m gonna grab my things. Want me to get yours too? Saves you getting up! I bet you have all your stuff in a bag already and all organised too!”

Logan graciously thanked Patton for the offer and took him up on it. He sat and continued to simply exist in the living area. It was quite strange to think that he and Patton had met so many years ago, and that the twins had entered his life before even that. ‘I suppose time has little meaning to an immortal being...’ Logan mused.

The door shutting and a small surprised yelp pulled Logan from his thoughts. Patton had gone over on his ankle by stepping in just the wrong place in the newly formed crater in the floor. Time slowed as Logan stood and sprinted over to Patton, catching him before he hit the floor.

“Are you alright?”

Patton seemed to falter for a second before grinning and hoping out of Logan’s arms, “Yup, all good! I’m gonna need to get used to that, haha!”

Logan narrowed his eyes, “That will not be necessary.” He stalked over to the two doors located directly next to each other and banged on them both loudly. Patton, behind him, was fretting and telling Logan it was fine, there was no need to interrupt them. But it was too late for that.

“What do you want?”

“Yeeeeees?”

Both doors opened almost simultaneously. Roman’s face held an annoyed pout, while Remus was grinning in an unhinged manner. However, both their expression faltered as they caught sight of the death glare Logan was giving both of them. “You will repair the floor today. You should have already dropped off your things, so you shouldn’t need to come along with us. If your presence is necessary, I shall call you. Do I make myself clear?” Both of them nodded sharply before slamming their respective doors upon Logan’s gesture.

“Right. Shall we fetch Virgil and Dorian? I believe it is time for us to head out.” Logan asked, completely softening as he looked back to Patton.

“Uh… y-yeah!” Patton agreed after a moment of hesitation. No one would dare argue with angry Logan. It had been a painful lesson for each of them to endure. Patton scurried off to Virgil’s room, knocking specifically before entering in order to let the man inside know it was him. Logan approached Dorian’s room and knocked significantly lighter before calling out to him.

Their odd quartet made their way through the streets, all huddling under their parasols. They used to get a fair few stares from the locals, but everyone had become accustomed to them by this point. Seeing the bright colours of Patton’s attire contrasted by the dark colours of Virgil’s, the oddly formal outfit of Logan’s alongside the more casual outfits of his companions, and all of this didn’t hold a candle to Dorian. He wore a veil over half of his face, completely shielding it from view. They always seemed to be in a rush as well, especially on extremely sunny days like today. But it was normal for them, so they managed to reach their destination without incident.

After dropping their belongings into their respective positions, three of them took up seats in the crew room and waited for the rest of their colleagues to show up. Logan was absent as he was doing last minute checks over at the prompt corner, preparing it to his liking. He did make an appearance before all the cast and crew once they had arrived in order to introduce himself and reaffirm the point of the technical rehearsal.

It went well. As well as the first day of technical rehearsal can go for such a large show. Logan had to call over comms multiple times to tell the director that the technical departments were not ready to continue on just yet as Patton was working to programme lighting for the entire show, and it was not as simple as programming a few washes to change. Virgil had several issues with QLab messing up and not playing the sound files correctly, meaning that it took an extended break to sort out the issue each time it occurred. The one who was least stressed was Dorian as he sat up on the fly floor each time there was a long break, which was basically after every scene change. Comms were particularly busy, and tensions were already rising in the theatre. Thankfully, they had the evening to go and cool off in order to come back the next day refreshed.

“Thank you Virgil.” Logan said, as Virgil signed off comms for the day. “DSM off cans.” He finished, just to be thorough, even though he’d already heard everyone else sign off. He hung the headset up on the prompt desk and ran his hands down his face, sighing heavily. His technical notes were a complete mess and it was already stressing him out, but nothing was truly set in stone yet so Logan couldn’t do much but wait. He groaned to himself before resting his forehead on the desk.

“Not doing so well?” Dorian’s voice called from behind, causing Logan to sit up sharply.

“Just a little stressed is all.” Logan said plainly.

“I can’t understand why at all. That director was just a ray of sunshine the whole time, never losing his temper once…” Dorian drawled sarcastically, crossing his arms.

Logan shh’d him, “Be careful what you say in here. He could hear you.”

“Not that he’d even know who I was, but I understand.” Dorian held his hands up in defeat, “I’ll attempt to be more careful from now on.”

“Thank you. Shall we head back home? I believe we could all do with a break from being here.” Logan suggested.

“I thought you’d never ask.”

The way home was far easier. The sun had already set and so they slowly meandered back to their joint home, venting their frustrations about the production on the way. Virgil was extremely outspoken, even going so far as to illustrate some of his threats with gestures that made Patton gasp in horror each time. It was a far cry from his quiet attitude during the work day, but no one minded.

As they walked, Logan watched Dorian out of the corner of his eye for a while. The veil was on the opposite side of him, meaning that Logan could at least see some of the man’s face. He’d only joined them recently – well, if you could count 125 years ‘recent’ – and there was still a level of trust they were yet to reach with him. They did know the reason he covered his face, however. His turning had not been easy. It had been a vicious attack by particularly ferocious vampire, who’d torn away at his face and neck for some unknown reason. Thankfully, Logan had been passing through the area nearby and came across the mauling. He fought off the attacker and helped Dorian, offering to ensure that he turned in order to save his life. Only Logan and Patton had seen the injury left from the attack and Patton had almost thrown up once he saw it. He apologised immediately, saying he didn’t expect it to be such a fresh wound and be so bad. Patton began crying and had hugged the man, but since that day, Dorian had kept the scarring hidden from all around him.

“Oh no you’re not! You’re sitting here and we’re having family time!” Patton’s stern voice alerted Logan to the fact they had already reached their home. He watched with vague amusement as Patton wrestled with Virgil in order to get him to sit in his chair before running over to fetch Roman and Remus. Dorian casually took a seat and gestured for Logan to join them.

Virgil groaned, “Why do we have to do family night? I just wanna go sleep and forget this day happened…”

“Virgil, c’mon!” Patton pleaded, puppy dog eyes in full effect, “Family night is important, and we can’t have family night without the full fam, now can we?”

“I dunno. Seems like you could, especially since I barely count anyway.”

Patton and Virgil continued to go back and forth whilst the twins took spaces on the couches.

“What are we doing for the family night?” Roman asked, brushing small pieces of thread onto the floor. In his hands, he held an in-progress sewing project. It was a small extra piece of costume that Logan had to inform Roman about as the director had demanded it be added – after yelling for five entire minutes about how it was crucial to the character or whatever.

“How about something exciting!?” Remus twisted up onto his knees from his cross-legged position on the floor, “Like strip poker, or truth or dare, or Russian roulette! I have a gun in the prop room, I can go get it ri-”

Patton squeaked, “No, no, no! Absolutely none of those! We’re playing a nice easy board game tonight!”

“Can’t wait to hate you all again.”

“Dorian! What did I say about being nice?”

“I don’t quite recall.”

Family nights had always been chaotic when only four of them had attended, but now that both Dorian and Virgil were opening up to them all a lot more, it was getting far worse… but not particularly bad. It was a chaos that encompassed them all and it made them feel, well, like a family. An odd, pieced together, hodgepodge of a family, but a family, nonetheless. Logan had given up hope a while ago about Virgil ever getting comfortable enough with them all to sit down like this. Let alone allow Patton to drag him in and convince him to actually stick around.

The two had gotten off to a rocky start, and that was still an understatement.

Patton had been strolling through the woods nearby, stretching his legs and just enjoying some alone time after a hectic day of helping out the twins with their projects for an upcoming client. It was supposed to be peaceful and calming, but Patton got the shock of his life when he found a body hanging from a tree. As quick as he could, Patton got the young man down and checked for signs of life. There was a faint pulse, but not much else. As he was fretting about what to do, a flash of white caught his eye. A folded note was nailed to the tree the man had previously been in. It took only a sentence or two for Patton to realise it was a suicide note and that this had been self-inflicted, which only served to make Patton even more distraught. Here, before him, was a young man, with his entire life ahead of him, and he’d chosen to attempt to get rid of that life. Tears welled up and Patton acted rashly. A drop of blood later and Virgil began to turn.

Once he regained consciousness, he was a little confused. Patton explained what he’d done and started to tell him why, but Virgil lost his temper. He screamed and shouted, cursed and cried. He called Patton every name synonymous with stupid as well as more than a few unsavoury terms. Tears fell like rivers down his cheeks as he screamed his throat raw. Virgil then ran off into the forest. Patton couldn’t move for minutes afterwards. He was in a state of shock. No one had ever said anything like that to him. No one had said such harsh things. Least of all a stranger, someone Patton wanted to help. Silently, he cried. Patton walked back home and launched himself into Logan’s arms as soon as he could.

Weeks passed and not a soul had seen Virgil anywhere. After a short meeting, the four of them had decided to each take a night in rotation and search for him, but absolutely nothing had turned up. Until…

“I found hiiiiim!” Remus sing-songed, holding a squirming Virgil in his grip as he burst through the door one night.

From then on, Virgil had a room in their home. It took a long time, but he started to trust Logan, and then Roman, and then Remus. It took well over 100 years for Virgil to come to terms with what Patton had done and forgive him somewhat. But no one would ever have guessed that the pair had been at odds ever if they saw them now.

After a stressful day and a lot of reminiscing, Logan was thankful that his own turning was simple and boring. The same could be said for Patton’s, who had actually asked to be turned as he was dealing with some incurable illness at the time. But that was all in the past. Logan was here, in the crowded living room, with his five family members, playing some childish board game for entertainment. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

--

My other stuff: http://nekoabi.tumblr.com/myworks Mobile Accessible Masterlist: http://nekoabi.tumblr.com/post/181954641376/fic-masterlist

General Tag List: @not-so-innocent-bi-sander @didsomeonesayprince @llamaly @justanotherpurplebutterfly  @iaminmultiplefandoms @ultimate-queen-of-fandoms2 @lowkeyvirgilobsessed @louisthewarlock @fangsandrainbows @xxladystarlightxx @sleepyssnail @ao-koshka @notalwaysthevillian @pumpkinminette @doces-e--tuga @coloursintheblur @safesandersides @hogwarts-my-love

[areiton]

bloom on my skin, echo in my soul - 00Q

Soulmate 00Q as promised, my dears. It’s long so you can read over on AO3 if you’d like! 

Read on AO3

~*~ 

MI6 doesn’t allow soulbonds. 

It’s a security risk, he’s told, and he sits at his little metal table in a cinderblock room and smiles tightly. 

“Will it be a problem?” the woman asks, her eyes sharp and he smiles, all sharp teeth and angles and shakes his head. 

“Do I look like someone with a soulmate?” he asks, dripping contempt. 

She smiles at him, then, and it feels more threatening than anything else she’s done so far, up to and including throwing him into this windowless cell. 

“Very good. Welcome to MI6,” R says crisply. 

~*~ 

 Not everyone has a soulmate, and even fewer have a viable soulbond. Greyson knows the stats--he memorized them when he was in grade school, when ink, black and blood red, first dotted over his skin and pain sank like a hot poker into his gut. 

This is what he knows. 

Less than forty percent of the population has a soulmate. 

Of that forty percent, the soulbond manifests as a mark for all of them, empathetic pain links for five percent and telepathic bonds for point five percent. 

There was an almost even split about bonding without physical contact first. 

Greyson woke up with pale clear skin when he was eight and while reading, he crumpled in agony. Ink smeared across his thigh and pain spiked in his gut and thoughts, frantic and foreign, spilled across his mind while he sat still and shaking in his desk and listened to history lessons. 

~*~ 

Q likes Greyson, and R trusts him, and despite--or perhaps because of--his unorthodox recruitment, the Double-Oh’s find him intriguing. 

He’s set to work in front of a terminal of screens and told to build their infrastructure into something that can’t be hacked. 

“Anything can be hacked,” he says, because it’s true, and Q smiles at him, this smart sharp thing that makes him think he’s done something right. 

Everything at MI6 is a test, he’s learning. 

“Do your best,” they tell him, giving him a cup of tea and plenty of space, and he does just that. 

~*~ 

 When he’s sixteen, the voice in his mind that he’s never spoken back to, never done more than listen to when it rambles, stops. 

There’s no pain to accompany it, but there’s a pressure in his lungs that worries him and he lies in bed, and listens to silence that’s terrifying, and touches the red and black on his thigh and up his belly, and he doesn’t speak, really, but he reaches, a feather light brush of reassurance and solidarity and he breathes again, against that damnable pressure and light-headedness, when he feels someone reach back. 

~*~ 

 He builds a maze and layers it with traps and safety switches, a nest of viruses and hidden caches of data and escape matches that only someone trained would find. 

It takes six months, months of working too long and sleeping too little and fielding R&D questions between coding, and consuming tea that’s placed at his station by R and Q and later, the rest of the branch. 

He’s reclusive and quiet and short when he’s drawn into conversation, and only ever seems alive when he’s in front of his computers and his face is lit by their glow. 

But he’s coding something that will protect all of them, and they like him for it. 

~*~ 

 He learns to live with it. 

With the constant bruises, with the stabbing pain echoed in his body, with the scars that never last. 

With the voice that rumbles with threat but never at him. 

He learns to live with it and he learns to hide it. 

Because soulmates are not common enough to be trusted, and he wants a life, something beyond the violent rage on the other end of this bond that he never asked for. 

Do you miss me? They whisper, sometimes, and he never answers, because he doesn’t know if it would be a lie or the truth. 

~*~ 

 The first time he walks an agent through a mission, he’s punch drunk and his eyes ache and Nadia is trembling as she stares at the screens, indecisive. 

“Go down the stairs,” he says, and nudges her gently to the side, “take the fourth floor exit. Excellent. There’s a guard in the second hall to your right--that’s lovely, 002. Take their weapons--” 

He listens to the sharp rapid breathing and walks the agent through the building swarming with guards and all the way to the embassy. And for the first time since he joined MI6, he doesn’t itch for a keyboard and quiet solitude. 

For the first time since a voice echoed in his head, he doesn’t feel alone. 

~*~ 

 The voice is comforting. He—Q decided long ago that his soulmate is man, just from listening to him talk for years—talks at the strangest times. Long rambles when he’s lingering on the edge of sleep, a steady ticking count in the mornings, a too bright white noise when Q was a boy studying and when he was a hacker on the wrong side of legal, and when he was buried in the bowls of MI6, piecing together it’s cyber defenses.

He’s chatty, and sometimes Q wonders if his soulmate is like this with the rest of the world. There’s a reserved quality to him in those early days, that slides away as the years slip past.

Sometimes, he lays in bed and aches with sensory echo, with the pleasure starburst bright in his soulmate’s mind, and a nameless gasp on his lips, and he feels loved.

~*~

 Silva happens and the world comes crashing down, or maybe just his world. M is shaken in a way he’s never seen, and R is in the hospital and the Quartermaster is dead in the ruins of MI6.

He’s pushed into a position he knew he’d fill, one day, but not yet.

007 comes back from the dead and it’s a flurry of whisper in Q Branch. He watches his physical and psych evals, watches when Tanner and the others walk away and 007 trembles, on the verge of collapse. He doesn’t, collapse, though. He rallies, a beautiful broken thing, and M stamps his evals approved.

~*~

 His soulmate never tells him this:

His name.

His location.

He tells Q about the world, rambling stories about his friends and his time in the Navy, about places he’s seen and books he’s read and on lazy weekends that come so rarely it sometimes worries Q, his soulmate tells him about the show he lies in bed to watch.

He knows his soulmate lives a life of danger and bears those marks, fading ink, on his skin, and the pain echoed in his body, but he never tells him.

Q—Greyson and Quillen and Ghost and Q—

He never tells his soulmate anything.

~*~

 They sit in front of a beautiful painting and it’s…familiar.

It pulses in his gut like an echo, and eyes the color of ice in spring assess him, amused and dismissive and curling warm.

Everyone—Eve and R and Tanner and even M in her caustic, brutal way, warned him about 007. About his unpredictability and violence and his casual disregard for authority and dismissiveness, his aloof reserve.

No one told him that looking at James Bond, he’d feel the first hint of spring, a slow unfurling warmth hidden in the ice.

They sit in front of a beautiful painting and insult each other and find a common ground and Q’s lips curl into a smile as he retreats.

~*~

 When they wipe away his past, they wipe everything.

They take Greyson Laurence, the only child of only children, orphaned at age ten, and wipe him away, place him in a box in the ground near his parents he can’t remember.

They take Ghost, a hacker on the wrong side of legal, infamous and a few countries and burn him, pin his crimes and actions on a dead body, take his bank account and wipe it clean.

They give him a new apartment and a new name and an untraceable account with his inheritance if not his ill-gotten earnings.

They do exactly what they promise—destroy who he was and create something new, keeping only the bits that will be of use to Queen and Country.

Quillen, as he is called now, an unsubtle maker that will one day morph into Q—Quillen finds he doesn’t mind.

They wipe away everything—except the voice in his head, the ink on his skin, the fading echoes of bullets in his shoulder.

~*~

 He is used to echo pains and ink blooming dark and violent on his skin, used to it fading into shiny red sympathy scars. He’s used to makeup to cover the visible marks and clothes to cover everything else and the familiar grounding pain of being connect to another soul.

He isn’t used to the pain, one morning in his flat, pain that is sharp and searing, hot across his ribs. He gasps, and doesn’t need to lift his shirt to know that black ink is spreading like rivulets of blood.

There’s a moment, a hot rush of fear and vertigo, a whispered apology and he almost screams when pain explodes across his back, and fills up his lungs.

He wakes alone, his kitten licking at the rivulet of blood on his forehead, and his head aches, sharp and insistent and his.

He doesn’t hear his soulmate’s whispers or feel his body bloom with echoed pain, for a long time.

~*~

 007 lingers in London after Skyfall, a wraith haunting MI6, lurking in Q Branch, his eyes bright and assessing. Eve, Q knows, likes him, in a way that few like the assassin. She doesn’t trust him, certainly not with Q, whom she’s irrationally protective of, but she likes him.

Maybe because he never held it against her, the whole messy shooting business.

She says that 007 is grieving, a child with a lost mother.

Q watches the surveillance videos and occasionally, sees him in person, and he sees something that Mallory and Eve don’t see, that he’s not sure anyone sees.

There is grief, bright and silvery in his eyes, yes.

But that grief is the foam on a sea of fury, buffeted along by rage as deep as the ocean.

And in the aftermath of Silva’s attack and hack and the deadly affair at Skyfall, Q understands that fury.

He’s felt it too, the same helpless, incandescent rage seething in him since 007 said, cold and lonely, “Agent down.”

~*~

 There are times when the bond is still, when the voice in his mind doesn’t whisper, when pain doesn’t echo through him.

Times when Q thinks his soulmate is happy, a kind of peaceful contentment that makes Q ache with longing and jealousy and joy, a strange and potent mix.

And there are times when the bond is still and the voice is silent and pain doesn’t thrum through him, and Q knows, knows deep in his gut where the piece of him that belongs to someone he will never meet rests, that his soulmate is heartbroken. That grief and guilt and misery dogs his steps, drags at him with claws sharper than any weapon Q has felt the echo of.

A kind of misery and pain that makes Q ache with longing and echoed grief and the urge to reach, and reach, to draw his soulmate close and whisper, I am here. You aren’t alone.

He doesn’t.

He can’t.

Greyson Laurence is dead and Ghost is dead and Quillen is just a shadow clinging to a position and he doesn’t have, cannot have, a soulmate.

He bears silent witness to a grief that shakes him and wishes that he could do more.

~*~

 “Q,” 007 purrs and the minions stir, a flock of pigeons disturbed by a great hunting cat.

Q sighs and hides his smile, and gives the agent a disinterested stare. “You haven’t managed to bring my equipment back unscathed, have you, 007?”

“I am in perfect working order, Quartermaster. Would you like a demonstration?”

A squeak comes from one of the minions and 007’s smile goes shark sharp and the tips of Q’s ears warm.

It is a strange and heady thing, to be on the other end of 007’s bright hungry gaze. Even though it is a game it is harmless and flattering, and there is this too.

“Excellent. I’ll just inform Medical that you’re ready for your yearly physical, shall I?” Q smiles sweetly.

The look on 007’s face, startled, apprehensive and pleased, is worth all the trouble his flirting causes.

~*~

 His soulmate has a habit of falling in love.

It bothered him, the first time it happened, when the other man fell in a brief and passionate affair and infatuation that ended after a month.

It bothered him the time after that.

The third time, he almost expected it, the way the voice went wistful and longing, thoughts circling a nebulous, faceless person. Q sighed at his soulmate’s ridiculous antics and went about his business at Q Branch and a few weeks later, when he felt the familiar crushing loneliness and regret, he sighs, and prepares himself for a month of morose drinking, a pain and ink speckled body.

He falls in love and in lust and Q is only a little annoyed when he realizes there is something strange and longing and familiar in the voice in his head, pining and sweet. It’s teasing and longing because no one has ever kept his soulmate at a distance, and familiar because he has felt him in love over and over and over again.

He smiles to himself when his soulmate quotes poetry, badly and drunk, and compares the newest object of his affection to stars and suns and fey otherworld creatures.

He’s a bit mad, Q thinks, fondly.

~*~

 “You didn’t need to shoot them,” Q observes and there’s a huff from the other end of the line, a gentle noise that makes Q shiver.

Ink is blooming on his ribs and 007 is cocky and grinning in his ear and on the CCTV he’s hacked. “But where’s the fun in that?”

Q snorts, inelegant and to the point, and 007’s lips twitch. “You have a window, 007, do hurry. Even you won’t be able to handle all of the guards should they realize you’re still there.”

“Doubting me, Quartermaster?”

“Recognizing the limitations of my tools, agent. Go—now.”

007 darts across the screen and into a server room, safe for the moment, and a sharp burst of affection and pride fills up his head, and Q rubs at his temple.

~*~

 They live in the present, both of them. Q doesn’t allow anything to slip over into his soulmate’s shared emotions, only the barest brush of awareness to allow the other to know he’s still there. His soulmate lives and bleeds and loves and grieves, and never dreams about the future.

It startles Q, when he does.

When the sweet longing and affection drifts into dreams, gentle and hesitant, about waking up in bed next to a warm, lean body. When he catches his soulmate thinking, I could bring him here, on holiday. He’d love the sun.

When he feels the pang of loneliness in a quiet hotel room and the longing for a warm flat filled with familiar comfortable things.

He realizes then, this is different—the love that his soulmate has fallen into this time.

It matters.

~*~

 It happens, like this.

Q is on the tube, half asleep, a take away cup of tea doing little to rouse him.

Q is snatched, taken by a prick in the neck and a bruising hand on his arm, and a voice in his head, screaming, is the last thing he knows for a long long time.

Q is woken, strapped to a chair, in a cinderblock room not so different from the one where he was held and questioned and offered a new life. There’s a low hum of frantic fury in his mind, and the taste of blood in his mouth and he wonders how his bruises look, painted across his soulmate’s body in blooming ink.

You have to tell me where you are, his soulmate says and Q—

Q closes his eyes and begins reciting the value of pi, blanking his mind.

He understands, abruptly, why MI6 does not allow soulbonds.

~*~

 He can feel this—

Relief, sharp and intoxicating, in his soulmate’s mind.

Hands, gentle and soothing as he’s lifted.

A warm voice, soothing in a way that overlaps with the familiar voice in his mind.

Strong arms cradle him, and he knows that he’s safe, with the scent of 007 around him and pain riddled through his body and his mind washed in relief and awe.

“Don’t look,” 007 murmurs.

Close your eyes, darling.

He obeys, thoughtless, and curled into Bond’s warmth. He stirs when someone approaches and 006 says, “How is he?”

Bond doesn’t answer, and Q presses into him with a low whine, and lets himself be carried to safety.

~*~                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Bond won’t leave his side.

His soulmate is silent, a watchful kind of stillness in his mind, and now, away from the pain and terror and the blood, Q knows.

He can feel Bond’s eyes on him, icy blue, spring thaw, endless and steady and he wants to look.

He wants to reach out, brush feather light against the mind that has shared his own for most of his life, wants to see Bond’s face, when he does.

He wants to peel the pristine suit and button-up shirt away, wants to see his own wounds mirrored in ink across Bond’s body, like his so often has borne Bond’s wounds.

He wants the room clear, and the questions heavy in the air to fill up the silence.

He wants everything, for the first time, wants everything that a soulmate promises, and everything he can never have.

MI6 doesn’t allow soulbonds.

 ~*~

Bond lingers while he is discharged, and shifts away from the wall when M frowns at him. “I’ll take the Quartermaster home,” he says, and M arches an eyebrow.

“I can,” Eve offers and Q knows it’s going to be an argument, and he’s too tired for that.

“Bond will be fine,” Q says. “In case anyone has tampered with my security.”

Eve’s lips thin, and that will be a problem for another day.

“Q, you’ll need to debrief, tomorrow. And Bond—”

“Tomorrow, M,” Bond says, and there’s no room for negotiation in those two words, just steely impatience that is at odds with the hand gentle on his elbow, and the fingers on the small of his back, moving him forward and Q—

Q let himself be guided.

~*~

 They don’t talk.

They should. He knows they should. But there are decades of words between them, of Bond’s words, echoing in his mind, emotions echoing through his soul, pain painted across his body.

“I missed you,” he whispers, the answer to a question asked once, a thousand times, again and again.

Bond’s smile is bright, beautiful, and when he kisses him, Q can feel it, a feedback loop of blinding pleasure, and the gentle thrill and awe that they are here, finally together.

 ~*~

 MI6 doesn’t allow soulbonds. And yet--

The Quartermaster stands in Q Branch directing his agent to safety, and across the line, James murmurs in his ear, in his head, in his heart.  

[dustedmagazine]

Slept Ons: The Best Records of 2020 That We Never Got Around To

Tattoos and shorts! How did we miss the Oily Boys?

It happens pretty much every year.  After much fussing and second-guessing, the year-end list gets finalized, set in stone really, encapsulating 12 months of enthusiastic listening, and surely these are the best ten records anyone could find, right? Right?  And then, a day or a week later, someone else puts up their list or records their year-end radio show, and there it is, the record you could have loved and pushed and written about…if only you’d known about it.  My self-kick in the shins came during Joe Belock’s 2020 round-up on WFMU when he played the Chats.  Others on our staff knew, earlier on, that they weren’t writing about records they loved for whatever reason — work, family, mp3 overload, etc. Except now they are.  Here.  Now. Enjoy.  

Contributors include me (Jennifer Kelly), Eric McDowell, Jonathan Shaw, Justin Cober-Lake, Bill Meyer, Bryon Hayes, Ian Mathers, Andrew Forell, Michael Rosenstein and Patrick Masterson. 

The Chats — High Risk Behavior (Bargain Bin)

High Risk Behaviour by The Chats

Cartoonishly primitive and gleefully out of luck, The Chats hurl Molotov cocktails of punk, bright and exploding even as they come. They’re from Australia, which totally makes sense; there’s a sunny, health-care-subsidized, devil-may-care vibe to their down-on-their luck stories. Musically, the songs are stripped down like Billy Childish, sped up like the Ramones, brute simple like Eddy Current Suppression Ring. Most of them are about alcohol: drinking, being drunk, getting arrested for being drunk, eating while drunk…etc. etc. But there’s an art to singing about getting hammered, and few manage the butt-headed conviction of “Drunk & Disorderly.” Its jungle rhythms, vicious, saw-toothed bass, quick knife jabs of guitar frame an all-hands drum-shocked chant: “Relaxation, mood alteration, boredom leads to intoxication.” Later singer Eamon Sandwith cuts right to the point about romance with the couplet, “I was cautious, double wrapped, but still I got the clap.” The album’s highlights include the most belligerently glorious song ever about cyber-fraud in “Identity Theft,” whose shout along chorus buoys you up, even as the dark web drains your savings account dry. The album strings together a laundry list of dead-end, unfortunate situations, one after another truly hopeless developments, but nonetheless it explodes with joy. Bandcamp says the guitar player has already left—so you’re too late to see the Chats live—but it must have been fun while it lasted.

Jennifer Kelly

Oliver Coates — skins n slime  (RVNG Intl)

skins n slime by Oliver Coates

2020 was a year of loss, of losing, of feeling lost. Whether weathering the despair of illness and death, the discomfort of displacement or the drift of temporal reverie, English cellist Oliver Coates creates music to reflect all this and more on skins n slime. Using modulators, loops and effects, Coates employs elements from drone, shoegaze and industrial to extend the range of the cello and conjure otherworldly sounds of crushing intensity and great beauty. Beneath the layering, distortion and dissonance, the human element remains strong. The tactility of fingers and bow on strings and the expressive essence of tone form the core of Coates composition and performance. If his experiments seem a willful swipe at the restrictions of the classical world from whence he came, the visceral power of a track like “Reunification 2018”, which hunkers in the same netherworld as anything by Deathprod or Lawrence English, the liminal, static bedecked ache of “Honey” and the unadorned minimalism of “Caretaker Part 1 (Breathing)” are works of a serious talent. skins n slime is an album to sit with and soak in; allow it to percolate and permeate and you’ll find yourself forgetting the outside world, if only for a while.  

Andrew Forell  

Bertrand Denzler / Antonin Gerbal — Sbatax (Umlaut Records)

Sbatax by Denzler - Gerbal

Tenor sax player Bertrand Denzler and drummer Antonin Gerbal released this duo recording last summer which slipped under the radar of many listeners. Denzler is as likely to be heard these days composing and performing pieces by others in the French ensemble ONCEIM, playing solo, or in settings for quiet improvisation. But he’s been burning it up as a free jazz player for years now as well. Gerbal also casts a broad net, as a member of ONCEIM, deconstructing free bop in the group Peeping Tom, or recontextualizing the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik along with Pat Thomas, Joel Grip and Seymour Wright in the group Ahmed amongst many other projects. The two have worked together in a variety of contexts for a decade now, recording a fantastic duo back in 2014. Sbatax, recorded five years later at a live performance in Berlin is a worthy follow-up.  

Gerbal attacks his kit with ferocity out of the gate, with slashing cymbals and thundering kit, cascading along with drubbing momentum. Denzler charges in with a husky, jagged, repeated motif which he loops and teases apart, matching the caterwauling vigor of his partner straightaway. Over the course of this 40-minute outing, one can hear the two lock in, coursing forward with mounting intensity. Denzler increasingly peppers his playing with trenchant blasts and rasping salvos, riding along on Gerbal’s torrential fusillades. Throughout, one can hear the two dive deep in to free jazz traditions while shaping the arc of the improvisation with an acute ear toward the overall form of the piece. Midway through, Denzler steps back for a torrid drum solo, then jumps back in with renewed dynamism as the two ride waves of commanding potency and focus to a rousing conclusion, goaded on by the cheering audience. Anyone wondering whether there is still life in the tenor/drum duo format should dig this one up.  

Michael Rosenstein

Kaelin Ellis — After Thoughts (self-released)

After Thoughts by KAELIN ELLIS

To be sure, “slept on” hardly characterizes Kaelin Ellis in 2020. After a trickle of lone tracks in the first months of the year, a Twitter video posted by the 23-year-old producer and multi-instrumentalist caught the attention of Lupe Fiasco, quickly precipitating the joint EP House. It’s a catchy story from any number of angles — the star-powered “discovery” of a young talent, the interconnectedness of the digital age, the silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic — but it risks overshadowing Ellis’s two 2020 solo records: Moments, released in the lead-up to House, and After Thoughts, released in October. It doesn’t help that each album’s dozen tracks scarcely add up to as many minutes, or that the producer’s titles deliberately downplay the results. And some, of course, will judge these jazzy, deeply soulful beats only against their potential as platforms for some other, more extroverted artist. “I’d like to think I’m a jack of all trades,” Ellis told one interviewer, “but in all honesty my specialty is creating a space for others to stand out.”

Yet as with all small, good things, there’s reward in savoring these miniatures on their own terms, and After Thoughts in particular proved an unexpected retreat from last fall’s anxieties. Ellis has a poet’s gift for distillation and juxtaposition, a director’s knack for pathos and dramatic sequencing — powers that combine to somehow render a fully realized world. As fleeting as it is, Ellis’s work communicates a generosity of care and concentration, opening a space for others not just to stand out but also to settle in.

Eric McDowell   

Lloyd Miller with Ian Camp and Adam Michael Terry — At the Ends of the World

At the Ends of the World by Lloyd Miller with Ian Camp and Adam Michael Terry

Miller and company fuse the feel of a contemporary classical concert with eastern modalities and instrumentation. The recordings sound live off the floor, and give a welcome sense of space and detail to the sensitive playing. Miller has explored the intersection between Persian and other cultural traditions and jazz through the lens of academic scholarship and recorded output since the 1960s. With this release, the performances linger in a space where vibe is as important as compositional structure. The results revel in the beauty when seemingly unrelated musical ideas emerge together in the same moment, with startling results.

Arthur Krumins

 Oily Boys — Cro Memory Grin (Cool Death)

Cro Memory Grin by Oily Boys

The title of this 2020 LP by Australian punks Oily Boys sounds like a pun on “Cro-Magnon,” an outmoded scientific name for early humans. It’s apt: the music is smarter than knuckle-dragger beatdown or run-of-the-mill powerviolence, but still driven by a rancorous, id-bound savagery. The smarts are just perceptible enough to keep things pretty interesting. Some of the noisier, droning and semi-melodic stretches of Cro Memory Grin recall the records made by the Men (especially Leave Home) before they decided to try to make like Uncle Tupelo, or some lesser version of the Hold Steady. Oily Boys inhabit a darker sensibility, and their music is more profoundly bonkers than anything those other bands got up to. Aggro, discordant punk; flagellating hardcore burners; psych-rock-adjacent sonic exorcisms — you get it all, sometimes in a single five-minute passage of Cro Memory Grin (check out the sequence from “Lizard Scheme” to “Heat Harmony” to “Stick Him.” Yikes). A bunch of the tunes spill over into one another, feedback and sustain jumping the gap from one track to the next, which gives the record a live vibe. It feels volatile and sweaty. The ill intent and unmitigated nastiness accumulate into a palpable force, tainting the air and leaving stains on your tee shirt. Oily Boys have been kicking around Sydney’s punk scene since at least 2014, but this is their first full-length record. One hopes they can continue to play with this degree of possessed abandon without completing burning themselves to down to smoldering cinders. At least long enough to record some more music.

Jonathan Shaw

 Dougie Poole — The Freelancer's Blues (Wharf Cat)

The Freelancer's Blues by Dougie Poole

A cursory listen might misconstrue the heart of Dougie Poole's second album, The Freelancer's Blues. When he mixes his wobbly country sound with lyrics like those in “Vaping on the Job,” it sounds like genre play, a smirking look at millennial life through an urban cowboy's vintage sound. Poole does target a particular set of issues, but mapping them with his own slightly psychedelic country comes with very little of the postmodern itch. His characters feel just as troubled as anyone coming out of 1970s Nashville, and as Poole explores these lives with wit and empathy, the songs quickly find their resonance.

The album, though it wouldn't reach for pretentious terms, carries an existential problem at its center. Poole circles around the fundamental void: work deadens, relocation doesn't help, spiritual pursuits falter, intelligence burdens, and even the drugs don't help. When Poole finally gets the title track, the preceding album gives his confession extra weight, a mix of life's strictures and personal limitation combining for a crisis best avoided but wonderfully shared. The Freelancer's Blues comes rich in Nashville tradition but finds an ideal fit in its contemporary place, likely providing a soundtrack for a variety of times and spaces yet to come.

Justin Cober-Lake

 Schlippenbach Quartett — Three Nails Left (Corbett Vs. Dempsey)

You might say that this record has been slept on twice. The second recording to be released by the Alexander von Schlippenbach, Evan Parker and Paul Lovens (augmented this time by Peter Kowald) was released in 1975, and didn’t get a second pressing — on vinyl — until 2019. So, Corbett Vs. Dempsey stepped up last summer, it had never been on CD. But this writer was so stumped on how to relate how intense, startling, and unlike any other free improvisation it was and is, that he just… slept on it. Until now. Even if you know this band, if you don’t know this album, well, it’s time you got acquainted.

Bill Meyer 

Stonegrass — Stonegrass (Cosmic Range)

STONEGRASS by Stonegrass

Released on the cusp of a tentative re-opening for the city of Toronto after two months of lock-down, this slab of psychedelic funk-rock was the perfect antidote to the COVID blues when it arrived at the tail end of a Spring spent in near-isolation. The jam sessions that became Stonegrass were also a new beginning for multi-instrumentalist Matthew “Doc” Dunn and drummer Jay Anderson, who reignited a spirit of collaboration after a decade of sonic estrangement following the demise of their Spiritual Sky Blues Band project. Listening to these songs, you’d never know they spent any time apart. The tight, bottom-wagging jams on offer are evidence that these two are joined together at the third eye. Anderson’s grooves run deep, and Dunn — whether he’s traipsing along on guitar, keys or flutes — is right there with him. There’s enough fuzz here to satiate the heads, but the real treat here is the rhythmic interplay. Strap in and prepare to get down. 

Bryon Hayes 

 Bob Vylan — We Live Here EP (Venn Records)

Bob Vylan flew under the radar in 2020 successfully enough that when someone nominated them for the best of 2020 poll in Tom Ewing’s Peoples’ Pop Polls project on Twitter (each month a different year or category gets voted on in World Cup-style brackets, it’s great fun and only occasionally maddening), most of the reaction was “is that one a typo?” Nobody had that response after listening to “We Live Here” — my wife also participates in the poll, so we just play all the candidates in our apartment, and Bob Vylan was the first time both of our jaws dropped in amazement; the song got played about ten times in a row at that point. Bobby (vocals/guitar/production) and Bobbie (drums/“spiritual inspiration”) Vylan’s 18-minute EP lives up to that title track, fireball after fireball aimed directly at the corrupt, crumbling, racist state that seems utterly indifferent to human suffering unless there’s profit in it. Whether it’s the raging catharsis of the title track or the cool, precise hostility of “Lynch Your Leaders,” Bob Vylan have made something vital and essential here, that very much speaks to 2020 but sadly will stay relevant long past it.  

Ian Mathers

 Working Men’s Club — Working Men’s Club (Heavenly Recordings)

It’s been evident these past few years that I’ve retreated from music and committed myself to the slower world of books as a way of giving my mind a break from the accelerating madness outside, but I could never really leave my radio family the same way I could never really leave Dusted. Another great example why: A fellow CHIRP volunteer played “John Cooper Clarke” in a December Zoom social I actually managed to catch, and I’ve been addicted to Working Men’s Club’s debut LP from October ever since. The quartet hails from Todmodren, a market town you won’t be surprised upon listening to discover is roughly equidistant between Leeds and Manchester; the album screams Hacienda vibes in its seamless integration of post-punk signifiers and dancefloor style. It’s easy to bandy about names from Rip It Up and Start Again or even The Velvet Underground in 12-minute closer “Angel,” certainly one of the most arresting tracks of the year, but the thing that struck me immediately is that this was the record I’d always anticipated but never got from Factory Floor — smart, aloof and occasionally calculated, yet still fun enough to play for any crowd itching to move. Until the community of a dance party or Working Men’s Club live set is once again possible, patience and a fully formed first album will have to suffice. You’ll have to imagine the part where I corner you at the party to rave about it, I’m afraid.

Patrick Masterson