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jonesyjonesyjonesy · 3 years ago

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Wildflowers (pt. viii)

a john paul jones x fem!oc fic

summary: Julia Morgan knew nannying for three girls who had recently lost their mother would come with many challenges. But she never thought their father, the enigmatic musician John Paul Jones, would be causing her the most trouble. And while Julia is not in the business of saving broken men, her tenderness might be meant for more than little girls and wildflowers.

pt. i, crocus pt. ii, gorse pt. iii, primrose pt. iv, willow 🌼 pt. v, heart’s-ease pt. vi.i, daisy 🌼 pt. vi.ii, daisy pt. vi.iii, daisy 🌼 pt. vii, beech pt. viii, clover

(🌼) denotes nsfw

notes: mad dad, spoilers for 'the apartment' if you're worried

a/n: The further I get into this story, the more tropes and cliches we are snuggling up to. I hope it's enjoyable and not trite (ooo...self-conscious, are we, jjj?). I'm thinking of starting to include a glossary of cultural references that might be of note as we move forward. Maybe when I get a day off...Anyway, I hope you enjoy lovies! 🥰

pt. viii, clover

“Look, Jacinda, life is complicated.” “Very complicated."

The car was moving like molasses even though John was driving above the speed limit. The questions of the little girl between us had almost slowed time to a stop.

“I don’t think I understand,” Jacinda said carefully, her brow furrowing. She looked to me and then to John, but neither of us had the confidence to look back.

I focused on the road ahead of us, lit only by the headlights of the car. It was late, approaching 10 o’clock. I wanted nothing more than for Jacinda to feel the weight of that lateness in her eyes, like her sisters did as they slept in the backseat.

But she was alert. And she was persistent. “Daddy?”

“I’m sorry, what was the question?” John sputtered. His knuckles tensed around the steering wheel.

“Why would –”

“Right, um,” John cut her short. We had both heard her, clear as a bell, and knew from the moment we stepped out of the cinema that she would have a million questions.

I felt him nervously looking at me from the corner of his eye. “Don’t look at me,” I whispered over Jacinda’s head.

John’s eyes widened as he turned back to the road. “I’m not, I – “ John swallowed. “Look, Jacinda, life is complicated.”

“Very complicated,” I added.

“More complicated than it seems,” he went on, “from a movie.”

It was supposed to be a nice night out. For the girls. John’s apology. I was just along for the ride, but now that we were sitting here with Jacinda’s unsated curiosity, I really wanted to get off.

And it was all because of a damn song Jacinda picked up on the playground.

It didn’t start off so bad, the song. In fact, when Jacinda came through the front door singing the tune, we were all very well-humored about it, John included. “I’ve been to Kansas City. Twice, in fact, and I can tell you that they have not, as your lyrics describe, ‘gone about as far as they can go’.”

It was so charming, Jacinda as the choirmaster as she taught Tamara and Kiera the lyrics to the song. In no time at all, there was a chorus of little voices singing the only three lines Jacinda knew in a messy harmony. Which was cute for the first evening. Charming.

But when it didn't blow over the next day, Warren House filled with frustration.

Now, I personally did not mind the song, even as it was repeated over and over. I didn’t even mind the humming of it, like mosquitoes in my ear. Over my years working with children, the sounds they made seemed to bother me less and less until they were relegated into background noise.

Annie, on the other hand, was fully affronted, going as far as to ban the girls from the kitchen unless they wanted her terrifyingly sharp, “Hush.”

John made it much longer than Annie, although I thought he would be able to withstand the constant drone of girls singing with an American southern twang perhaps indefinitely. After all, the life of a musician was most definitely a loud one, especially from what I had heard of Zeppelin now (I was surprised he hadn’t mentioned a constant ringing in his ears). However, he broke down over the long car rides to and from their grandmother’s house. When they arrived back home, with the girls totally love-flushed from unending doting from grandma, John found me up in my quarters, drenched in hair-frizzing desperation. “Just an hour. Of silence. Please.”

I was happy to oblige. I scooped the girls up and dragged them out with me to Ashdown. We walked far enough out to the first creek bridge where we removed our shoes and carefully down the sloping bank into the clear stream water, having to keep a tender tread on the algae-covered stones.

“It’s so slimy!” Kiera laughed.

“It’s so cold,” was Tamara’s unimpressed response.

“We should come back and swim,” Jacinda said, clinging onto my sleeve for balance before bashfully adding, “When it’s warmer.”

On the way back, I tried to kindly put an embargo on the song. “It’s lost its charm. You know? It used to be fun. Now it’s sort of getting on daddy’s nerves and you know, that’s not very nice.”

“And Annie’s,” Tamara replied. “And mine too.”

“Of course, that’s why you’re always singing along,” I said with a sardonic smile and poked her in the side.

Tamara laughed and pushed me back playfully. She had gotten very good at living the adage, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” when it came to her sisters and the song was no different.

“So let’s take a break for the night. Hm? Let it rest.”

The girls all agreed and, to their credit, made it all evening without even a peep of the song. John, Annie, and I all exchanged looks now and then as if the peace was too good to be true.

Unfortunately, it was. The next morning, I was having breakfast with the girls before school when John walked in looking as if he hadn’t slept a wink, his hair matted on one side of his head and the bags under his eyes so heavy I thought he should have face-planted into his bowl of oatmeal. It wasn’t unusual for him to be sleepless. He had said as much just the week before: the night in the studio when I heard each and every detail about Mo he was willing to share.

“I’ll just lay there with my eyes open. I can’t just go to sleep. Not anymore. I used to be just fine. On tour even, never lost a night’s sleep, at least not on my own account. Because I knew where everyone was,” he had said. “No matter what time zone I was in, I could hazard a guess. And I’d fall asleep imagining what Mo was up to and…picturing how the morning would go for her. Dragging herself out of bed, opening the curtains, washing her face and…I guess I’d become reliant on that to fall asleep. Now it’s just like what the hell do I think about?” John had rubbed his eyes, the tiredness right there but too elusive to hold onto. “I usually fall asleep sitting at the piano or something because at least I’m distracted.”

By the end of that late night that was already morning, I knew (what felt like) everything about Mo, about John and Mo, from beginning to end and then some. Stories I have not repeated to this day. After all, he trusted me enough to not only listen, but to see him, watch him experience it all again. It was a strange sort of honor to watch a man talk about a woman the way John talked about Mo. Even just the way his eyes, full of reverence and devotion, seemed to conjure her as if she was in the room with us. And in the days following, we seemed to have a new vocabulary; I could see why things were done a certain way, what he was searching for and responding to in his day-to-day life, the parts of her he was trying to emulate as best he could, especially for the girls.

I revealed nothing of my new vocabulary to Pat when we spoke on the phone a few days later. Our first “debrief”, as she called it. “I don’t know a thing about the type of woman John would want. I don’t think he could possibly ever want anyone else,” I said decisively. She laughed and told me to keep working on him and that she’d focus her search on brunettes.

But back to breakfast: it must have been a particularly rough night for John. On top of his appearance, he was extremely quiet and barely looked up from his breakfast, even when summoned by one of the girls for attention. And that worried me. I found myself worrying much more about all the Baldwins now that I knew about all the intricacies of Maureen.

The table reflected his mood, the silence interrupted only by clinking of silverware against dishes until the humming started. Kiera didn’t even realize it, that she was humming the forbidden tune as she chewed on a piece of toast. John immediately bristled and his eyes darted to Kiera. His lips twisted together, effortfully pulling back the ire he knew she didn’t deserve. Tamara and Jacinda both held back snickers.

I softly touched Kiera’s arm; she looked up at me with wide, bewildered eyes. “You’re humming, dear,” I smiled.

“The song,” Jacinda added through her teeth.

“Sorry,” Kiera said, a blush appearing on her face.

“It’s your food, Annie,” I called cheerfully across the kitchen and playfully nudged Kiera. “So delicious you get lost in thought, hm?”

Annie grunted from her place at the sink. “Alright, lay it on thick.”

The table descended into silence again and was, only minutes later, interrupted by Kiera’s humming. Tamara couldn’t help but laugh this time, Jacinda angrily shushing her.

John’s intake of breath was audible across the table, harsh air scrambling into his lungs. He looked down his nose at her and said sternly, “Kiera.”

She looked up, but this time knew before anyone mentioned it. Her head fell just as fast as it shot up, now paying very close attention to the yolk of her over easy egg. “I can’t help it.”

“Well, try,” he grumbled.

There were moments of my work where I felt ill-equipped; witnessing a person parent their own children sometimes filled me with a know-it-all mentality. Very easy and unfair of me to judge from the outside the quality of other people’s parenting, easy to pick out where they were going wrong. I tried to act as a modulator, a pacifist, a translator. But sometimes it was hard to not be a judge as well. This morning, John’s exhaustion and impatience were getting the best of him, and I wasn’t sure how long his fuse would be.

Not five minutes later, it was Tamara who was the hummer. She pinched her lips together and pushed her food around her plate as if she was none the wiser, but she was smiling deviously.

John again, but this time: “Tamara.”

But it was too late. With Tamara’s humming, Kiera joined in. Jacinda looked horrified. “We’re not supposed to sing that.”

“We’re not,” Tamara said. “We’re humming.”

“Girls,” John said, even harsher than before. His jaw was pulsating.

I fell back, not sure what I would or should say.

Tamara started, “Everything’s up to date in Kansas City…”

And Kiera picked up, “They’ve gone about as far as they can go.”

“Enough,” John said. His nostrils were starting to flare

“They went and built a skyscraper…”

John pushed himself up from the table, his chair scuffing against the floor with a long grinding sound and took his plate with him toward the sink.

“Seven stories high…”

He dropped his plate into the sink with a clatter and gripped the counter. His knuckles went white. “Enough, girls.”

Kiera stood on her chair enthusiastically, Jacinda gripping at her dress to get her down. “About as high as a building oughta –“

“I said, enough! Shut up!” John erupted.

The kitchen went quiet as we all stared back at him. The pulsing fury in his face abated to a pale horror as he realized what he had said.

I looked to Annie who was shaking her head in shock and then to the girls. Deer in headlights had never been so apt as the three girls gaped at their father, who was usually so soft-spoken and gentle, even good-humored if his grief allowed.

“I mean…” he began.

The kitchen echoed with his words; they only seemed to get louder with the memory of them. Kiera and Tamara had turned deep red. And though Jacinda was the most innocent of them all, the embarrassment was clearest on her face; her lips screwed upward and her eyes glimmering with scalding tears that she was desperately trying to hold back.

“I’m –“

He couldn’t get an apology out before Jacinda burst, her palms pressed up to her eyes accompanied by an unmatched wail, the intensity of which I had never heard from any of the girls in earnest.

“I’m sorry, I’m really…” John tried to continue, but knew his words were meaningless now. He swallowed thickly.

Amidst this wreckage, I sat petrified, practically not even breathing. Annie had been able to disappear without a sound from the kitchen, but I was trapped there at the table. I wished I could melt into the floor and not bear witness, knowing that in some way my presence was only adding to the level of shame everyone was feeling. I wasn’t sure whether to reach out or retreat, until John tried to go toward Jacinda and she cowered away from him and sprinted out of the room.

John’s empty, reaching hands turned into fists which he shoved down into the pockets of his robe. With the tendons of his neck tensing dangerously and straining to be on voice, he repeated, “I’m sorry, girls, I don’t know –“

“It’s okay, daddy,” Tamara replied and went about her breakfast as if nothing had changed but the way the breeze was hitting the window.

“Yeah, it’s okay,” Kiera added. Her voice trembled the smallest bit as she looked up at him.

“We’re sorry too, right Kiera?”

“Yeah, we’re sorry.”

“No, no,” John’s forehead scrunched together into piles of frantic wrinkles. “I…”

My eyes met John’s; the sheer overwhelm in his gaze made my stomach churn. “I’ll go find her, alright?”

John nodded adamantly and brought his fingers to his lips, trapped in spiraling thought. One apology would have been one thing, but three different ones for three incredibly different and vibrant little girls would be another.

I left the kitchen and followed the sound of crying to the playroom where I found Jacinda curled around a pillow on the window seat. I walked over and sat at the other end gently and spoke in the same manner, “That didn’t feel very good, did it?”

The sobbing abated from behind her curtain of chestnut hair.

“Daddy doesn’t yell like that usually,” I said, scooching myself slightly closer.

“No,” Jacinda croaked.

“No, I didn’t think so.” I sat there a moment and watched her as she caught her breath, face pressed into the pillow. “He’s just tired and…Sometimes people aren’t very good at using their words nicely. Even daddies. Even me sometimes.”

Jacinda sat up and whimpered, “It’s my fault for even singing the song in the first place.”

“Oh, no Cin, no it’s not.”

“It is, it really is. I made it all b-bad and now daddy hates me.”

I held back a soft laugh. “You know that’s not true.”

“It’s true. You don’t get it,” she murmured in a small voice. She reminded me of a little bug whose wings had been plucked off. Her heart was just so magnanimous to everyone but herself. Maybe that’s why we found each other so quickly. I knew the feeling well.

“You’re right,” I said and began pushing strands of hair out of her face. “You’re feeling so… much right now. It’s hard not to feel the way you do. But I know how much it would break your father’s heart to hear you say something like that.”

Jacinda didn’t have a response, just leaned into my hand and let me swipe away the sheen of tears on her cheeks. “I don’t want to go to school.”

“Mm… I know, but it might make you feel better,” I said, taking her hands in mine. “Take your mind off of things.”

Jacinda harrumphed. “I have a spelling test and I’m bad at spelling tests.”

I snorted, “No you’re not.”

“I can’t spell ‘icicle’, I can’t ever remember.”

I pulled her into a hug and whispered in her ear, “You’re not going to forget it because I’m going to whisper it in your ear right now. Are you ready?”

I felt her grin spread against my collarbone.

“I-c-i-c-l-e. Your turn.”

As she spelled the word, perfectly I might add, I pushed my face into her hair, freshly washed and smelling clovery and fresh. I could already feel how she had grown in the three short months I’ve known her and I felt that little tug of time at the back of my skull.

We were interrupted by a pitiful knocking at the door by John, who had come to apologize, evidently having smoothed things over with Tamara and Kiera. He was a sight, not being even nearly dressed and now in a state of trembling panic. As we exchanged places, John stopped me, fingers pinched together as if he was folding up a gum wrapper, and murmured, “You take them today.” He couldn’t meet my gaze for more than a moment, so utterly draped in a velvety cloak of shame I was afraid he’d gotten lost in it.

So, I piled the girls in the car, Kiera included, for she was unwilling to remain at home with her father for even the half hour I’d be gone.

When we returned home, John had disappeared, and Kiera had regained her spirits. The day went on as normal, activity to activity, even though there was a strange pall to be had over Warren House, even with the June sun shining so grandly.

John didn’t make an appearance around lunch time, not even for a cup of tea, and I was starting to worry again. I left Kiera with a fresh pack of colored pencils on the playroom floor and snuck down the back hallway to the studio. The door was totally shut today. I knocked. No response. I knocked again and still nothing. So, with a deep breath, I pushed the door open. I had never stepped into the studio during the day, at least not meaningfully enough to see how the sun streamed in through the windows and scalded pieces of the carpet.

John was sprawled out on the couch still in his clothes from the night before, asleep with a hand over his eyes, mouth slightly ajar, and a section of the newspaper pressed to his chest. The poor thing. Really, truly. I crossed the room and started to pull the curtains closed until I heard a stuttering inhale of waking. I turned back and found John seizing up out of sleep and looking at me. “Mm…hi.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you I thought –”

“S’fine,” he answered, rubbing his face.

“You want them open or closed?”

“Just… leave them however,” he mumbled.

I dropped the curtains as they were, one fully closed and the other aching to be pulled definitively one way or the other, then walked back toward the sitting area where he was still screwing his hands over his eyes. I smiled, “You know, if you want to get your rest, I’ll get the girls and – ”

He dropped his hands to his thighs with a slap. “What are you doing tonight?”

I raised my eyebrows and didn’t respond.

He looked up at me and licked his upper lip. “I thought I’d take the girls to a movie,” he said and held up the newspaper, pointing to the movie times which he had circled in pen. “To apologize for being a complete…fuckhead.”

“Don’t be so mean to yourself.”

“What would you call me then?” John asked dryly. “A lout… a terror…”

“Tired, John,” I said. “I’d call you tired. You need your rest. You deserve your –“

“Don’t,” John cut me off. “…do the nice nanny thing with me. Alright? I know you…you mean well, but I really don’t deserve that right now, so.”

I winced at his words. There it was, that box I always lived in that hemmed me in as some sort of sainted caregiver. “It’s not a ‘nice nanny thing’. It’s just a nice thing,” I said quietly and crossed my arms over my chest. John’s jaw fell, ready to respond, but I didn’t want to hear any hint of apology. “You should take the girls. Leave me out of it. They’d love it.”

“No, no, Julia, please I’ll do something stupid again, just come and I’ll throw in an extra –“

“John, do not.”

“To your paycheck this week, it’s –“

“Stop that, you already did that even though I said not to.”

John flushed around his nose and his eyes turned up to mine again, waiting for an answer. A hint of a smile on his lips.

“What’s the movie?” I asked.

“That’s your deciding factor?”

I shrugged. “Depends. I’ve seen The Absentminded Professor too many times for a lifetime.”

“Oh no, no Fred MacMurray, I promise. But plenty of Dick Van Dyke.”

“Not Mary Poppins…” I groaned.

“No, no, it’s a rescreen of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

I snorted, “You’re getting annoyed by ‘Kansas City’, but you’re not worried about the girls walking around screaming the lyrics to ‘Toot Sweets’?”

“That is a risk I am willing to take at this point,” John added, slouching back into the couch. He started to pull at an errant thread on his sleeve. “Can’t believe I lost my temper like that.”

“It happens.”

“Well, it shouldn’t. I shouldn’t do that, they’ve already been through so much, you know?” John replied with a harshness meant for himself. “You heard them. Trying to be nice. To me. I’m their father, I shouldn’t – they shouldn’t have to tiptoes around me or – “

I smiled. “John, they see how you hurt just as much as you see it in them. It’s…you’re all trying to take care of each other.”

John looked up at me, his heavy eyes twitching at the corners as if capturing the moment clearly. “And then there’s you. Trying to keep everyone from falling apart,” he said. “Must be exhausting.”

“Just you, John,” I ribbed, picking up a shirt from the ground and tossing it onto the chair of clothes. “Get your act together.”

He laughed hoarsely in response.

I agreed to accompany them that evening, much to his relief. After a quiet dinner, John announced the treat to the girls and they excitedly leapt up to get dressed, donning charming little frocks and silver-buckled shoes. At the behest of Kiera who was rifling through my closet, I chose a shorter dress covered in vibrant tropical flowers and my brand-new espadrilles (sponsored by Mr. Baldwin’s indiscretions).

Us girls piled into the car, waiting for John, which made me laugh. In a household of all girls, it was their father that was making us fashionably late.

“Daddy always takes forever,” Tamara said with a roll of her eyes as she leaned onto the front seat to talk to me.

“Does he now?”

“He has a process, that’s what he calls it.”

I laughed, “A process?”

“It’s the hair,” Jacinda chirped.

I had to resist repeating every word they said out of sheer surprise. “Should I be scared? Is he going to come out in platforms and a multicolored cape?”

The girls laughed, a chorus of noes.

“He always looks very nice,” Jacinda added seriously.

“But it takes forever,” Tamara groaned and slouched into the backseat again.

From the car, we watched the front door as the time ticked on my watch, all itching to get to the cinema and, finally, John made an appearance. Jacinda hadn’t been lying. He did look nice. Nothing particularly outlandish, but very on trend: a striped button-down with rolled up cuffs, unbuttoned just enough to reveal a patch of hair crawling up his chest, brown corduroy pants, and, notably, the expensive watch on his wrist. And his hair was well-coiffed, especially compared to the bedhead he had earlier in the day.

John slid into the driver’s seat and gave an enthusiastic grin to the girls, “Are you ready?” and was met with giddy cheers.

Up close, it made sense, how long it took on his hair. It was as if he had managed to tame each lock, train it to heed his command so that it managed to frame his face elegantly. I suddenly became too aware of how long I was looking, taking in and categorizing each detail. The seed Pat had planted was elbowing its way through the topsoil. Slowly. Surely. And the words spilled out beyond my control: “You look nice.”

John briefly looked from the road to me, an unexpected smile on his face. “Had to look my best to visit your Cousin Graham.”

I gaped in an amused shock and looked away. “You’re not his type, I’m afraid.”

“Mmm. That’s what he wants you to think.”

John clearly knew that a school night date to the cinema would be an absolute hit; the girls looked so dear as they carried their popcorn and boxes of candy which John had commented would rot their teeth, but he had no business refusing on such a special night.

The theatre was nearly empty, save an older couple several rows ahead of us, which I found odd, but paid no mind to. That is, until the movie started, and we were not met with the brash and bold opening overture of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but the saccharinely sweet-scored The Apartment.

I looked down the row past Jacinda and Tamara to John who was already looking back at me with Kiera on his lap. We attempted to communicate through the darkened confusion until I was interrupted by Jacinda who put her hand on my arm and whispered, “I don’t think this is –“

“I know it isn’t, I don’t – I’m going to go figure this out.”

I felt my way down the row of velvet seats and back out of the theatre where I found a young employee wearing a rumpled burgundy jacket. “Pardon me, we bought tickets to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but it seems that there’s been some sort of error. That we were directed to the wrong theatre or – ”

“Film was ruined when we got it,” the boy said, gnawing on his gum as he looked at me with half-shuddered eyes. “Had to throw on what we had.”

“But we – we were sold tickets to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and – “

“Well, there is no Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Sorry.”

He started to walk away from me, but I followed him down the hall. “You know, it’s not even a children’s movie. It seems bad business to sell tickets and – ”

“Get a refund on your way out,” he said, not even bothering to look over his shoulder at me.

I was left in the quiet of the cinema hallway and looked around out of sheer confusion. I didn’t want to ruin the thrill, John’s attempt at mending. I don’t think either of us could have borne the drive home with the girls sulking. I went back to the theatre and pushed my way past Jacinda and Tamara to reach John.

“It’s not Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

“Well, I know that,” he whispered back, resituating Kiera on his lap away from our conversation.

“Yes, but there is – I mean, they don’t have it, it’s not playing.”

“Julia, I can’t see,” Tamara whined, nudging my thigh.

I apologized and looked down at the girls; all of them had their eyes glued to the screen, attention rapt, even Kiera. I crouched down so that I was not in Tamara’s way, plunked between her knees and John’s. “What do you think? Should we go?”

“Nooooo,” Kiera moaned and clutched at John’s shirt. “No, it just started.”

“I just don’t know if it’s the most… appropriate,” John said, chewing on his lower lip and looking back to the screen.

I followed his gaze and watched as a man spoke on the phone at a rowdy bar with a blonde woman waiting outside the booth, “-- and I think I got lucky. She's a skater with the Ice Show and I thought maybe I could bring her up for a quiet drink.”

“Perhaps a little…” John murmured, “…adult.”

“At least they’re seeming to enjoy it,” I said with a sympathetic smile.

John let out a sigh. “Let’s give it ten minutes.”

Famous last words of John Paul Jones; time became moot as the plot of the movie snuck into both of our subconsciouses as if they had snatched events from our own lives to use on the screen and glued us to our seats for the rest of the film. The Apartment, in a sentence, revolved around a young executive who lent his apartment to his superiors so that they could carry on in extramarital affairs. And there, in the audience, with three young girls too young to really grasp the concept, were two perfect mirrors to the unfaithful characters who paraded across the screen. Sure, the man (played by Fred MacMurray to my chagrin) was a heartless womanizer talking to his lover while his family celebrated Christmas in the background and his counterpart carried on with the foolish hope he would leave his wife. But they were archetypes we could mold ourselves to, leading us to reflect on our own faults.

I spent a good deal of the movie throwing glances at John who grew smaller and smaller the longer it went on and looked at the screen as if he were a dog being reprimanded for tracking in mud. Only once did our eyes meet in that momentary, terrifying way before aggressively focusing back on the screen.

Kiera and Tamara eventually fell asleep, but Jacinda remained attentive the entire movie. By the end, at a particularly intense and tragic moment, she gripped my arm tightly and, when the moment was revealed to be a complete comedic misunderstanding, tears slid down her cheeks in relief.

“I thought he was dead,” she whispered.

“I know, me too, love,” I replied and put my arm around her shoulder.

John leaned forward in his seat concernedly and I gestured down my cheeks with a finger, mouthing, “She’s crying.”

His eyes softened from concern to admiration for how deeply his daughter was feeling. And while I felt that too, I dreaded for the movie to end. If she was feeling so deeply, it meant she had been paying attention. And where there was attention, there would be curiosity. Questions.

On my arm as we left the theatre, Jacinda frowned, trying to capture words between her ruby lips. “Julia…”

“Yes, dear.”

“I’m confused.”

“About what?”

“The movie.”

“Which part?”

“All of it?”

I tossed a look over my shoulder at John who had both Kiera and Tamara by a hand, walking slowly. “I can’t explain the whole movie to you, Cin. We just watched it!”

“Well, I don’t mean the whole movie but – if you’re married, you’re not supposed to kiss other people, right?”

“Perhaps not like the men in the movie, no,” I swallowed.

“And you’re not supposed to kiss a married person if you’re not married to them, right?”

My mouth was hot. “No. You’re right.”

“Then –“

“Let’s wait. Hm? For your father and – you can sit up in front and we’ll all talk. Alright?”

Which is how we found ourselves in the predicament of being trapped in the front seat with Jacinda having repeated these questions for John as we peeled out of the parking lot and set off down the road.

“Look, Jacinda, life is complicated.”

“Very complicated,” I added.

“More complicated than it seems,” he went on, “from a movie. When you’re little, it doesn’t seem that way. Right? Seems like everything is very black and white, right? But the older you get, it just gets more…”

“Complicated,” I offered.

John looked at me with a frantic positivity and a goofy smile, an attempt at infusing this conversation with levity. “Yes! Complicated. Julia’s right it’s –“

“Complicated,” Jacinda echoed.

John bit his tongue now, or else we would just be sputtering the word ‘complicated’ back and forth and make her disillusioned with the idea we had anything good to say ever.

“Didn’t he love his family?” Jacinda asked. “Why would he need to do that if he loved them?”

John’s eyes could have sprung from their sockets the way he gaped.

“I don’t think ‘need’ is the right word,” I said carefully. “You know. There are things you ‘need’ to do and there are things you ‘want’ to do. Like you ‘need’ to eat and drink water and you ‘want’ to go to the movies.”

Jacinda smiled.

“But sometimes, as you get older, you want things that aren’t necessarily the best thing for you. They’re just sort of…placeholders or…I don’t know.”

John nodded slowly. His Adam’s apple bobbed in a place between speaking and swallowing.

“Like Goldilocks,” I went on, a light going off in my head. “And the bears. You know. She wandered through the woods, and she was tired, and she found the cottage. Now, she was a strong young girl, she wasn’t starving or lost. She could have gone right back home. But that would have been inconvenient or hard and so what did she do?”

Jacinda considered, “Well, she eats their porridge.”

“She eats it! Because it’s there and she’s hungry. And then?”

“She sits in the chairs.”

“Because her feet are tired and she doesn’t want to walk home and then she –“

“Sleeps! In their –”

“Yes! In their beds,” I said, ramping up the drama as if I was telling the story of Goldilocks in its entirety. “Now. She didn’t need to do these things. She wanted to. Because she wanted to be comfortable. And that’s not a bad thing, to want to be comfortable. But she hurt a lot of people, or I guess bears, she hurt them because she wasn’t thinking about them.”

Jacinda pursed her lips, “Because she was selfish.”

“I think what Julia is trying to say is that sometimes we’re so focused on what we want that we sort of forget or block out the other things around us. Other people’s feelings sometimes. So we can be…” John flitted his gaze toward me once more, “comfortable. Right?”

“Right,” I smiled. “As you get older, there are a lot more choices like that. And sometimes you’re better at making them than others.” I leaned down to her and said in a voice just for her, “But what matters is that you try your very best.”

I looked up to John to see if he agreed or if he had anything to add. What I got in return was an easeful gaze and upturned corners of his lips, sated solemnity. “Exactly,” he added. “And you’re already doing a great job at that. Especially with that spelling test today.”

“That was because of Julia!” Jacinda grinned. “She helped me remember how to spell icicle.”

John half-laughed. “Could you teach me? I seem to have forgotten.”

The rest of the ride, Jacinda attempted to teach John how to spell icicle and he played the fool so brilliantly, doping at every turn. I leaned into the passenger window and watched the town rolling past as we made our way back onto Warren Drive. Perhaps I wasn’t as bad as Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment, carrying on with a married man, drawing him away from his family. But there was always that desire for wildness in me. To rail against this perception of my untouchability as a caregiver. I couldn’t reconcile, though, how much of this wildness was genuine and how much was an act. I would need to get quiet about it and put my ear to the earth for a while and let it echo back to what I was. At least for now.

Back to Warren House, inside the front door, shoes kicked off, the small hum of exhaustion and hangover of excitement, all interrupted by John. “Alright girls, it’s well past bedtime, so upstairs and into your pajamas.”

“Will you read to us?” Tamara asked as the three girls slowly started up the stairs.

“You just saw a whole movie,” he scoffed.

“Well, Kiera and I were asleep for most of it,” she frowned.

Kiera agreed with a “yeah” through a long yawn.

“That’s not my fault,” John teased, leaning on the newel post. “But since I’m in a giving mood tonight. One story.”

The girls gleefully bounded the rest of the way upstairs, leaving John and I alone in the front hole, basking in a wake of their spirit.

Neither of us knew quite where to begin though, no doubt both wondering if the other felt some sort of deserved mocking from the movie.

“What a night, huh?” John said nervously through a smile.

I nodded. “You promised there’d be no Fred MacMurray and yet…”

John put his face in his hand and laughed. “I’m sorry, how was I to know?”

“At least it wasn’t The Absentminded Professor,” I said drolly and posted up against the wall opposite him.

John lifted his head and settled his eyes on me for what felt like a long time. I was usually able to pick up on what he was thinking from watching me, whether it was trying to catch me in a fib or gauge whether I was frustrated with him. But this felt entirely different. And I didn’t mind it, being looked at like this, whatever it was. “You were very generous with the whole Goldilocks thing.”

I frowned, “How do you mean?”

“To me. That was generous, you could have just stayed silent and made me stew,” John sighed. “And I would have deserved it to.”

I laughed lightly, “Yes. Well. I don’t know if that would have helped her understand any.”

“Right,” he nodded. “No. You’re right. You’re really good at it… talking to them.”

I smiled shyly. “Oh.”

“I don’t know how you do that; you just seem to whip things up out of nowhere and know the right- the right things to say,” he continued. Fatigue was tiptoeing its way through his words.

“Not always.” Not always.

“When it counts, then,” John replied with one firm nod. “So, thank you for coming tonight.”

“Thank you for inviting me,” I nodded back.

John smiled and then eyed his watch. “Fuck it’s late.”

“I know, you must be exhausted.”

“Me? No, I’m always exhausted so I’m never exhausted. It’s a trick I’ve learned, it’s just my stasis,” he said impishly.

“Is that how it works?” I teased.

John smiled away from me. “Alright, lay off.”

Tamara appeared at the top of the stairs. “Daddy, we’re ready!”

“I’ll be up in a moment,” he called back and then turned back to me looking alert as ever. “Drink? After bedtime?”

“John, you should go to bed,” I said in a low voice.

He let out a plangent sigh. “I’d like to. But I won’t for a while,” he replied. Then, he looked at me, his blue eyes glimmering, no exhaustion in sight. “So unless you’re tired, you should join me.”

Jacinda now joined Tamara. “Daddy!”

“Yes, just a –“

“Kiera is stuck in her dress.”

John's face screwed together into a look of complete incredulousness. “Stuck in her dress?”

“It’s up over her head and –“ Jacinda couldn’t finish her sentence before she descended into giggles.

“Let me deal with that, you go read,” I laughed, patting John on the shoulder before making my way up the stairs. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”

“Good,” John affirmed with a smile.

I went to Kiera’s room and found her laid back on the bed with her dress up over her head and her arms stuck in an upright position. But instead of being distraught, she was humming Kansas City to herself and kicking her legs over the side of the bed.

“Kiera, love, are you stuck?”

The humming stopped. “Yes.”

“Should I leave you to be stuck?”

She laughed like the notes of a song, “No.”

I helped the dress back down over her head and undid the buttons on her collar, teasing her in a little voice all the way about how silly she was. Kiera managed her way out of her clothes and into her nightgown at a slug’s pace, finally settling down into bed.

“Would you like a story?” I asked, already going through some of the books on her bookshelf.

“Mmm…”

“What about Ferdinand? Ferdinand the Bull, you love –“

“Would you sing to me?”

I froze and stared at Kiera who was sitting upright, wobbling back and forth in tired stupor. If I could have written no lullabies into my contract, I would have. I didn’t fancy myself a particularly strong singer, not that that mattered much for lullabies since they were so little and personal. It was that personal bit that nagged at me. I never knew where to start; lullabies from my own child that took me to memories of my mother with whom I now shared an emotional distance we couldn’t seem to bridge? Or lullabies that I had once sung that made my heart feel fit to burst?

“Alright,” I answered, creeping back to the bed.

Kiera patted the spot beside her and, once I sat, she pushed herself into the crook of my arm and rested her head on my chest. “Mm… you’re so soft, Julia.”

I held her there for a bit in silence, hoping she would nod off before I would have to give her the song she was looking for, but eventually she blinked her eyes open. “Are you going to start?”

“I’m just thinking,” I said nervously. “Which one I should do just for you.”

A smile spread across her face as she closed her eyes again, waiting patiently for me to begin. A 5-year-old wasn’t a baby at all, but I could see it in the milkiness of her cheeks and softness of her jaw. I felt overcome with a deep yearning for a baby. Not just a baby. My baby.

I swallowed. I knew a few lullabies, but only one really good one. I used to think it was the most beautiful song in the world and when I first heard it, I thought it would suit a lullaby so well. And it did. Worked like a charm. Always. But after everything, it hurt to sing.

I hadn’t sung it in years and I wasn’t sure how it would feel in my mouth.

“Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you…”

I felt the pinpricks of tears in my eyes.

“Tomorrow I’ll miss you…”

And my fingers jittered as I stroked her arm.

“Remember I’ll always be true.”

It was impossible not to sing it with a smile, though.

“And while I’m away, I’ll write home everyday.”

I leant in closer to the top of her head, caught the scent of clover.

“And I’ll send all my loving to you.”

To my delight, it worked just as it always had, pulling Kiera from her half-sleep into a dreamland.

I must have followed her, because the next thing I knew, I shuddered awake in the middle of the night with Kiera now splayed across my stomach in deep slumber. I began to untangle from her until I realized the lamp was off and there was a blanket across my legs that hadn’t been there before.

I smiled to myself. Maybe it was permission or maybe it was a gift. Whatever it was, I took it, and remained there with her through the night. The aching lullaby heart was more than worth it.

tag list: @jimmys-zeppelin, @calico-skiess, @kari-12-10, @grxtsch, @edal-weis, @ritacaroline, @kyunisixx, @salixfragilis, @rogerfuckintaylor, @rebel-without-a-zeppelin, @jimmypages, @jimmypagearchive, @dollyvandal (always open for additions 💋)

#drink every time they say chitty chitty bang bang #weeeeeee!#a scene away from warren house? blasphemy!#the tropes are intensifying #also my mom sang that song to me when I was little and it lives close to my heart #a little sappy but hey #john paul jones #led zeppelin #fanfiction #fanfic #julia morgan #oh dear #fluff #maddy daddy #jonesy #jpj

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jonesyjonesyjonesy · 3 years ago

Text

Wildflowers (pt. v)

a john paul jones x fem!oc fic

pt. i, crocus pt. ii, gorse pt. iii, primrose pt. iv, willow 🌼 pt. v, heart’s-ease pt. vi.i, daisy 🌼 pt. vi.ii, daisy pt. vi.iii, daisy 🌼

(🌼) denotes nsfw

notes: grief, no seriously grief, hurt/comfort, angst, swearing

a/n: Ah, it had to happen eventually. Julia and John, toe to toe. Please be warned there's allusion to and discussion of grief and death in this chapter. @lady-jane-revisited, my writing confidant, described it as a "rollercoaster" so to continue the metaphor, strap in.

pt. v, "heart's-ease"

"What the fuck is wrong with you? What don’t you understand about ‘leave me alone’?"

need to catch up? click here for pt. iv, willow

It was inevitable that something would break eventually. A hairline fracture, a crack, then shatter. Although I didn’t think it would be so literal when it happened.

The hairline fracture I could only see with hindsight. Let’s start there.

With the girls home over their Easter break, the adventuring was much more varied and irregular. The weather was getting warmer and the rain held off most of the first week, so we managed our way into the forest for a few trail walks. “Only a half hour out,” John had sternly said as I helped Jacinda into her rain jacket. “Nothing more than that.”

I agreed, at least for the time being. After all, half an hour was more than enough time on Kiera’s little legs.

But even with my agreement, my communications with John were feeling very strained. There was no attempt from either of us to try and discuss Tamara’s revelatory information. On my side of things, it felt like a personal subject I should not breach. John wanted things professional and, while disappointing, his disdain for having a nanny in the house didn’t actually have to interfere with my work. At least it wouldn’t have, if not for his sudden switch in attitude. A coldness, a curtness, and a sudden examination of my every move.

I was patient and kind in my responses, even when his tone was verging on hostile. I bit my tongue at every turn. And this was starting to wear on me. Resentment started to ache through my bones that I had to sit by and take his subtle abuses in the name of taking care of his children.

It wasn’t until the afternoon under the beech tree that I realized what was going on. I had convinced Tamara to join Jacinda, Kiera, and me on one of our walks. It was pleasant and quiet, Kiera and Jacinda leading the way excitedly and Tamara and I walking together behind them in relative silence. I was starting to understand Tamara a bit more in the sense that engaging her could be a dangerous task if I caught her on an off day. Of all the girls, she was the least inclined to talk about her mother and yet the most impacted by her loss. Like John, she would wince at the mention of her and when either of her sisters was experiencing pangs of grief (whether expressed overtly or subconsciously) would try to patch it up as quick as she could. “There’s no use crying about it, that won’t do anything,” Tamara would say, almost coldly, if not for the way her arms wrapped around her younger sisters in tender embraces. She had the stiffest upper lip of them all, but took any opportunity for her softness to show, only when eyes were not on her as if that softness being so blatantly seen would make her crumble.

But anyway, the walk that started off quiet, by the end was riotous, with the girls becoming entranced by two red squirrels that were playing a game of tag excitedly through the trees as we followed the path. I suggested they try their hand at squirreliness on the old beech tree at the edge of the great lawn. They raced back out the forest and up toward the tree.

The tree was the sturdy kind with one strong branch at the perfect height for little girls to scurry onto. I stood at the foot of the tree and helped Kiera gain her footing while Jacinda and Tamara both climbed excitedly, trying to see who could get higher. Kiera plodded slowly, still trying to understand how her motor movements could allow her to climb from branch to branch without falling. “I can’t do it,” she pouted.

“Yes, you can,” I said with a smile. “You have to let go with that hand and reach it up there,” I said, pointing to a shorter branch that would be within her reach if she just stretched it out.

“Will you catch me? If I fall?”

“I’ll catch you, but you won’t fall,” I put my hand on her back gently for only a moment before stepping back. “You’ve got it, love.”

And she did. Of course, she did. She would have made it as far as her sisters, albeit slower, if not for the shout from across the lawn.

“What are you doing?”

I whipped around to see John charging down the lawn with a speed I didn’t think he was capable of. There was a terrifyingly wild look in his eyes that stunned me to my spot.

“For heaven’s sake, get down from there!” he shouted to the girls who all were just as taken off guard as I was.

“But look how high up we are!” Tamara exclaimed, swinging her legs over the branch she was on.

“I don’t care how – too high, you’re too high up,” John replied. His usually mellow tone of voice was replaced with high-pitching tension. He stopped at the base of the tree, breath heaving. I was not sure of how to proceed, hoping if I stayed frozen he wouldn’t take much notice of me. The wild look up close was more clear, not so much terrifying as it was terrified. “Help me get them down, would you?”

I reached up for Kiera’s leg. “Of course.”

Jacinda and Tamara begrudgingly descended from the tree; as soon as each of them was in reach, John grabbed them tightly and deposited them back to the safe and steady earth. Kiera easily melted into my arms from her place on the branch, fragile and shaken by her father’s outburst. Once all the girls were back on the ground, John frantically checked them over for any bumps and scrapes before sighing exasperatedly. “Inside, alright? It’s almost dinner,” he said. “Okay?”

“Come on,” Tamara said, taking Kiera by the hand.

Kiera’s eyes tightened at the corners. “I was just – I didn’t get to climb,” she huffed.

“Come on,” Tamara said and, with a final yank, started leading Kiera and Jacinda up to the house.

John and I both watched them go in silence. Neither of us would look at each other. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him run his hand back through his hair just for the hair to fall in his face again. His energy, the stress was palpable, bounding off of him and onto me. He cleared his throat and I looked up to him. “No tree climbing. Alright?” he said, attempting to slacken the strain in his voice to no avail.

“Alright,” I answered.

He gave an almost imperceptible nod and then walked off without another word, up to the house.

I had never met a parent adverse to tree climbing, even in high caliber families. Everyone expected grass stains and muddied pant legs, no matter how much they cost.

And while I was unsettled by his request, I suddenly understood that each and every action he took was tinged with the fear of loss. Maureen’s death, from what Annie told me, was not an accident, but an illness. Sudden, unexpected, ravaging her quickly. They knew the time it would happen and prepared for grief in the best way they could. Regardless of the manner of her death, John was now treading as gently as he could over a rug that had already been pulled out from under him once already. He wanted to be sure it wouldn’t do so again.

We were able to get some distance on Good Friday when John and the girls went out to visit Mrs. Hegarty for the holiday weekend. Mrs. Hegarty had apparently extended the invitation to me as well, but Annie had already claimed me for her family’s celebration. “What do you mean you don’t have anyone to celebrate Easter with?” she asked me incredulously while we washed dishes one night.

“Well, I do, I do, it’s just…” I tried to shake off all the emotional entanglements that came along with thinking about my family. “You know how family can be.”

“You’ve only got one, Julia. Don’t take them for granted.”

I took a dish towel and twisted it thoughtlessly. “It’s all the questions. You know. You wouldn’t want to be the obligatory old maid at the table, would you?”

“Oh, that’s all nonsense,” she snapped. “How old are you anyway?”

“27.”

Annie’s eyebrows jumped. “Oh, well…maybe you are an old maid then.”

“Annie!” I gasped and snapped the towel against her backside.

Annie yelped and grabbed hold of a wooden spoon. “You are going to get it!” she threatened with a laugh and snipped my upper arm. After adamantly repenting for her comment, I agreed to attend her Easter celebration. And, boy, was it a celebration. All of Annie’s five children (three of whom were younger than me) were married and had their own children, save the youngest, Bethany, who was expecting her first baby in August. Bethany was radiant and the belle of the entire event, eager to talk about her impending motherhood with anyone who would listen. I ended up being that sounding board most of the holiday. She was all of 19 and yet seemed so sure of herself. “I think it’s a boy, but David’s sure it’s a girl. But I tell him that I have to be right. I just have to be. The baby’s in me, for goodness sake.” Her gray marble eyes, just like her mother’s, sparkled. “I have to be right.”

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, did I sleep well that night after all the noise and rambunctious love of Annie’s big family. It was something to hold onto when the coldness returned the next morning. Even Kiera and Jacinda’s excited greeting could not distract from the pall that John brought into the house, assisted by Tamara, who slunk off to her room without a word when they arrived. “Did you have a nice time?” I asked when John and I were left alone in the front hall with the girls’ bags.

John shrugged, “It was fine. The girls enjoyed themselves for the most part. That’s all I really care about.”

I smiled, “Makes things a little easier.”

He considered what I had said a moment, eyes drifting from mine to the floor. It occurred to me that if everything was lensed in grief, John was spending a good deal of his time reminding himself that not everything people said was in reference to his wife’s passing. “Yes, certainly does. Holidays have been one of the trickier things,” he said.

At dinner, I noticed dark and sunken bags under Tamara’s eyes, so dissonant against her brightly toned skin and freckles and looking so much like her father whose own weariness showed constantly. I made a point later that night, when I heard John firmly in his studio, to go check on her in her room as had become a sort of dangerous habit of mine after the first night I had read to her.

“You weren’t sleeping well at grandma’s, were you?” I asked, perching at the edge of her bed and reaching for the top book in the stack of orange Nancy Drews on her bedside table.

“Mummy used to lay with us until we fell asleep at grandma’s,” she said and drew herself tighter under the covers as she watched me turn to the bookmarked section in her book. “We have to share a room there and Kiera talks in her sleep.”

I laughed, “What’s she say?”

“Well, last night, she started talking about playing hide and seek,” Tamara said. “Except when she started counting for people to hide, she counted up instead of down. So I never knew when it was going to end.”

“How high did she get?”

“Only to 22. Then she starts skipping numbers.”

“That must’ve been annoying,” I sighed. “21...22…25..38…97…”

“97?!” Tamara laughed. “No, she doesn’t know 97.”

I didn’t even get through a chapter before she was asleep, snoring lightly and curled around her very worn, crocheted blue rabbit. All the tension in her face completely dissipated in sleep. The thorny little girl was no longer so thorny, even if she tended to avoid me in the daylight hours.

I turned off the bedside lamp and would have snuck out of the room and down the hall gingerly if not bumping directly into someone. I gasped and jumped back, now face to face with John who wore an ireful expression.

“Jesus Christ, what is with all of you tiptoeing around and --”

He cut me off with a low and suffering whisper, “What do you think you’re doing?”

My pulse wasn’t able to slow down from the fright. “I was reading to her.”

John was silent. His eyes came into focus in the shadowy hallway, completely iced over they could give me frostbite.

I swallowed and tried to draw him away from the doorway so as to not wake her. “Could we – could we have this conversation in the back?”

“If I’ve ever been anything, Julia, I think I’ve been clear,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “I’ve been very clear about the lines and the – the boundaries.”

“John, I really would like to –“

“This is explicitly crossing that boundary, you know that, right?”

I could not, cannot stand condescension. To be spoken down to, like a child, could spark in me an embarrassing, catastrophic temper. I felt my jaw tighten in an attempt to remain calm. “Yes, I understand. I’m sorry.”

John took an effortful breath to avoid increasing his volume. “You should’ve gotten me.”

“I didn’t want to interrupt you. And your playing.”

His teeth glinted as his jaw hung open, so heavily forward in his mouth, looking for the next thing to say or perhaps sizing me up as a complete dunce. “That doesn’t matter.”

“Noted,” I said quietly.

From Kiera’s room, we both heard her call in a small and half-asleep voice for her father. We exchanged a look, me wanting nothing more than to get away and him being called to attention. But as he went, I couldn’t help but let my contempt get the best of me. “You know she doesn’t sleep well? “

John turned back to me, his hand on the door to Kiera’s room. “What?”

“Tamara. I’ve started reading to her at night because she has trouble falling asleep,” I replied.

Another flash of anger across his face, the flaring of his nostrils and the wrenching of his brow, suddenly met with confusion. “She’s never mentioned it.”

“Right, I figured,” I said and started chewing on the inside of my lower lip. “She looked so tired at dinner, I had to check on her tonight. She says she barely slept while you all were away.”

Reduced to a wounded silence, John stared at me. I had meant it to hurt. And between my exhaustion, and his aggression, I didn’t care what the consequences were. Anything that was to be said further was cut short by Kiera calling out for John; he skittishly launched himself into the room without another word.

The crack. Now it was obvious that things were falling apart, but the two of us pressed on the next day, tensions high but unspoken. I did not check on Tamara the next few days, hearing John pad up the stairs and past my room after bedtime to check on her. Each time he passed through, my blood boiled. I had no more patience. It had been abused incessantly by his arrogance and forceful sanctioning of my work when he, it seemed, had no awareness of what his children actually needed.

This crack probably could have existed for a while without being patched up if not for a poorly timed business trip up to London. “I tried to get out of it, but there was only so much I could do,” he said to me and Annie stoically after dinner one night. “I thought about doing the drive back and forth, but –“

“Oh, you’re not doing that, goodness gracious,” Annie snapped. “That’s ridiculous. Julia’ll be plenty fine, right dear?”

I smiled. Through all of this, Annie had been a guidepost and, while of course tending toward John with her sympathies, she wanted nothing more than for us to get on. “Absolutely.”

The days leading up to his departure were filled with instructions and reassurances (“School pickup is at 4.” “I know, John. I’ll be there at 3:45.”). Arrangements for phone calls over the three days he would be gone, a morning check-in and nighttime call with the girls with a list of emergency numbers to call depending on where he would be. I put all my resentments aside and took in everything with grace and poise, carrying a notepad around with me half the time in case he thought of something unexpectedly. I was determined that John would return to Warren House with the girls in high spirits and that he would see, really see, that I was not just capable and competent, but an asset.

It was all going fine, the first two days. The phone calls, the updates, the girls all contented, even Tamara who we all had been worried would have a fit over John’s absence.

The third day, with John’s return set for the next morning, was when things went entirely awry. When the girls climbed in the car after school, Jacinda descended into a fit of sneezing and sniffling.

“When did you start feeling sick?” I asked.

She stuffily replied, “After lunch,” and then broke into another sneeze.

“Cover your mouth, would you?” Tamara asked, pushing herself up against the car window. “I don’t want your germs.”

By the time we arrived home, Jacinda was a complete wreck of watery eyes and snot. I rushed her up to bed and spent the first part of the evening tending to her. It didn’t seem more than a common cold, nothing to have particular concern over other than her fever. Regardless, I attended to her with my best bedside manner until she nodded off to sweat out the fever.

The phone rang promptly at half past seven and I went down to the kitchen where the girls had crowded around the phone at the dinner table the past two nights. In my head, I ran through the way I would deliver the news: straightforward, calm, matter of fact. Jacinda’s got a cold and a slight fever but she’s doing just fine and you don’t have to worry a bit about it. And then we could move on after an inevitable question and answer session.

Tamara and Kiera raced to answer it, with Tamara nudging Kiera out by the smallest bit. “Daddy,” she answered. “Jacinda’s sick in bed.”

And there went my carefully constructed delivery.

Tamara’s excited smile shifted to a frown before handing me the receiver with her lips curled up. “He wants to talk to you.”

I took the phone from her and answered in as sweet a voice as I could. “Hello, John, how’s London today?”

“Why am I just hearing that Jacinda’s ill now?” John ignored my attempt at pleasantries.

“I’ve been busy with getting her fever down. I think you can understand that,” I continued calmly. Kiera and Tamara both had their eyes trained on me with a discomfiting intensity. I had to keep an even keel for their sake. “She’s doing just fine.”

“I’ll come home now.”

I shook my head, “That’s not necessary, really.”

“It’ll only be –“

“She’s asleep,” I cut him off. “I’ll stay in her room tonight and keep a close eye. You can leave first thing in the morning, but you’re not going to do the drive now, that’s ridiculous.”

He huffed, “It’s not ridiculous, it’s –“

“Forgive my choice of words, I didn’t mean that flippantly,” I said, shutting my eyes tightly. This man would be the death of me, I was sure. “It’s a common cold. I can assure you. You’ve got an event tonight, anyway. Just enjoy yourself.”

A pause on the line, the sound of a lighter clanking against itself and then a long inhale on a cigarette. “I don’t give a fuck about that.”

I had never heard him swear like that and I wasn’t sure if it was exhaustion or if he had been drinking. “Please, let me handle this, John. It will be alright.”

Somehow, miraculously, he agreed and assured me that he’d be out of London early enough to take Tamara to school, which to me was madness but I wasn’t going to fight him on it. After the girls spoke with him, we hung up the phone and went to the playroom for a little extra television that night. By 9, everyone was in bed and sound asleep. I posted up in Jacinda’s room in my nightgown with a copy of Nine Stories. I fell asleep in the rocking chair opposite her bed before being awoken by her deep cough around midnight. I decided to take her temperature, which had dropped slightly since earlier in the evening.

“Julia,” she said quietly.

“Yes, love.”

“I’m so hot.”

“That’s good, then. You’re not shivering anymore,” I smiled and ran my hand over her forehead where several dark brown locks of hair were stuck with sweat. “Let me get you a cool cloth then, alright? And I’ll refill your water too.”

It’s then that I heard the front door open, the heavy creak on its hinge an impossible noise to miss, even from all the way upstairs. Goddammit. It felt like a horror movie as I sat at the side of Jacinda’s bed, just waiting for him. Each of his quick footsteps filled me with dread.

John opened the door to Jacinda’s room carefully, peeking around the door so as to not disturb her. I did not offer a smile or a greeting. I was livid that now in the middle of the night, here he was, dressed in a dark suit and tie and his hair properly coiffed for the first time.

Before he could speak, Jacinda turned over in bed and squinted at her father. “Hi, daddy.”

“Hello, love,” he said with a tired smile and flanked her on the other side of the bed. “How are you feeling?”

“Hot,” she sighed.

John laughed and nodded, “You look it.”

Jacinda stretched her arms up toward his neck and let out a soft whimper. He leaned forward, taking her up in his arms and embracing her tightly with a kiss to the cheek. “Oh, Jacinda, what am I going to do with you?”

I started to get up, murmuring, “Her fever’s down. I was just about to get her a cold compress for her head.”

“I’ll do it,” John replied quickly.

“No, I’ve got it, you can –“

“You can go to sleep, I’ll do it.”

I stared at him, dead in the eye, and reached for her glass of water before wordlessly leaving the room.

He followed, moments later, catching up to me on the stairs. “What the hell are you doing?”

I didn’t stop, course set for the kitchen. “I’m getting Jacinda a glass of water.”

“I said I would get it.”

“You also said you were going to wait to come home until tomorrow morning, so I unfortunately cannot take you at your word,” I replied.

“Are you joking right now?”

I stopped short of the kitchen door. “Do I look like I’m joking?”

The crack, splitting even more. Without an immediate reply, I went into the kitchen to the sink.

John followed. “You can’t be upset with me.”

“I can be however I like.”

“I’m – you’re upset with me,” he repeated almost incredulously.

“Yes, John, I am. I’m very, very upset,” I said, putting the glass into the sink under the stream of water and then turning to him with a firm stance.

“My child is sick, I have every right to –“

“It’s not that. Jesus Christ, are you so thick-headed you can’t see past your own nose?” I couldn’t control what was coming out of my mouth. “Can you not see that you are never satisfied with anything I do? That you don’t trust my judgment or – or – fuck, I’m sick of playing nice over it because there are children involved and because of whatever other circumstances.”

John gawped at me. “You absolutely cannot be serious right now. You are the one who is constantly pushing.”

“Pushing? I’m pushing?”

“Yes, and I cannot help but feel it's purposeful,” he snapped.

I laughed bitterly and turned away, starting to search for a clean dish towel to wet. “That is absurd. That’s the most absurd thing. In fact, it’s – “ In my fury, I wasn’t even able to see straight in the dim, moonlit kitchen, opening every drawer and cabinet without purpose. “It’s offensive.”

“Here.”

I looked up to see John holding out a cloth to me. I took it from him and grumbled a thank you before returning to the sink. “What would I get from that, hm?”

“I don’t know, you tell me.”

I squeezed out the towel fiercely. “If you don’t trust me, I don’t think you should keep me around. That’s what this is about.”

“I’ve done my best to trust you, Julia, but you seem to want to cross lines and just muddle everything up. And then I leave for three fucking days and this happens.”

“I didn’t get Jacinda sick,” I scoffed.

John vacillated. “No, not directly, obviously, but –“

“What do you mean ‘not directly’? I’m not responsible for every breath they take, Christ. You’re –“ I let out a frustrated grunt and slapped the rag down on the counter. “Just because I’m a woman who works with children, doesn’t mean I want to be everyone’s fucking mother, John. And I certainly don’t want to be yours. That’s what’s offensive.”

“No, of course you don’t want to be everyone’s mother. How would you know what that’s really like anyway?”

That’s when my rage turned from red to white hot, bursting across my vision. “My god, you’re a petulant prick.”

John burst into laughter. “Well, at least we’re getting somewhere.”

“As if you know anything about me. As if you’ve even tried. I live in your goddamn house and, in your eyes, I may as well be a creature that goes bump in the night.”

“Well, when you’re sneaking around and ignoring my deliberate instructions –“

“I’m only going to say this once,” I growled. “I’m not trying to be Maureen. I don’t want to be Maureen. And I can’t even begin to imagine how much you are suffering over her death, but that doesn’t give you the right to treat me like dirt. I don’t give a shit who you are.”

As the rage dissipated from my vision, John’s face came back into focus. Paper white and his eyes glazed over. He had a hand gripped to the counter now as if I had physically wounded him. Good, I thought. I pulled the now overflowing glass out of the sink and placed it on the counter beside the wet rag. Then, I walked out of the kitchen murmuring, “All yours,” as I passed John.

I hate to admit how good it felt, even just conjuring the image of his crestfallen face in my memory. But it felt good to shake him to his core after the way he had made me feel the past three weeks. If that meant the termination of my contract, so be it. At least I would be far from Warren House and the memory of John Baldwin or John Paul Jones or whatever it was he was called.

And then there was the break.

I didn’t get far up the stairs before I heard it, the blasting shatter of glass down in the kitchen. I froze in place. Instinctually, despite everything, I flew back down the stairs to the kitchen. The small, dark part of me screeched for me to ignore it, but it was not my way to go things like that unseen. I stood at the door and listened for movement, but I couldn’t hear anything, so I went inside. On the floor was the glass, smashed up in a puddle of water.

No sign of John except for shallow breaths, gulps for air that sounded almost painful.

The longest moment of my life, almost, and then a moan from somewhere in the kitchen. “Please, leave me alone.”

I tiptoed around the kitchen island and found him on the floor with his back up against the cabinets and hunched over himself with his head between his knees. His suit jacket was crumpled up around him, dwarfing him beyond comparison.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know, I think I threw it.”

I pursed my lips, unsure of how to respond.

“Would you just go?”

“John, I can’t leave you here like this,” I said, dropping to my knees a ways away from him.

Suddenly, his head shot up and where I expected there to be hot tears was just helplessly wide eyes and a trembling jaw. “What the fuck is wrong with you? What don’t you understand about ‘leave me alone’? My god.” His words came out as if someone was pressing their hand against his neck, hiccupping and strained. His fingers pressed up into the underside of his jaw suddenly and he swore again.

“It hurts,” I said tentatively. “Your jaw?”

“Julia, please –“ he began, the rims of his eyes going red.

The moment his eyes swam up to mine, I was struck with the memory of a little boy that used to be in my care, Michael, or Mikey as I fondly called him. Mikey was a bruiser of a boy on the playground and, at home, the softest, most loving soul. He would bottle everything up, no thanks to his apathetic father who encouraged his son’s bullyish tendencies. There always came a day, every few months, when Mikey would come to me with a shaking jaw and a desperate look in his eyes, in a huge amount of pain from the tension that had built up from not crying.

“John, you have to cry.”

Surface, hollow breaths. His gaze turned to the cabinet in front of him, hanging onto the ability to not burst into tears. “No, I don’t want to.”

“John –“

“I don’t want to,” he continued. “I have done enough. Enough enough. I have cried enough.”

And despite everything that had happened that night, I reached for him, putting my hand firmly around his bicep. We sat like this for a long while until John muttered to himself: “Oh my god.” And then, as if God called back, he began to weep. Streams of tears seemed to just appear out of thin air.

“Come here,” I whispered and pulled him the rest of the way to me. John gasped up against me, his mouth pulling against the sleeve of my nightgown, arms stiffly at his side yet unresistant to my touch. In my embrace, he felt so incredibly small. His clothes masked his true diminutiveness that I imagined was only exacerbated by grief. I could feel his ribs and hip bones kneading into the soft parts of me. “That’s it.”

A wail, a keen, tore from his lips, absorbed by my body, shaking my ribs. John’s hands found the front of my nightgown, clutching at the fabric like a child hanging onto their mother’s skirt as he leant further into me. My instincts kept on; I combed my fingers up through his hair and began to rock him back and forth. I could feel him relaxing, the tension in his body flooding out even as his sobs continued to echo. I rubbed a hand over his back, feeling the ridges of his shoulder blades through his coat. He smelled like cigarettes and brandy and a distant sort of cologne. Only hours ago, he was pretending to be fine for all to see and now he was a wreck.

And his instincts prevailed as well. There was no limit to his lamentations. They were loud and messy, so opposite the man I met when I arrived at Warren House.

We stayed like this awhile. I couldn’t tell how long. Eventually, his weeping abated and his hands released my gown and spread against my lower ribs to push himself up to sitting. John looked away from me and folded his hands under himself. A lone tear strayed down his face which he quickly swept away. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright. We all need to smash a glass and have a good cry now and again.”

“No, not just that. All of it.”

I knew. The little cruelties that had bent upon me over time. “Me too. I’m sorry too.”

“It’s so hard,” John murmured, leaning his head up against the cabinets and scrunching his eyes closed. His voice was nothing more than a croak at this point. “It sounds so simple but it’s so fucking hard, Julia.”

“Of course.”

“I just want to be good enough. I want to be able to do it.”

I smiled, “You are doing it.”

“No, but,” he opened his eyes again and ran his knuckle up the ridge of the wooden cabinet. “I should be able to do it on my own. I totally – I didn’t even know Tamara wasn’t sleeping, you know? I didn’t even know that. I should know that.”

I sighed, “I was being unkind.”

“No, you were right. To say something. I shouldn’t need you to have to point it out. Fucking embarrassing,” he muttered. “I shouldn’t need your help to begin with.”

“Oh, stop that,” I replied. “John, everyone needs help. That’s why you need two people to do the damn thing in the first place.”

He smiled back at me, “I had no idea you swore so much.”

I laughed, “You either.”

John wrapped his hands around the toes of his leather loafers. “And I can be a petulant prick, you’re right.”

“Don’t hold that against me, I was angry and I…shouldn’t have said that.”

“No, no, I’ll never forget,” John replied with a cheeky glint in his eye and a skewed smile. “You’ll never live it down.”

I was grateful for the moment of levity, but could not shake what needed to be said. “My job is to make things easier for you. That’s it. You have to take a sort of comfort in the fact that even if I wanted to, there would be no way that I could ever be a replacement for the girls’ mother. There’s just no way.”

John’s smile faded. “I think that’s what I’m scared of. That they’ve lost out on that. Completely and utterly lost it.”

“You have to give them a little credit that they’re doing their best to adapt,” I explained. “That’s what childhood is, just adaptation after adaptation. It just gets harder as you get older.”

“Yeah, you’re right about that.”

Silence returned to us, although, for the first time, not entirely uncomfortable.

“She was so brilliant,” he said unprompted. In the moonlight that dripped through the window, John looked a bit beautiful, lips swollen red from crying and an angelic dishevelment to his posture. His deep-set eyes veiled by their lids created a sort of innocence to him. I had forgotten he was still so young.

“I never met her, but if your girls have shown me anything, it’s that Maureen was brilliant.”

John smiled again and his eyes met mine, teeming again with tears, but this time, not held back.

“Because with a petulant prick for a father, their good qualities certainly didn’t come from you,” I dryly added.

John’s tears broke forth with his laughter. A bolt of laughter, just as big as his weeping. He pushed the tears aside and nodded heavily. “That was good. That was good, Julia.”

I leaned forward and put my hand on his knee. “They adore you, John. Give yourself some credit.”

That’s when we heard small footsteps at the kitchen door. I whipped around to find Jacinda there, the poor thing in need of care.

“Cin, don’t come in, there’s broken glass,” I said, holding out a hand and jumping to my feet.

Jacinda looked at the two of us, her tired eyes awakening to the scene before her.

John followed suit and reached for another glass. “Sorry, darling, I was so clumsy.”

I watched her watch him. He could say whatever he wanted. She would see through him and I didn’t doubt she had heard some of his outburst earlier. Jacinda looked at me and I pulled at my collar that I realized was drenched with salty tears. Before I could think, John had grabbed the cloth and glass of water. “Alright, come on, back into bed,” John said, his dress shoes clipping across the kitchen floor. He shooed her out the door and followed her out with a bubbly and lilting voice.

Now, I was the one left alone with the shattered glass. If I didn’t know the truth, it could have been me who had thrown it.

Not a minute later, the door swung open again, John’s hand pressed against it with the energy of both coming and going. “Please don’t clean that up, I’ll get it. Please,” John said with a soft tone.

I smiled, “Sure.”

“Thank you.” As was his fashion with me, he looked as if he would speak again and then decided against it before disappearing back out the door.

I cleaned up the glass and the water anyway and then went up to bed, although it took me a long time to fall asleep. Again and again, I pressed my hand to the slow drying spot on my chest where John had wept. Yes, something had shattered that night. Completely and utterly without hope of being rebuilt. But that meant something new could appear in its place. Something much, much better.

click here for pt. vi.i, daisy

✨ For more of my writing, visit my masterlist. ✨

taglist: @princesspagey, @jimmys-zeppelin, @kari-12-10, @grxtsch, @edal-weis, @salixfragilis, @kyunisixx, @ritacaroline, @rogerfuckintaylor (let me know if you’d like to be added 🥰)

#wildflowers #the nannyfic #john paul jones x fem!oc #john paul jones #and you know what #julia morgan #a queen deserves her own tag #fanfiction #fanfic #rpf #classic rock rpf #hurt/comfort #angst #grief #mo jones <- please forgive me #i love you #the jones gals

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warmday · 3 years ago

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kiera your most recent gifset changed my goddamn life if you have the time/inclination would you be willing to give us a bit of insight on your process for that one? what was going through your brain et cetera? thank u love u you're so talented mwah <3

of course & thank u love u 🌼🌼🌼

okay um. i'll structure this a lil bit with like, a small breakdown for scene choice/idea per character n stuff cause thats planning n then the layout/actual gifs. (whoa this got long sorry for the ramble — if u just want layout type stuff go to ‘design’ in bold lol)

so 'planning' was that i was actually just sorta thinking abt like, reputations in mdzs, n specifically abt wwx n nhs n how different it is for both of them lol, which led to me wanting to create a set about it. i sorta thought like. the line i put in the desc of ‘my reputation precedes me’ with a focus on the ‘precedes’ thing -> leads to having the ‘reputation’ image overtake/block out the ‘true’ image (this is not meta. i am not saying that the behind part is a real self and the front is a fake. there is nuance i’m just talking for the sake of like, creating a starker contrast for the gifs i sort of focused on what i thought separated those facets of these characters) i didn’t actually plan on having everyone but nhs smiling but i knew nhs’ would look different to the rest, its just the behind scenes sorta came up as i made each gif lmao.

the main thing i kept in mind for later when picking scenes/getting frames tho was that the scenes needed to be like, ‘shoulders up’ stuff to make the effect work

so for wwx and wen ning i think that their reputations are more feared, and end up sort of covering how much theyre actually like. human. people. etc. etc. etc.

— for wwx i chose a nightless city confrontation scene for the top and the behind scene is actually from. um cant check rn p sure it was ep 24? the end of that when hes at lotus pier (great scene! yanli smiles so much top tier!) bc like. he loves him family he loves lotus pier guys but ‘yiling laozu’ is said to have ‘betrayed’ them so i felt like the contrast was appropriate.

— for wen ning, as the ‘ghost general’ he’s treated a lot like an object/thing (’wen ning is not a thing’ line or however it went) rather than a person, which is why i went for the scene on dafan mountain bc hes not really himself at that point + highlighted his feared reputation (everyone immediately went terror mode at the sight of him like. wwx is like wait theres smth wrong with him but no one else can notice that bc this is just what they expect of the ‘ghost general’ ya know), so for the behind scene i wanted smth of him smiling bc i like it i think that helps highlight like, no hes a person bro, and specifically i went with the one from ep 50 where hes talking to wwx and gonna leave on his own bc i also thought that was appropriate given how the ‘ghost general’ is always linked to wwx. once again, i was going for the strongest contrast i could find (that also worked like, gif wise).

so gonna skip to lwj and jiang cheng now (dont worry i love nhs). in contrast to yiling laozu n ghost general being ‘feared’ reputations, i think hanguang jun and sandu shengshou are respected reputations: this is why when i posted it i put wen ning and wwx together and lwj and jiang cheng together. obvi like, you’ve got a bunch of ‘thin line between fear and respect’ stuff going on there, but like, in terms of how theyre perceived by others in the story, well i dont remember anyone saying that hanguang jun kidnaps children or kills without mercy lmao. but their ‘respected’ reputations both seem very. untouchable.

— so for lwj. well i actually had some trouble (if u checked the art channel in jerver. well you’ll see my issues). he doesnt emote properly!!! or rather, every scene i thought of for the ‘hanguang jun’ moment he was emoting too much!!!. okay seriously though i knew that i wanted smth happier/more emotional/smiling/etc. for his behind/’lan wangji’ scene bc of how ‘unemotional’/stoic/etc. he’s considered to be, i wasn’t sure exactly what one to go for at first but i went with the ep 50 wwx/sizhui one just bc he’s clearly his most ‘lwj’ around them (lxc lovers dont worry him too but u know what i mean!!!) + its just a nice smile guys :3. i ended up choosing the ep 2 one bc it was the most ‘stoic’ type one i could find that also fit the layout requirements lmao.

— for jiang cheng i knew right away i wanted his behind scene to be the lotus pier flashback/dream bc like. well it makes me cry but also bc i thought it contrasted well with his intimidating sect leader rep. which then just left finding a rep scene where he a) didn’t look like he was actually about to breakdown crying lol and b) fit the layout requirements. so ep 2 again (thank u for my life ep 2)

so now we’re at nhs. i knew right away his was going to contrast all the others bc of how his rep works the other way around from everyone elses — while obvi everyone else (well, not wen ning ig) do work to cultivate their reputations (esp jc imo) its really not used the same way that nhs’ is. the headshaker isn’t really feared and its hard to really say ‘respected’ at least in the same way hanguang jun/sandu shengshou are. so right off the bat it was gonna go the other way. so choosing scenes i also knew i wanted to use that uh.. ep 48 i believe? scene for the behind cause its like. everything he’s been working towards in a moment, its all revealed in that look. and for the ‘headshaker’ scene i needed smth where he’s putting on his act quite visibly + again fits the layout and i really liked the way he hides behind the fan in the one i went with, esp because it sorta created three layers to the gif instead of just two like everyone else. when i made the nhs one i’d already made the wwx and wen ning ones and i’d realised that they faced the left while my nhs one was facing right and i was like ‘hell yes! lets go with this!’ bc i really wanted to make it as visually distinct from the others as possible (hence the third dif: everyone else has a colour, but nhs’ gif is white so it’s a lot starker)

whew okay so:

design

so i made up the base gif, i.e. blended the scenes (as i mentioned — everyone but nhs is overlayed to the left) n just added my base colouring on so the main thing was just getting it to a specific colour and then adding the text + lil border things. so the first one i made was the wwx so i’ll just go thru that:

[id: screenshot of two images of wei wuxian, overlayed: there is no a noticable blue tint to the background scene and to the edge of the top scene. the top left behind his head is white. /end id]

so first just combining the two (already sharpened) scenes — using layer mask on a group to make the overlay for the top scene — i tended to mess around with positioning to hid the bg scene enough but not too much yadda yadda yadda

[id: the same image as before, but the colours are now more vibrant, and there is more red tones in the scene — the blues are still visible. /end id]

then added colouring

[id: the same image as before, but the blue lines around the second image have dimmed significantly, and the other blue tones are now closer to a purple shade. /end id]

then i used selective colour to decolour those blues — i wanted to make the line as invisible as possible.

[id: same image as before, but all the blue/purple shades are now dull red. /end id]

then i paint over a new layer with a colour picked red and set the layer to hue — i painted specifically on the clothing, the right side of the top image, and over the blue line.

[id: the same image as before, but the edges are all black /end id]

then i just painted over again with black to fill in all the edges (set that layer to multiply).

— i basically did this for all of them, just with the respective colour (again, made nhs gif white to create contrast).

so for text:

i then made the first name, in this case ‘wei wuxian’ — i messed around with font for a bit but i knew i wanted smth cursive/script like/etc for the front/title one so i wanted to keep it simple + in caps behind.

[id: same image as before but with small caps sans serif font text reading ‘wei wuxian’. /end id]

so first i just typed it (in lemon milk bold font, small caps) and then converted that text to a smart object.

then i used the marquee tool to highlight the bottom half of that text object —> then, while still highlighted i selected the move tool and moved the bottom half of the text down 15px. then deselect and recentre the whole text layer so it looks like this:

[id: same image as before but the text has been split horizontally. /end id]

then i right click the text object and hit ‘select pixels’ and made a gradient map layer and made it [colour] and black

[id: same image as before, but the text is now coloured red and black. /end id]

— so i choose to split the text like this to a) make more room for the title text, b) symbolise how the title is overtaking the name in the same way the reputation scene is cutting off the behind scene. and i choose to make this part colourful while the title stuff was black/white to further emphasise that bc then it feels more like part of the background rather than text ur supposed to read ya know?

anyway then just write in the title (sudestada regula font)

[id: same image, now with ‘yiling laozu’ written in cursive font. /end id]

then i duplicated the text, put that layer behind it, made it white n moved it off centre so i got this:

[id: same image, but the ‘yiling laozu’ text now stands out with a white border. /end id]

i wanted to do this because it once again reiterated the duplicated theme (obviously it also makes the text actually stand out more, but i did consider just changing the text colour instead but choose this because of the theme stuff).

so it felt mostly finished but i wanted to add smth else so i made little corners with the shape tool and then did the same thing i did to the text (select, make a gradient map) to do this:

[id: same image, but with small lines in an equal L shape in each corner. /end id]

the reason i wanted these was once again to match the theme: they look like frame edges, and its a little bit to the left theme wise but i really like mdzs has a lot to do with ‘framing’ — by which i mean, how a person is viewed by others (e.g. their reputation) and how thats impacting their treatment, the perceived morality of their actions, etc. etc. so i just wanted to tie it all together with smth like that.

and yeah thats basically it lol <3

#wow sorry this is like half ramble half tutorial bullshit but u were too vague and i got in my own head <3 #thank u for the ask tho lexi mwah mwah

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