#name me a more compelling story of loss or guilt

[mediacircuspod]

Toxic love story Jesus and Judas but make it a musical

[onlyymirknows]

What are your headcanons for Reiner coping with Bertholdt’s death? Do you think he actually has the time to grieve during the timeskip or is it only post-Rumbling that he allows himself to fully embrace what happened?

Hello! Thanks for the ask, this is my first on this blog 💖

I think he theoretically has the time to grieve Bertholdt during the time skip but I don’t think he actually does. Reiner’s main methods of dealing with emotional stress are repression and distraction. He basically ignores his problems by occupying his mind with something else.

And Reiner is presented with a really compelling distraction when he returns to Marley:

Fighting for his life and reputation in a brand new war is the perfect distraction from what happened on Paradis. Not just the presumed deaths of Bertholdt and Annie but also his immense guilt over the things he did.

I think the fact that he resorts to suicide the moment he’s confronted with the idea of going back to Paradis is a good indication of how little he’s processed his emotions.

That said, he doesn’t react strongly when people mention Bertholdt which tells me that he’s accepted it factually. But in my head, Reiner hasn’t bothered to confront the emotional reality of the loss (among a ton of other things) because he’s got his finish line.

In addition to that, there’s nobody for him to talk to about Bertholdt in Marley. Everyone back home only knew 11 y/o Bert, not the 16 y/o he developed into. Reiner also can’t admit to the fact that the two experienced a big shift in their worldview together (eg- island devils don’t exist.)

So it wouldn’t be until after the Rumbling that he has to contend with a lot of his unresolved trauma, including the grief of losing his best friend. (And potentially his love interest/boyfriend depending on who you ask.)

Best case scenario is his friends/family proactively encourage his healing and don’t let him run away. Worst case scenario, he goes full distraction mode (my HC is workaholism) and won’t admit there’s a problem until he falls apart.

Some talk about my relevant long fic below the cut

My fic is gonna be about the worst case scenario because I want to dig into the emotional aspects of his character. Namely his unresolved grief, childhood emotional trauma, and queerness.

Plus I want to write about how trauma feels, having been on my own healing journey. It’s kind of a vent fic that spun out into a full narrative that I really need to write an outline for lol.

It’s gotten a bit complicated with multiple POV’s/plot threads so I’m taking my time. I watched a video recently talking about the pitfalls of serialized fiction. I’d like to avoid some of the bigger ones, namely putting in scenes/details with no narrative purpose.

Not everything needs to be Chekov’s gun but I’m sure you know how it is 🤭 so an outline is gonna help a lot. But I feel pretty good about the main story beats! I could talk about my fic a lot more but I’ll leave it here.

[pennamenotfound]

I feel like one of the reasons that the Bells Hells are so interesting and compelling to me is that they’re all so angry. Anger is so interesting to me because of its volatility. The way it can, more than any other emotion, be twisted. Think of how much more volatile Percy was in campaign one because of his revenge boner than Caleb in campaign two with his deepset guilt and grief.  

And like, sure, we had anger before in the other campaigns.

Like Percy was super angry obviously, and Vex had her rage, and Scanlan had his moment (what’s my mother’s name) in Campaign one, and you could probably pull moments for the rest of Vox Machina. Grog’s a barbarian, he rages all the time. Plus with his herd. Okay, sure. Vax certainly had his moments. Keyleth at Raishan. (I don’t think Pike realy had any real anger moments in her arc.) But their stories don’t rely on their anger as much as Percy and Vex, and not nearly as much as Bells Hells. 

In the Mighty Nein, there’s Beau who is super angry at the world, justifiably so, but the rest of the party not so much. Caleb and Yasha are guilt and grief. Cad’s faith. Jester definitely had her problems with emotion, but anger wasn’t really part of it so much as learning to let herself feel something other than happy. Fjord’s journey to Melora was much more about introspection, Veth’s journey back to herself was certainly emotionally taxing for her, but it’s back to greif and loss for her. Kingsley is all about discovery, and Essek was about finding friendship. 

But Bells Hells. They’re all so angry. With maybe the exception of Chetney, but he’s also a werewolf which is its own sort of instability. 

Ashton’s a given---Tal’s so good at anger in his characters. Perfect punk, angry at the world, angry at their situation. *chef’s kiss* perfect barbarian

Imogen has such rage bubbling. “We’re gonna sunder you, Delilah Briarwood” for one, but also, with her mother. With her powers. 

Fearne with her parents. The way she was discovering her anger had so much potential, and I really wanted to see her actually throw some fireballs or something.

Orym. I saw the look on Liam’s face when he had that insight check whisper from Tuldus. Dude, Otohan and the Ruby Vanguard killed his husband and his dad (I know, father in law, but Orym says dad.) He’s the nice one, he’s said it before himself, but... under the surface, i think he’s got some rage in him. 

FCG. Oh, FCG, with their unpredictable rage mode. Trying so desperately to be the caretaker when they don’t even know what they are. The professor in Yios gave him a lot of good information, but there’s a lot they don’t know. 

For me, with FCG and Orym both, it’s a lot of aren’t you tired of being nice? Don’t you want to go apeshit?

And then Laudna. Laudna, with the most to be angry about. She was murdered by the Briarwoods, and spent the next thirty years with her murderer in her head. Looking like a corpse. Not knowing if she was dead or alive. Being chased out of towns all over Tal’Dorei until she ran all the way to Marquet. No friends, even before she died, before Imogen. And she’s really the most interesting to me. Because we don’t see a lot of rage with her. Even with Percy in Whitestone, it’s forgiveness. It’s understanding. The only time I remember in the campaign her really being angry was when FCG turned on the party that time, and that was related to Delilah’s manipulations. 

Orym said once something like she had the worst thing out of all of them happen, and yet she’s the happiest, and how is that? And she goes, well, because the worst thing that’s happened to me already happened. 

And it’s so interesting to me because we could, in another universe, have another Ashton in Laudna. Because, really, very similar things happened to them. Both died. Both put back together not quite right, not quite in control of their situation. Feared, even. 

But she’s so loving, caring, and not wrathful, and honestly, I’d kind of love to see some anger from her. And I think we might see it if Imogen gets hurt.

Anyway i’m unhinged about bells hells. I love vox machina and mighty nein but I’ve connected most to bells hells because I’ve been watching CR since CR3 started, and I love my angy bois. 

[thelordofgifs]

One characterisation choice in the fairest stars that I feel compelled to defend a little is that of Maedhros – and specifically, the way he grieves. Honestly Maedhros being both such a fandom favourite and also SO messy and complex makes him an intimidating character for little me to try to write, so I do hope he comes across in tfs as recognisably himself!

Anyway, I think after the posting of Part 10 (which ended with Curufin’s dramatic lie that Fingon and Maglor were both dead), a lot of people were expecting Maedhros to go absolutely feral and furious with grief; and the direction I chose, of grief that absolutely froze him, grief that broke him, grief that was completely disabling even before the unreality attack started, might be a little unexpected? After all, Maedhros in canon is defined by his resilience: within a few years of being rescued from Thangorodrim, he’s done some impressive political wrangling, learned to fight left-handed, and headed off to the eastern front of the war against Morgoth.

Counterpoint: Maedhros canonically responds to the loss of a loved one by freezing, messing up, or otherwise removing himself from the narrative.

A chronological list of examples:

Finwë. Okay, admittedly Maedhros keeps his head quite well on his grandfather’s death: in some drafts he’s the one who delivers the news to the Valar and (though he doesn’t realise it) his father. What he notably doesn’t do, however, is rush after Morgoth and Ungoliant in a blind quest for vengeance. That’s his father’s job! And despite some superficial similarities, I don’t think Maedhros is much like Fëanor; or, rather, I think he deliberately makes an effort to be different to Fëanor.

Amrod. Not really published silm canon, but it’s worth noting that in the Shibboleth of Fëanor version, after Fëanor realises that he accidentally killed his youngest son, “nobody dared speak of this matter to Fëanor again” (might have slightly butchered that quotation bc I’m not looking it up). This is in a version of the story where Curufin was the only son involved in the ship-burning, so Maedhros doesn’t even have any particular culpability or guilt complex around Amrod’s death, but still – no significant reaction.

Fëanor. One of the obvious examples! Immediately after his father’s death, Maedhros makes the stupidest decision of his life and agrees to parley with Morgoth – despite having just sworn to avenge Fëanor! My own reading of this situation is that Maedhros simply wasn’t thinking clearly; stunned and grieving, he went along with what felt like the easiest course of action, and paid a terrible price for it.

Fingon. Another classic example. Maedhros after Fingon’s death is absolutely defined by his inaction – he spends some thirty years post-Nirnaeth simply wandering in the wilds, and, when time comes for the Second Kinslaying, it’s Celegorm who spearheads that. We aren’t told anything about Maedhros’ reaction to Fingon’s death (because ouch), but it doesn’t feel like a huge leap to say that it devastated Maedhros, so much so that he just. shut down.

Post-Second Kinslaying things get murkier because Maedhros has imo more upsetting things to deal with than his brothers’ deaths, namely his own terrible fall from grace. But I would like to point out that after the Third Kinslaying and one or both twins’ deaths (depending on your preferred Amrod crispiness), it’s Maglor who cares for Elrond and Elros; Maedhros, you could argue, is not in the mental state necessary to do so.

God this got long. Anyway, with regards to tfs specifically, Maedhros is dealing with a loss that’s actually worse than anything he experiences in canon – he thinks BOTH Fingon and Maglor are dead, at the same time! So I hope his reaction doesn’t feel too out-of-character; I was worried, in writing it, that I was woobifying him too much, but I do think there’s some canonical justification for this interpretation of him. Hopefully. And thank you to everyone who’s indulging this silly little story and all my unasked-for babbling about it ❤️❤️

[rusquared]

Life, rudely, interrupts my mourning.

Walking up and down my most familiar part of the city, podcast blaring in my ears lest any Silence creep in, I am rudely interrupted by the fireflies coming alight. It’s a gentle twinkle, a passing flicker in one’s periphery, and so you feel compelled to look. Even the rainbow, just faintly visible outside my window after a brief thunderstorm - or the remnants of that lighting to the east half an hour later, illuminating clouds that looked something out of a childhood film - they interrupt me. They interrupt me.

Back to schedule, I pass by a science building and I think, “I should’ve gone there more often.” Or I think of the emails still left unread and go, “I shouldn’t be in this position.” or the uncomfortable envy that occasionally takes over, that I know to be selfish and cruel, but tantalizing nonetheless. This is my daily routine, permeating every moment, interrupted just briefly by the Present.

Sometimes I get sick of mourning Me (the perfect, untouchable, lovable Me) and I turn to other avenues. A piece of art that will occupy my time (I have emails to send, I have work to do) or even the occasional poem, never really written out of joy anymore. Or a paper flower, a crane (I haven’t called my mother in two months).  A dog greeting me in boundless joy every morning  because I can manage the bare minimum of kissing her soft head.

Walking downhill from my evening walk, and determinedly ignoring any person whose silhouette could be someone I know (and therefore someone who will hear of my failure), I read an essay on mourning. Actual mourning, mind you. Of death that is not simply the loss of a possible self, but the loss of a person you could touch and hug and tease relentlessly over a misspoken phrase. I have not, thus far, become familiar with that sort of mourning. I know it will arrive, I can only hope for it to take its time.

But the essay was still gripping. I haven’t even finished it, but it’s echoes are already becoming noticeable in the way I write this poem tonight.  Twice during this reading I paused, took a screenshot, and thought of the story that I love. And immediately I was filled with a slight shame. This beautiful piece on loss and love was probably not meant to be shared with a fictional name by someone who spends most of their waking hours avoiding reality. I wasn’t the target audience, though I know and fear that I one day will be. When that day comes, I wonder if my mourning of Me will finally cease, become silly and ridiculous. How could I mourn a nonexistent self when I’ve lost someone I actually knew and loved?

I digress. The slight chill of the rain is still in the air and the dog once again welcomed me home with her tail wagging furiously. I still have a laundry list of tasks and I still have the aching guilt of shame. Or the aching shame of guilt. The terms tend to get juggled around in my head. I know there is no point in dreaming every minute of a life re-done, much better, a regression, if you will (hah). I only have this life and its mundane hurt, the way the clock doesn’t humor my desperate attempts to stop it, the way the days on the calendar got lost to me even as I was acutely aware of them. Even as I stared at the calendar.

There we go. I’m back on track, fireflies and stories be damned. My imagination is once again active and if you could only see the beautiful plans I have for when that time machine is complete. A life of no mourning except the inevitable mourning that will take its time, because I asked it to. 

I want to draw again.

[gealach-in-a-misty-world]

With the plot against them foiled and the city of Qi-Katai in safe hands, Velasin and Caethari have begun to test the waters of their relationship. But the wider political ramifications of their marriage are still playing out across two nations, and all too soon, they’re summoned north to Tithena’s capital city, Qi-Xihan, to present themselves to its monarch. With Caethari newly invested as his grandmother’s heir and Velasin’s old ghosts gnawing at his heels, what little peace they’ve managed to find is swiftly put to the test. Cae’s recent losses have left him racked with grief and guilt, while Vel struggles with the disconnect between instincts that have kept him safe in secrecy and what an open life requires of him now. Pursued by unknown assailants and with Qi-Xihan’s court factions jockeying for power, Vel and Cae must use all the skills at their disposal to not only survive, but thrive – because there’s more than one way to end an alliance, and more than one person who wants to see them fail.

"We are not tragedies". Foz Meadows' All the Hidden Paths is the surprise sequel to last year's A Strange and Stubborn Endurance, an excellent exploration of abuse and healing that became one of my favorite books of 2022. The first book seemed to be a standalone novel and resolve everything, although it left some threads; these threads are explored beautifully in this sequel, where the question is pretty simple: what next? After facing one's fears and coming out, what is next?

The answer is that of course not everything is finally and magically solved; one has to work through one's issues. Vel struggles for the most part of this novel with his dark thoughts, pulled forth by the turmoil Cae himself is feeling after the events of the first novel. They need to learn to know each other and trust each other, and most importantly, communicate. This novel features a constant push and pull between Velasin's trauma and Caethari's sense of inadequacy that isn't perfectly resolved, setting perhaps the stage for a third book. I would love a final volume in this series; the news of this one sequel had taken me completely by surprise. One can see that there's still material to explore, if the author wanted to.

The mystery is more enticing than the one in the first novel's, less straightforward and thus exciting as the duo, with the help of Vel's valet friend and a reluctant ally, attempt to find the name behind an unnerving number of murder attempts. The appearance of many new characters makes the narration vibrant and well-rounded, with a sharp focus on the intricate politics of the new court setting, building on the rich world-building of the first novel. Caethari and Velasin don't know who to trust, and we are left spinning with possibilities as they navigate such unfamiliar grounds at the same time as they attempt to navigate their relationship and overcome the hurdles coming their way. It's refreshing to see that even despite the conflict building, we never doubt their love for each other. This novel is also definitely spicier than the first, with a good number of sex scenes that range from being intimately sweet to exceedingly intense. Once again, one can only be grateful for the author's decision to put trigger warnings at the beginning of the novel.

Onto the elephant in the room, or rather, the new POV that dominates a few interludes: the character's journey was compelling and his plight made one sympathize with him, but there was perhaps an issue of pacing, where a few more interludes might have been needed to better appreciate his story and how it entwined with the main characters'. As things stand, one finds oneself wanting for more, and his ending especially feels a bit abrupt.

All the Hidden Paths is a stunning sequel that builds on the lovely foundations of the first novel.

✨ 4.5 stars

.

📚📚📚 IF YOU LOVE THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE:

* A Taste of Gold and Iron, by Alexandra Rowland

for: anxiety, politics

[You can find more of my reviews about queer speculative fiction on my blog MISTY WORLD]

[cathygeha]

REVIEW

The Shattered Bones by David Santana

Deep dive into a dark world that saw mental and physical pain suffered by more than one character in the book ~ It was dark, gritty, compelling, and immersive ~ WOW!

What I liked: * That it took me out of my comfort zone

* It made me think and feel and question “what ifs”

* That characters could not be clumped into only good or evil ~ most were complex

* The plot, pacing, settings, and writing

* The hints about why Rylan started his journey and mission without really knowing 100% the true reasons behind what he is doing ~ Hope they will come out over the rest of the series

* Ryland’s backstory that came out in flashbacks ~ They made me want to know more about him and what set him on the path he chose to follow

* Abigail: The woman Ryland loves, marries, and has a child with ~ want to know more about her, too

* Emily: Ryland’s mother, protective mother, caring, conservative, loving, supportive – want to know more about her

* Jean: Ryland’s little sister, a bit of a pest, enjoyed education and became an educator, won’t tell you more but she may have a bigger part as the series progresses

* The Garbage Route: a list of places Ryland plans to stop on his mission ~ Do wonder how he chose the people he will stop to “spend time with”

* The journal that Ryland is keeping on his journey and the information he chooses to record.

* Helio: FBI agent, from immigrant parents, bright, single, has baggage from the way he was raised, has potential, will probably have a bigger part to play as the story progresses

* Knowing that there is another book to look forward to.

What I didn’t like: * Who and what I was meant not to like

* Not having all of the answers at the end of the book and though not a cliff hanger…definitely left me eager to read what comes next

Did I like this book? Yes

Would I read more in this series? Definitely

Thank you to the author, Goodnight Highway Publishing, and NetGalley for the ARC – This is my honest review.

5 Stars

BLURB

Army veteran, Rylan "Rye" Beam, struggled to find balance after the Iraq War, reaching for a version of himself that no longer existed. With his boots back on American soil, he began building a family, convinced he was "maintaining" by drowning his demons in a bottle of whiskey. Unaware of how delicately he teetered on the brink, a devastating tragedy suddenly collapsed the ground underfoot and sent him headlong onto a murderous path.  Unable to cope with the loss of his family, Rylan resolves to die, but fearing he has squandered his life, vows to make a difference on the way out. He sets off on a cross-country quest for redemption and retribution, carrying a hammer in one hand and a list of twenty-one names in the other, while a brash young FBI agent finds himself tasked with picking up the trail of a serial killer. As his list becomes shorter, Rylan's mind begins crumbling under the weight of long-repressed guilt and an increasing number of broken bodies, and what began as a desperate man's attempt to satisfy a twisted sense of duty, evolves into something new when he starts interviewing his victims. While seeking to understand what motivates people to commit violent crimes, his victims' stories challenge his rigid perception of guilt and innocence, forcing him to question the limits of justice. THE SHATTERED BONES, is the first novel in a multi-part series chronicling the journey of a serial killer, the experiences that shaped him, and an FBI agent's struggle to stop his rampage.

AUTHOR BIO

David Santana is a retired US Army Infantryman, a former drill sergeant, and a veteran of multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Born in Colorado Springs, CO, he currently resides with his family in Washington DC. THE SHATTERED BONES, his debut novel, is a product of over a decade of development, and is a semi-finalist for the 2024 Kindle Book Award in the horror/suspense category. Discover more about this exciting new author at: TheDavidSantana.com

[therealvinelle]

I know this is like taking a bat to the beehive but... I really wanna hear your opinions on the whole... Imprinting thing

(Note before we go any further: this meta is written purely about the shapeshifting aspect of the Quileute characters, I don’t at all get into the racism in Twilight or any kind of social commentary. This is a purely watsonian meta. Others in this fandom have already addressed the racial dynamics at play, far more eloquently and knowledgeably than me. If I say something in here that’s in any way offensive, that’s not my intention and I’m open to criticism.)

Ooh imprinting.

I touch upon it here, basically I hate it.

The imprinting is part of this theme where the shapeshifters lose their free will and autonomy, and I find it tragic, cruel, and unnecessary.

First of, the fact that they have to phase at all.

They’re made warriors to protect their tribe. There’s no choice involved, only genetics and magic irrevocably changing their lives, and at a ridiculously young age, too. Sam is the oldest of them, and he is 19.

Violence is an inherent part of what they become. Their purpose is to protect the tribe, by fighting vampires. Not only is this insanely dangerous (we see Jake get so injured by a single vampire that he’s bedridden for weeks), but if they succeed, they will have killed. In the singularly brutal manner of tearing apart and burning someone who looks a lot like a human, who talks and might beg for their life, at that. And I remind you, most of these shapeshifters are literal children. They might not see vampires as people, but all the same, killing one can’t be good for their mental wellbeing. (Thought: Perhaps an argument can be made for Laurent’s death having a part in the turn Jake’s personality took? Some, though not many, of the symptoms for PTSD do fit. I don’t know enough about PTSD to pursue this train of thought, but it occurred to me just now, in particular he becomes quite aggressive and prone to outbursts after that incident, so into a parenthesis it goes)

Not to mention how inhumane that responsibility is. Vampires in the Twilight-verse are terrifying, and the shapeshifters might have the power to fight them. But (and this is where I plug one of my all-time favorite animes, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, as it asks the question “Is it okay to sacrifice yourself for others?” because that’s... well there’s a parallel to be made to the shapeshifters. It’s on Netflix!) does that mean they should? Is it really their responsibility? Again- they’re kids!

Then there’s the time Sam lost control, and accidentally mauled the girl he loved. And it’s so cruel to both him and Emily. Sam never chose to have to control himself in the first place, he never chose shapeshifting. He didn’t choose to imprint on Emily either, and he didn’t choose to lose control that day. At no point in the series of events that led to Emily being mauled did Sam have any real choice, and yet he will shoulder the guilt for what happened for the rest of his life.

These kids get superpowers, and several of them seem to enjoy being shapeshifters, but the fact remains that they now carry this huge responsibility to protect their families and homes, doing so is incredibly dangerous, they lose out on their regular lives, and they can’t opt out of it.

This all sucks, but then we get to the fact that they are deprived of their free will, as their alpha can issue an order they physically can’t break. The alpha becomes alpha because of bloodlines, not because of a democratic election. Jake got a mockery of a choice in that he could choose to become alpha himself, or let Sam continue, which was really just choosing between a rock and a hard place. There is no limitation to what this order can be, from “don’t say X to person Y” to “let’s kill someone you love”. Jake has to struggle to break that last one, and he’s only successful because of the bloodline thing letting him become his own alpha.

Oh, and there’s the massive invasion of privacy when they have a hive mind. Cool concept, less cool to have it be reality. Leah is the poster child for how a hive mind can backfire, and they can’t opt out of this.

I’m not good at gifs, but the shapeshifters just make me think of that gif of someone flicking a lightswitch on and off, “WELCOME TO HELL!”. Of course, Twilight in general is a pit of despair for everybody, so I suppose that gif really is... well it sums up all of canon.

So, we have these kids aged 19 or younger, as of Breaking Dawn they skew as young as thirteen, their lives are turned upside down by something they can’t opt out of, they must shoulder this huge responsibility to protect their homes and families from the terrifying threat of vampires, and on top of all of that, they must obey orders that are so irresistible, they can compel them to harm someone they care for.

With all of that in mind, you’d think that the shapeshifters had enough on their plate. That through all of this they would at least retain their selves, and be able to look forward to a future where they could stop phasing, and go on to live normal, human, lives.

Yeah, NOT IF THEY IMPRINT.

I’ll just quote Jake’s description:

Everything inside me came undone as I stared at the tiny porcelain face of the halfvampire, half-human baby. All the lines that held me to my life were sliced apart in swift cuts, like clipping the strings to a bunch of balloons. Everything that made me who I was—my love for the dead girl upstairs, my love for my father, my loyalty to my new pack, the love for my other brothers, my hatred for my enemies, my home, my name, my self—disconnected from me in that second—snip, snip, snip—and floated up into space. 

I was not left drifting. A new string held me where I was. 

Not one string, but a million. Not strings, but steel cables. A million steel cables all tying me to one thing—to the very center of the universe. 

I could see that now—how the universe swirled around this one point. I’d never seen the symmetry of the universe before, but now it was plain. 

The gravity of the earth no longer tied me to the place where I stood. (Breaking Dawn, page 237)

Everything that made me who I was disconnected from me.

Jake’s love for his father, his home, his very own self, it’s all gone now. And while I have thoughts on the authenticity of this imprint, whether it was organic, the description above is apparently how imprinting feels. It’s along the lines of what Sam, Jared, and Paul all describe.

I don’t think I can put into words just how devastating I find imprinting, I think the above quotation speaks for itself. And as with all other shapeshifter things, there is no choice involved.

We see its devastating effects in the Emily, Sam, and Leah debacle. Sam and Leah were serious together, so much so that they were engaged. Sam had fallen for and chosen to be with Leah. Perhaps they would have broken up eventually, but Leah was still the choice he made. Then he imprints on Emily, and all that is for naught. He had to break up with Leah, who if she hadn’t phased never would have learned why, Emily and Leah’s relationship is ruined, and Emily must forever live with the knowledge that if Sam had his free will intact he would be with another woman.

Then there’s Jared and Kim. Kim crushed on Jared, but Jared never noticed her. The fact that they were in the same class is damning: if a boy is attracted to a girl, he's gonna notice her. Jared never did.

Quil imprints on Claire, who is a toddler. That’s just a recipe for misery and disaster all around.

And I’ve only touched the shapeshifter side of things. They lose their autonomy and freedom, but the imprintées draw the short straw too. They’re now responsible for this other person’s happiness. Sure, having someone who’ll be whatever you need them to be sounds nice (well, it sounds horrifying, but I’m playing ball) on paper, but you can’t opt out of them being like that. The imprintée can’t say “Sorry, not interested,” and she certainly can’t shut the imprinter out of her life, not without irrevocably ruining the imprinter’s life. The imprinter needs her. She’s the center of his earth now, but she didn’t choose to be.

Imprinting is a liferuiner for everyone involved.

Then we have the question of what imprinting is even for. I’m afraid I agree with Billy, that it’s for procreation. We see Sam, who was dating a woman about to phase (even if Leah isn’t infertile, she’s a warrior now. She can’t run in the woods and fight vampires, and gestate and nurse a child at the same time) conveniently imprint on her cousin, who as cousin to Leah is from a shifter bloodline. Claire, as Emily’s cousin, has those same genetics. Paul imprints on a woman from the Black family line. Jake is the outlier, but either Renesmée’s gift helped that imprinting along, or he imprinted because of the offspring they could potentially have (I firmly believe it’s the former because the latter... NOPE. Also, I can’t imagine whatever magic drives imprinting would want vampiric progeny for the future generations. Regardless of Renesmée’s person, her biology is wired to desire human blood. That’s exactly what Jake is supposed to protect people from. Bad match.).

I just.... ughhh. God, I hate imprinting so much, and on every level.

To me, everything about the shapeshifters is about free will, autonomy, and the loss thereof. And it would have been beautiful if their story was about reclaiming that, but it isn’t. None of this, with the exception of the alpha orders, is even acknowledged.

So, in summation, yes I hate imprinting, but it’s only the horror cherry on top of a very sad and problematic cake.

[softyoongiionly]

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Just outside the boundaries of your town, deep within the trenches of the forest sits a massive tower made from smoke-stained ivory. Decrepit and ominous, it looms over your town like a warning- like a shadow...

There are opposing rumors as to what resides in the tower.

One of them, the one that just so happens to appeal to you the most, is that there is a deity living in that tower.  

The one who knows.  

The one who blesses and curses the deserving and offers wisdom that no mortal can.  

And now, faced with the imminent demise of your family- you have no choice but to seek answers in the darkness. 

What, in god’s name, will you find?

Pairing: Jimin x Reader

Genre: demi-god! au, demi-god! Jimin, mythology, slight angst, smut, fantasy

Word count: 8k (THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PWP)

Warnings: likely inaccurate representations of greek mythology lmao, unprotected sex (wrap it up plz), mentions of violence/death, slightly spooky??? allusions to corruption and murder (non-explicit), JIMIN (cause he’s always a warning), probably a messy plot cause I went feral with this one. parts are unedited oops. 

A/N: i have nothing to say. this was supposed to be demon porn and now we have a completely new au. SOMEONE PLEASE STOP ME. okay anyways,,,, i love u. 

Corruption.  

It ran rampant through your town like the plague, devouring everything in its path. One right after another, you have seen it swallow those who you had come to respect; good town folk, who at one time, moved through the world with a moral compass stronger than the one you felt you possessed, had now fallen ill to the disease.  

And you understood...to an extent. The universe was not a benevolent dealer. It randomly assigns cards to its patrons and cares not about the outcome- or the losses. You understood that sometimes people were simply without a winning hand.  

But the need to win was still present.  

However, your town was spoiled with a type of greed that wafted through the streets and turned everything to mold. Neighbor betraying neighbor, partner betraying partner- even mother’s betraying their children...

All to please one man...

Lord Instinctus was the ruler of your province. Born into nobility, he took over the position after his father passed away and began turning the tides in his favor. Taxes were raised, work hours following suit and, harsh punishments were administered to anyone who dared questioned the new system. He forced your town to pledge their loyalty to him on the day he took over and sent ‘enforcers’ to hide out in the town in search of any signs of rebellion.  

However, his cruelty was not unique. Too many men have followed the path paved before them and suckled at the teet of avarice, until they were compelled to out do one another.

To outkill one another...

What made Lord Instinctus unique was the fact that he had never shown his face before. During his initiation into the noble court, the townspeople were given blindfolds and told to face away from their Lord and simply listen. Few people broke the rules but, the ones who did were immediately executed.  

You still remember the shudder that ran through your body as you heard the sound of your townspeople hitting the pavement. From that point on, the tone was set. Insubordination means death; the terms were simple.  

The lack of knowledge and the possibility of death didn’t stop speculation from blooming. In fact, the appearance of the Lord was essentially the usual topic of conversation at every pub on the main street. After the freeing of spirits, both liquid or otherwise, the rumors begin pouring into the atmosphere.

“He’s probably horribly deformed...”

“Inbreeding is common amongst the nobility; it would make sense...”

“My cousin walked by the villa the other day, he said Lord Invictus had a tail!”

“A tail you say?! So is he some sort of hybrid?!”

“Oh please, that’s preposterous- he's probably just hideous...”

You bite your bottom lip, as you wipe the whiskey from the chestnut countertop, resisting the urge to smirk. Bartending was certainly not a glamorous job but, it paid your taxes and helped put food on the table for you and your family.  

Glamorous it was not but, amusing it definitely was.  

“I bet you he still beds a new woman every night though...”

“A pretty face ain’t worth more than all that gold he has aye?”

“Maybe he’s cursed...”

“That wouldn’t surprise me either- I hear noble families make deals with the magic folk all the time.”

“If you all want to know so bad, why don’t you just pay the tower a visit?”

With that meager suggestion, the bustle of the pub comes to halt- all eyes now on the man who mentioned a topic that is normally banned from public spaces.

“What? You can’t tell me you haven’t wondered what was up there...”

“We know what’s up there-”

“Or rather- who's up there.”

Just outside the boundaries of your town, deep within the trenches of the forest sits a massive tower made from smoke-stained ivory. Decrepit and ominous, it looms over your town like a warning- like a shadow...

It’s said to be the home a monster.  

The tower was used as a prison for the most dastardly of criminals. For years, just before the establishment of your town, it served as a last resort for the rotten underbelly of society. Countless lives were taken, madness ensued- until the revolution came. The tower was set aflame by revolutionaries but for whatever reason, it did not crumble.  

The ivory merely sizzled and turned gray and then over time, it turned black. For years it was abandoned until one day, just after sunset, light emanated from the tower once more. Onlookers who were near the building went inside to see if some vagrant had moved in.  

And they never returned...

Several spiritual advisors have visited the town, including religious figures from various faiths, and they have all arrived at the same conclusion: a demon has taken residence in the tower. Despite the efforts to bless the building, the light comes on every evening.  

Thus, it is assumed that the demon remains unharmed.  

“What about Mrs. Jeon? She left offerings for the beast and her son was cured of the plague the next morning.”

“Or Mr. Kim- he left one as well and found gold in his backyard that very night...”

“You aren’t suggesting there is a benevolent being in that tower, are you? Should I remind you of how many disappearances have occurred?”

There are opposing rumors you suppose.  

One of them, the one that just so happens to appeal to you the most, is that there is a deity living in that tower.  

The one who knows.  

The one who blesses and curses the deserving and offers wisdom that no mortal can.  

“Hey here’s a thought- how about Jacob tests his theory eh? Why don’t you go down and find out yourself? Report back to us with your findings...”

The pub erupts with laughter now, the uneasiness slowly melting away from the room.  

You elect to keep your thoughts to yourself, as you finish up counting the money you had made from that evening- making sure to leave a portion for the incoming team.  

The bite of the winter wind is harsh and untamed as it scraps across your skin, causing you to hurriedly put your coat on. It feels like winter never ends in your town and if it weren’t for the fact that your family stocks up throughout the year, you would be worried where your next meal is coming from.  

Walking down the street towards your home, you catch sight of the tower in the distance. The way the windows begin to glow, almost makes you feel like it’s somehow staring back at you- taunting you.  

You would be lying if you said it didn’t tempt you.  

It always has.  

Even as a young girl, you remember being drawn to the infamy, to the danger...

Your mother always told you that being curious was a good thing, that it led the greatest minds of humankind. You kept that with you as you moved through life, trying your best to understand what your purpose was.  

But times were hard...

With a malevolent lord hanging over the morale of your town, digging his fingers into the heart and soul of your people and crippling them with eternal debt, it was causing you to look for answers.  

And you were beginning to look in some unorthodox places.

Dinner with your family soothes the aching curiosity in your chest as you try and remind yourself of all the things you have to be grateful for. After your meal, you wrestle your little brother into his bed before telling him his favorite bedtime story. Once his eyelids have kissed, you turn out his light and move into the main room to wish sweet dreams upon your parents.  

And although the pleasantries are nice, there are a few things throughout the evening that disturbed you.  

The limp in your father’s movement.

The blisters on your mother’s hands.

The bags beneath the otherwise unburden gaze of your little brother.  

Exhaustion was palpable.  

Living beneath the weight of a corrupt leadership will do that to you.

As your head hits the pillow, you can hear your mother murmur in desperation.

“I won’t have enough to pay him this week...what are we going to do?”

“I can work extra hours at the mill- we will figure it out.”

“How could you possibly work any longer-”

You feel your chest twist with guilt as you hear the crack in your mother's voice.

“You’re falling apart my love...if you continue pushing yourself this way, I’m afraid I will lose you and I can’t- I can’t-”

The muffled nature of her cries suggests that your father has pulled her in for a hug, trying to erase the inevitable with his affection.  

“We will endure, I promise. Just hang on a little longer.”

With your father’s final words, their conversation begins to die down.  

This can’t possibly go on much longer. You might be able to pick up more hours at the pub and, perhaps procure a second job but, the dues will never end.  

Your family will never exist for any other reason aside from paying to the noble family.  

So you make a decision. Hard work clearly isn’t the answer and revolution would only shed innocent blood. If the practical world had nothing else to offer then, you would seek answers from beyond.  

Your parents retired to their rooms shortly after their conversation but, you wait until you’re sure the house has fallen silent before you make your next move. Embarking on this mission would be simple but what lies at your destination is anything but; so, you try to be prepared for the possible outcomes.

Wrapping yourself in the thickest coat you can find, you slip your dagger beneath the onyx material and slowly creep out of your bedroom.  

The streets were still bustling with life; your town rarely ever rests and the pubs and shops are open well past midnight.  

It might sound like the product of a vibrant town but, it’s mainly due to the ever-present demand for profit.  

Limited hours mean limited sales.

Thankfully, no one really notices your presence as you traverse your way down the streets and through the alleyway. The noise echoing from the main street slowly diminishes and makes way for the sound of the wind dancing through the trees. The forest itself does not frighten you. You grew up memorizing it with your father as he taught you the fundamentals or foraging and gardening. The sound of the owls is expected as is the chill that runs up your spine with the increase of the breeze.  

However, as you near the tower- fear begins to slither its way into your veins. It’s quite a sickening feeling as it seems to stop you in your tracks but, you push on anyway- determined to finish what you have started.

The wrought iron surrounding the tower is stained with rust, corroded and crackling with age, the creaking of its bars alarms you, stopping you in your tracks and forcing you to look up.  

And there it is: the tower.  

It stands above you like a menacing giant and although it’s presence should deter you, it doesn’t. Making an effort to be as silent as you can, you slip past the opening in the gate and begin walking up the broken cobblestone pathway.  

There is nothing but dirt surrounding the perimeter of the tower and other than the moon, the only light before you is coming from the very top window. It’s glowing but the color isn’t stable- it's as if it were shifting slowly from red to green to blue and then back again. Faced with the wooden French doors, you question the idea of knocking.  

If someone truly did live here, it would only be polite...right?

With a shaky hand, you knock three times as loudly as you can. For a moment there is nothing, but just as you ready your hand to knock again, the door groans and begins to slowly creak open.  

The already unstable heartbeat in your chest begins to rattle without mercy as you brace yourself for whatever horrible creature might lay on the other side. Instead, however, there is no one.  

The door opens entirely to reveal that instead of the simple but filthy interior you expect from an abandoned tower such as this one, there is a rather decadent home. Large marble pillars extend upwards seemingly holding nothing in place while glamorous furniture positions itself through the foray. Everything is cooled tone with greys and shades of blue, black often lining the borders of the funiture. There is no lantern, the moon lighting up the interior of the room just as it led your path up to the door.  

The layout doesn’t make sense.  

The tower is cylindrical and doesn’t offer enough space for such an open floor plan so, how is it that the inside looks like lavish mansion?

You swallow your fear and newfound confusion as you tentatively look around the expanse of the room.

“Hello?”

Nothing.  

You take a deep breath and decide that the likelihood of someone (or something) answering that call is slim, especially given the way you were welcomed into the tower in the first place.  

You place your hand inside your pocket, gripping the dagger for good measure before beginning to make your way towards the staircase. The moonlight is sufficient enough at first but for whatever reason, as you begin making your way up the stone staircase, the interior of the tower seems to slowly darken. Your grip on the dagger tightens as you stop walking, frozen in your steps, cursing yourself for embarking on a journey so reckless.  

Suddenly, all of the light from the room vanishes, forcing a gasp from your throat. You manage to grip the railing to steady yourself but you have no idea what you are to do next.  

And then, someone speaks.

“Well- you’re awfully far from home...aren’t you?”

The sound of the voice rushes through your senses much like the wind did. It’s too sweet for your liking but, it entrances you none the less.

“Who are you?”  

As much as you try to steady your breathing, the way your voice cracks, gives you away instantly.

Laughter bounces off the stone walls, sinister and playful all at once before the voice speaks again,

“Don’t you think that’s a question I should be asking you? You are the intruder after all...”

Disembodied or not, the voice makes a valid point. You did walk in unannounced and you most certainly weren’t invited.  

“I’m Y/N Y/L/N.” The strength in your voice comes back slightly as you grip the railing a bit tighter, “I came here because- “

“I know why you’re here...” The voice is much closer now, likely positioned at the top of the stairs, “Humans are so predictable; always looking for a handout.”

This offends you greatly and regardless of the amount of danger you might be in, you let the voice know anyway.

“I am not looking for a hand out. My family and I work from sunrise until sunset to make ends meet. I’m here to make an offering- not merely to take whatever miracles that you make.” Stronger and stronger, your voice rises to the occasion, preparing itself to either spar with the beast or scream for help.

“Miracles hm?” Sinister laughter slinks down the staircase, practically teasing the exposed skin of your neck, “Is that what you think I do?”  

You swallow the bile that creeps up your throat, “I’ve heard many stories- but I wanted to see for myself. Some of my people claim you’ve blessed them but, the clergy said a demon lived here...”

“Oh?” It rises with inquisition, “And you came anyway? Do I have a heretic in my presence?”  

Shaking your head does nothing in the darkness but it’s instinctual, “I don’t believe in demons- at least, not the kind who dwell in abandoned towers.”

“Is there a kind you do believe in then?”  

There is something in you that urges you forward, captivated by the sweet sound of the voice above you, desperate to view the owner and desperate to see the moonlight again.

“Hell is nothing but a metaphor and it’s demons all the same. There is plenty of evil here, plenty of suffering- by definition, there is a demon ruling over my town- he is draining us of our resources for his own gain. I couldn’t imagine a more accurate representation.”

Suddenly, you hear the sound of boots clicking slowly and steadily down the stone stairs. You brace yourself, still feeling frozen in your place- wishing to see whoever or whatever is front of you.

“If I did make miracles,” It muses and, now you’re able to discern that it’s only a few steps in front of you, “What exactly would you be offering me in return?”

Taking a deep breath through your nose, you place all your effort into trying to make out whether or not there was an actual owner to this voice. Finally, your eyes adjust enough to see the faint shadow of a figure which appears to be sitting on the second set of stairs.  

“Name your terms, I will do my best.”  

“Ah ah-” The voice corrects along with a side of twinkling laughter, “That isn’t how this works...”

You’re growing frustrated with the apparent mind games but, you know it’s in your best interest to be patient; you still don’t know what you’re dealing with.

“How does it work then?”

Silence passes through the air for a moment before the voice speaks again, “You must bring me the thing you treasure the most so, that I may know your true intentions- I cannot help you until I can see you properly.”

You snort, “You’d be able to see me if you hadn’t wiped the light from this room...”

Laughter comes again but this time, it’s lower and deepened with suggestion, “I’m not referring to physical sight, human. You might not be able to see in the dark but, I can.”

For whatever reason, its response sounds salacious and riddled with an innuendo that you’re slightly afraid to comment on.  

And the reaction it creates within you, only frightens you further.  

“I’ve just told you that I barely have enough money to scrape by- I don’t have anything of value to give you.”  

“I never asked you to bring me anything of value nor did I ask you to give it away- you’re not listening very well...I don’t know how I’m supposed to help you if you can’t follow instructions.”

It sounds irritated and fond all at once, prompting you to nod immediately, not wanting to upset your only shot at freedom.

“I’m sorry.” You breathe, “I’m just-”

“Don’t lie to me...”

Your gaze strains to try and make out the expression of the figure in front of you but, its futile- the darkness impeding your effort.

“What do you mean?”

“You were going to tell me that you’re scared.” The voice accuses, “But you’re not- even though, you most certainly should be.”  

It wasn’t wrong. You should have ran when the door opened on its own, when the lights began to dim, when a voice began speaking to you...

But you didn’t.

You were undeniably intrigued.  

“Are you going to hurt me?”

An insidious bought of laughter comes from the figure before it sighs, “Hmmm, maybe a little bit.”

When your lips part with something that resembles shock, the laughter comes again only slowing to a halt for the sound of the figure’s tongue tutting against its teeth.

“You are a curious girl...” It observes, “...promises of harm should not excite you and yet- excitement flows from you anyway. Why?”

It kills you to refrain from denying it but, you have no choice.

“Your voice-” A sigh leaves your lips, “it’s very intriguing.”

Maybe it’s part of the creature's abilities, you think, its voice is the main weapon to lure unsuspecting and vulnerable humans into its clutches. The only question is-  what happens once it has you.

“Is it now?” The voice sounds intrigued, “Most humans don’t seem to think so. Are you sure you’re hearing me right, girl? I’ve been told my voice is the thing of nightmares.”

This perplexes you; how could anyone possibly think such a voice was frightening? Despite this creature being anything but human, it sounds very much like a man- a warm and mischievous man who seems hellbent on getting you into bed.  

“What does my voice sound like to you?” It asks, a smile in its tone.

You ponder this question for a second, realizing very quickly that you can’t exactly tell this creature that it sounds like it’s trying to seduce you. But still, that does seem to be the only appropriate description.

“Sort of...like a melody.”

Laughter comes again but, this time it’s paired with the moonlight slowly fading back into the tower, covering every surface until it finally reveals the appearance of the figure.  

Beautiful.  

Not an it but a he...

A man with wings.  

On the steps before you, he stands, leaning casually against the railing now. Atop his head is a tousled mop of sapphire hair, just below are his eyes- nearly black and hooded with the same seduction as his voice and cloaking his figure is a black linen ensemble fitted only by the same color corset. His pillowy lips and soft skin would be a masterpiece on their own but coupled with the giant pair of onyx wings protruding proudly from his back- his visuals become simply devastating.  

“What do you see?” He smirks, licking over his lips.

Unable to resist, you shake your head in complete awe, all of the sensible words dying before they leave your throat, “You- are you an angel?”

The light allows you to see him now as his head tilts another round of laughter, “Try again...you’re very close.”

Perhaps the clergy was right...

“A demon then...” You resign because despite your previously-held beliefs, if this really was a demon, then you know very well you shouldn’t be dealing with him. “I should go.”

His smirk broadens, “But I thought you didn’t believe in demons?”

“I didn’t but, that’s clearly what you’re alluding to. If a winged man tells me he’s a demon, I think it’s wise that I return home.”  

Through your moment of clarity, your desire for him persists- especially now that you see what he looks like. But you know better than to make a deal with a demon, even if you are desperate.

“Do you think the universe is that simple? Angels and demons? Good and evil? You don’t think that maybe- in all of his vastness, there is a chance for the inbetweeners?” He presses and now his black eyes seem to glow, his gaze slightly hypnotic.  

Tightening your coat around your body, you stay staring at him for a moment before you respond, “Is that what you are? Something in between?”

He licks his lips, his eyes finally allowing themselves to wander over your figure. There isn’t much of you showing but, he still drinks you up regardless, exposing and exciting you all at once.  

“I was sent by the underworld to do business for the gods...” He drops his voice to a near whisper, his gaze burning a hole in you, which now aches to be filled.  

You take in a shaky breath through your nose, nodding in understanding, “Did you kill the people who disappeared here? Is that what happens when their judgment goes south?”  

He arches his brow, tilting his head with his inquiry- his voice dripping with darkness, “Maybe I did...maybe I didn’t. I don’t see how that’s relevant- especially since you’ve already decided you were leaving. Which of course-” He waves his hand then, the wooden door behind you creaking open, “-you are free to do.”

There is something about him you haven’t touched on but, it’s beginning to eat you up inside. He may be an otherworldly being, possessing the tower like a beautiful virus but, he is starting to look familiar. This of course, is hard to imagine because his beauty is so striking that you don’t see how you could ever forget it. But nonetheless, you feel like you’ve seen him before.  

And this is what has kept you frozen.  

“Will you not give me any answers?” You border on pleading but, attempt to keep your tone firm.

He chuckles, “You didn’t come to me for answers. You came for help- which I’ve already agreed to give you.”

The supernatural discourse that has transpired, thoroughly distracted you from the reasons for seeking him out in the first place. Your situation had not changed; you were still desperate for money, desperate for justice and desperate for peace.  

“You won’t hurt my family...” It’s not a question, and it leaves no room for any other response aside from the one he gives you.

“I won’t.”  

Nodding, you glance behind your shoulder towards the door, “I have to go home. I don’t have the item you asked for. I can be back within the hour...”

For the first time, he looks slightly disappointed but as you complete your sentence, he shakes his head, “No. Don't come back tonight.” He insists, “If you wish to do business with me- you must return tomorrow after midnight. I will wait for you at the shoreline.”

This confuses you, “The shoreline? Why can’t we meet here? The water is dangerous after dark.”

The smirk returns to his tender lips, “I know.”  

With that, he waves his hand again- causing the door to swing open and slam against the tower walls.

Jumping at the sound, your gaze shoots back behind you before returning to where the creature stood.  

But he had vanished.  

You have no choice but to heed his requests and rush away from the tower, the curiosity inside you almost too much to bear.  

Nothing is out of the ordinary as you walk back home, at least not at first. But when you pass the massive clock tower in the center of town, you realize something strange...

The clock hadn’t moved, not even a second.  

You remember very clearly reading the time as you hurried past it on your way to the tower and now, even as you’re staring at it, it stands perfectly still. Until suddenly, without warning, the hands of time begin to move again. The clicking almost startles you, your brain filling with a million questions despite your decision to turn away and return home.  

Time had seemingly stood still whilst you were in the tower.  

Slipping beneath the covers, you try your hardest to get to sleep despite being bombarded with images of the haunting man you had just encountered.  

You know you should be terrified.  

You know you should be wary.

But the familiarity of him has possessed you and, you’re determined to understand why.  

The next night, with your treasured object tucked securely in your coat, you make your way back to him.  

You make sure to check the clock tower before you do, logging the time away for later to see if last night had been more than just a fluke.  

12:32am.

The clock tower has never lied but, you’re starting to think it might be influenced by whatever resided in the tower- magic, beast, or otherwise.  

As you pass through the many trees, you begin to hear the chaotic crashing of the waves in the distance. The tower may be frightening but, few things could match the malevolent temper of the sea. In fact, you’ve always believed that nothing could. The sea was unrivaled in her cruelty, consuming the world at will, just for the fun of it- you've theorized that she likes the screams. During the day, she simmered- blue and serene, allowing boats to decorate her surface like candles on a birthday cake. At night though, her temper worsens and it’s as if she suddenly remembers all the injustice she has faced. Her waves swell to horrific heights, smashing into the seawalls built around your town, creeping over like a titan looking for vengeance.  

You’ve always felt pity for her. It must be hard: being the heart and soul of humanity, being responsible for the very nature of things- only to be forgotten. Only to be mistreated...

Your boots are discarded near the last patch of grass before the sand and, your toes brace themselves icy chill of the sea breeze. You’re especially thankful for the coat now as you suspect that your teeth would have already begun chattering had it not been for the thick fabric protecting you.  

The waves haven’t begun their violent dance just yet but, you can sense their temper beneath your feet. They will begin soon.  

“The sea-” The voice from the tower is behind you, “it suits you.”

Breathless, you turn to face him and even though you’re more prepared for his beauty than you were last night, it still shocks you.

He’s wearing a black silk gown, that drapes effortlessly off his body, the sleeves made out of French lace and extending well past his fingertips. His wings are shuttered behind him, folded almost modestly against his back.

“Thank you.” It’s the only response you have before you reach into the fold of your coat, “I have the-”

He holds up his hand, his voice commanding but gentle, “Wait. I want you to walk with me first. I don’t like rushing through my business deals.”

Your hand slowly retreats from your coat as you warily look behind you, “You want to walk along the shoreline? I told you, it’s too dangerous- at least for me it is, I don’t exactly have an escape mechanism attached to my back.”

He smirks, his tempting gaze flourishing with fondness you cannot place, “What causes you to mistrust the sea so much? Surely she wouldn’t hurt one of her own...”

Your brow furrows, “What do you mean?”

Extending from the confines of silk, his fingers reach out to you, fluttering with invitation, “I will show you.”

And really, you’d be a fool not to accept.  

Interlacing your fingers with his, you feel electricity simmer ever so slightly beneath your skin. You’re assuming it’s from the power that likely resides within him but, you don’t expect it to affect you so much.

The sound of the waves begins to softly roar in the distance but the water isn’t close enough to the shoreline to pose any immediate threat.

Not yet at least...

You begin walking alongside him as he leads you both in the opposite direction of your town border. For quite a few moments, he just gazes at the eternal stretch of sand before you, his soft mouth curved up ever so slightly. He looks pensive and serene all at once and, it confuses you.

“May I tell you a story?”

His request surprises you but, you aren’t really in a position to say no. And if you’re being honest, you really didn’t want to.  

“Yes.” You murmur, feeling compelled to keep your volume at a minimum.

He smiles softly to himself, glancing towards the water briefly before beginning.  

“The water has many gods...” He speaks softly, letting out a sigh, “Lir, Irish god of the sea, Tefnut, Egyptian goddess of the rain, Amimitl, Aztec god of lakes and fisherman...” His explanation already has you interested. You were taught much of the stories beyond your land but, it had always fascinated you, “The gods of the sea are known for the temperate nature, they often stay away from humans and avoid interfering with the mortal coil. Death by water is merely a request they carry out for the gods of death and destruction and thus, there is goddess who rules over the violence of the sea itself.”

Just as he finishes his sentence, the temper of the sea seems to roar to life, the swollen waves crashing aggressively, still not close enough to reach you.

Not yet at least...

“Cymopoleia, is the goddess of violent sea storms. Poseidon, her father, tasked her with overseeing the malignant waters and tending to the causalities. She was not the creator of the storms but she carried the ability.” He moves through the story as if he has told it a 100 times but he seems captivated by it nonetheless, “When it came time for her to bear a child. She conjured up a spirit from within her very core. She crafted them out of the essence of the sea and placed them inside of clamshell in her palace. She was awaiting the full moon when someone snuck into the depths of the ocean and stole them from her.”

The gasp that leaves your lips cannot be helped, you didn’t realize how engrossed you were until suddenly you recognize the port from another town nearby.

You had been walking awhile.

“Why would someone do that?” You press, shaking your head.

He sends a solemn look your way, “Many thoughtless humans believe that if they capture the essence of a god, they will become one themselves. Foolishly, he opened the clam shell and released the spirit into the world. By the time the goddess found him, it was too late- but she delegated his fate anyway. She took his life beneath the depths of a violent storm and placed a curse upon anyone who shared his bloodline. She made it so that any one of his descendants would bear the physical embodiment of his fate.”

“So, they look like they’ve died at sea?”

He can’t help but smirk, a bit of the darkness you saw at the tower, beginning to creep back. “Indeed. They are horribly disfigured and regardless of their efforts, they all meet the same fate. His lineage believes that if they send enough offerings out to sea or if they build high enough walls, that they will somehow escape their deaths. But of course, this if futile- the goddess vowed that she would continue to collect them until her spirit was returned.”  

His story ends and it’s like something clicks within you. Without warning, you squeeze his hand, slowing both of you to a stop, just before the light of the upcoming pier hits you.  

“Does this have something to do with my town? Is that why you’re telling me this?”  

Lord Invictus certainly fit the description for a descendent of this thief and, although it bores no sense of logic- you have no choice but to believe it anyway.  

It all fits together too well...

He turns towards you now, his smirk now a small smile, “It has to do with you Y/N.”

Your brow furrows, “Me? What do you mean?”

He nods to your coat, something otherworldly lingering in his eyes, “I’d like to see what you’ve brought with you now.”

Still riddled with confusion, you reach inside your coat and find that the item you had brought with you (a beaded necklace gifted to you at birth by your parents) had turned into something else.  

And now, sitting in the palm of your hand- was a clamshell.  

“What is this? This isn’t what I brought to you- I-” You begin to panic, confusion and fear starting to take over, “Did you do this? Did you take my necklace?”

Finally, the sinister smirk returns as his wings begin to unfurl from behind his back. Along with his shift in expression, another danger is brewing very close to you- you can feel it.  

The sea is growing irritated and whipping the wind and the water up into a frenzy. As you look toward the water, you have no choice but to look on in horror as you see the beginning of something deadly.  

A rogue wave.

The grip on your hand tightens as his extraordinary strength keeps you in place.  

“I think it’s time I formally introduce myself-” His voice is loaded with bad intentions but it sounds sweet anyway as he burns his gaze into yours, “My name is Jimin. Son of Tartarus, the god of punishment and Nyx, the goddess of the night.”

Your eyes are wide with desperation, not fully registering what he said before he’s yanking you against his chest and turning you to face the sea. Standing behind you, he unleashes a spell of wicked laughter as his wings unfurl from behind is back to wrap around the both of you, so that the only thing you’re able to see is the wall of water coming for you.  

“I have to come to send you home Y/N...your mother has been waiting for you a very long time.”

His arms are wrapped around you now, crushing you against his chest as his wings begin flapping- the wind picking up furiously around you.

“Jimin!” You scream, eyes welling up with tears, “You promised you wouldn’t hurt me! You promised! Why are you doing this to me?!”

He laughs at you, and it isn’t necessarily malevolent but merely amused, as if he in on a joke you weren’t part of.

“Shhhh, quiet down my little sea nymph...” He whispers salaciously into your ear, “...your fate will be painless.”

You’re crying now, digging your nails into his skin, attempting to break free as the massive creature that is the ocean rushes towards you without mercy. The crest of the wave arches above you proudly, the swirling darkness of the water mocking the mere audacity of your existence but, as you brace for impact- it never comes.  

Only the darkness does...

And it’s the darkness that consumes you.  

“Jimin!” A voice breaks into your subconscious, luring you out of what you hope was a nightmare, “You couldn’t have brought her home without scaring her? She was practically driftwood when she arrived here.”

That familiar twinkle of laughter sounds then and, it forces your eyes open.  

“I’m sorry your grace- it's just in my nature.” He defends poorly, still chuckling to himself, “I can’t imagine my brothers are doing much better.”

You are somewhere extraordinary, that much is certain. Above your immediate line of sight is an ornate glass ceiling that seems to glow a cerulean blue. All around you are gold furnishings, each decorated with various moldings of sea creatures.  

“She’s awake!”  

Your vision, still slightly cloudy, now lands upon a being so beautiful- that you have to blink a few times to ensure you’re seeing the right thing. Draped in blue silk and decorated with gold and pearls, is a woman who looks at you with nothing but love in her eyes.

“Oh my- its really you...”

She seems tentative but, you’re suddenly overcome with joy- filled with an almost cosmic sense of peace.  

“Mother!” You cry, rushing off of the bed you were laying on and into her arms.  

She takes you in her arms immediately, her skin cool against yours like the tepid waters of the bay. She sniffles, tightening her grip on you,

“I knew you’d come home...I knew one day I would find you.”

And it really doesn’t make much sense does it?

How could your life swing so violently from one direction to the next?

Your life on earth seems so insignificant now...now that you’re back with her.  

Cymopoleia- queen of violent sea storms and, your mother.  

She explains it all to you, gently stroking your hair and fawning over you.  

The spirit in the depths was you. Born into a human body, you were fated to one day meet with the demi-god of darkness, who with a bit of trickery- would return you to your rightful place in the cosmos.  

Your mother assures you that your mortal family would be relieved of your memory until it was safe for you to visit them, until the gods of fate decide. In addition, Lord Invictus would be the last of the bloodline to pay for what his ancestor had done and, the fog of greed and corruption- which begin the day you were born, would soon be lifted.  

The explanation is long and doesn’t leave you completely fulfilled but, your mother assures you that you have all the time in the world to understand the complexity of the universe.  

Hours later, after you’ve had a decent feast, your mother instructs Jimin to escort you to your bedroom.  

As he leads you down the hallway towards your chambers, you send a playful glare his way, “So- how much of what you told me was a lie?”

He merely smirks, “None of it.”

You scoff, “Even the part of about your voice? And all that nonsense about excitement and me being curious? You knew all along what was to happen- you just tricked me.”

Jimin chuckles darkly, stopping just outside your bedroom door before turning to you, “The part about my voice frightening people wasn’t a lie, Y/N. My father is the god of punishment, any mortal that hears my voice usually cowers in fear...”

“Is that why I felt so drawn to you? Because you were meant to take me home?”  

His smirk broadens, “No...you feel drawn me because you want to fuck me.”

Your mouth goes completely dry at his bold statement but, you are unable to deny it- your fingers suddenly twitching at your side.

“Wh-”

“It’s not your fault really...” He murmurs, his body shifting towards you, “...it’s just the way I was made. I am used to people lusting after me- however,” Jimin reaches out then, to brush his thumb over the swell of your cheek, “-I have never known true lust until I had the pleasure of meeting you.”

“You lust for me?” You whisper, completely drawn up with desire- finally allowing your true nature, the nature of a demi-goddess pour out of your soul.

He licks his lips, his gaze upon you timid as he presses his thumb into your face, “I do.”  

You turn to the side suddenly, capturing his thumb between your lips, “Show me.”

It's all it takes: that one phrase of consent being enough to unleash all the urges within him.

You’re inside your chamber seconds later, Jimin clawing at the fabric of your robe, his fingers digging into your skin as he does, his lips latching on to every part of you he can reach.

“I knew the moment you walked into my tower-” He grunts, “I knew- there was no way a mortal could be tempting, so dreadfully seductive.”

You sigh hopelessly, raking your hands through the sapphire tendrils on his head, your lips ghosting along the swell of his cheek, the tail of his brow, the shell of his ear...

“In the underworld...” He’s practically growling now, scratching his nails up the newly exposed skin of your back, “We are never taught to refuse our desires. You were my greatest challenge- it took everything in me not to devour you right there.”

You smirk now, positioning your lips at his ear, “I wouldn’t have known what to do with you though- aren't you glad you were patient?”

He grunts again, pressing his hips against yours defiantly, “Patience is for virtuous gods- “ He doesn't answer your question but, you know that he means yes. In spite of his darker nature, Jimin still believes in doing the right thing.... most of the time.  

He has you on the bed moments later, his wings spreading proudly. He’s panting, his eyes completely black with lust as he nudges your legs open, determined to finally taste what he’s been craving.  

For the demi-god of darkness, denying his desires for even a second is painful. He aches to fufill them over and over again...

You were certainly no exception.  

But you want to keep teasing him...

Reaching down, you spread yourself open for him- feeling the visceral substance of your arousal sticking to your inner thighs.

“What are you waiting for then?” You lean up, grasping your hand behind his neck and staring directly into the abyss that is his gaze, “Defile me...”

Jimin growls, sliding into you instantly, his hands quickly bracing themselves on either side of your head. He smirks as your eyes roll back the sheer pleasure of him inside of you causing your nipples to harden.  

“Oh look at that-” He chuckles, his own expression unstable with pleasure, “Are you going brain dead already hm? Is this cock that good?”

Your eyes come back into play as you stare up at him, your hands gripping either side of his face as he starts a power rhythm within you.  

This wasn’t meant to last long, the carnal desire too much for either one of you to handle...

Perhaps, if your feelings permitted it- you'd make love another time.  

Nodding, you moan as he increases the rhythm, pressing your forehead against his own.  

“You feel so good.” You whisper, “I didn’t know it could- oh...” A whimper leaves your lips as he hits that spot inside of you, the pleasure completely ruining your ability to speak.

“Of course you didn’t- you’ve only ever let mortals play with your pretty cunt haven’t you?” He laughs, mocking you and cooing all at once, “And now that I’ve gotten ahold of it, you’re never going to want anyone else. I will ruin you ugh-” He finally breaks, his own brow furrowed with the onslaught of his release as you tighten around him, “-ugh fuck yes. I can feel how badly your cunt wants me- it's like you’re begging me to cum.”

“I want you to cum,” You whisper shakily, kissing at his mouth, “Fill me up please, I need it.”

He growls, kissing you back with just as much fervor, his hips moving so fast that the pleasure fucks with your vision.  

“I’m going to make a mess of you, they will smell me on you until I can come back-” He promises, smirking ever so slightly, “and then- I'll paint the inside of you all over again won’t I? Such a masterpiece this cunt will be...and you’ll be all mine, cumming only for me.”  

And he wasn’t wrong because, mere seconds later- the two of you are cumming all over one another, ruining the silk sheets with your release and clawing desperately at one another.  

With the mutual utterance of your names, Jimin collapses beside you and, moments later- when you get your wits about you, he is ushering you onto his chest.  

Sweaty, exhausted and satisfied, you lay together in silence for quite a while.

Until finally you speak, “I’m not quite sure what came over me.”

Jimin chuckles but this time, the sound is much warmer than you’re used to, “Immortal lust, it’s a blessing and a curse but, eternal life has to stay interesting somehow.”

You trace patterns on his chest whilst he covers your body with one of his wings, the feathers teasing at your sensitive skin.

“Did you mean it?”  

And he doesn’t even bother asking, he knows exactly what you’re referring to.

“I want you.” He affirms, “If you’ll have me- I felt quite possessive of you then but, I won’t insist on anything you aren’t comfortable with.”

You smile, tracing a heart directly over the spot where his heart would beat, “It fits doesn’t it? You and I?”

If the past few days have taught you anything, it is that sometimes- it is appropriate to succumb to fate. Sometimes, believing in the simplicity of destiny works out. Being with Jimin felt right and, for now, this was enough.  

“It does.” His statement is simple but his expression says it all: he is elated.

You fall back into comfortable silence once again before one more pressing question leaves your lips, “Did I hear you mention something about your brothers earlier?”

Jimin nods, his eyes half-closed as he cuddles closer to you, “You did. I have six of them.”

“Are they- like you?” You murmur, unable to stop your curiosity.

He nods again, “They are.”

You think one more question will suffice but, his answer will unfortunately bring about a thousand more, “Are they all on missions too?”

Jimin’s trademark smirk shows itself once again as he snickers, “They are-” He repeats before a great sense of pride comes over his expression...

“I was just the first one to return.”

A/N: should this be a series? asking for a friend...

[opinated-user]

What's wild is that Aliana's revenge is so flat and uninteresting and has so little effect on her as a person that I sometimes forget it was ever a plot point.

Meanwhile in another fanfic I'm reading, I'm absorbed entirely by the revenge plot because it has such an impact on the characters that you genuinely cannot forget about it. It's impacting them forty years after the revenge was gotten. To TL;DR 300k worth of fic and hours upon hours of canon, one character was being repeatedly raped by three others, and, a year and a half into it, snapped and murdered one in what's basically acknowledged as a mental health meltdown. His best friend helped cover for him... and then went on to go murder the other two rapists without being asked to, because it's 1978 at that point and he knows the cops don't listen to POC when it comes to most crimes but especially aren't going to listen to poor POC who are accusing rich white men.

If LO were writing it, that'd be the end of it. Evil was killed, thus all trauma is gone, no further thought needed, the end.

Because a good writer is writing it, even in 2018 the character whose rapists are all dead is still struggling with trauma. He doesn't like what it says about him that he did that, worries he's a bad person, is horrified to realize that if he had a do-over he probably wouldn't do it all differently, felt tremendously guilty seeing the family of his rapist grieve the loss of their son, and has all kinds of self-doubts that linger well into middle age as a result of this. He can't bring himself to ask his best friend if he killed the other two because if the answer is yes, then he can't deal with that guilt so it's easier just to not ask.

It's forty years later and he still has anxiety issues, still worries about his kids and grandkids becoming victims of the same kind of crime, still has a deep distrust of authority figures because he tried to come forward with accusations and wasn't believed. The evil was defeated, the rapists were killed, he got to go on to marry the love of his life and raise a family and his actions still have psychological consequences because real life isn't as simple as 'kill bad guy, live happily ever after'.

And as a result it's really easy to sympathize with him because when your main character gives a shit about others and has the capacity for guilt, shame, regret and self-doubt, they feel like a person. He feels like an actual trauma victim, too, which is why the murder is so cathartic. You can have both revenge and a family life in one character, you just have to write it so the latter is effected by the former. His resulting anxiety and guilt have made him a very worried, hard-to-understand dad and granddad. That's a plot point that goes on to have impact on the greater story.

IDK, it's late here and I'm rambling but basically what I'm getting at is that it's not that LO's list of Aliana's goals is incompatible with each other. They aren't, that's not the problem. The problem is not considering how a character's values, mindset and trauma would impact those goals even when they're obtained. She can't, because that's more thought and introspection than she's capable of, and that's a lot of work on the author's end to create an end result that's actually compelling.

But Aliana is, as a result, a dime-a-dozen badass Mary Sue who saves the day. Sometimes I forget her name entirely. She's generic. I have actually sat back and asked myself if I would do things any differently than Joe, the character in the other fic I mentioned, did. I've asked myself if I could live with murder, even if someone 100% deserved it, knowing it'd hurt the people in their life who didn't deserve to lose someone they loved to a horrific act of violence that would traumatize them by proxy. Joe has made me actually think in response to his actions, living rent-free in my head outside of the context of fanfiction for months now ever since I started reading. I never think when it comes to Aliana. She'll murder/maim/choke whoever she has to and be done with it and will never, ever lose. Joe fucks up. Joe loses. Joe doubts himself. LO isn't brave enough to let Aliana do those things.

If we handed Joe's writer the premise of Aliana, there's probably a compelling character in there somewhere. The problem isn't the premise. The problem is the writer.

indeed. couldn't have said it better.

[scarlet-star-witch]

Hiii, I would really like to see Lella having a little accident and din being a mother hen and taking care of her (pre accident and loss of memory of course). I just can’t stop thinking about din being a protector with the love of his life. Amazing story btw 🤍 thank u

Pairing: Din x Iella (Female OC)

Word Count: 1191

Fade Into You Masterlist 

~~

“Get down!” Din screamed and as terror washed over him, he threw himself over Iella’s body, pinning her to the ground and covering her from the blast of the explosion that rocked the small town they were stationed in.

Iella grit her teeth as the pain in her arm throbbed wildly.

“Are you ok?” He asked, looking down at her intently. 

Even with the helmet covering his face, Iella felt compelled to tell him all of her secrets. He just had that way about him. But they were trying to keep their new relationship quiet, especially infront of Quin and Xi’an, who clearly held affections for Din.

“I’m ok.” She assured him, hoping the strain in her voice wouldn’t give away how much she truly was in pain.

She knew the blaster bolt that had ripped through her upper arm just minutes before would be enough for Din to lose his cool. 

That was the last thing they needed. She knew he wouldn’t be able to keep his cool, that his reaction would blow their cover, so she stayed quiet. 

Later that night, as they were back on the transport, Quin was organizing for a wild night out, as was the regular for them.

“You coming?”

“No, I think I’ll turn in early tonight.” She answered his request, ignoring Xi’an’s roll of her eyes at her words.

She knew the Twi’lek thought she was a prissy, goody two-shoes. But really, Iella was just trying to hide the fact that her arm was bleeding and throbbing in pain. 

“Mando? You wanna get crazy tonight?” Xi’an asked flirtily, causing the Mandalorian to stiffen in his seat, finally tearing his attention away from the woman who held his affection, that he knew was acting differently since the fight. 

“No. I think I need an early night, too. We need some rest before our next hunt.” He said, thinking of the first excuse that came to his mind. 

Xi’an scoffed and stood from her seat. “You two are more boring than I thought you would be.” She muttered as she made her way down the ramp and off the ship. 

“Have a good night.” Iella said to Quin with a plastic smile as she moved past him to make her way to her little bunk. 

She sighed as soon as she closed the door behind her, finally wincing and showing just how much her arm was hurting her. 

She moved to the small bathroom, peeling off the long sleeved shirt she wore that was thankfully black to hide the steady flow of blood. She hissed as she saw the gash on her arm and the blood that poured out of it. 

Grabbing a towel, she quickly pressed it against her injury, holding back a whimper of pain as she pressed it against her wound. 

Suddenly, a knock sounded at her door, making her eyes go wide.

“El? It’s me, are you ok?” Din’s quiet voice sounded on the other side of the door.

Whispering a quick curse, Iella grit her teeth, and, ignoring the pain in her arm, quickly put on her long sleeved shirt back on. She jogged to the door, knowing the more time that passed, the more worried he would become. 

She plastered on the fakest expression and opened the door, only to meet the judgemental gaze of the helmeted Mandalorian who only tilted his head in contemplation at the sight of her. Iella swallowed thickly, she knew he could see right through her. 

“Are you ok?”

“I’m fine.” 

Din sighed and stepped into the room, slamming the door closed behind him. 

“Really, cause you’ve been acting differently since the mission.”

“I’m fine.”

“Yeah, you said that.” Din said monotonously. “Now, tell me what’s really going on.”

“Nothing’s going on-”

“Don’t lie to me, El.”

“I’m not- fuck!” She yelled in pain as Din suddenly reached out to grab onto her arm. He recoiled at the sound of her in pain and, behind his helmet, he wore a horrified expression. 

“What happened?” He asked through gritted teeth. 

“Nothin-”

“Iella, enough of the bullshit. Tell me what happened.” 

His voice left no room for arguments and she sighed heavily. Slowly beginning to remove the shirt she wore. She didn’t notice how his body stiffened, how he immediately averted his gaze respectfully, his heart racing at the prospect of her removing her clothing in front of him. 

But once her shirt was off, leaving her in only a small tank top, revealing her bleeding wound, Din’s body tensed for an entirely different reason. 

“Who did this?” He asked, his voice low with a deadly anger. 

“I don’t know.”

“Who did this?!” He yelled again, his anger reaching a boiling point at seeing her injury. 

He could never keep a levelled head when it came to her in danger. 

“I don’t know! Din, It happened so fast, I didn’t see who it was.” She argued back, the use of his name, which he had just recently told her, throwing him for a loop. 

He always felt overwhelmed whenever she used it and he was forced to silence.

Din sighed heavily, bowing his head as he tried his hardest to calm down. 

“Are you ok?”

“I’m fine, it just stings a little.” She said softly, almost bashfully. 

He noticed her averting her gaze and leaned forward, catching her chin with his fingers, making her look up at him. 

“Don’t hide this, ok? Next time you’re hurt you tell me.” He told her and she nodded shyly. 

He gently moved her to sit on the edge of her small bed, grabbing the first aid kit from the bathroom and returning to kneel in front of her. 

“I’m sorry.” He whispered to her in comfort as she hissed in pain as he pressed the alcohol swab against her open wound. His stomach turned at the expression of pain on her face, but he forced himself to continue to disinfect her injury. 

They were silent as he dressed her wound and covered it with gauze, Iella having to look away from his intense stare through the helmet which she had become affluent at reading.

“I’m sorry.” She whispered. “I should have told you.”

The guilt he heard in her voice turned his stomach and he shook his head. 

“Close your eyes.” His raspy voice uttered, stunning her to silence for a moment, before she realized just what he was asking.

Her heart raced as she closed her eyes and she heard the sound of his helmet being removed and placed on the ground.

“Don’t ever apologize for this.” He whispered, the sound of his unfiltered voice sending a shiver down her spine. “I will always be here to take care of you.” He promised.

Before she could say another word back to him, his lips were crashing to hers, catching her in a passionate kiss that turned her mind to mush. 

Din reluctantly pulled away from her after a few seconds, letting his forehead rest against hers. 

“You tell me next time, ok? Cause I can’t handle the thought of you being hurt.”

“Thank you.” Iella whispered.

“Always, Cyare.”

~~

Let me know if there’s a scene you’d like me to write for these two xx

[anthrofreshtodeath]

CMWHS 1 - Draft

Not sure why I feel compelled to share the first draft of chapter 1 of Call Me When He Sleeps, but I do. I think I wanted to share what it's going to sound like. There are going to be lines of dialogue from episodes 5x12 and 5x13, but the story itself will diverge wildly from canon, obviously. I'm going to try to have a semi-regular writing schedule despite the craziness at work, but we'll see how it goes. I'm kinda doing this one by feeling, guys, rather than by intellect. Hope you enjoy and please be patient with me along the way. It's long and it's NSFW, so see it below the cut.

Jane Rizzoli, at close to midnight, stands in front of her own front door. She sighs, wanting more when confronted with the finality that the door represents: once she walks through it, she must grapple with her thoughts, those that have recently enervated her both in their contents and their persistence.

She is no longer with child.

Apparently, she muses, the thoughts will find her whether she’s holding this bag of takeout in the hall or eating it at her table, so she fishes in her front pocket for her keys because she’s hungry. She slides one in the lock, jiggles it because the lock is fickle, and sighs again when the smell of home assaults her. Despite what one might expect, the scent isn’t exactly the most welcome.

She is no longer with child.

Detective Rizzoli lost that child in the line of duty, had traded their life for the life of another child, one that arguably needed Jane more urgently than the one that was growing inside of her. The fact does nothing for the burning grief somewhere between her trachea and her esophagus, some phantom place she cannot reach, and therefore some phantom pain she cannot alleviate.

She sets the Chinese food down on the table in the enclave across from her kitchen, the table that has three chairs, though she’ll only occupy one. Casey, she thinks. Just a name; she won’t allow herself the indulgence, the anger, the sadness of more. The baby follows shortly after, two others that could have been here with her, on either side of her.

But that’s the problem, isn't it? Thinking that they would have if they could have. In the days before the baby was lost, it had become increasingly clear to Jane that Casey had no intentions of choosing her. Over war, over adventure, over himself. She could have come to accept that because she is the same, really, honestly, when she thinks about it. But he also would not have chosen their child. That, she doesn’t understand.

Then, within the guilt and the loss, she feels a tiny pang of relief.

The baby is not here and therefore will never learn that their father has no time for them or their mother. But, that means that Jane is alone. She crosses the floor into the kitchen proper and stands, hips cocked, in front of the open fridge. The cold air accompanies her impulsive inner statement that neither of them would have been enough for her anyway. God, she groans to herself, how fucked up is that?

It’s true, no matter the degree of fucked-up. And maybe, even if they were here, she wouldn’t be satisfied. Neither of them, she thinks as she pulls a beer from the middle shelf and pops the top on a magnet bottle opener sticking to the freezer door, is Maura.

She cranes her neck, checks the clock on the microwave - 11:32 PM. It’s late enough; she’ll allow herself that assertion: they are not as good as Maura being here, which Maura is not. Again, the apartment is empty save Jane. Jane mourns this fact; downs her drink in four hearty gulps. Immediately she reaches for two more.

Maura isn’t here.

And why should she be? It’s an ungodly hour, she has a boyfriend who loves her, and Jane has been… surly. Unavailable. If the sun is up, Jane grouses. Jane sulks, Jane retreats into herself.

When the moon is out, however, Jane changes. She loses inhibition, perhaps having grown just too tired of the effort it takes to keep herself afloat during the day.

She grabs a fork from her silverware drawer, slams the drawer shut, and carries her beers back over to her waiting meal. She smacks one of them at just the right angle on the table corner, and the cap flies off. She doesn’t care where it lands, because she is too occupied with the phone she has just set next to her first container.

Now, she waits.

She gulps that second beer just as quickly as the first, and then she complements it with a few half-hearted bites of broccoli beef. The thought of eating some of her steamed rice sickens her, so she leaves that box untouched. And whether it’s one bite from now or ten, her phone will ring, the person on the other line deserving of more than a Jane distracted by nausea.

So, Jane will eat just a little, and drink, and wiggle her knee in anticipation.

Tonight takes longer than some of the others, so Jane rises, pushes the sleeves of her oxford shirt higher up her forearms, and retrieves her fourth beer. It is when she opens it and takes her first sip, that her phone chirps.

Maura Isles illuminates the screen, both in name and in likeness.

Jane lets it ring a few more times to garner the illusion of detachedness. One she knows Maura will see right through. “Hey,” she answers. She sounds cool, masculine, as she always does.

“Hi,” Maura says. Jane hears shuffling on the other line, and then a barely discernible click. A door has closed. “Did you make it home ok?”

“Sure did,” Jane answers. She eats another bite of dinner, late though it is, and then taps the prongs of her fork on her lower lip.

Maura exhales with relief. “Good,” she says. “Sometimes I worry if we don’t leave at the same time.”

“We usually don’t,” Jane replies. “Not anymore.”

Maura ignores the petulance. “What are you doing now?”

“Eatin’,” Jane says. She considers stopping there, considers acting annoyed that Maura hasn’t taken the bait for an easy argument about Jack and all the time that Maura spends with him. But, the moon is out, and Jane changes when it is. “I stopped at that little place just past State on the way home. And don’t worry, I’m not in the bed. I’m actually at the table like a normal human.”

“Can I admit something to you?” Maura asks softly.

Jane’s heart hurts. “Yeah,” she says.

“It makes me sad to think of you, sitting all alone at your table right now, this late at night,” says Maura. “Without me there.”

Jane wants to say Well I wouldn’t be alone if you weren’t with Jack right now. I’d be at your place. We’d be eating this shitty food together. She doesn’t. She reminds herself it is night. “Oh yeah? What would you be doin’ if you were here?” She counters with sass.

Maura laughs and it's so light but so happy that she must be away from Jack. “Something truly naughty, like fix you dinner and ask you about your day.”

“Well I got dinner covered, but you can still ask how my day went,” Jane responds.

“Would you tell me? If I did ask?” Maura is suspicious. Wary.

For good reason. “Probably not. Every day’s been pretty much the same recently,” says Jane. She huffs in frustration with herself and her walls, immovable even to her. “But you could still ask.”

“I think I’ll wait until you’re ready to tell me,” says Maura. She shifts and Jane hears bedclothes.

“Ok,” she replies. “You in bed?”

“Mmhmm, the guest bed downstairs,” Maura answers.

Jane envisions the finger twirl that Maura is probably doing against those satin sheets right at this moment. Her heartbeat drops into her pants. The alcohol has made her wet and Maura’s admission, so much more than just relaying her location, makes her yearn. “Guest bed, huh? Where’s Jack?”

“Asleep, upstairs,” Maura is honest.

“There a reason why you’re not up there with him?” Jane asks, though they talk on the phone like this at least three times a week. Though she knows the answer.

“He… he snores sometimes,” Maura lies. The statement isn’t the untruth, the reasoning is. She doesn’t go downstairs and dial Jane because her boyfriend has a faulty velum.

“Well that’s not cute,” Jane quips, and she drinks. “Get you one of those remote-controlled beds. You can just air lift him when he gets too loud.”

“Jane,” Maura admonishes, but she doesn’t finish the gripe. She pauses for several seconds, and then takes a deep inhale. “We had sex tonight.”

Jane grimaces. “Thanks for sharin’,” she growls.

“I only share because… well, sometimes I don’t…” Maura trails off.

Jane jogs down that trail to find her. “Finish? I know, I know,” she says. “Is that the only reason you call me? When that happens?”

“God no,” Maura nearly laughs. Jane hears the almost-chuckle. “I call you because I care about you. And you don’t really talk to me during the day anymore.”

“I don’t really talk to anyone during the day anymore, kid,” Jane admits.

“I know, and even though I wish you would, I’ll take what I can get. If that means calling you when we both should be asleep, that’s an easy sacrifice to make,” says Maura.

“I don’t really deserve you, you know,” Jane replies.

“Maybe you don’t, but I like being here anyway,” Maura tells her. She sounds unsure if Jane knows that or not. They sit in silence for a little while, so if Jane didn’t know, she accepts it now. “And though it’s not the only reason I call, I do enjoy talking to you when things have been particularly frustrating.”

“Lemme ask you somethin’,” Jane leans back in her chair and it creaks. “You ever just tell him it’s frustrating? Try to teach him how to touch you so it isn’t? He really loves you, Maura. If you want your relationship to work, eventually you gotta do that.”

Neither of them confess that they do not want the relationship to work. Maura because she isn’t certain she doesn’t, Jane because she is ashamed that she is certain she doesn’t. “I… I don’t think that, even if I were to do that, he would do half the things to me that you do.” Maura surprises them both with her boldness.

“You mean that you do,” Jane tries to clarify, “‘cause we’re just on the phone. My lips do the talkin’, but your fingers do all the walkin’.”

“Do you honestly think that if I could feel this good all by myself, I’d still be calling you?” Maura clarifies right back. “Talk to me. The way you love to do when no one else is awake.”

Jane shivers. She twitches between her legs, and she sniffs to grasp as tightly as she can at wisps of control. “You and the dirty talk, sheesh,” she teases as a way to hedge, to buy herself some time and a little gumption. “Who knew?”

“I didn’t even know, until recently. And we’re still the only two that do,” croaks Maura. She has started; Jane notes the change in her voice that signals it. “Tell me what you would do. If you were here.”

Nighttime Jane wants this just as much as Maura does. She unbuckles her belt, undoes her fly, but goes no further than that. “Honestly?”

“That’s what we use the nighttime for, isn’t it?” Maura muses. Jane strains her ears to discern any nasty sounds that might make their way to her. “Radical honesty you can deny when the sun comes up.”

Jane recoils at the barb even though Maura can’t see her. “Maura…”

“I want your honesty, yes,” Maura replies, drawing out the yes, the vowel elongating, laying out against their desire just like Jane imagines Maura stretching out against the bed she occupies, back arched and knees spread. An unashamed sexual pose befitting the liberated woman on the other line.

Jane runs her thumb under the waistband of her own underwear when she visualizes it. “If I had the balls to go over there, I think the first thing I’d do is walk through the front door and find you.”

Maura chuckles lowly. It slithers down Jane’s spine and embraces her hips. “That is so… tame.”

“Well it’s important,” Jane counters, blushing as she takes a pause to sip more beer. “The most important, really. My favorite part of the day is when I get to lay eyes on ya. It sets the tone.”

A third player, Boston, enters the fray. Maura must like that, because the groan on the line welcomes that North End cadence with what sounds like open legs. The ensuing huff says that Maura doesn’t like the fact that she likes what Jane has just said. “I need you to get to the point… ah,” she gripes, but then she moans.

Jane snorts. “No ya don’t. Ya need me to be me. Ya need me to tell ya that I’d come by after a long day at work and before we did anything nasty, I’d kick my shoes off in the hall and hug ya til ya felt you were gonna pop,” she emphasizes her accent on purpose.

Maura sniffles loudly. “You used to do that,” she laments, cutting through the haze of sex, unable to keep it quiet.

“Yeah, I know,” Jane admits. “Still want to,” she says.

“Then start again,” pleads Maura. The desperation in her voice comes from sadness and not from touching herself. “You haven’t been to the house after work in so long. Months.”

But all Jane wants to do is grasp at the lost moment. “Can’t yet,” she replies. “Plus, you got a man over there to do less than half of all the things I do, remember?” She tosses Maura’s words back at her like a grenade. She wonders if she actually wants war, if she even has the impulse control to stop it.

“Jane don’t-”

“Can we get back to the task at hand? Specifically, your hand? I wanna make you wet enough to hear it over the phone,” Jane interrupts Maura, apparently finding that impulse control. Or at least, trading one impulse for another.

Now, they are off. Maura gasps, and they have truly begun. “It won’t take much more,” she taunts.

“See? The hug helps. Even if ya just fantasizin’ ‘bout it,” Jane goads back. “But I gotta admit my favorite part of this is when you tell me what you want me to do.” She has needs, too, and now, with Maura firmly committed to their purpose, she slips her hand completely into her boyshorts. Fucking christ, she thinks. Fantasizing about the hug they haven’t shared in months has affected her, too. She starts with lazy fingers, just to take stock of the moisture. She leans back in her chair, opens her knees while keeping her boots planted on the hardwood. She bites back a moan when she looks down: these conversations between her and Maura always make her feel like a cowboy, in control.

“I want you on top of me,” Maura says, lusting after that control. “I need you inside and I need you to make me come without me having to tell you how.”

“Yes ma’am,” Jane laughs softly. Clearly, it’s a recent, sore subject for her best friend. And, she understands. Maura spends all day at work delegating, ordering people around, making executive decision after executive decision. It would make sense that sometimes she just wants to go home and sweat out the sheets without having to present a research paper on all the things that make her hot. Jane supposes she can do that, at least, even if she can’t provide the emotional intimacy Maura craves during waking hours. Jack’s probably better at that, anyway. “Lemme start slow. Lemme put some fingers on it and figure out how ready you are on my own.”

“That might be my favorite part of this,” says Maura. She shudders audibly. “When you do reconnaissance for yourself.”

They’ve never had sex, never touched each other that way, but far be it from Jane to burst the fantasy bubble. She rolls with it, and then rolls once over her own clit to loosen up her tongue. “Put ya hand on mine, then. We’re always better together.”

“I’m definitely wet enough for you to slip in,” Maura’s voice is hurried and heavy. Jane wants to reach through the damn phone and get Maura there herself.

But she’s in a North End walk up and Maura’s in a Beacon Hill palace, so she makes do with words. “So slide me in, then. I’m right there, baby. You’re gonna do that and then you’re gonna wrap yourself around me while I make your expensive-ass bed rock.”

Maura loves to envision Jane fucking her with rhythm and force, the deadly combination with which Jane does everything in life, and Jane knows this because Maura sobs. “God, I need you deep.”

“You seen my trigger finger? As deep as you can handle. And when I go even deeper than that, I’m gonna hold your legs open til you can’t take it any more,” Jane whispers frenetically. She rubs tight circles on herself now. The past few times, they’ve flown past the tentative, shy talk they started with, and land in some of the dirtiest territory Jane’s ever been. It’s enough to make her moan, too. “Shit, that’s good, babe.”

Maura releases this sound that, if Jane didn’t know better, she’d think is a laugh. It’s manic, it’s wanton. “My mouth is ready for you,” she says, in the register of devotion.

Jane imagines Maura holding onto her as they bounce together in that guest bed, on their way to oblivion. She growls, grits her teeth, chases her climax. “I don’t know what you and Jack do,” she says like a threat, “but ya mouth is not where I’d be givin’ you my kids.”

It’s nonsensical - Jane can’t do what she claims. It’s also so wholesome, so raunchy, and so queer, all at once, that it makes Maura come - just like that. Her breath hitches in Jane’s ear, higher and higher and higher until it catches, and she releases a stifled little scream into the pillow next to her head. “Oh, daddy,” she cries. She indulges the urge to call Jane that almost every time they phone fuck now.

It’s Jane’s favorite sound and it dismantles her. She can be as loud as she wants in her empty home. “Agh, fuck, Maura,” she groans. It’s long and because of the beers, she doesn’t care.

Maura’s breathing is nowhere close to returning to normal, and pride swims around Jane’s pounding heart. “Let me come over, please,” Maura begs as she pants. “Let me come see you.” In addition to naughty pet names, this has increased as well: the need to consummate.

Jane hangs her head and pulls her hand out of her pants. She rests her elbows on the tabletop. “I don’t think boyfriend number one would like that very much.”

Maura does laugh a little this time. She sounds tired, but oddly thrilled. “Boyfriend number one? Does that mean you’re boyfriend number two?”

“If I was, there’d be no boyfriend number one. There’d be nobody else,” Jane asserts, narrowing her angular eyebrows.

Maura knows it’s true. “So let me in, then. You can take your rightful place, you know. Here with me, in person. Where you belong. Open up to me; I miss you.”

“That’s uh, easier said than done,” Jane says. She dances away from the edge they get closer to every time they talk.

Maura’s scoff gives away her confusion. Jane knows she’s giving Maura whiplash, but she just can’t seem to stop herself. “Well, can’t you try?” Maura pushes, growing annoyed.

“Not… not tonight, Maura,” Jane denies her. It hurts both of them. “I don’t have the energy it would take to give you what you need. That’s why Jack…”

“That’s why Jack what?” Maura interrogates Jane in a rare subjugation of roles. The sheets rustle when she sits up.

“That’s why Jack is with you tonight, in ya real bed, there to hold you when ya go back upstairs and sleep.” Jane spins Maura’s attitude back on her in record time. She stands up, holds the phone to her head with her shoulder, and snatches her zipper closed. She fastens her button with violence and gathers up her beer bottles to take to the sink.

Before Jane can continue the veiled insinuation that Jack has what she wants, despite what Maura has just told her about her rightful place, Maura cuts her off. “Good night, Jane. See you in the morning.”

Jane grips the lip of her counter and stifles the entwining urges to scream and cry at the same time. What the fuck am I doing? “Yeah yeah, night. I’ll pick you up at 7:30.”

Maura has already hung up.

——

Jane, as fresh faced as she can be given her late night and overall melancholy, rummages for keys in her slack pockets for the second time in eight hours. This time, she settles on the one that opens Maura’s door, and slides it in the lock. The heavy mechanism drops open with ease, and Jane uses her bare, lithe arm to push through and into the conditioned air of the home.

She had chosen a t-shirt to tuck into her pants this morning because she’d been too tired to think about forcing her hands to do buttons, but somehow, despite having done the same activity the previous night, Maura sits at the island, looking refreshed. Bubbly even, with the newspaper in her hand and a smile on her pretty features. “Mornin’,” Jane calls out, raising her eyebrows once.

“Good morning!” Maura replies brightly, setting her pencil down, watching Jane saunter into the kitchen to stand just across from her. “Coffee?”

As always, their evening escapades will be filed away into history, unspoken. Jane is grateful that Maura at least gives her this. She returns the smile to show Maura that gratitude. “I’d love some, but we got a dead girl in Kenmore square,” she says softly.

Maura curls a surprised brow upward at Jane, who looms over. “We do? Oh, shit. My phone must have been off,” she says, picking up the offending object and checking the screen. Sure enough, as they both can see, it’s blank.

Jane resents the implications immediately, despite her encouragement of them: Maura only turns her phone off when she goes to bed if someone is still in it. Jack did not go back home. She turns toward the stairs and taps her fingertips on the counter. “Hi, Jack,” she says loudly and with faux sweetness. When she looks back at Maura, she sucks her teeth. “He does know he can come down here, right?”

Maura shrugs. “He can’t, actually. Not until he finds his pants. I’ve looked everywhere.”

“Chi bonu,” Jane rolls her eyes. “A grown man that can keep track of his own clothes.”

Maura crosses her legs because she catches Jane looking at them and, well, what better punishment. “Don’t begrudge him being here when I’m the one who wants him to be.”

Jane pulls her head back, incredulous and wild-eyed. “You want me to begrudge you, then?” she starts, forearms resting on the tools of her kit belt as she backs away from the island. She straightens her spine, cocks it for a fight.

“I-” Maura begins, just as ready, but then Jack emerges.

He is in Maura’s floral robe, sleepy with a coffee mug against his lips. He ambles into their tussle none the wiser, and clears his throat. “Ladies,” he greets more in the imitation of coolness than the actual thing, and chooses to stand right next to Jane. No space between them. Their shoulders knock. Well, his shoulder knocks her upper arm, because she stands about two inches taller than him in her work boots. If she were barefoot, they would be the exact same height. “Hey,” he says to her. His voice is morning-rough. He stands with his legs apart and his eyes on her.

She tries not to look at him and fails. She does reign in the mean laugh, however. “Hey,” she says back.

Still so close, he turns to Maura. “Is uh, is Thursday still a good day for me to bring Allie by?” he asks.

Maura’s eyes soften, her cheeks round with the genuineness of her grin. “I’m looking forward to it,” she says honestly, touching his arm and rubbing the hairs there with her thumb. Jane immediately finds the refrigerator door absolutely riveting.

“Great,” Jack says, eyes darting between the two women who flank him. If he senses something, he doesn’t mention it, but he purses his lips once as if to show them he smells the tension. He sips his coffee again and makes his way back toward the bedrooms. “See ya, Jane.”

Jane shakes her head once he’s out of sight. “Yeah, uh hey. Good luck with ya pants,” she derides, dropping her standard accent on purpose. She glares at Maura as she does so.

Maura glares back. “Don’t you think that was a little terse?”

“Well sorry but men who need women to do basic daily living tasks for them make me uncomfortable,” Jane grumbles as she waits for Maura to gather up her bags and phone.

Maura frowns. “You’ve never lost something at a lover’s house before, after being in the throes of passion?” She says it to injure. She likes how revenge tastes on her tongue, especially for Jane. Jane has learned this over their years of constant push and pull. Mostly, it is pull, but oh, can Maura push with the best of them, rivalling Jane herself.

“Haven’t had the chance,” Jane bites back, tossing her head in the direction of the stairs. They march to the front door and despite their quarrel, she opens it for Maura.

Maura steps through into the early morning sun. Jane changes in the sun lately, becomes this Jane. “Not what I meant, and you know it. And that’s not because of me. I have offered you the chance countless times in the past few weeks. It’s you that keeps us apart. Not me,” she scolds.

Jane’s own shit and the very real boyfriend on the other side of the door make her brain ache. “You know how I feel about cheatin’,” she says. “And you know how I feel in general. Like shit. Tell me what I can do for you like this, huh?”

Maura has had this argument several times since the hospital, and she refuses to have it again. “I take you at your word. You say you can’t provide for me? I’ll believe you,” she hits again, knowing the insinuation of Jane’s failure to protect and provide would cut into Jane’s chest. It would burn. “But then you don’t get to be mad that he is in my home, in my bed. You don’t get to be mad that he’s doing what you won’t, even though you’ve been told you can.”

They arrive at Jane’s cruiser down the street and Jane yanks that passenger door open. “Get in the goddamn car, Maura.”

___

They enter the apartment of the decedent they’ve been called to investigate together. Jane pulls her ponytail from under her blazer collar just before Maura hands her some purple nitrile gloves. She smacks them on with a grunt of thanks. “Who’s Allie?” she asks.

Maura follows the chatter of police officers and crime techs that travels down the front hall. “Jack’s daughter.”

“Meeting his kids, huh? Sounds like it’s gettin’ serious,” Jane comments. She looks ahead, not at Maura.

“It might be,” Maura says. “But she’s coming because her seventh-grade homeroom is doing a career study project, and she wants to shadow me for extra credit.”

Jane smirks. “Well I wanna shadow you for extra credit, too, but that seems a little grown-up for a seventh grader.”

Maura blushes, and then is indignant. “What do you mean by grown-up?”

“Boring,” Jane can barely wait to say. Her smirk becomes a full blown, toothy smile.

Maura melts. “You doubt my ability to make forensics fun?” she quips, and just like that, their anxiety volleys back into playfulness. She both loves and hates the ride.

“Fun for me? Absolutely. Fun for a thirteen year-old? I don’t know about that,” Jane chuckles.

“Well, if conversation lags, I’ll vamp,” Maura counters. Suddenly, she feels defensive of her ability to entertain teenagers. It’s never been… great. “I’ll talk about what interested me at this age.”

“Such as?”

“My favorite books,” Maura states confidently. “Or, you know, when I was thirteen, I did a science project on the antimicrobial properties of common foods. Garlic gets the most press, but the cruciferous family is not to be underestimated.”

Jane stops them just before they enter the living room, her hand on Maura’s elbow. She steps close, into Maura’s space, and breathes up sweet notes of coffee and organic breath mints wafting her way.

Maura’s breath catches.

“So, your plan B is Anne of Green Gables or broccoli. Good luck with that,” Jane teases, but there’s no mirth in her tone and they both lick their lips. She steps away before Maura can close the distance.

“Danielle Mitchell,” Vince Korsak barks as soon as Jane and Maura enter the living room. Maura shakes her head slowly to gather herself, and then she kneels next to Danielle.

“Lemme guess, twenty somethin’?” Jane replies, staring right at Danielle’s Starry Night print hanging near a window.

Korsak laughs, the infectious one that comes from his belly and makes him sound all weezy. “How’d you know?”

Jane points to the art. “There a law that requires New England girls to decorate their first apartments with the same five things? Ten bucks there’s a Breakfast at Tiffany’s poster above her bed.”

Maura’s had enough of the wild conjecture and pipes up. “Oh, you cannot know that?”

Jane turns to face her fully and pushes her chest out. “Wanna bet?”

“Taste is an individual’s preference based on their specific cultural experience, Jane. It’s impossible to predict,” Maura responds in a chest beat of her own, albeit philosophical.

“No, no, no wait,” Jane waves her off, “Marilyn Monroe, white dress, on the subway grate. Twenty bucks.”

Maura scoffs at Jane’s presumption. “Deal.”

Korsak rolls his eyes and the three of them walk to the bedroom together.

Marilyn strikes her classic, sexy pose over Danielle’s headboard and Jane pumps her fist. “Yes!” she shouts. Then she points to Maura. “Pay up, baby.”

Maura flushes dark red and hopes that Korsak doesn’t notice. Luckily, he is far too busy trying to look at anything in the room but them. “Maybe later,” she flirts, because that is their usual way of doing things.

Jane, still high from victory, glowers. “A’right, but don’t think I’m gonna forget.”

For the rest of the hour, Maura catalogues the condition of the body and the detectives make their way through the immaculate apartment. To them, cleaning the place suggests the killer had access to the place, and knew her schedule. Knew that they’d have the time to do a deep cleanse.

Jane takes one last look at the bag over Danielle’s head and hopes that some deadbeat boyfriend didn’t do this to her.

___

Jane rocks on her heels in the elevator on her way down to the morgue. Nina’s expert investigating had yielded no evidence of a significant other yet, and Jane secretly hopes that the autopsy will. Because other than disgruntled lover, she has no leads or hunches to pursue.

She struts right past Susie Chang at her work station, and pushes into the autopsy suite where Maura takes notes on a clipboard. “You owe me twenty bucks, Dr. Isles,” says Jane, instead of hello.

“It’s on my desk,” Maura doesn’t look up from her writing, but she does smile into it. “But just for the record, I’ve been doing some thinking, and I do want to say I think you are underestimating the merit of Danielle’s posters.”

“What, you mean you’re gonna get like a Bob Marley poster in - no, wait,” Jane raises her left eyebrow and taps her chin in fake thought, “Keep calm and buy shoes.”

Maura smiles right at Jane this time. “Ooh. That’s a good one. I like it. But I’m not talking about taste. I’m talking about the evolutionary basis for cultural trends.”

“Ain’t no evolutionary basis for beer hats and foam fingers, even though I like ‘em,” Jane argues.

“No. Imitation, I mean. The fact that her posters mirror most young adults her age. It’s a survival strategy,” Maura says.

“Loving boring shit is a safety thing?” Jane asks. She scoffs. “I don’t buy it.”

“Choosing things we feel comfortable with, or that help us to blend in, is an ancient evolutionary strategy to keep us alive,” Maura says.

“That go for boring people, too?” Jane snaps.

Maura doesn’t rise to the bait; she just sighs loudly. “You know, the viceroy butterfly imitates the appearance of the less-palatable monarch, thereby deterring predators and ensuring survival.”

“For butterflies,” Jane raises her voice. She stalks over to Maura’s side. “We got bigger brains for a reason, Maura.”

“My point is that being unoriginal has its advantages.” Maura stands her ground even when the smell of Jane’s sweat and lavender perfume make her sway.

“Not for Danielle,” says Jane.

Maura, sensing her two options are an argument or a fruitful work discussion, chooses the latter. “Petechial hemorrhaging confirms that the cause of death was asphyxiation.”

Jane nods, leans against the edge of an empty slab. “Yeah, that’s what we put as the MO in our NCIC search.” Their similarities abound, despite the rift between them.

“Anything so far?” Maura asks, soft for Detective Rizzoli because she knows that she’s about to run herself ragged for Danielle.

“Nah. A few strangulations, a few girls in Danielle’s demographic, but nothing that can prove this was a repeat killing,” Jane answers. “I need a special detail that can link her to any other victims.”

Maura, leaning over Danielle’s open mouth with forceps, gasped. “Jasmine Hess.”

Jane points at her, shaking her finger. “Ok, yeah… Hess, Jasmine. Found dead in Plymouth County about six months ago. M.E.-”

“Found a cork in her throat,” Maura finishes for her, standing up and brandishing a similar cork she has just found in Danielle’s pharynx.

“Shit,” curses Jane. “Looks like there’s somethin’ to your theory of imitation after all”

Maura knits her brow. “Imitation? What makes you think it’s not the same person?”

“‘Cause the guy that did this murder is already in jail. I remember the case now - he got put away by a hot shot prosecutor last year. I gotta go tell Korsak and Frankie,” she announces distractedly, her mind already working all angles of the case they’ve assembled so far. She knows, as soon as she goes upstairs, she won’t surface until she’s figured out who killed Danielle. She kisses Maura’s cheek just before she leaves, an impulsion born of the guilt she already feels for her absence.

She doesn’t look back, however, when she does go.

[veliseraptor]

Regarding Xue Yang pleading that he changed: would xiao xingchen be able to reconcile that with what was done to Song Lan's temple? It is a source of personal grief for him since it's tied to the loss of his eyes and friend, and they might even be people he met before or know by name from Song Lan telling stories maybe. Wouldn't any leniency be tied to Song Lan's anger and "resentment" he'd directed towards Xiao Xingchen? If so, how would they work it out?

oh this is one of my favorite crunchy bits of this because that is the question, isn’t it! and I think the answer is that it’s complicated. (ask me a characterization question, get a complicated answer.)

first of all, I think Xiao Xingchen feel at least a little like it’s not his judgment to make re: Song Lan’s loss, and I don’t think especially at this point Xiao Xingchen is particularly vengeance minded (and not, I would think, inclined to take revenge on someone else’s behalf). he also has such a guilt complex about his own role in the massacre of Baixue Temple (as in, he holds himself far more substantially responsible for it than he should) that I think he would...have sort of a hard time feeling like he could really get into that.

it’d be too easy for Xue Yang to turn that back on him, and I think he knows it.

which doesn’t mean he isn’t thinking about it, in this hypothetical scenario! I think he’d have to. both because of what that particular massacre meant for his own life and because of the acute betrayal he fears it would be for him to not condemn Xue Yang on Song Lan’s behalf, since Song Lan isn’t there to do it himself.

but on the other hand! I think there’s a very compelling case based on three major factors for Xiao Xingchen holding back and at least giving this whole second chance thing a trial run, one of which is logical and two of which are...not at all that. the logical one is, as mentioned about: it’s not his vengeance to claim. if Song Lan were there, that would be one thing; I think Xiao Xingchen would have a very hard time justifying stopping Song Lan from taking revenge on Xue Yang. but when Song Lan isn’t there, and isn’t even in Xiao Xingchen’s life again - how can he make that decision based on a guess about what he’d want? doesn’t he need to make it based on his own beliefs and his own understanding of the situation?

which is a reason to hold back, but it’s the non-logical reasons that would be more decisive, which are:

one: Xiao Xingchen doesn’t want to kill his friend, even if his friend is also Xue Yang, because that would hurt and also it would mean he was wrong all along and has been so stupid and none of what he was treasuring so much was ever real - so he wants, at least on some level, to have reasons not to do it.

two: Xiao Xingchen is profoundly lonely and just doesn’t want to lose anyone else.

another thing is: because of Xiao Xingchen’s guilt about his own role in that massacre - I can see him coming down much harder about it. however, I can also see him being more inclined to hold back, because of his personal need to feel like his own fault can be somehow mitigated or partially absolved through Xue Yang becoming better because of him. because if he manages to in some way fix things then maybe it retroactively provides some kind of absolution for Xiao Xingchen’s mistake in pointing Xue Yang at Baixue Temple in the first place.

(massive scare quotes around “mistake” - this is Xiao Xingchen’s framing I’m talking about here, not mine.)

which is a psychological wrinkle it’s probably a good thing Xue Yang wouldn’t pick up on, because he’d absolutely exploit the shit out of it if he did.

and of course all of this is also contingent on this being a timeline where, if applicable, Xiao Xingchen is at least not aware that Song Lan is dead. because that’s gonna shoot down all of this hypothetical straight off.

regardless, though, Xiao Xingchen is going to be feeling a whole lot of guilt and self-doubt about the whole thing and his one consolation is going to be that at least since he’s never going to see Song Lan again then Song Lan never has to know so he won’t feel betrayed about it.

[orderoftheavengers]

Scarlet Legilimens

House: Ravenclaw

Species: Human/phoenix hybrid (formerly human)

Blood Status: Pureblood

(Pointless) Wand: Cherry, 13 inches, phoenix feather  

(Pointless) Broom: Firebolt Supreme

Patronus: Red-billed firefinch

Specialty: Legilimency, Occlumency, Flying, Dark Arts, Wandless Magic

Sorting

Wanda Maximoff is a living example of how the traits of Ravenclaw House may be applied to the most heinous villainy, and the most self-sacrificing heroism. As a villain, she is crafty and manipulative; as a hero, clever and intuitive. Her fighting style, for good or evil, is always more sneaky and innovative than “bold.” Ironically, her mind is also her weakest point as well as her strongest, as poor Wanda continuously ends up as the manipulated as often as the manipulator. A born Legilimens, her abilities, strengths and flaws are all mind related.

Note the “cleverness” and “ready mind” mentioned by the Sorting Hat needn’t always come in the form of a bookish nerd, as Luna Lovegood, Sybil Trelawney, Profeesor Quirrel and Professor Lockheart are all Ravenclaw. Wanda may not spend her free time studying or watching the Discovery Channel, but she does spend much of it experimenting with her powers, and letting her imagination loose. When faced with unbearable loss, she wasn’t immediately able to face her grief head-on, like a Gryffindor; nor, as a corrupt Ministry leader lied, did she try to resurrect her lost lover; instead, she escaped into her own mind, imagining up an (almost) complete fictitious life for herself and Vision, in a matter of seconds, without even realizing she was doing it.

Wanda is capable of impressive courage, ambition and loyalty, to be sure; but all of those things have wavered, when her reality was turned upside-down. She shed years of indoctrination after reading Ultron’s mind and seeing the grim truth. (And yes, she can read a machine’s mind! That’s a Ravenclaw right there.)

Durmstrang Experiments

Wanda and her twin brother Pietro were born to wizarding parents, in the tiny European nation of Sokovia. Wanda was a born Legilimens, like Queenie Goldstein, able to peek into others’ minds without having to perform any spells. A poor family, their father made ends meet by enchanting posters and lobby cards of old Muggle sitcoms to play out entire episodes, which he then sold to Muggle-enthusiasts in the wizarding world. Their home was decimated by a spell invented by Tony Stark, who never intended for it to end up in the claws of banshee terrorists. The twins ended up in a crap Muggle orphanage, which only intensified their prejudices. By the time they entered Durmstrang, a school infamous for professors that supported Dark Magic and even Voldemort, they were ripe for indoctrination and radicalization.

Due to Wanda’s being a Legilimens, the twins were selected for a dangerous experiment by their headmaster Professor Beowulf Von Stucker. Using the Mind Stone, the twins were to be fused with their wands. Wanda’s first name suddenly became very appropriate, a la Remus Lupin. Wanda merged with her phoenix-feathered wand, transforming the born Legilimens into a powerful human/phoenix hybrid. Her telepathic powers were enhanced, and she gained many powers of a phoenix, including flight, inhuman strength for her levitation spells, and being nearly indestructible. Being part wand also made her able to do wandless magic with no effort. Pietro, meanwhile, was merged with his Veela-hair wand, making him a human/Veela hybrid, and gifting him with a Veela’s dancing speed and silvery hair.

(A very special thanks to AlasterBoneman for the idea about Wanda's wand being integrated into her body.) Order of the Avengers Wanda and Pietro are finishing up their first year when they cross paths with the Order of the Avengers, and they don't exactly make a good first impression. Their vitriol against the Avengers and Tony Stark makes very little sense, especially given that Wanda is a telepath, and should easily see they aren't the villains (not to mention how much she has in common with Natasha, whose life story Wanda personally digs up). But, the twins are still only about eleven, and kids that age can be pretty stupid. The Avengers trace Loki's confiscated broom-scepter to Durmstrang, where the dark wizards from the Order of Hydra are keeping it. Wanda, having recently studied with a Boggart, uses her Legillimency to make the Avengers relive their traumas. Tony's fear shows Wanda that he clearly wants to protect the world, and yet she makes the very un-Ravenclaw decision to keep pursuing "revenge." Her plan inadvertently leads to Tony and Bruce accidentally creating a dangerous and ear-bleedingly-irritating gargoyle named Ultron, who the twins personally work with. Wanda even shocks Bruce into green-wolf form, and sends him on a rampage through one of the dormitories at Durmstrang (but it's not her or Pietro's House, so she could care less). Finally, after much too long, she puts her mental powers to some use, and reads Ultron's mind. That's when she puts two and two together. By then, Ultron has unleashed an army of Cornish Pixies to levitate Durmstrang Castle miles into the air, planning to drop it in an explosion of magic that will alert the Muggles to the existence of wizards. Huddled in a swaying castle tower, she confesses her guilt to Hufflepuff Clint Barton. Clint invites her to redeem herself by joining the Avengers. Durmstrang is saved, but sadly, Pietro takes a killing curse for Clint and another first year. wrought with grief and guilt, wanda begins her second year of schooling at Hogwarts, where--after an unusually long time on the stool--she is sorted into Ravenclaw. Her lonely mood is raised slightly when she finds the attractive new Golem, Vision, hovering to the Ravenclaw table alongside her.

The Scarlet Witch Hunt

Perhaps living on her own for a while is what finally helps Wanda regain the confidence to think for herself. When Vision suggests that they both drop out of their respective schools and just run off together, she urges him against the idea. When Vision senses a disturbance in his Mind Stone, she inspects it for him, but reports, “I just feel you.”

They are interrupted by a rude crowd of Trolls under their window, calling for Wanda’s blood. She’s fine to ignore them, but Vision—ever the logical Ravenclaw—is compelled intellectually argue with the Trolls in his lady's honor.

“Wanda is a redemption-seeking-antihero like Tony, who she has not expressed any hatred for since the Ultron fiasco—not even during the whole ‘Civil War’ calamity! In fact, of everyone on Team Cap, she was the least awful to Tony! The only verbal exchange between them during the whole drunk Quidditch match was a brief pout about being 'locked in her room,' which she had no problem with until Hawkeye came and pressured her. She was literally the only person in the Squid prison not insulting him! And just a few minutes ago, when I wanted her to run away with me, she was telling me to keep my loyalties to Stark, and when the news reported him missing she was visibly scared for him! Seriously, where are you Trolls even getting that she still hates Tony?”

One Troll with particularly long horns shouts back, “Well what about that cleavage and slutty red leather? Tony Stark was never a slu—er, wait…”

Vision is now standing in the window frame, unbuttoning his fly.

“Vision?” Wanda asks nervously. “What are you doing?”

A glittering, purple stream poursd out from her boyfriend’s “better wand,” threatening to deface the crowd below.

“Vision no!” she cries, quickly containing the violet river in an energy ball.

Steady hand…    she carefully lifts the ball of glistening liquid higher and higher into the air. …Not gonna screw this one up—

“I say Wanda, is that a giant flying donut?” Vision asks curiously.

Wanda glances up, and there is indeed a gargantuan space donut in the night sky, coming right for them. The strange sight distracts her, causing her hand to slip—just as she’s levitating Visions liquids right over said donut.

This enchanted pastry is in fact the vessel of some of Thanos’s most vicious minions. And Wanda has just drenched them in Vision’s you-know-what.

While Wanda gasps behind her hand, Vision suggests, “Let’s go for a walk.”

On their way down the quiet lamp-lit streets, they are soon stopped by a group of Thanos’s putrid goblin children, currently slightly more putrid than usual.

A blue female goblin roars, “Now you’ve really succeeded in pissing us off!”

Before she can stop herself, Wanda blurts out, “Pissed off? Smells more to me like you ‘been pissed on!”

Somewhere, a boxing bell dings, and a badass wizard’s duel begins.

Just when Wanda and Vision are cornered, a train passes by, causing all parties to freeze dramatically for no apparent reason. Wanda tries to make her body move, to take this opportunity to blast her opponents, but some force has her glued in place, as low music hisses theatrically throughout the night. The train passes, to reveal a shadowy figure, posing heroically. Instead of shooting the figure with a hex, one of the goblins simply throws a spear, which the figure catches expertly. Wanda and Vision both know that there is only one person on the planet would could make an entrance with this much ham and cheese.

Steve Rogers dramatically stepped into the light, revealing his fluffy new beard, and the duel gets a bit more epic.

Oh Snap

In the wizarding nation of Wakanda, Black Panther’s brilliant sister Shuri does her damndest to save her fellow Ravenclaw, and safely remove the Infinity Stone from Vision’s forehead. Sadly, Thanos’s forces overwhelm her, and Wanda is forced to kill her lover--the last family she has left. Many would assume only a Gryffindor would have the resolve to do this, but a Ravenclaw’s wisdom and pragmatism can go a long way.

Ever the sadist, that purple f*ck Thanos uses the Time Stone to resurrect Vision and kill him again, in front of Wanda, and even has the gault "comfort" her in a patronizing manner.

And yet, she’s not so distraught when Thanos’s Dusting curse comes for her. It could be that she’s so despaired by now that she welcomes death. Or maybe the half-phoenix simply doesn’t react to dissolving into ash the same way other beings might…

…in any case, she is resurrected over the summer by Bruce Banner. Vision, sadly, isn’t. In her grief, Wanda accidently traps herself and the entire school of Hogwarts inside the Mirror of Erised, but that's another story entirely. 

Wand, Broom and Patronus

Cherry wood is associated with some of the most powerful and lethal wands.  Phoenix feather wands are considered to have the widest range of magic, and are among the post powerful, yet also the most difficult to tame. 

The red-billed firefinch is one of the few bird species where the females sport some red coloring. These birds are tiny and quiet, but very active. They are flexible about where they live and with whom; they can mix with other bird species, and can live in the wild or captivity, provided they always have plenty of space. Their nests are different from other birds', having a dome shape and being low in bushes. Not unlike the hidden fortress Wanda creates, to hide her family. These crafty birds also build mock-nests to fool predators.  

AN: This has undergone some changes in both the story and image, since the release of "WandaVision." If anyone is for any reason attached to Wanda's old broom, the previous version is saved in my Stash. I plan to reuse that fire design somewhere else, possibly for Harry's Firebolt in my more serious Potter art.

[like-rain-or-confetti]

Ghost of You (Alec Volturi x Reader)

WARNING: Death! Dark Themes! Mentions of possible suicide!

(Inspired by Simulacra) 

You lay lifelessly on the forest floor. Your knees dirty, dirt buried under your finger nails. He made sure you were dead. You didn’t move, you didn't breathe. There was no heartbeat. You were peacefully silent. Carlisle looked down at your body with a frown on his face. "Carlisle?" Carlisle turned to see Bella, who in turn was then exposed to your body. She gasped, recoiling immediately. She couldn't take her eyes off you. You looked as though you were just sleeping. One of your hands draped across your stomach. However your other arm gave a very different story. It was sprawled out flat on the forest floor with your phone mere inches from your fingertips. "What happened?" Bella felt tears well up in her eyes. Carlisle moved closer to your body picking up your phone before hurrying back and moving towards Bella. "Go and find Edward and then call your father." Carlisle said, putting the phone in his pocket. "Are they...?" "Go. Now." Bella pressed her phone to her ear, barely feeling Edwards fingers rest against her back. "Dad? You've got to come to the woods there's... it's (Y/N). They're dead." 

Carlisle couldn't stop his frown as he watched your body be lifted into a body bag. Arms folded over each other ever so slightly. "So Bella and Edward found them?" Charlie shifted to stand beside Carlisle. Carlisle nodded. "Yes." He had to lie. Charlie couldn’t know he was with the body- not Edward and Bella. "Is there any chance you could make a guess on the time of death?" Carlisle numbly shook his head. "Not for certain, there isn't any decomposition but they're pale so it could be a matter of hours." "Well, we'll get an autopsy and see if we can piece together what's happened." Charlie stated. "How do you do that? If you don't mind my asking?" Carlisle turned his gaze to Charlie. "I'm a doctor, I see so many brutal injuries and conditions. So much worse than (Y/N) looks, yet even now i stand here and don't know what to say or do." The question made Carlisle seem human but that wasn't why he asked. Carlisle knew the secret of his profession. He had lost many patients. He knew you personally though. Whilst you looked somewhat unharmed, Carlisle was finding the image difficult to stomach. Charlie had basically watched you grow up. He knew you since you were born and he, at best, seemed unphased. "I try to focus on it in one perspective. I'm the Chief of Police. People need me right now to keep everyone in the right direction. I'm going to be needed composed for now but when I'm just Charlie Swan, I'm going to feel the loss just as much as everyone else. Their parents, my neighbors- my friends- they're going to need their friend when I have to tell them what has happened." Charlie put a hand on Carlisle's shoulder. "I'll take it from here. Don't worry about this." Carlisle nodded. "Take care of yourself, Charlie." "You too. Oh, and one more thing. When you found them, did you move them or anything else on the scene?" Carlisle shook his head. "No, they haven't been moved since I've been here." Charlie nodded before walking away. Carlisle stared at the empty space you were once in. Now he had to tell Alec the news. The news he'd never want. 

Jane stared at her brother who hadn't moved from his desk. "Alec...Alec please say something." It had been three days since he found out you were dead and Jane could see her dear twin was suffering, even if he didn't show it. "Did you know they don't immediately bury the dead anymore?" Alec spoke up but didn't turn to look at his sister. "They put the bodies in a large kind of freezer. Tight, enclosed spaces for people allocated like drawers." "Alec..." "(Y/N) didn't like small spaces, did you know that?" Alec continued. Jane swallowed, biting her lip. Jane moved to crouch beside him, taking his hand and lightly giving it a kiss as he continued. "You know, when the masters told me I laughed. I don't know why I did, but I did. I didn't find it funny. I just couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that i could go through any more pain. Haven't I suffered enough?" Alec's gaze lowered slightly. "I'm angry at them...at (Y/N). Although I know it’s not their fault. I stood there thinking. ‘how dare you? How dare you leave?’ Then it hit me why I feel so angry towards them. I don’t know how they died.” Alec looked at his twin. “I wasn’t the most loving or approachable person at times but…Jane do you think they would ever…?” Alec trailed off, unable to say the words. However, Jane knew immediately. She firmly squeezed his hand. “No. You two weren’t perfect but you two loved each other very much and I know they wouldn’t never do such a thing. Especially not because of you.” Alec laughed bitterly and quietly to himself. “ 'loved’? That’s the issue isn’t it, sister?” “What do you mean?” “A matter of days ago, they stopped loving me. Yet I still love them.” “Don’t think of it like this was a choice, Alec. (Y/N) died. They didn’t stop loving you because they wanted to. They stopped loving you because they can’t. They’re dead. Besides, perhaps there’s more to death than we realise. Perhaps they still do love you.. wherever they may be.” Alec scoffed. “You don’t want to hear it. I know.” Jane continued. “You and I aren’t very compelled by such things as the 'afterlife’ but if it’s what you have to say for now. Then so be it.” Alec’s empty and unfeeling facade cracked ever so slightly, eyes darkening even more than was thought possible, the red in his eyes no longer visible. “I don’t want to let go and I feel like I have to.” “Alec, you’re already letting go. It’s alright. It’s still early days, you’re going to feel a lot of things but when you’re ready, you’ll say goodbye. No one forces you to let go of someone after they die. You do so on your own.” Jane admitted she wasn’t the best at advice or anything of the sort. However Alec knew that, and for his sister to simply let him speak was enough. Jane rose to a stand. “Be hurt Alec, let yourself feel everything you feel. It’ll be better that way. Just give it time.” She bent over slightly to kiss her brothers forehead before leaving. 

A few days had passed and Carlisle had arrived somewhat unexpectedly for Alec but Aro, Caius and Marcus appeared to have been expecting him. “It’s good to see you all again, even if under such sad times.” Carlisle greeted solemnly. “Yes, dear friend. It is a very sad time indeed.” Aro slowly nodded, his hands clasped in front of him. “I trust your coven are doing well through these difficult times?” “We are doing our best. I can only hope the same goes for the Volturi.” Aro cracked a smile. Carlisle turned to meet Alec’s pitch black eyes. He nodded in greeting. “Hello Alec, I give you my condolences.” “Hello Carlisle. Thank you for the gesture.” Alec replied without a hint of emotion but his eyes spoke volumes. “You also have my apologies. I was unable to bring any of (Y/N)’s things for you. Their death is still in early days of investigation, so all of their things are being inspected.” Carlisle said, guilt in his eyes and sympathy. “You don’t have to worry, Carlisle. I wouldn’t want you to trouble yourself so. I appreciate the sentiment but it’s not your job.” Carlisle nodded. “However, i did get this.” Carlisle dug into his pocket and pulled out a phone. “It was at the scene but I took it before any services arrived.” “Their phone?” Alec tilted his head. “Phones are more advanced in the recent years. They can take photographs, play music, notes, messages, videos. I haven’t looked but I’m certain that a lot of their life is documented in here.” Alec gasped and was inches in front of Carlisle immediately, staring at the device in his hand. Carlisle dug into his other pocket. "This should charge it up. You’ll have to plug it in every now and then for the battery but other than that. It was the best I could do.” “This…” Alec swallowed. “This is more than I could have ever asked for. Thank you.” Carlisle smiled a sad smile and nodded. “Of course.” Carlisle held out the phone toward Alec and Alec could barely move to take it. The possibility that even a piece of you was left in the small device was gut wrenching but also releasing the most wonderful feeling of comfort and relief that just maybe he got to have a memory of you after all. 

Alec stared at the charging phone the whole time. When he had plugged it in, it had a ‘50%’ battery. Finally it hit '100%’ and he remembered which button Carlisle said turned it on. He pressed down on it and it vibrated in his fingertips. Unexpectedly, what he saw made Alec squeeze his eyes shut and cover his mouth, barely able to stifle the noise that escaped him. After a moment he opened his eyes. Your picture smiled back at him, your face angled  up slightly towards a light source with your eyes shut. The phone began to load each application and ran 'anti-virus checks’…whatever that meant. He vaguely remembered Carlisle telling him it was a touch screen. He didn’t really know what that meant either.  So he broke the phrase down and tapped the screen. Nothing. He quickly glided his finger across the screen and a box popped up on the screen asking for a password.

The password seemed to be four digits…that he didn’t know. The receptionist suggested your birthday or birth year. He tried both and hadn’t gotten anything. The receptionist hummed in thought. “Four digits you say?” Alec nodded. She sighed and her gaze passed Alec and drifted to her desk. Immediately she did a double take on Alec. “Let me see. I think I’ve got it.” Alec handed it over, peering around her. “What do you think it could be?” “Your name.” She answered. “But I can only type numbers?” Alec frowned. “Yes, so look, there’s tiny letters under the numbers. So if we spell your name then perhaps that’ll be it? I have a niece around your age, she does the same thing with the boys she falls head over heels for.” Alec said nothing but to his surprise it worked and the phone unlocked. 

Slowly things began to reboot, his thumb accidentally touching the screen to see your music playlist. He saw an arrow at the bottom left and tapped it bringing him back to the home screen. He tapped again and found your pictures. Alec’s jaw twisted slightly. There were many pictures of you, your friends, your family. None of him, Alec nor the Volturi allowed it. So his life with you was hidden. These pictures only showed the first half of your life. Although some wouldn’t open. Carlisle didn’t mention any damage so Alec wasn’t entirely sure what he was looking at. Suddenly, Alec no longer had access to your pictures and was taken back to the home screen. Instead he found your messages. 

He felt this was a bad idea. He was never one to pry. He trusted you and you trusted him, he felt as though he'd be breaking that trust. However he reminded himself of something very important. You were dead. The messages meant nothing now. Silently he tapped the icon and your messages appeared. 

His eyes were immediately caught by your mother's name. When he opened it he smiled. Your mother loved you to the end of the universe and she had no problem letting anyone know.  There were more family members with their own messages were just as casual- none of which expressed so much love as your mother's did. 

Then there were the Cullen's messages. He went through every last one of them and wasn't surprised by their contents. They were all the same. Disapproval for being with Alec. Edward especially seemed to be eager to pick arguments as the messages always grew heated quickly. Alec was glad that you defended yourself and seemed to disregard him and the rest of the Cullen's. That being said, it seemed as though these conversations didn't end on good terms. In fact, Alec remembered you saying that you were not friendly with the family before you...were gone.  Suddenly a tired sigh ran through his ears.  Alec looked up, no one was around. He grew uncertain as to whether he had sighed and not realised it but the sigh didn't sound like him.  Alec was quick to consider it his imagination, if not himself.  The messages could make him sigh, they were so exasperating.  All the messages in the phone had a contact name. All but one.  The messages from the number were brief and your responses gave the very strong impression that you were not friendly with this person. 

Marcus sat Alec down. “I know how you’re feeling.”  “Were you angry with Didyme?” Alec suddenly asked. Marcus was silent.  “I’m angry with (Y/N).” Alec admitted. “Why?” Marcus asked.  “Because they changed everything. They changed the impossibility of any decent humans. They weren’t decent- they were the best. They stayed long enough to change everything i thought i knew and then left. That means another human has hurt me and this hurt, it’s killing me. It kills me and i cant even hate them for it. i can’t bring myself to regret them, i cant bring myself to wish i had never met them because i would do this over and over again just to have a moment with them.”  “Alec,” Marcus said with a pained look. “I’m so sorry.”  “Master...is that really the only thing you can say to me right now?” Alec put his head in his hands. Marcus responded. “It’s the only response you’re ready for right now.”  “What?”  “Alec, you don’t want to hear that (Y/N)’s death isn’t your fault.” Marcus began.  “Because that’s the point!” Alec cried. “I did everything right! I did everything i could and they died anyway!”  “I know, and that’s why i’m sorry.” Marcus said.

Alec was laying on his bed, the phone in his fingers before he sat up sharply. There was an unknown number in the phone, all of the Cullen’s numbers were saved except Carlisle and Esme’s and Alec was told that Carlisle was the one who found you. None of the Cullen’s approved of your relationship with Alec, their relations with the Volturi strained but surely Carlisle wouldn’t have... Alec couldn’t finish the thought. A noise escaped Alec’s throat, dropping the phone in his lap, he slapped his hands over his mouth. Jane was by his side in moments. “Alec...?”  “Jane...” Alec managed out, his eyes pitch black. “tell me, they said, that Swan girl found Carlisle over (Y/N)’s body right? Right?” Alec asked as Jane wrapped an arm around him. “Yes, why?”  “He gave me the phone.” Alec whimpered.  “Alec...” Jane said quietly.  “He gave me the phone, the only thing left! He- he gave it to me when he didn’t have to and now i think i know why. He feels guilty!”  “For what?” Jane turned her brothers face, forcing him to look at her.  “The Cullen’s didn’t approve of (Y/N) and I. Our covens hadn’t forgiven each other. He...he killed them, Jane. He killed my (Y/N).” Jane was silent, watching her brother and Alec continued. “He wanted the human girl gone before she saw (Y/N). He was the first to find them and he gave me the phone, why would he do that? Why would he risk that if he didn’t feel guilty? We know him Jane, we know him. He feels guilt easily. Jane, he killed my (Y/N).” Jane pulled Alec into a hug as he sobbed although no tears would fall. Alec continued. “There’s an unknown number - his number wasn’t saved. (Y/N) was to meet the person in the woods and not tell anyone and Carlisle found them! It was Carlisle!”  “Alec...” Jane whispered. “We have to be certain. We need proof.”  “How?” He asked. “Stay here, alright? I know what to do. Give me the phone.” Alec struggled, unable to hand it over.  “I’ll give it back, I promise.” Jane took the phone from him gently. “Where’s the unknown number?” Alec showed her. “Stay here, okay? I’m going to check the number.”  “How?” Alec asked.  “Carlisle had called us before so we’ll have a record of his number. We’ll know if the number is a match.”  Jane explained before leaving.

Jane returned with the phone about twenty minutes later. “It’s not a match.” Alec stared at his sister. “It’s not?” Jane shook her head. “No. Whoever was communicating with (Y/N)...it wasn’t Carlisle.” 

Alec needed to spend some time alone in the woods and so he did, taking the phone with him. He propped his back against the tree, sitting on the forest floor, looking through the phone. A new picture had resurfaced, blurred green, grey and brown slanted lines. Another picture had nothing but brown and orange leaves, dirt and twigs. The last picture was of nothing, pitch black. However Alec discovered a video. One he hadn’t seen before. 

“I’ve to meet him here.” You said, the camera shaking and the forest floor cracking with every step you took. “I don’t know wh-” The video cut out momentarily.  “He called me, told me to come.” Your voice said as you put the hone down despite you lowering the phone to show brown, orange and green blurs from the forest floor.

The phone suddenly cut off, moving back to the home screen. However suddenly something wasn’t quite right. A number pad came up and to his shock, Alec watched as a number was typed in. One new number at a time, before the loud speaker was activated. The phone began to dial all by itself. Alec couldn’t look away, the same unknown number had been dialled in and the phone was now ringing without Alec touching it. Much to his horror, someone answered.  “Who in the hell is this?” A male voice said, a familiar one. Alec’s eyes darkened, he recognised the voice. His mouth twisted. This whole moment was so surreal, it never really hit him what he was hearing. Instead of him responding another familiar voice spoke for him.  “You can’t forget me yet!” The voice was distorted but undoubtedly and completely yours.  “W-what?” The man staggered.  “Do you remember my face!?” Your voice yelled.  “Got you.” Alec finally said and there was a pause.  “What?” The man responded. Alec responded out of a stiff jaw, seeing red. “I’m coming for you, Vladimir.” 

Jane moved to Alec’s side. “Are you prepared for this?” Jane asked, her hand resting on Alec’s shoulder.  “Yes, sister.” Alec nodded.  “We’ll get him, he won’t get away with this.” Jane promised him. “I’ll make him pay more than i ever have with anyone else.” Alec looked at his sister with a smile. “I’m counting on it, because I intend to make him pay for ever second. We’re going to enjoy this.”  “It’ll be fun and it’ll be for (Y/N).” Jane agreed.  “He’s not getting out of this alive. I wont stand for it.” Alec said.  “No one lays a hand on them without paying the price and no one hurts my brother.” Jane finished. Alec wrapped his arm around his sister before pressing a kiss to her cheek. 

Vladimir was met with Demetri and Felix first, then the twins, all four boxing him in. Jane grinned tossing Stefan’s head to the side.  “Saving the best for last.” Felix grinned maliciously.  “I told you, i’d find you.” Alec growled, his eyes darkening my the minute.  “But while we wait...” Jane smiled at Vladimir before he fell to the ground in agony. Screaming and wailing. Jane’s smile grew, her stare down at him piercing. Alec watched with eyes full of hate. “I want to rip him apart.” Alec finally said amidst Vladimir’s screams.  “We can’t- not until Aro gets here.” Demetri stated, watching Vladimir. Alec was quiet for a moment.  “Nevertheless...” Alec trailed off and in a matter of seconds he lunged grabbing Vladimir’s arm and bending it back in a horrific way it shouldn’t ever bend before completely ripping it off. Vladimir’s screams became more hysteric. Alec dropped the arm beside Vladimir and a few seconds later Aro, Marcus and Caius had arrived. 

“Jane...” Aro said lightly and Jane broke her stare looking to Aro.  “Master.” She acknowledged. Vladimir curled up slightly on the ground, groaning in pain but no longer under Jane’s control. Aro put a hand on Alec’s shoulder and nodding to him, silently asking Alec to trust him. Finally, Aro turned to Vladimir. “Well Vladimir, you’ve certainly gotten yourself into a lot of bother.” Vladimir chuckled amongst his groans of pain. “Good. That was the plan.”  “I hope you still think it’s worth it when you’re nothing but ashes. You understand we simply cannot let you live don’t you? The Volturi don’t give second chances.”  “You don’t scare me.” Vladimir said ruefully.  “What did you do to them?” Caius spoke up.  “To the human?” Vladimir laughed again before turning to Alec. “You want every little detail? You want to know why? Idiots. All of you.”  “Jane?” Caius turned to Jane but Vladimir interrupted.  “You took my mate from me. I want you to know the pain I've felt for a millennia. So when i heard the witch twin had grown attached to a human? The opportunity was too good. After some time and observations, i tracked them down and pin pointed them. When i found the human, I started sending messages. Of course they tried to figure out who i was through the process. Stupid human thought it was one of the Cullens.”  “What did you do to them?” Caius pressed. Vladimir turned to Alec. “I told them to meet me in the woods, telling them i’d reveal who i was.” 

Vladimir was approaching behind you quickly, watching as you put your phone back in your pocket. You barely got the time to turn when a twig snapped behind you before you were kicked to the ground the phone falling out of your pocket and landing among the fallen leaves. It lit up for a moment before turning black. You yelped and Vladimir grabbed you, rolling you over and pinning you down. You screamed and tried to struggle and get him off but to no use. Vladimir grinned pinning your arms down.  You looked terrified. You didn’t know who he was as you were scared for your life.  “Nothing personal, little human. I have to teach your little boyfriend a lesson.” Vladimir knew how he would kill you, it wouldn’t be quick. “It’ll all be over soon, trust me.” 

Confusion along with terror clouded your eyes and Vladimir suddenly wrapped his hands around your neck and squeezed. You gasped, beating at his arms and trying to claw his hands away from your neck but to no use, he was a vampire and significantly stronger. You couldn’t do anything.  “You’ll be found little one. I promise.” Vladimir smiled down at you as panic set in. Your legs kicked under him but to no avail. Your hands failed in attempt to grab anything on the ground. Your outstretched hands brushing against your phone but only nudging it further away. You clawed at Vladimir once more before noticing you were growing weak. Your struggling became weaker and more like twitching. 

Vladimir couldn’t help but smile. “Damn, did it feel good seeing the light fade from their eyes. Now you know what it’s like-” Alec lunged with a scream. Demetri grabbed Alec hauling him back as Alec screamed over and over again. Jane hurried to her brother, trying to get through to him. Alec didn’t respond continuing to scream, his eyes black and full of rage and agony. He couldn’t handle it, knowing the agony you must have endured for minutes. The torture it must have been to struggle to breathe. He couldn’t forgive, he couldn't contain himself. He couldn't say anything and instead could only scream. 

Bella was immediately thrown off to see the Volturi in the Cullen’s sitting room. Edward urged her to sit down. Bella eyed Alec, Aro, Marcus and Caius on the opposite couch. Alec’s eyes never leaving the floor whilst she had the leaders gaze’s boring into her. Edward sat down beside Bella, taking her hand. “It’s been... what’s happening?” Bella finally asked. “The Volturi...Alec figured out how (Y/N) died.” Edward said gently. Bella stared at him and Edward continued. “A long time enemy of the Volturi is the Romanian coven. There is a man in that coven called Vladimir. Bella, Vladimir killed (Y/N).” Bella was still for a moment before shaking her head. “No...no that cant be right. They- they’d never hurt anybody. Why would they be killed? How did they die?”  “(Y/N) was killed as an act of revenge, to hurt Alec. He didn’t have any interest for their blood which is why their wasn’t any wounds but the bruising suggests that...(Y/N) was strangled.” Edward explained. “I didn’t see any bruises- no! No they just- they just stopped breathing! It happens! I didn’t see any-” Bella shook her head. “Bella, the bruises are there, they’re even more prominent after...” Edward trailed off. 

Bella suddenly leapt out of her seat, staggering back under her back hit the wall. Edward immediately reached for her as she doubled over, gagging as she did so.  “It’s okay.” Edward rubbed her back as she covered her face.  “It can’t be. Not (Y/N). Not (Y/N).” Bella shook her head.  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Edward pulled her in.  “No...” Bella sobbed into his shoulder. 

Emmett, Jasper, Felix and Demetri created a bonfire where you body was found. The Volturi and the Cullen’s gathering together to pay their respects and final farewell that night. 

Alec looked down at the flames of the bonfire, the Cullen’s and the Volturi surrounding it. The final goodbye to you. Alec slowly pulled the phone out of his pocket, hearing a beep. He unlocked the phone seeing a small ‘1′ highlighted in the notes app. He opened it to see one had been made only seconds ago. He opened it and swallowed.  ‘Set me free.’ It said. 

Suddenly an urge over took Alec, telling him what he had to do. He tossed the phone into the bonfire.  Sap from the branches snapped and spat slightly but as he looked up, he was met with your gaze directly across from him. You smiled at him, the breeze flowing through your hair and he stared in disbelief. Alec looked around to see if anyone else could see you but they didn’t seem to notice you. When he shifted his eyes back to where you once stood he found you were gone. He exhaled feeling you were finally at peace and since you were, he could be too. Marcus moved to Alec’s side and Alec nodded, silently assuring Marcus he was okay.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Treat Your S(h)elf: A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945 by Ernst Jünger (2019)

Keeping a journal: The short entries are often as dry as instant tea. Writing them down is like pouring hot water over them to release their aroma.

- Ernst Jünger,  A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945 (2019)

Paris is very much my home these days and so I enjoy reading about the history of this beautiful city. It is difficult to live in Paris today and conjure up much sense of the city in the early 1940s. It is indeed, as it is called throughout the world, the City of Light. But back in 1940 when France fell and Paris occupied until its liberation on 24 August 1944, it was a city in darkness. Like so much else that happened in France during World War II, the Nazi occupation of Paris was something entirely more complex and ambiguous than has generally been understood.

We tend to think of those four years as difficult but minimally destructive by comparison with the hell the Nazis wreaked elsewhere in the country. But as recent historians have shown the Nazi occupation was a terrible time for Paris, not just because the Nazis were there but because Paris itself was complicit in its own humiliation. As the historian Ronald Risbottom has shown in his compelling book, ‘When Paris went Dark’, “Even today, the French endeavour both to remember and to find ways to forget their country’s trials during World War II; their ambivalence stems from the cunning and original arrangement they devised with the Nazis, which was approved by Hitler and assented to by Philipe Petain, the recently appointed head of the Third Republic, that had ended the Battle of France in June of 1940. This treaty - known by all as the Armistice - had entangled France and the French in a web of cooperation, resistance, accommodation, and, later, of defensiveness, forgetfulness, and guilt from which they are still trying to escape.”

It is almost certainly a unique event in human history, one in which a ruthless and unscrupulous invader occupied a city known for its sophistication and liberality, declining to destroy it or even to exact physical damage on more than a minority of its citizens yet leaving it in a state of “embarrassment, self-abasement, guilt and a felt loss of masculine superiority that would mark the years of the Occupation. To this day, more than one visitor or foreigners living in Paris are struck by how sensitive Paris and Parisians remain about the role of the city and its citizens in its most humiliating moment of the twentieth century.

Indeed bringing up the subject with French friends, my French partner’s family, or even relatives (by marriage - such as a French aunt married to my Norwegian uncle or the French partners of my cousins here in France) is like walking on egg shells. It brings up too many distant ghosts for many families. Nearly every household has a story. It can be one of resistance or one of collaboration or (more likely) one of passive indifference and acceptance.

And yet I remain fascinated and intrigued partly because of historical interest and partly out of curiosity about the human condition under stress. In Britain - despite the trauma of daily bombardment from German bombers - the country was never invaded. And so whilst war brings out the best and worst in people, it was altogether a different experience to the one experienced by mainland European countries. I don’t think we British truly have understood of life was really like under occupation and the choices people are willingly or not made just to survive the war.

The history of Paris from 1940 to 1944 gives the lie to the old childhood taunt: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. The Germans for the most part spared Parisians sticks and stones (except, of course, Parisians who were Jewish), but the “names” they inflicted in the form of truncated freedoms, greatly reduced food and supplies, an unceasing fear of the unexpected and calamitous, and the simple fact of their inescapable, looming presence did deep damage of a different kind. It traumatised the city and its inhabitants in ways very little understood by others, especially Britain.

The carefully curated image of French resistance against the Nazis has been asked to serve critical functions in that nation’s collective memory. The manufactured myth served to postpone for a quarter of a century deeper analyses of how easily France had been beaten and how feckless had been the nation’s reaction to German authority, especially between 1940 and 1943. And yet the myth of a universal resistance was important to France’s idea of itself as a beacon for human liberty. It was also badly needed as an example of the courage one needed in the face of monstrous political ideologies.

There remained the ethical questions that would haunt France for decades: Which actions, exactly, constitute collaboration and which constitute resistance? It is still asking these questions over 70 years later. But behind such question lies a deeper and more haunting question of moral culpability that many are quick to throw responsibility - along with their own shame of inaction - onto others but not look inwards at their own guilt and passivity.

But what about the occupiers? What did they feel? Were the German Wehrmacht during the day simply tourists sitting in cafes, dining on gourmand food, buying silk stockings and the latest fashions for their wives back home and by night drinking and debauching on the cultural and seedy delights of Paris?

Moral culpability is a question that Ernst Jünger, the celebrated German author, never asks himself of his time as a German officer in Paris. But culpability is a question that looms large after reading the war journals of Ernst Jünger from 1941-1945, now published by Columbia University Press as A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945. It should have been re-titled as a ‘A German writer pre-occupied by Parisian night life and his navel’.

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) was what is sometimes called a “controversial” figure. A First World War hero who was wounded seven times, he was undoubtedly uncommonly brave. He also insisted that those who were less brave should play their part, forcing retreating soldiers to join his unit at gunpoint. His 1920 book Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern), recounting his war experiences and portraying war in a heroic light, made him famous. In the 1920s he became involved in anti-democratic right-wing groups like the paramilitary Freikorps and wrote for a number of nationalist journals. He remained aloof from the Nazis, however, and, while he boasted that he “hated democracy like the plague”, was more of a nationalist than a racist. 

Jünger spent much of the Second as an officer stationed in Paris, where these war journals are an almost daily record of the views and impressions of a well-read literary figure, entomologist, and cultural critic, now available for the first time in English translation in A German Officer in Occupied Paris. Posted in white-collar positions in Paris with the German military during the 1940-1944 occupation.

Nazi Germany produced two wartime diaries of equal literary and historical significance but written from the most different perspectives conceivable: Victor Klemperer and Ernst Jünger. Victor Klemperer wrote furtively, in daily dread of transport to an extermination camp, a fate he was spared by the firebombing of Dresden. Ernst Jünger, by contrast, had what was once called a “good war.” As a bestselling German author, he drew cushy occupation duty in Paris, where he could hobnob with famous artists and writers, prowl antiquarian bookstores, and forage for the rare beetles he collected. Yet Klemperer and Jünger both found themselves anxiously sifting propaganda and hearsay to learn the truth about distant events on which their lives hung.

For English-speaking readers who do not know his work, A German Officer in Occupied Paris shows the many sides of this complex, elusive writer.

In the judicious and helpful foreword by San Francisco-based historian Elliot Neaman, who says. “Like a God in France, Jünger operated on the edge of politics in Paris, rather like a butterfly fluttering among the resistors and collaborators. He didn’t trust the generals, who had taken a personal oath to Hitler, to be able to carry out a coup.”

Jünger had visited the city prior to the war, was fluent in French, and now had the contacts and the time to become even more familiar with the French capital. During his stay in Paris he met painters such as Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso as well as literary figures including Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jean Cocteau, all of whom figure in his Journals, which reflect a view of Paris that had become a tourism mecca during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

To Jünger, Paris was “a capital, symbol and fortress of an ancient tradition of heightened life and unifying ideas, which nations especially lack nowadays” (30 May 1941). After wandering around the Place du Tertre, near the Sacré Cœur Cathedral in the Montmartre section of Paris, he wrote: “The city has become my second spiritual home and represents more and more strongly the essence of what I love and cherish about ancient culture” (18 September 1942). At the same time, Jünger was aware of the “shafts of glaring looks” with which he was sometimes viewed by locals as he wandered in uniform through the city’s streets and byways (18 August 1942, 89, and 29 September 1943).

A German Officer in Occupied Paris is divided into four parts: the “First Paris Journal,” his writings from 1941 through October 1942; “Notes from the Caucasus,” continuing his account through February 1943; the “Second Paris Journal,” covering the period from his return to Paris through the liberation of France in the late summer of 1944; and finally the “Kirchhorst Diaries,” his account of having been placed in charge of the local militia [Volkssturm] and his reflections on the bombings and imminent defeat of Germany.

The “First Paris Journal” reflects the comings and goings of a German officer and writer happy to rediscover Paris at a time when it seemed clear that Germany had won the war and would dominate France and perhaps Europe indefinitely. Closer physically to the fighting following his transfer to the East in October 1942, Jünger devoted greater attention to the fighting and the raw nature of the German-Soviet struggle in “Notes from the Caucasus.”

By the time he returned to Paris and began his “Second Paris Journal” in February 1943, the Germans had been defeated at Stalingrad and it had become increasingly evident that a titanic struggle loomed and that the Germans might well lose the war.

The final section, the “Kirchhorst Diaries,” is set against the backdrop of the Allied invasion of Germany, accompanied by intense bombing and the destruction of German cities and homes including Jünger’s own, and the seemingly countless numbers of civilian refugees seeking shelter and food. Through it all, Jünger continues his reading, including that of the Bible, his book collecting, and visits to antiquarian booksellers when possible, and his chats with various literary figures in Paris and, at times, in Germany.

Much of the material in the Journals is introspective, with Jünger addressing his innermost thoughts and dreams. Snakes also appear with some frequency in the Journals, for example, in the entry of 13 July 1943, where during a restless night because of air raid sirens in Paris, he recalls having dreamt of dark black snakes devouring more brightly colored ones. In the Journal entry, he linked snakes back to primal forces incarnating life and death, and good and evil. This connection, he noted, was the reason people fear the sight of a snake, “almost stronger than the sight of sexual organs, with which there is also a connection” (13 July 1943). Following a conversation with the “Doctoresse,” the name that Jünger used for Sophie Ravoux, with whom he was intimate and had an affair in Paris, he described his own manner of thinking as “atomistically by osmosis and filtration of the smallest particles of thoughts.” His thought process, he explained, ran not according to principles of cause and effect but rather at the “level” of the vowels of a sentence, on the molecular level; “This explains why I know people who couldn’t help becoming my friends, even through dreams” (22 January 1944). Addressing Eros and sexual organs, Jünger added that he wished to study the connections between language and physique. Colours also had spiritual values, “Just as green and red are part of white, higher entities are polarised in intellectual couples—as is the universe into blue and red”.

Jünger’s position as an army captain gave him a panorama of the war that left no room for heroes. Violence became a grim leveller that made ideologies interchangeable. Germans on the eastern front were reading On the Marble Cliffs as a condemnation of Soviet Russia rather than of Nazi Germany. Hitler had unleashed a dehumanising force on the world, one that made Russians, Germans, the French Resistance and Allied pilots all look the same, locked in an escalating cycle of cruelty. Jünger witnessed Allied planes strafing screaming children in the streets, releasing bombs timed to explode while presents were handed out on Christmas Eve. Accounts drifted in of Parisian friends, who had once tried to transcend national boundaries with him through measured discussion in the salons, being harassed as collaborators. His summary of this second war could have been a reverse of the first: ‘Inactivity brings men together, whereas battle separates them.’

The picture of Jünger’s political views that emerges in his Journals, however, is a highly chivalric and military elitist one in which a small number of bold idealists, for lack of a better term, struggle against demos and technocracy, democracy and technicians, who are destroying the soul of an older European society. Writing while back home in Kirchhorst on 6 November 1944, following the expulsion of the Germans from France and walking around viewing the destruction wrought by the Allied bombs in Germany, he observed: “As I walked, I thought about the cursory style of contemporary thinkers, the way they pronounce judgment on ideas and symbols that people have been working on and creating for millennia. In so doing they are unaware of their own place in the universe, and of that little bit of destructive work allocated to them by the world spirit.”

He went on to criticise “the old liberals, Dadaists, and free-thinkers, as they begin to moralise at the end of a life devoted to the destruction of the old guard and the undermining of order.” Jünger then referred to Dostoevsky’s novel The Demons, in which the sons of Stepan Trofimovich “are encouraged to scorn anything that had formerly been considered fundamental.” Having destroyed their father, these “young conservatives,” now sensing “the new elemental power” of “the demos,” are then dragged to their deaths. In the ensuing chaos, “only the nihilist retains his fearsome power.” Jünger mentions Hindenburg, and the destruction of the conservatives by the Nazis is clearly implied (6 November 1944).

In August 1943, he described his political views as a combination of Guelph (relating to the medieval supporters of the Pope against the Holy Roman Emperor), Prussian, Gross-Deutscher (in support of a Greater Germany including Austria), European, and citizen of the world “all at once.” As he put it, “My political core is like a clock with cog wheels that work against each other.” However, he added: “Yet, when I look at the face of the clock, I could imagine a noon when all these identities coincide” (1 August 1943).

While violence raged all around, Jünger continued his secret diary, for publication after the war. This ended for him when American tanks rumbled through his village in April 1945, Jünger proclaiming that the deeper the fall, the greater the ensuing rise. Jünger survived investigation in the immediate postwar period and went on to become a grand old man of German literature, with a considerable following at home and abroad. A year before his death he was – as the phrase goes – received into the Catholic church. Having lived through a violent century he expired in his bed in his 103rd year.

The war journals is a highly nuanced, albeit self-made, picture of a human being in the middle of World War II, who is a flirtatious fascist, yet who apparently seems to care for other human beings, regardless of their so-called social strata or race. Take for example this entry dated Paris, 28 July 1942, “The unfortunate pharmacist on the corner: his wife has been deported. Such benign individuals would not think of defending themselves, except with reasons. Even when they kill themselves, they are not choosing the lot of the free who have retreated into their last bastions, rather they seek the night as frightened children seek their mothers. It is appalling how blind even young people have become to the sufferings of the vulnerable; they have simply lost any feeling for it. They have become too weak for the chivalrous life. They have even lost the simple decency that prevents us from injuring the weak. The opposite is true: they take pride in it.”

Having said that, I found some of the contents repugnant as Jünger, a devout entomologist, easily writes about finding a new insect while fires are burning all around Paris in 1943. Indeed Jünger paints himself as the detached botanist-scholar, determined to survive and help the world recover in peacetime. For him, the best way to avoid being sucked into the vortex of violence was to disconnect from emotion and group mentalities: to feel nothing and be on no one’s side, only bearing witness. A detached eye in the storm.

His journal is a hedonistic carousel, as he frequented theatres, literary salons and Left bank bookstalls along the Seine, as well as having a meeting of artistic minds with Picasso, Braque and Cocteau. It’s possible to make your way through this collection and have a grand ole time, enjoying the moments when Jünger encounters celebrities like Picasso, or when Monet’s daughter-in-law gives him the key to the gardens at Giverny for his own private tour, or when he describes another gourmet meal with the well-heeled of Parisian society: “The salad was served on silver, the ice cream on a heavy gold service that had belonged to Sarah Bernhardt.” Jünger relishes his name-dropping and his contacts with the upper crust. He sees himself as one of the Übermenschen: “In this country the superior man lives like Odysseus, taunted by worthless usurpers in his own palace.”

The author himself gets lost in the fog of mystic self regard as all artistic writers are prone to do and confesses that in an entry labeled 26 Aug 1942: “At times I have difficulty distinguishing between my conscious and unconscious existence. I mean between that part of my life that has been knit together by dreams and the other.”

To read the diary in chronological order is to realise that Jünger’s submersion in art and literature was his way of preserving his humanity while serving the machinery of a lethally violent state. One way of doing this was through a voracious program of reading, chiefly literature and history, often reading two or three books at once. One is not surprised at the German and French reading but at the abundance of English writers, whom he read in the original—Melville, Joyce, Poe, Conrad, Kipling, Thomas Wolfe, Thornton Wilder, the Brontës, ad infinitum. The range is also remarkable. Jünger pivots from the 1772 fantasy Diable amoureux to a biography of the painter Turner to Crime and Punishment. And throughout the entire diary, one finds him reading the Bible, cover to cover, which he began shortly after his posting to Paris.

Over and over again I had to remind myself this is a diary. Diaries by definition have one eye on self serving posterity.  

So it’s not surprising that Jünger would tweak reality to create this image of poetic detachment. With his constant ��stories of indulgence in Paris, the reader might assume he had no job while he was  there. In fact he was censoring letters and newspapers, a cog in the Nazi machine he so despised. He omits anything that would make him appear a villain. An ongoing extramarital affair in Paris is barely hinted at. But neither does he try to look a hero, omitting how he passed on to Jews information of upcoming deportations, buying them time to escape.

Should he have continued to enjoy his life as a flâneur for so long? He had solid proof of what was going on, debriefed as he was on the mass shootings and death camps on the eastern front. Throughout his career he had railed against inertia, lauding men of action who sacrificed themselves for a just cause. And then such a cause presented itself. Jünger’s colleagues in Paris were involved in the Stauffenberg plot of 1944, and asked for his help. He was one of the most influential conservative voices in Germany at the time, one of the few that Hitler’s followers might have taken seriously. Yet he refused to commit himself during the chaos. Instead, Jünger waited for evil to destroy itself: a fireman who fought the blaze by waiting for the building to burn down. As usual, he inhabited a grey area.

Jünger remains a problematic figure of controversy, perhaps even emblematic of the aged old question how does one respond to brutish evil? There are no easy answers. Addressing the French who collaborated with Germany during the war Robert Paxton, a well regarded historian of Vichy France wrote, “Even Frenchmen of the best intentions, faced with the harsh alternative of doing one’s job, whose risks were moral and abstract, or practicing civil disobedience, whose risks were material and immediate, went on doing the job. The same may be said of the German occupiers. Many of them were “good Germans,” men of cultivation, confident that their country’s success outweighed a few moral blemishes, dutifully fulfilling some minor blameless function in a regime whose cumulative effect was brutish.”

Was Jünger one of those they called a ‘good German’? Eating sole and duck  at the famous Tour d’Argent restaurant, while gazing down at the hungry civilians in the buildings below was the choice Jünger made. In his 4 Just 1942 diary entry he wrote, “upon the grey sea of roofs at their feet, beneath which the starving eke out their living. In times like this - eating well and much - brings a feeling of power”.

We are always told to speak truth to power. Before we can speak one must think. But thinking truth to power is never enough in itself unless one acts out truth to power. Words without action is nothing. So the question one has to ask even as one reads from the detached safety of distance and time: how would one act in his shoes or indeed a Frenchman’s shoes?

More than anything, the diary raises, for me at least, the question of moral culpability. It’s impossible to tell what Jünger was really thinking, and so perhaps one tantalising aspect of these war journals is psychological more than anything else. All this stuff is swirling around his life but we hear about the harmless social fluff for the most part. For example, he notes “In Charleville, I was a witness at a military tribunal. I used the opportunity to buy books, like novels by Gide and various works by Rimbaud.” I wanted to hear about the tribunal, but alas, it vanished into Jünger’s damn book buying.

And yet if you judge Jünger by his diary entries alone then it would be very easy to find him guilty. But diaries conceal as much as they reveal. For all the criticism that Jünger has served up a self-serving exculpatory diary, the truth is that he leaves his most selfless acts unmentioned. It is known that he gave advance warning to Jews facing deportation: The writer Joseph Breitbach was one, as he subsequently confirmed, and Walter Benjamin was possibly another.

None of this, for obvious reason, could be committed to paper, nor could the names of Adolf Hitler or any of his henchmen. Instead, their appearances are marked by Jünger’s felicitous code names. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi chief propagandist, is “Grandgoschier,” a character from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel meaning “Big Throat.” SS Chief Heinrich Himmler is “Schinderhannes,” the name of a notorious German highwayman but also a pun on horse knacker. And Hermann Goering is simply “Head Forester,” citing the most fatuous of his many official titles.

Jünger thought a great deal about the mystic and symbolic power of sounds, and he reserved his most apposite pseudonym for Hitler, “Kniébolo,” a name that is at once menacing and absurd. It suggests a kneeling demon (Diabolos), a leitmotif of the diary as Jünger became ever more convinced of Hitler’s essentially Satanic character- in the literal biblical sense.

So grey areas get more grey when we either try to step back and be detached to render a verdict on Jünger or if we step into his shoes to get inside his head. This is the limitation of a secret and coded diary, no matter how scrupulously written and how fascinating they are to read. Diaries are written for oneself or an imagined other; they play on the satisfactions of monologue. Letters are shaped by the contingencies of distance and time between writer and recipient; they become over time scattered in various places and must be "collected" to form a single body of writing.

Diaries are shaped by moments of inspiration but also by habit; they are woven together by a single voice and usually are contained between covers. Diarists play with the tension between concealing and revealing, between "telling all" and speaking obliquely or keeping silent. Like letter writing, diarists inscribe the risks and pleasures of expression and trust. The diary is an uncertain genre uneasily balanced between literary and historic writing. The diary belongs to the woman where history and literature overlap. So it’s easy to conclude that we will always have ambiguity and tension between these two polar opposites.

After 1945, Jünger again withdrew into private life, but continued to publish. Seclusion encouraged attention. His reputation grew. Scholarly editions appeared. In three last decades, doubters aside, he enjoyed growing recognition, travelled the world, deepened his knowledge of nature and voiced concern about human damage to the planet. Jünger poured out books late into his nineties. By then he had swept Germany’s top literary prizes and been visited in his Swabian retreat by the statesmen of Europe, including Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand.

Jünger’s experience of life did little to dent his loathing of liberalism and democracy. On a country walk along a bomb-pitted road near his home late in 1944, Jünger indulges a moment of conservative relish, telling himself that it is liberals who are to blame for all that has befallen. How wonderful it is, he writes sarcastically, “to watch the drama of the old liberals, Dadaists and freethinkers, as they begin to moralise at the end of a life devoted completely to the destruction of the old guard and the undermining of order”. “Blame the liberals!” was the reactionary’s charge at birth (there is a profound difference between true conservatism and the extreme reactionary). It hobbled the Weimar Republic and bedevils politics today. Politically, he had learnt nothing. Today Western Europe society is eating itself inwards through the corrosive influence of the woke-ness of cultural Marxism and the conservative now finds himself/herself in the sweetly ironic position of defending the tenets of true liberalism.

For English-speaking readers who do not know his work, A German Officer in Occupied Paris shows the many sides of this complex, elusive writer. These diaries are invaluable about the man and his times. Jünger is nowadays probably less read than read about. So these war journals are to be welcomed and to be read with great interest. 

For some these journal entries alone will still provide material to debate the moral choices made - and evaded - by Jünger. To critics, Jünger participated too much and judged too little. To defenders, he was indeed on the hard right, but no fascist and, besides, his prose was what mattered, not his politics. Not to pity Jünger’s personal travails would be defective. Not to respond to his prose would be deaf. But all of us can ponder Jean Cocteau’s final verdict, who liked Jünger and considered him a friend but whose aloofness troubled him: “Some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.” Jünger may have washed his hands of his time in Paris but the hand of history forever tapping on his shoulder is less forgiving.