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prettybillycore · 9 months ago

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A Girl in the Men of Letters || Thomas Shelby x Winchester!Reader

Pairing(s): Winchester!Reader x Thomas Shelby, Minor Dean Winchester x Castiel

Universe: Peaky Blinders + Supernatural

Summary: When Dean and Cas’s daughter (Reader) is left home alone in the bunker, she discovers a door that leads to the dangerous world of 1920s Birmingham. It doesn’t take her long to meet the one and only Thomas Shelby, who is quickly captivated by her Winchester charm. Will Reader fall head over heels for Tommy too or will she recognize the dangers of the Shelby family and stay away?

Rating: Mature (18+)

Word Count: 6.0k

Warnings: unprotected sex (p in v), age gap relationship (reader is in their 20s and Tommy is in his 40s), fingering, swearing, drinking, mentions of underage drinking, alcoholism

A/N: WOOO! My first smut??? Are we really here??? Oh my god….

Read it here under the cut or on AO3

You were never supposed to go snooping around the bunker without your dad, his boyfriend, Castiel, or your uncle, but when did you ever listen to the rules anyway? You were an adult, you shouldn’t have to follow rules set by your dad all the time. It felt silly and childish. Yet, here you were, sitting by yourself in the bunker, not doing anything.

Since Castiel had gone missing, and the angels were out to get your family, your father pretty much kept you under lock and key. You were in the library, staring at another book about angelic lore and the words were no longer making sense to you. You slammed the book shut and groaned in annoyance. Uncle Sam and your dad had been gone for five days so far. You were starting to go stir-crazy. This is what led to your exploration of the bunker alone.

A lot of the doors in the bunker were unexplainably locked. They had been since before your family had arrived at the bunker. You and your family had no idea how to open the doors, and after some monsters crawled out of a previously locked one, your dad forbade you from opening any that didn’t open on their own. What your dad didn’t know is that you found an old key ring a few weeks ago stashed in one of the boxes in the library when you were researching vampires with Uncle Sam. Now that no one was here, you could actually see where they might lead. The last locked door that opened was an accident. A witch from the 1980s came through the door and gave your family quite the trouble. Eventually, Uncle Sam and your dad were able to catch her and dispose of her, but not before she nearly took you out with a few of her spells. You didn’t know what would be waiting for you on the other side of the new locked doors, but you hoped it would be something to spice up your days.

None of the keys on the ring you found were labeled, so you just had to guess where they might fit. You hoped they fit into any doors at all. You would hate if you went to all the trouble of hiding the key ring just for the keys not to open any of the doors in the bunker. The first door you tried was at the end of the hall where your bedrooms were. It didn’t unlock with any of the keys, so you moved on to a door near the entrance to the kitchen. No luck there, either. You were becoming slightly frustrated, but you pushed forward. Two more doors down another hall didn’t open. You were starting to think maybe your worst fear was true, that the keys didn’t open any doors in the bunker at all. That is until you tried door number five. The first key didn’t work, and neither did the second. However, when you placed the third key up to the lock, it slid perfectly. The sound of the key turning and the mechanism unlocking filled your heart with excitement. Finally, there was going to be something to do while your Uncle Sam and Dad were gone. Surely, your adventure into this door wouldn’t be more than a few hours. They wouldn’t even know you were gone in the first place. You pushed open the door with all your might and were disappointed when you were met with a small, dark coat closet. Really? A coat closet? You thought to yourself. Was this all there was to it? Just an entryway into someone’s dusty old coat closet? You thought surely there had to be more to it, so you filed through the coats hanging up. They were women’s wear and what you assumed was stylish for the time period, though very different from your regular clothing. You could hear muffled talking coming from somewhere on the other side of the closet, and you were just dying to know what was out there. You took one look back at the bunker before slipping on one of the coats and a pair of creme-colored high heels.

On the other side of the coats was a large wooden door; the detailing looked old and pretty. The door itself looked old and heavy. You shut yourself into the closet, leaving the bunker behind, and walked forward into the new door. You opened it slowly and quietly, not knowing what was going to be waiting for you on the other side. You jumped out of your skin when you were almost immediately met with the sound of a woman’s voice. “My my, the men of letters don’t usually send women; what do I owe the pleasure?” Her voice was raspy yet smooth, with a thick accent that you couldn’t quite place. She was sitting in a chair across the room from the closet. She was eying you closely. She may have sounded somewhat friendly, but she was definitely still assessing whether or not you were a threat. She was older but still had a fire in her eyes. She was smoking a cigarette and was waiting patiently for an answer.

You dusted off the front of your coat, not that it did you much good, in an attempt to look more presentable to the woman in front of you. Of course, she thought you were from the men of letters; they must have some connection to every place the bunker leads. “There have been some issues within our organization and so some of our records have not been kept orderly. I’m here to check up on how things are going.”

She seemed to believe you. “Dreadful. I hate the man they usually send anyway. It would be much nicer if they sent you from now on. I’m guessing I’ll need to fill you in on some of our operations since your data has been lost?”

You nodded. “That would be wonderful, Ms–”

“Everyone around her calls me Aunt Pol.”

“Duley noted. That would be wonderful, Aunt Pol.”

You now noticed the second presence in the room you were in, who Aunt Pol had been talking to while you were in the coat closet. A man, leaning against the door, smoking a cigarette, much like Aunt Pol was. He caught your attention immediately. He was decently older than you, you being in your early twenties, but that didn’t really seem to matter. His eyes were a crisp blue like the sea and his hands were worn in the same ways yours were– what years of hunting will do to you. “You’re free to leave, Tommy. This is women’s business,” Aunt Pol said with a smile.

Tommy blew the smoke out of his chest. He eyed you carefully. It was a look you recognized from your work. He was trying to get a read on you. “I’d like to hear what the lady has to say for herself, and I’d love to know how you explain our business, Aunt Pol,” Tommy replied. He took another puff of his cigarette.

The air was heavy with smoke now. You did your best not to let the smell bother you. Aunt Pol smiled at you this time. “Why don’t you have a seat–”

“Y/n.”

“Y/n, why don’t you take a seat, and we can talk business? Tommy, you can stay if you so please,” Aunt Pol gestured vaguely to the couch across from her spot in the chair she had been perched in.

Tommy began to walk over from his place near the exit. “I wouldn’t miss this meeting for the world,” he said.

| < ♥️ > |

After your meeting, you let yourself fall into this world. There was something charming about Tommy that you couldn’t quite put your finger on. His voice was smooth, and his accent was thick. You found yourself hanging on every word that came out of his mouth. Aunt Pol was quick to notice your feelings toward Tommy, but she said nothing. She was curious how it would all play out. You were now in a pub, your system buzzing with cool liquor. You were no stranger to drinking. You had been drinking since far before the legal age of twenty-one. You were barely past twenty-one now, but that didn’t matter with Tommy, not with him, not within this pub. The legal drinking age was definitely lower, and no one even questioned your presence in the space. What you did notice people questioning was Tommy being seen with someone substantially younger than himself. You felt the creepy eyes of the older patrons of the pub tracing your curves. You grimaced and tried to drown the feeling in whiskey, something you learned from your dad, but it wasn’t really working this time. You and Tommy were standing at the countertop, receiving free drink after free drink from the barkeep. He was no fool. He also noticed the looks that you were attracting from around the bar. No one dared look at him the wrong way, but that didn’t mean they left his dates alone. Wordlessly, Tommy wrapped his arm around your waist, pulling you into his side. He was almost using his body to block yours from view. His fingertips ever so slightly pressed into your skin. You felt heat rise to your cheeks but said nothing. Another drink was placed in your hand as soon as you finished the one you had.

“Tommy!” A voice cut through the crowd. “Who do you got here?” You turned your head to look at the person speaking, but Tommy’s arm kept you from fully turning around. Two men were looking between you and Tommy: a younger man with a cigarette in his mouth and a slightly older man with a thick mustache. “Does she have a name?” the younger one asked. He was the one who had originally called out to Tommy, too.

“Boys, this is Y/n. Y/n, these two are my brothers, Arthur and John,” he explained.

You smiled at them both. “Lovely to meet you.”

John grabbed the cigarette from between his teeth and grinned. “Where did you find a fast woman like her? Don’t see her type around the city often.”

Tommy’s eyes darted around. No one was paying much attention to the brothers’ conversation. “Would you believe the Men of Letters sent her?”

Arthur laughed. “Those bastards sent an angel like her? What changed?”

“New management,” you said with a smile.

“I’ll drink to that,” John replied.

Tommy gestured to a door off to the side of the bar. “Let’s take this somewhere more private.”

“Agreed. It’s crowded out here tonight,” Arthur started.

“Probably all the patrons staying extra long to gawk at your girl, Tommy,” John said with a laugh.

You felt Tommy’s fingers grip your hip a little bit tighter at John’s words. You were surprised by his interest in you. It was no surprise that you were interested in him– he was everything that a girl could dream about. Handsome, powerful, rich, and mysterious? Sign you up. However, you found his interest in you a little shocking. You didn’t know what he could possibly see in you. Still, you didn’t mind being the object of his affection for the time being. You were interested to see where it would lead you.

| < ♥️ > |

You and Tommy were the last ones in the pub. Even his brothers had long gone home. Tommy was behind the bar, pouring himself yet another glass of whiskey while you leaned on the countertop. Your whole body was fuzzy, and your heart felt like it was about to burst every time you made eye contact with Tommy. The alcohol in your system was not helping how much your little crush was affecting you. His eyes trailed up and down your form. “What? What are you staring at?” You asked.

He seemed slightly taken back by your boldness. “You’re the only thing to look at in here, love.” He took a small sip of the drink in his hand.

“It’s late,” you started, “I should be getting back home.”

Tommy shook his head. “No can do, Dove. Aunt Pol is definitely asleep by now. Your only option is to spend the night in Birmingham.”

“But where would I stay here?”

“Well, seeing as you are drunk and we’re the only ones left in the pub, you can spend the night at my house. I’m not letting you go anywhere else alone. It’s too dangerous,” He said. His mind was already made up.

“I guess I will accept your invitation then, Tommy. Lead the way whenever you’re ready,” you replied with a soft smile.

| < ♥️ > |

Tommy insisted that you take his bed, and he would take the couch, no matter how much you protested. He showed you to his room; it was quaint and quiet. The only noise that could be heard was a bit of movement from the world outside. You shrugged off the coat that you had stolen from Aunt Pol’s closet all those hours ago. You could feel Tommy’s eyes watching you closely. You didn’t feel like there was much to show– you were wearing a simple T-shirt and shorts with one of your dad’s flannels draped around your shoulders. Still, Tommy’s eyes searched the little bits of your skin that had been revealed. You pretended not to notice. “Thank you for giving me a place to stay. It’s very kind of you.”

“I wasn’t going to leave you out in the cold, Love.” His words were simple, but you could tell that he genuinely meant them.

“I’m not sure what exactly I’ll wear to bed. I didn’t plan on spending the night here,” you replied. Tommy had already put on a nightshirt while you used the bathroom when you first arrived at the house. His eyes flicked between you, and the shirt draped across his chest.

Without a word, he pulled the shirt up over his head. He held the fabric out to you, a small smile on his face. “This looks like it will fit you,” he said. You could feel the heat rising to your cheeks as your eyes scanned over his bare chest. His muscles were toned, and his skin was scarred and tattooed. A familiar warmth rushed to your core at the sight. Tommy’s appearance utterly took you. You didn’t know where to look as you took the shirt from his outstretched hand. Everywhere felt like too much, but your eyes settled on a tattoo on the upper part of his chest. “Oh, that? I have tattoos older than you, Love.”

You smiled at him. “I have one tattoo myself.”

“Really? Care to share?” He asked.

You, without much thought behind the action, pulled your shirt over your head, revealing the anti-possession tattoo that graced your chest. Every hunter needed one; you were no exception. That didn’t matter to Tommy, though. His eyes traced your newly exposed skin. With the hand that had the shirt in it, he reached out and traced the inner circle of the tattoo, taking a step closer to you. His breath was quiet and steady. Yours was louder and more breathy. This did not go unnoticed by Tommy. His hand moved from your tattoo to your upper arm, gently pulling you closer to him. “Tommy?” You questioned quietly.

“Hush, Love,” he replied. He brushed your hair out of your face with his hand and leaned in, firmly pressing his lips to yours. Your stomach was doing flips, but you chose to ignore it. You dropped the shirts in your hands and wrapped your hands around his neck, losing your fingers in his hair. Without breaking the kiss, Tommy slowly backed you up toward the bed. When your legs hit the edge, you squeaked in surprise. He chuckled lightly at your reaction. Tommy gently moved his hand to your back and guided you down onto the bed, only briefly breaking the kiss. Once you were properly on the bed, Tommy positioned himself over you and connected his lips to yours again, even more passionately than the first time. His hands were on either side of your body, trapping you on the mattress, but you didn’t really mind. You placed your hands back in his hair, ever so slightly pulling on the ends. He nearly growled at the contact, moving his lips from yours to leave a stream of kisses on your neck. “T… Tommy…” you moaned as he started nipping at the skin on your sweet spot.

He groaned at the sound of his name falling from your lips. He would do anything to hear it again and again and again. He continued his exploration of your upper body, biting not hard enough to leave marks but just enough to make you moan his name. He pulled away for a moment and sat up; you whimpered at the loss of contact. “You can’t be making pretty sounds like that, love… That’s dangerous…” He helped you sit up just enough that he could take off your bra. As soon as it was off, his eyes were exploring the newly exposed skin, hungry for more of you. “Fuck… You’re gorgeous…” The words rolled right off his tongue. He didn’t even think about it. You blushed slightly at the compliment. Suddenly feeling slightly exposed, you tried to cover your chest with your hands and arms. Tommy instantly wasn’t having that, he grabbed each of your arms and pinned them to the bed. “Don’t hide from me, Y/n… I want all of you.” His face was only a few centimeters from yours, the words hushed, almost just a breath that came out of his mouth.

“Okay…” You replied quietly, still feeling a little unsure.

Tommy caught on to your nervousness, moving his hands to be next to yours instead of pinning them. “You’re okay, Love. You tell me to stop, I’ll stop.”

You shook your head, “No. I want this. I want you…” Your blush grew, but you didn’t attempt to hide your face. You kept your eyes trained on Tommy’s.

He smiled softly, gently connecting his lips with yours again. One of his hands moved to your face, cupping your cheek. The kiss was passionate but gentle. You smiled into the kiss, hardly able to contain how happy you were to be experiencing this, to be experiencing Tommy. He broke the kiss and began working to unbuckle his pants. You blushed even redder at the idea of what was coming next, but you were thrilled. He threw his pants and boxers to the side, and the sight of him nearly took you out. His hands found their way to your hips, and he grabbed the waistband of your shorts, his eyes flicking up to yours. “Are you okay with this, Love?”

You nodded vigorously. “Yes.”

He made quick work of your shorts, pulling them down and throwing them somewhere else in the room that didn’t matter to either of you. He chuckled a little bit at the sight of your underwear. “My… Someone’s wet…” He teased, gently rubbing your core through the thin fabric. You couldn’t hold back a moan. “All this for me?”

He quickly maneuvered his fingers underneath the fabric, finally making contact with your dripping center. “Fuck Tommy…” you moaned as he began to move his fingers.

“Oh yeah? Does that feel good, Love?”

“You feel so good, Tommy…” You breathed.

“You are the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen… keep making those pretty little noises and saying my name, Love…”

“T… Tommy…” You mumbled. It was almost hard to hear you said it so under your breath.

“You can be louder than that, Love,” he stated.

“I need you… inside me…” you moaned. He pulled his fingers away almost instantly, and you whimpered again at the loss of contact. “Tommy…”

Without a word, he pulled your underwear down your legs and threw them into the dark abyss of a room. He lined himself up and looked you in the eye. “You’re sure?” He asked.

You nodded. “Yes, Tommy. Please… Please, for the love of God, fuck me…”

He chuckled lowly, almost growling. “I think God left us a long time ago, Love…” With that, he slowly pushed himself inside you. He gave you a couple of seconds to adjust before he began moving, but it felt so good it didn’t even matter once he started. Your moans quickly became louder and closer together. You couldn’t hold them back.

“Fuck fuck fuck… Tommy…” The words tumbled out of your mouth like a prayer.

He looked at you, his eyes dark. “You feel so fuckin’ good, Y/n…”

“Fuck… Tommy, I’m close…” You whispered, feeling your climax building.

“Me too,” he replied in a similar hushed tone. “Cum for me, Love.”

You moaned again at his words, feeling the knot inside your stomach build and then release into the best orgasm you think you’ve ever experienced. You were breathing hard, and Tommy wasn’t far behind you; you felt his cum enter you. After he finished, also breathing hard, he let himself drop down on top of you, laying his head on your chest. The room was quiet, and you felt at peace with Tommy lying on you. You ran your hands through his hair, and he wrapped his arms around your waist. You close your eyes, feeling the most relaxed that you think you’ve ever felt. There was just something about being with Tommy that made you feel safe. His breath slowed and steadied; yours did, too. You let yourself fall into a deep, peaceful sleep in Tommy’s arms.

| < ♥️ > |

The next morning, you awoke with Tommy’s arms wrapped protectively around you. He was still asleep when you woke up. The rise and fall of his chest was steady and soft. It was the first time that you had seen him look truly peaceful. You smiled at his resting form. He slowly opened his eyes, raking them over your exposed skin before meeting your eyes. He smiled back at you. You think it’s the first time you’ve seen him actually smile. “G’mornin’.” The word falls from his mouth. His accent was thick with his morning voice. God, this was a sound and sight you could get used to.

“Morning…” You replied, a soft look gracing your features.

“How are you, Love?” He asked.

“Good. I could stay like this forever.”

The idea brought that smile back to his face. You wanted to see it over and over again. “You’ll have to come back the next time the Men of Letters have business with us. I’d be happy to have you as my guest again.”

“That won’t be difficult… The Men of Letters like me a lot…” you lied through your teeth. You felt a small pang of guilt for lying to Tommy after you two had become so close, but you knew you couldn’t tell him the whole truth… there was no way he would believe you.

“I can see why,” He mused, gently playing with the tips of your fingers.

“All the screaming stops when I’m with you…” you said quietly.

He furrowed his eyebrows. “What screaming?”

“I’ve seen a lot,” you started. “I’ve seen a lot of people die. I’ve heard a lot of screams, a lot of death rattles. Normally, when I lay in bed and close my eyes, I hear the screams of all the people I couldn’t help or I couldn’t save, but… with you, the world is quiet. I don’t hear the screams anymore…”

You assumed Tommy continued to play with the tips of your fingers in an attempt to comfort you. It was a sweet gesture that made your heart go soft. “I can’t hear the shovels when I’m with you, so I guess we’re even.”

“The shovels?” You asked.

Tommy sighed. “Troubles from my time as a soldier… I always hear shovels coming against the far wall. Usually, they break through before the sun rises, and I am jolted from my sleep, but not last night… not with you.”

“I’m glad I could bring you a little bit of peace,” you replied, grabbing his hand and intertwining your fingers. “I could get used to waking up next to you…”

Yet again, Tommy flashed a smile at you. It made your heart swell. “We’ll have to do this again sometime soon.”

“I would love that,” you returned his smile. He gently placed a kiss on your forehead before pulling away from you and getting himself out of bed. The lack of warmth saddened you that this caused, but you were made curious by Tommy sticking his hand out toward you. You sat up in the bed and reached your hand out to his. He swiftly pulled you from the bed into a warm embrace, his arms draped around your midsection, his forehead leaning on yours.

“We should get you back to Aunt Pol’s house,” Tommy said in a hushed tone. “Get you home. You’ve already been here much longer than you originally planned. Someone on the other side of that door is bound to be worried about you.”

You sighed, leaning up, stopping just before your lips touched his. “Just one more kiss for the road… something to remember the night by…” you said before grabbing him by the back of his neck and smashing your lips onto his.

| < ♥️ > |

You hung the coat you had taken back up; you felt like it was only right. You could hear Aunt Pol and Tommy talking through the door. You couldn’t make out what exactly they were saying, but you could hear Tommy’s low, raspy tone through the wood. It made it so hard to leave. You let out a soft sigh. What was the harm in staying a little longer? You were about to walk back out into Aunt Pol’s sitting room when you heard voices on the other side of the Bunker’s door. Your heart nearly stopped. Your family must have gotten back from their hunt. You quickly opened the Bunker door and fled through it, fumbling to lock it behind you with the keys. “Y/n!” Your dad called, “Y/n, we’re home!”

Once the door was shut and locked, you brushed off your pants and briefly ran your fingers through your hair, trying to make sure that you looked presentable. When you felt ready, you ran down the hallway and made your way to the main area of the Bunker, a large smile on your face. Your dad and your Uncle Sam both were smiling brightly at you as they came down the stairs. “Oh, Y/n, there you are,” Sam said, still beaming.

“Sorry, I was all the way in my room… What’s got you two so happy?” you asked, genuinely curious about their current state.

“We have a surprise for you,” Dean replied.

“Oh?” You questioned.

“Come on in!” Dean called.

Suddenly, Cas was standing directly in front of you; his smile was also wide. “Castiel!!” You cheered, engulfing him in a hug. Since he and your dad started dating, he has become like a second father to you. You had been so worried about him since he had gone missing, and you were thrilled to have him back. He hugged you back tightly, his arms wrapped around your back, gently swinging you side to side.

“It’s good to see you, Y/n… I’ve missed you,” he said quietly.

“I’ve missed you too… so much… I know my dad has too…” You pulled back from the hug so you could look him in the eye. You couldn’t stop the huge grin on your face. “This is a huge win for us. We have to do something to celebrate having Cas back.”

“Drinks are on me tonight. Do we feel like going out, or do we just want to get something from the store and watch a movie or something?” Dean asked, rubbing his hands together.

You laughed. You knew his go-to was to get a drink, but he hardly ever bought you a round when he had one. “I’m included? I’m honored,” you teased.

Your dad rolled his eyes. “So what are we feeling?”

“Probably safer to just get something from the store and stay in,” Sam replied. His face looks a little more gloomy than it did before. “Going out would be fun, but I don’t think it’s worth the risk right now.”

Dean sighed. “I hate that you’re right.” Dean ran his hand through his hair. “Cas and I will run and get drinks from the local convenience store, and then we can all have some and pick a movie to watch together. Sound like a plan?”

“So I’m still trapped in the bunker?” You asked, crossing your arms over your chest.

Dean let out another sigh. “We’ve been over this–”

“You were just talking about going out to a bar, and now I can’t even go to the store?” You snapped back. “I am tired of being in here. These walls get boring after a while, Dad.”

“Guys, let’s not do this,” Sam intervened, “We just got Cas back. This is a happy moment. It’s safer for you to stay in the Bunker, Y/n, but I’ll stay here with you while Dean and Cas go get the drinks, so you're not alone this time, okay?”

It was your turn to sigh. “Fine, fine. I’ll stay here. You better bring back something good to drink.”

“I always pick the best drinks!” Dean replied.

“Untrue,” you responded, completely deadpan.

“Cold,” your dad answered. “Come on, Cas. Let’s go.”

| < ♥️ > |

You, Cas, Sam, and Dean drank mostly beer and sat around the Bunker’s TV, watching movies into the early hours of the morning. Things felt almost normal again. You missed this; you really missed Cas. Now that he was back, things were starting to look up again for Team Free Will. You waved goodnight to everyone around 3 am and headed for your room. It was about the same size as the other bedrooms in the bunker, but you had really taken the time to make it your own. You had painted the walls your favorite color; there were thrifted decorations lining the walls and a cozy comforter covering your bed. You turned off the overhead light and turned on your bedside table lamp as you got ready for bed. You changed yourself into your pajamas and decided you wanted to run to the kitchen for a glass of water.

On your way to the kitchen, you pass Tommy’s door. You stopped at it for a brief moment, thinking about the events of the last day, and you blushed. You missed Tommy already, but you knew it would probably be a while before you could see him again. Your family was all back in the bunker, and they were definitely going to notice if you disappeared for hours on end. What you weren’t expecting was a soft knock coming from the door. You almost thought you were mistaken, that the sound wasn’t real… but then it happened again. You sprinted down the hall, back to your room, and grabbed the keys to the door as quickly as you could without being too loud in your footsteps. You fumbled briefly with the keys as you tried to open the door but eventually managed to unlock it and quietly pulled it open. On the other side, you were surprised to see Tommy. He looked tired, slightly bruised, and bloodied, though you had no idea what from. “Sorry to bother you at home, Love,” he said, his voice deep and grainy.

You looked both ways down the hallway. There was no signs of life. No one else in the bunker seemed to have been stirred by the knocking. You were in the clear (at least for now). You grabbed Tommy’s hand and pulled him all the way into the hallway, your voice barely above a whisper. “You’re not a bother. Never will be. What happened to you?”

The door shut quietly, leaving you both standing in the bunker. Tommy looked out of place. He didn’t fit the aesthetics of the bunker at all, but that didn’t matter to you in the slightest. He was perfect in your eyes, even if he was from a different time. “Doesn’t matter,” he replied. “I just needed to see you after the day I’ve had.”

Without saying anything else, you pulled him along quickly, taking him to your room. You let out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding in when the door shut behind you both. Tommy chuckled. “Based on how you’re acting, I’m assuming we’re not alone in this place.”

“Far from it,” you replied. “My parents are here, as well as my uncle.”

“Oh Christ…” Tommy muttered. “So your whole family are Men of Letters then?”

You felt another pang of guilt, similar to the one you had felt last night. You hated that you had to lie to him, but you felt like it was the safest option. “Something like that.”

“We’ll just have to be extra quiet then…” Tommy said. He closed the gap between the two of you, resting his hands on your hips. He pulled you closer by your hips, his lips hovering over yours. The only sound that could be heard was the noise of you both breathing. You put your hands on either side of his face and took the plunge, connecting your lips to his. One of his hands instantly started to slip under your pajama bottoms, causing you to moan quietly against his lips. He pulled away slightly, putting the pointer finger of his free hand up to your lips. “Quiet Dove… Wouldn’t want anyone to hear us…”

Suddenly, there was a knock at your door. “Y/n?” A voice called through the heavy wood. It was your dad. Your eyes went wide.

“Fuck!” you whispered. “You have to hide.” Tommy pulled away from you, and you were so close to whimpering, but you did your best to hold it together. “Just a second!” you called through the door. You grabbed Tommy by the hand and led him over to your bathroom. “Go in and lock the door. Turn off the light.”

He didn’t argue with you, though you could tell by the look on his face that he had some thoughts about your plan. You shut the door behind him and watched the light turn off from the crack under the door. You did your best to straighten out your clothes and hair before putting a smile on your face. You walked back over to your door and opened it, greeting Dean with that smile. “Hey, what can I do for you?”

“Everything alright? I could have sworn that I heard someone else’s voice in here…”

You gulped. “What? No… There’s no one else here. Just me getting ready for bed. I did have my TV on, though. Maybe that’s what you heard?”

Dean’s eyes searched your face. You knew he was trying to read you to see if you were lying. You held your ground. “Yeah, maybe that’s all it was. Let me know if there’s any trouble though, alright, Y/n?”

“Of course, always…”

“Goodnight, Y/n,” Dean replied with a yawn.

“Goodnight!” You shut your door behind your dad and locked it, taking a big deep breath when you couldn’t hear his footsteps anymore. Tommy let himself out of the bathroom, chuckling softly at your performance.

“I can’t believe you would lie to him like that,” Tommy teased as he walked over to you, resting hands back on your hips. “Where were we?”

You cupped his cheek, smiling brightly at him. You hate that you had to hide something as big as a lover from your family, but there was something about Tommy that made you not care about any of that. When you were with him, you could just be you. Not a hunter, not a Winchester, just you. “I believe you were about to kiss me again, Tommy…”

You smiled before he leaned down, once again connecting your lips to his.

-- END --

tags: @anijamess @weaponizedvirtue @deanwinchesterbrainrot

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hotdrinkaddict · 2 years ago

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Update on the art piece this is how james be copin'

parties and probably fantasizing about having idle chat with Daisy

had to read The Great Gatsby for english class recently and some assignments were art pieces so here's my

✨Jay Gatsby Fanart✨

Some realism attempts for drawing Gatsby as well as some concept drafts for a bigger piece for a test grade

i drew Daisy as blonde at first 'cause when I looked her up her actress was blonde when later in the book she's described with presumably brown hair -_-

shouts out to James Gatz for being a simp and sad he's fun to draw

#the great gatsby #jay gatsby #daisy buchanan #digital collage #great gatsby #1920's #does anyone remember the scene where gatsby is just freaking out about having tea with daisy #the whole time he is just going “OLD SPORT NICK YOU HAVE TO HELP ME I CAN'T TALK TO HER NICK I CAN'T DO THIS”#this book is funny to me

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abalidoth · 1 year ago

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what is cosmere? (is that what its called?)

The Cosmere is a big, interconnected fantasy universe that is the setting of most of the works by the author Brandon Sanderson. The cool thing about his books is that each series is contained to its own world, and you can read any of them in isolation without realizing you're missing anything, but if you read them all you get a sense of the larger plot happening behind the scenes as those worlds start to collide and things cross over.

Brandon's magic systems tend to be very rule-based and well-defined, with a lot of twists being characters finding interesting ways to use those rules of magic. This lends itself well to the crossovers, because all the magic systems (as different as they are) share the same underpinning principles.

Here's some quick rundowns of different series and standalones in the Cosmere:

The Stormlight Archive

Planned ten-book series, currently four books are out.

A massive sprawling epic about the world Roshar, that's hit by a hurricane about every four days, and all the life has adapted to survive that environment. Knights Radiant -- superpowered individuals with a close bond to a spirit -- are starting to re-emerge in the world after being absent for centuries.

Because there are so many characters, this is where a lot of the character fandom tends to focus their efforts. I wouldn't recommend starting with it, though -- the first book alone is a thousand pages. I'd wait until you have a sense of Brandon's writing. But it's very good.

Mistborn

One trilogy (completed), one tetralogy set a couple hundred years later (completed), two trilogies some time in the future.

One cool thing about this series is that it follows one world (Scadrial) from a vaguely Renaissance tech level in the first trilogy, to 1920s in the second series, and eventually 1980s in the third and space-age magic in the fourth.

The magic itself is very intricate and all woven around metals -- there are people called Metalborn who can ingest metals and burn them in their stomachs to get different effects, including super-senses, strength, and Magneto-ish metallokinesis. That last bit makes the gunfights in the second series particularly fun.

The first book is a heist novel about robbing a thousand-year-old God-Emperor blind. It's a pretty good place to start, although it's a pretty hefty novel to start with.

The Emperor's Soul

I'm putting this one in a different category from the rest of the one-offs for a very good reason -- it's, in my opinion, the single best place to start reading the Cosmere.

It's a novella (just over a hundred pages) about a forger named Shai who uses magic to rewrite the histories of objects. She is captured by the government of an empire to reforge the soul of their Emperor, who has been left braindead after an assassination attempt, in the 100 days before the mourning period is over.

It's a fantastic meditation on art, a cool introduction to the way Brandon writes both characters and magic systems, and Shai herself is one of my favorite Cosmere characters. If any of this sounds at all interesting to you, I recommend you check it out.

One-offs

Brandon has also written a bunch of one-off novels in the Cosmere.

Elantris: His first book, and the one that my tattoo is from. About a prince who is affected by a dark transformation and thrown into a city of fellow undead, and the princess betrothed to him who arrives just in time to be told he died. Good, but suffers from some first book issues, pacing problems, and weird plot cul-de-sacs. Set in the same world as The Emperor's Soul, although there's basically no crossover.

Warbreaker: About a world where souls (Breaths) are bought and sold, and used to animate objects to do work, ruled by The Returned, living gods who require a steady dose of Breaths to live. One of my favorites, and an essential if you'd like to get into the crossover-y parts of the cosmere, as it introduces a bunch of elements that show up later (Especially in Stormlight)

Tress of the Emerald Sea: The first of his wildly successful Kickstarter project books, it's a fairy tale style story about a girl who braves a sea of bubbling, deadly spores to rescue the man she loves. It's lovely, especially if you're into a more Diana Wynne Jones kind of vibe to your fantasy. Probably a pretty good place to start!

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter: The third Kickstarter book. About a shrine priestess who stacks rocks to draw spirits, and a man who paints the nightmares that roam the streets of his city to banish them -- they become trapped in each other's places and must learn about each other's worlds to survive. This is currently my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE cosmere novel, oh my GOD it's so good. I'm not sure it's a great place to start, as a lot of the conclusion might feel a bit rushed if you don't have a good feel for the vibe of how Brandon writes magic, but honestly it might stand alone just fine even then.

The Sunlit Man: Fourth Kickstarter book. I haven't read this one yet.

Novellas: There are a bunch of novellas and short stories, some set on worlds we haven't otherwise seen, some set on Roshar or Scadrial.

If any of this sounds good to you, I recommend you give his writing a shot. He's one of my all time favorite writers (the tattoo should prove that, lol) and the Cosmere fandom is by and large wonderful and welcoming. I've made many lifelong friendships there.

#cosmere #brandon sanderson #stormlight archive #mistborn #tesseranswers

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marzipanandminutiae · 7 months ago

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i'd love to learn just how victorian rational dress reformists would react at contemporary feminine hairstyles!

...in a similar line of thought do we have any records about their opinions on the Practicality of little girls hair or even the 20's bob (if some lived to see it)?

I'm not sure!

One of their biggest beefs with hair in their own time was often with hairpieces: false buns, curls, bangs/fringes, etc. used to augment one's natural hair. I'm not sure if they felt it weighed the head down or the extra pins were uncomfortable or what, but they didn't like it. false hair still exists, but its popularity has vastly waned. so maybe they'd think we had solved some issues- though long hair worn loose all the time would probably be seen as Hampering to women's daily activity

You do see some advocacy for short hair as an easier and sometimes healthier (??) option, but more often I've seen artistic and/or Dress Reform-oriented women with short hair who said nothing about it. You also have men who are...clearly just into ladies with short hair writing long Ye Olde Thinkpieces about how great it is. I mean, no shame there, I guess- everyone has their Thing. And while short hair on women was unusual, the Victwardians didn't seem to regard it with the same massive distrust and hand-wringing as conservative commentators of the 1920s did. Perhaps because it was less widespread?

The idea that little girls not only could have short hair but should was fairly common throughout the 19th century, obviously with variations. Similar reasoning was in play to that you might expect nowadays: that it was easier to care for, and that an active child wouldn't be hindered by it. there was also an idea, similar to that which led some women's hair to be cut off during serious illness, that short hair kept the head cooler and prevented or lowered fevers. I've actually read an admonition to keep children's hair short for just that reason in a book from the 1830s- The Ladies' Medical Oracle, by Elizabeth Mott. obviously this wasn't universal- see also: the original Alice in Wonderland illustrations, although it's worth noting that the real Alice Liddell had a bob as a child

(yes, little girls were expected to be active to a degree- even more if you're reading a book by someone who has experience with Actual Human Children. some doctors fretted that the uterus would be damaged by too much physical activity, but it seems like in practice, parents' were...again, aware of how real children behave. Longfellow's 1860 poem The Children's Hour describes his daughters storming his office to shower him with affection, quite energetically, and it was a smash hit)

as for how they reacted to 1920s bobs...well, most of the adult adopters thereof had at least lived through part of the Long Hair As Default For Women Edwardian era, and their thoughts ranged greatly on the subject. In fact, essays by Irene Castle (believed to be the originator of the trend in her late 20s c. 1913 or 1914, long before it caught on properly) and Mary Pickford (a late adopter at age 36 c. 1928) on why they had vs. hadn't cut their hair are often paired together as a commentary on how the trend was seen, along with others. sometimes these essays are rather strange- one wonders why these women, who must have lived when adult women all wore their hair up every day, describe the alleged oppression of "long, trailing locks." I guess when what you like has some social unacceptability, you might be inclined to phrase things in black and white thus

Dress reformers of the 1920s were more concerned with the deleterious effects of high-heeled shoes and the general idea that young women were encouraged to be too frivolous- and too loose in their sexual morals, as represented by the "short skirts"- actually about calf-length -and low-backed evening gowns of the era. that sounds kind of weird today, in the era of sex positivity, but earlier dress reform had, with a few exceptions, disavowed ideas of sexual freedom as thoroughly as mainstream society did. and I kind of get it- the notion that they advocated "free love" was often used to discredit genuine women's rights groups. still they weren't totally immune to sexual mores of their time, and some likely genuinely believed what they were saying

and that's not even getting into the Coiffure a la Titus trend of the late 18th-early 19th century, which had advocates claiming it was the best thing ever and detractors insisting it would result in women catching colds all the time. it was ever thus

anyway that's a bit of a long-winded answer, but I hope it helps!

#ask #fashion history #hair history #1920s #victorian #edwardian #long post #chibigrimmreaper #as you have probably noticed if you've seen my selfies I am Team Long Hair for myself. had fun with short hair in college but #the upkeep and styling was too much #if I could magically grow it all out again in an instant I'd maybe play around a bit more but. I can't.#and it behaves well when it's long #so yeah #that being said ladies are gorgeous in any hairstyle!

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misterbardman · 10 months ago

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Okay but I absolutely love making PJO oc’s with my friend who has never read a single PJO book yet. For context, I made an au that doesn’t have any canon characters but still has the same major events that way we can just use our oc’s without worry because I love writing oneshots and my friend loves to make oc’s.

Some of our favorite oc’s by tropes because it would take too long to list all of them and their backstories:

•Heartbreaker Hermes kid who is in love with,

•Country Apollo kid, typical cowboy who does not want heartbreaker kid breaking any more hearts

•AroAce daughter of Aphrodite who can be best described as Jade West or Sam Puckett

•Child of Athena who likes sewing and fashion design

•Daughter of Athena who instead of battle plans does dnd campaigns daily for the other campers

•Daughter of Ares who hates conflict but will fight as a last resort

•Daughter of Ares who is more of a typical girly girl wearing heels and makeup but will not hesitate to fight

•Child of Ares who doesn’t like physical fighting but loves videogames like Smash Bros or Call of Duty

•Daughter of Apollo who is a fortune teller who gets visions of the future like That So Raven

•Son of Apollo who was a 1920’s radio host before disappearing in the Labyrinth for about a hundred years

•Daughter of Aphrodite who was born in the 1700’s and became the leader of her own pirate crew (before ending up in the lotus hotel equivalent with the rest of her crew)

•Daughter of Persephone from the 1700’s who was a princess but fled the royal life and instead joined that pirate crew, as well as having a crush on the daughter of Aphrodite

•Daughter of Frey born in the 1700’s as a prince who was in search of the sword of summer and joined the pirate crew to broaden their search for the sword. (Did not find it)

•Daughter of Apollo who was abandoned as an infant and brought to camp a few months old by Apollo, who he decided to name her after himself because of course he would. He didn’t see her again until TOA but that’s fineeee.

We have so many oc’s but these are some of my favorites. A lot of other oc’s are meant to fill certain roles for plot but some are just made for fun.

Honestly I love our au, we decided to make the nearby town by camp a sort of town filled with adult demigods (sort of like New Rome), as well as a k-12 school for the year round campers to attend.

I’ve already written 17k worth of one shots with our oc’s (mostly trying to get the actual plots from the Titan war - TOA written out but burnout is real)

I have too many oc’s but I want to keep making more.

#percy jackon and the olympians #percy jackson #pjo hoo toa #trials of apollo #pjo #toa #pjo ocs #pjo oc #oc #original character #ocs #my ocs

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thalassandra · 1 month ago

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Introducing 𓆸 Thalassandra

about me 𓆸

⋆ ˚｡⋆౨ৎ Hello! My name is Alexandra, but you can call me Lexi or Lex for short. I’m a reality shifter, an artist, a bookworm, and a Pinterest addict, born and raised in Sweden.

⁺ ݃ * ₊ ･ﾟ⋆ ˚｡⁺ * ₊ ･ﾟ⋆ ˚｡⁺ ݃ * ₊ ･ﾟ⋆ ˚｡⁺ * ₊ ･ﾟ⋆ ˚｡⁺ * ₊ ･ﾟ⋆ ˚｡⁺ ݃ * ₊

I love! love! love!: journals and sketchbooks — think chaotic collages, pressed flowers, coffee stains, messy sketches next to intricate watercolour and gouache artworks, as well as streams of thoughts in the form of pen scribbles —, seashells, summer rain, handwritten letters from a time long passed (I’m a sentimental woman), sunny winter days, fresh dates and figs, carnations, and the ocean.

My favourite books are The Secret History by Donna Tartt, Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Circe by Madeline Miller, and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.

All time favourite movie is Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (2022), but I’m currently obsessing over the series Dark (2017-2020). Honestly, anything that even remotely touches upon the subject of reality shifting, the multiverse, and/or time travel I’ll love!

⁺ ݃ * ₊ ･ﾟ⋆ ˚｡⁺ * ₊ ･ﾟ⋆ ˚｡⁺ ݃ * ₊ ･ﾟ⋆ ˚｡⁺ * ₊ ･ﾟ⋆ ˚｡⁺ * ₊ ･ﾟ⋆ ˚｡⁺ ݃ * ₊

my realities 𓆸

✶ The Maze Runner (main DR)

Lexi; beloved Glade Mother; working as a med-jack; was probably a med-student before the Glade; the first and second-to-last girl to arrive in the box; mischievous prankster; ”I’m just a girl!”; *casually switches languages mid-sentence*; raging sweet tooth; ”please ask the creators for more fresh dates and art supplies.”; I spend most of my free time laying on the grass somewhere in the Glade, or on the floor of the Homestead; ”I need my daily floor time.”

✶ Band & illustrator DR (main DR)

Set in the 90s and 2000s; ’ALEX’; (almost) secret identity; co-creator of Gorillaz; artist, illustrator and writer; ”wait… ’ALEX’ is a…GIRL?”; part-time guitarist whenever Damon is too hungover.

✶ Fame DR

Set in 2012; emerging actress from Sweden; international sweetheart; med-student by day, disco girl by night; mysterious and private; big break after portraying the character Agnes in the Swedish cult classic Show Me Love; will eventually be portraying my TMR DR self in The Maze Runner trilogy.

✶ Singer DR

Basically stealing borrowing Veronica Maggio’s entire discography for this one…

✶ Marauders Era

Set in the 70’s; Hogwarts student; Ravenclaw; part of the Marauders; whimsical and spunky, just full of mischief.

✶ Sailor/fisherman DR

Fisherman’s daughter; set in 1920s Norway; Old salt; HANNO: father, sailor, traveller.

✶ Huset Anubis

Swedish House of Anubis; the dubbed version of the original Het Huis Anubis; takes place in Sweden, 2006; member of Sibuna Club.

+ many more!!

my shifting journey 𓆸

I’ve been a part of the subliminal and manifestation community since early 2019, which eventually led me to discover reality shifting after stumbling across a subliminal about traveling to different realities (back in 2020). The rest is history.

I was previously active on Amino (before it turned into a desolate wasteland) and have been lurking on Shiftblr for about a year now (I love y’all!).

I’ve shifted three times so far (that I’m aware of). The first two shifts happened back in 2020: one to my (now archived) DR and the other to a communal WR. My most recent shift was to my TMR reality back in December 2024! :D

That was it for now, byebye!

with love, Lexi.

#౨ৎ get to know lexi!#౨ৎ lexi’s realities #reality shifting #shiftblr #desired reality #shifting #shifting community #realityshifting #reality shift #shifting motivation #shifting realities #manifestation #shifting diary #shifting antis dni #law of assumption #intro post #introduction #loa

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therealvinelle · 7 months ago

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Is it true that Tom Riddle has a different name in a lot of translations because publishers thought making the anagram in book 2 would be super important so they changed the name rather than just letting that one thing not work in the translation? What's Tom's name in your Norwegian copy?

I'll have you know almost everybody have different names in the Norwegian translation. I'm sure Harry would too, if the translator could get away with it, sadly his name was on the title card.

Some of this is for pronunciation, Hermione Granger is made Hermine Grang so we're not all sounding like Victor Krumm trying to make sense of her name, others are given more of an overhaul to convey the pun or vibe from the original name. Alastor "Madeye" Moody is Alastor "Galøye" Bister ("Galøye" is literally "Madeye", while "bister" means "terse").

Other examples of translations include the Black family being Svart (Norwegian word for Black) but by and large keeping their constellation names and spelling (with such exceptions as Alfar ("ph" isn't how we spell the f-sound, and the d would doesn't really work either - it's a phonetic translation of Alphard) and Narsissa (the c would be a problem)), and foreign characters like Victor Krumm and Gellert Grindelwald stay (almost: Victor is now Viktor.) the same, presumably because they're foreign in-universe.

For punny translations we have not just the names, but places and things being made punny to best reflect the original. Diagon Alley is made Diagonalgangen, "The diagonal hallway" that with the -en ending becomes "walking diagonally". Heh. Quidditch is rumpeldunk, the snitch is "snoppen" (a euphemism for penis. I commend the translator for making the game somehow that little bit gayer than it already was), Rita Skeeter is Rita Slita (conveying that she's an exhausting, tireless person), Cornelius Fudge is Kornelius Bleouf (a made-up surname that coincidentally is pronounced the same as "bluff"). It keeps going.

Some people didn't get punny names, simply names that captured the vibe. The Crouch family is now Kroek, Percy is Perry, and Tom Riddle (whom I'll get further into below) is Tom Venster.

(Though, since you've got me talking about one of my favorite niche subjects: the translator did make a pun out of Tom's name that isn't in the original series.

Tom is a common name in Norwegian, but it also is the word for "empty". We have an unrelated idiom, "full av faen" - literally "full of the devil", figuratively a malicious or cruel person. For use in conversation, I could use it about a person but also about a particularly grouchy cat. My friend had a horrible day so now they're full av faen, I tried petting that cat but it's full av faen.

The chapter where we meet eleven-year-old Tom Riddle is titled "Tom, eller full av faen".

I can only imagine the translator had been waiting four books to make that pun.)

In other words, yes Tom's name was trnaslated. In Norwegian the full name is Tom Dredolo Venster, with the anagram being "Voldemort den store" (Voldemort the great). That's right, we suffered even worse secondhand embarrassment in Norway.

I am quite fond of the translated name, as it in my opinion captures the vibe of Tom Riddle very well. An ordinary name with a very nice ring to it, and you don't actually know anybody else with that exact name. Dredolo, the oddball middle name, is as foreign yet fitting with the rest as Marvolo is in English. It's a name that rolls off the tongue.

The Danes, by comparison, have Romeo Gåde Detlev. Which is a very... eyecatching name, I've seen it go viral several times (along with the French Tom Elvis Jedusor), but the problem is that Tom was named for his father, an English gentleman in the 1920's, and this name sounds like a cultural melting pot. Gåde, originally the middle name that stood out and had Mrs. Cole assuming Merope came from an exotic background, is now the most normal name in there.

I want to be lenient, I do, the translator hadn't read Half-Blood Prince at the time and didn't know how much emphasis would be placed on Tom's name being ordinary. But, well, he made the name a different ethnicity, and I can only imagine he must have wanted the first name "Romeo" quite badly. We're left with a name that signals completely different things, which I do think is relevant when Tom's name being painfully Muggle and ordinary, growing up in 1930's London, had such an impact. Being perceived as foreign, which he would be with that name, would change things. His shedding the name to become Voldemort also takes on a very different meaning when he's an Englishmen who spent the first few decades of his life being asked if his parents fled the Soviet Union.

So, not a fan of Romeo Detlev.

As for Tom Elvis Jedusor, that one I have no problem with. Elvis wouldn't become a star until several decades after Tom's birth, and the middle name is supposed to be unusual anyway. The rest of the name sounds appropriately French, no notes. (Though the Danish translator should have taken some for how to give readers a funny, but plausible name).

#harry potter #harry potter books #harry potter translated #harry potter meta #tom riddle #tom venster #thorstein bugge hoeverstad

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thesublemon · 2 months ago

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Theory, Reality, and 'Tango'

Happy to share a project I’ve been working on for the last few months. Around July, I happened upon a TV staging of the Polish play Tango by Sławomir Mrożek. Written in 1964, Tango is a classic of the mid-century Theater of the Absurd, as well as Polish avant-garde drama. It’s a highly famous play in Poland—a staple of high school curricula—but less well-known in the anglosphere these days. I enjoyed the staging a lot, and because it had no English subtitles, I thought I’d try to make some myself. This was a particularly fun project given that, as far as I know, the play hasn’t had a new English translation since 1968 [1]. I’ll use another post to talk a bit more about the translation process and the philosophy of translation that I found myself adopting—particularly how it differed from the philosophy I might have adopted if I was translating the play in book form, rather than a performance of it.

But for the moment, the long and short is that you can now watch Tango with my English translation on Youtube here. If you have a VPN (or are located in Poland), you can also watch on the Polish TVN website in better quality using a subtitle extension like Movie Subtitles or Substital. All subtitle files can be downloaded here.

youtube

As for the play. Tango takes place in a middle-class home of the 1960’s, and the drama centers on the dynamics between three generations of a single family. In Tango’s version of the world, permissiveness has won a complete cultural victory. Victorian traditionalism was overturned by the rebels and artists of the 1920’s, and all social values and conventions have since disappeared. Fed up with his family’s chaotic household, 25-year-old Artur, a member of the youngest generation, longs for his own form of rebellion. But with no conventions left to overthrow, the only rebellion remaining for Artur is rules and traditions. He attempts to instill order and re-impose tradition by force, but (avoiding specifics) it doesn’t go according to plan. In the end, no form of idealism wins in Tango. Not traditionalism, anti-traditionalism, or anti-anti-traditionalism. Instead, idealism ends up hollowed out and puppeted by those who are unscrupulous and willing to use violence to get what they want.

Tango struck me first because it was funny, and witty, and thematically felt startlingly relevant to the present day. This particular performance from 1999 that I’ve chosen to subtitle also struck me for being remarkably well-acted and well-staged. It’s tough to make absurdism feel emotionally genuine enough to have a dramatic effect, instead of descending into shallow pantomime and parody, and this rendition of Tango by director Maciej Englert pulls it off very well. The cast is comprised of some of Poland’s greatest stage actors of that time, and it shows.

But the play also made an impression on me because it seemed to be an unusual hybrid of theatrical modes, both in general and in the context of the Theater of the Absurd. Theater of the Absurd is often talked about as having a Western and an Eastern incarnation [2]. In the West, absurdism was considered existential and apolitical, while in the East—ie, in countries under Soviet control—absurdism was used to discuss ideas that were not safe to discuss directly. In reality, of course, this supposed division was not nearly so clear-cut. Especially since “Theater of the Absurd” wasn’t any kind of coherent artistic movement to begin with, but more of a general aesthetic trend [3]. Plenty of works that came out of the Western Theater of the Absurd had political attitudes, or at the very least observed dynamics with political implications [4]. And plenty of works that came out of the East depicted dynamics that resonated with people beyond those who lived within the Soviet bloc. This duality is especially alive in Tango, which is one of the reasons I found it such a fun and tricky play to pin down. On the one hand, one can read it as an allegory for, or commentary on, many specific things related to 19th and 20th century Polish history. On the other hand, the play’s ideas are also broad enough that it ends up feeling relevant to any number of cultures, eras, and situations.

This ink-blot quality is one of the reasons for the play’s lasting appeal. For example, how to read the collapse of values at the beginning of the play? Perhaps the social permissiveness refers to the actual liberalism of the 1920’s, and the failures of the intelligentsia that facilitated the Nazi takeover of Poland in the 1940’s. Or perhaps it refers to the destruction of decency and normalcy in the midst of war and occupation [5]. Or it refers to life on the shifting sands of Soviet dialectics, the struggle to create real meaning out of something that claims to be progressive, yet feels inherently insubstantial. Or it refers to a more general secular, postmodern condition. If values are arbitrary and self-created, then how does one choose what values to create? One reviewer of this staging observed how the impression Tango made had changed since 1964: "Artur's hysteria meant something different in the Polish People's Republic, a land of ideologues without ideals, than it does today. Searching for values at random was a mockery then—today it is perhaps one of the most moving scenes in the play.”

(See also Martin Esslin in The Theater of the Absurd: “When Tango was first performed in Warsaw in 1964 it understandably produced a violent reaction: the audience interpreted the play’s message as a sardonic comment on Stalinism and its totalitarian structure of terror. But the play made an equally strong impact in Western Germany and other countries of non-Communist Europe…[T]he growth of arbitrary bureaucratic power, the erosion of political ideals and the consequent pursuit of power for its own sake by otherwise undistinguishable parties, led by crude, uncultured careerists, might also, after all, turn out to be a feature of…‘advanced’ Western societies.”)

All this said. I don’t think Tango is simply somehow “accidentally” about ideas that can be interpreted as being about something other than Poland’s immediate travails. Arguably, the duality exists in the text itself. The play is about Poland and Europe [6], it is in conversation with other Polish drama about Poland (Wesele, Dziady), as well as Polish absurdism (Witkacy, Gombrowicz). And it is also about things like values, and power, and art writ large, and is in conversation with Beckett, Ionesco, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and others. Specificity and universality feed each other—this is nothing new in art.

If anything, the tension between the specific and the universal seems like one of the biggest features of the play. Tango is a war between idea and reality, the abstract and the concrete. And this is another way in which it’s an unusual theatrical hybrid. You might even call it a theatrical identity crisis.

Broad history: Prior to the 19th century, Western theater did not tend to be realistic in the modern sense of it. Instead it was characterized by symbolism, exaggeration, and verse. Greek plays, opera, Shakespeare, Molière. Such theater could be subtle and true, but it did not generally aim for trompe l’oeil mimicry of real life, or have much interest in “regular” people and everyday events. Then after a 19th and 20th century turn towards realism (Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw, etc), the Theater of the Absurd introduced a new and defiant kind of abstraction. In absurdist plays there might be internal, if absurd, logic, but the settings, characters and narratives tend to have only a limited amount of naturalism. Images are symbolic, language is Aesopian, and events take place in dreamy, generalized settings rather than a particular time and place. To the extent that absurdist plays use the concrete or naturalistic, it’s usually to immediately subvert it. Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, for instance, blares the Englishness of the characters and the setting, but in a way that is obviously nonsensical, and comedic (or horrific) precisely because it has only a superficial correspondence to the England of real life:

MRS. SMITH: There, it’s nine o’clock. We’ve drunk the soup, and eaten the fish and chips, and the English salad. The children have drunk English water. We’ve eaten well this evening. That’s because we live in the suburbs of London and because our name is Smith. [7]

Or The Lesson, another Ionesco, starts out in a naturalistically appointed room, with what could be naturalistic characters, but within two pages begins a jarring descent into blatant absurdity. Theater of the Absurd doesn’t just do away with realism, either. It also does away with the conventional narrative structures of both realistic and earlier, less-realistic theater. Various works in the Theater of the Absurd were called anti-theater for this reason. Instead of having a typical beginning, middle, and end, or problem-escalation-resolution, absurdist plays are often circular and unresolved. Vladimir and Estragon start Waiting for Godot waiting, and they finish it waiting. The endings of The Bald Soprano and The Lesson repeat their beginnings, like a mirror reflected in a mirror. Absurdity arises from the inescapable, Sisyphean nature of existential dilemmas, and this ends up reflected in the most basic structures of absurdist theater.

Compared to such plays, Tango makes a surprising amount of sense [8]. It has a beginning, middle, and end. It is not set in the real world, but it is set in “a” real world, with a vague but coherent history. The characters don’t speak like real people exactly, but they do have consistent motivations and personalities. They’re not anti-characters like the Smiths and Martins in The Bald Soprano. The play also contains various gestures towards naturalism. The idea of a play about regular people who live in a regular apartment, is taken straight from the realistic tradition. The stage instructions are detailed, insisting upon a set cluttered with specific items, with characters in specific clothes, all of which are taken from real life. Here’s an example from the beginning of Act III:

We see before us a conventional, bourgeois living room from half a century ago. The confusion, blurriness, and lack of contours are gone. The draperies, which had previously been strewn about—half-lying and half-hanging—giving the stage random folds and making it look like a rumpled bed, are now in their places and have become proper, regular draperies. The catafalque remains in the same place…but is now covered with napkins and trinkets, like an ordinary sideboard.

For a key moment of violence, Mrożek even makes a point of saying that the execution must be naturalistic:

Attention! This scene must be very realistic. Both blows must be performed in such a way that their theatrical fiction is not obvious. Have the revolver be made of rubber, or even feathers, or have [the actor] wear some kind of pad under [their] collar. It doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't look ‘theatrical’.

Tango also “makes sense” in that it (seemingly) contains the comprehensible allegory and symbolism of more conventional theater. Each of the characters could potentially be read as a representative of a different generation or some piece of the social fabric, much like the characters in Stanisław Wyspiański’s Wesele [9]. You can read grand-uncle Eugeniusz as the avatar of traditionalism—a class that supposedly cared about values, but in practice turned out to be craven and opportunistic. Or Artur’s father Stomil as the aging, ineffectual avant-garde. Or Artur’s cousin and fiancée Ala as “the people”, torn between Artur’s flavor of bullying idealism, and the vacant brutality of the family’s boorish houseguest Edek.

Yet in spite of all of this “sense”, the play is undeniably absurdist, full of the kind of seeming nonsense typical of other absurdist theater. Artur punishes Eugeniusz by putting a birdcage on his head, or makes his grandmother lie on a catafalque. There are illogical exchanges like the following:

ARTUR: Will you be staying with us for long? ALA: I don’t know. I told my mother I might not come back. ARTUR: What did she say? ALA: Nothing. She wasn’t at home.

And in general, the events of the play progress in an absurd fashion. There’s no logical reason that Artur’s schemes for his family could actually change the social structure of the world. Supposedly serious things like murder and repression are casually and comedically invoked (until they aren’t).

ARTUR: You know what, Father? Why don’t we try [killing Edek] after all? There’s no risk. At worst, you’ll shoot him. STOMIL: You think so?

In other words, Tango references and evokes, in both form and content, the last few hundred years of Western theater. The cultural call-and-response of tradition, rebellion, and counter-reformation that it depicts parallels the artistic call-and-response of traditional theater, realism, and absurdism. It is bogged down by theatrical history much as Artur is bogged down by social history. Or as the family's apartment is bogged down by material history:

This table, even more than the interior as a whole, gives the impression of confusion, randomness and sloppiness. Each plate, each item, comes from a different service, from a different era and is in a different style.

There’s a certain confusion and chaos surrounding what kind of play this is supposed to be. Should a playwright comment on a social situation, express a human condition, or experiment with form? What kind of play is good for art? Good for people? Good in general? Tango features outright mockery of empty avant-garde theater, and an interesting ambivalence about symbolism. On the one hand, the play clearly uses symbolism. On the other hand, it was written in a context in which symbolism and indirectness were required in order for it to be performed in its original language behind the Iron Curtain.

Throughout the play, the characters debate the value of “form”, “reality” and “idea”, and how and whether to either achieve or integrate or discard them. It is the age-old debate, in both society and art, of how to balance theory with reality, truth with artifice. But–just as in history–none of the characters can resolve the debate, and most are hypocrites about their positions. The characters crave and fear reality in equal measure. Stomil, who makes impotent experimental theater, champions the idea of going “beyond form”--ie, going beyond things like rules and abstractions. He denounces the rule-loving Artur as a “vulgar formalist” and celebrates Edek for his “authenticity.” But for all that Stomil claims that his art is trying to achieve some sort of grand concreteness, his creations and explanations are all highly inaccessible and theoretical (after shocking his audience by setting off a gun: “By direct action–we create unity between the moment of action and perception”). And he admits that he doesn’t actually like Edek, who is sleeping with his wife Eleonora (“I’ve had my eye on that scoundrel for a long time. You don’t know how much I’d love to finish him off.”). Meanwhile Artur claims to want a return to order and tradition, but he also wants to rebel–something inherently destabilizing.

STOMIL: What do you want exactly, tradition? ARTUR: World order! STOMIL: Is that all? ARTUR: And the right to rebel.

And when he tries to follow through with his plans he finds the results hollow and unsatisfying. He finds that reality erodes principle, and yet principles that are not animated by an idea, that is in turn animated by reality, lack vitality and endurance. He strives for “a system in which rebellion is one with order, and nothingness with existence” that “will transcend contradictions entirely!” Much like Stomil with his theatrical gunshot, Artur thinks he can conquer such contradictions by wielding force–something seemingly fundamentally “real”. But in the end, his talent turns out to mainly be in exalting the concept of force, rather than actually embodying it.

Meanwhile Eugeniusz supposedly wants a return to propriety. Not so much order, like Artur, but an appearance of moral rectitude, the rituals of civilization (“Start a family. Brush your teeth. Eat with a fork and knife! Make the world sit up straight again instead of slouching.”). He detests Edek’s “filth” and the “degradation” of the rest of the family. Yet for all his love of the forms of properness, no one is more willing to lower himself than Eugeniusz. He is quick to abandon his supposed principles and attach himself to whoever has power.

This sense of contradiction and call-and-response between theory and reality is even echoed in the structure of the play. The first act starts out as more absurdistly symbolist–the characters play rhyming card games, Artur metes out his birdcage and catafalque punishments, Ala turns out to have been hidden under a table the whole time, Stomil puts on a play about Adam and Eve. Then the second act becomes more naturalistic, with long one-on-one, interpersonal conversations that contain more conventional dramatic stakes. And finally the third act combines both modes. The third act is full of both abstract ideas and images–the family in their tight old-fashioned clothes, Artur’s quest for a unifying philosophy–and regular human drama related to marriage and infidelity. Until it finally ends in a moment of violent naturalism, in the form of that realistic blow (“Attention! This scene must be very realistic.”).

Taken as a whole, Tango follows the pattern and tenor of dialectical debate, with satirical circularity. Soviet dialectics promised a means of navigating and resolving contradictions. It promised a means of understanding the cycles of history, and existing in the correct moral relation to them. Add more context, add more cleverness, and the cycles are no longer confusing. You can win them. In practice though, this version of dialectics often merely acted as an elaborate justification for otherwise unjustifiable political ends [10]. But unlike in a dialectical debate, Tango makes the crude, concrete conclusions explicit. The winner of Tango is not a dialectician. The winner is violent reality, simply wearing philosophy’s jacket.

What Maciej Englert’s staging understands, and one of the reasons it had such an effect on me, is the real human feeling that suffuses the play. Artur’s confusion and distress are real. As is Stomil’s frustrated impotence, Ala’s love, or even Eugenia’s fear and irritation. The cozy, chaotic naturalism of the set (taken straight from the script directions) emphasizes this human scale. Tango is not simply a detached satire of Stalinism, “some abstract hypothesis, a play on words, a product of intellectual imagination.” It is about the tension between the human and everything more than human–and in order for that tension to work, the human aspect needs to be just as apparent as the abstract aspect. To paraphrase a good review, Artur in this production is both scary and pitiful, human and symbol. Eleonora seems at first a caricature, but “becomes unexpectedly moving in the scene in which she talks humanly, without a mask, to Ala.” While Ala is full of “the truth of unhappy feelings...the cynicism that usually dominates this role in other stagings is put in quotation marks; [she] only pretends to be nonchalant towards life.” And this is also why it is all the more crushing when both the human and the abstract turn out to have been paving the way for something worse, something they both lose out to.

Theater of Absurd appeals to me at the moment. It feels relevant. To the world, to my life. And the way Tango combines the Western and Eastern forms of the absurd gets at why. In the “Eastern” form, absurdism springs from a breakdown of logical reasoning that is imposed by external forces: war, authoritarian whim. Hence plays like Julius Hay’s The Horse, which tells the story of Caligula appointing his horse Incitatus to the Roman Senate, leading the population to start acting like horses. Or Václav Havel’s The Memorandum, in which bureaucratic characters are forced to communicate in an overly-rational neo-language that none of them can understand. In the “Western” form, absurdism springs from a more existential, post-modern breakdown of logical reasoning: how is one to make sense of existence if there is no objective logic? If all of the former institutions of meaning–religion, government, class, materialism, and so on–are meaningless, then what is left? And just as in Tango, it often feels today as if those two forms of absurdity have combined. If they were ever even separate.

No, of course I do not live under a totalitarian state, in the present-day West. I do not worry about gulags or famine or being hauled off in the night for saying the wrong thing. But there is a sense of institutional decay, and a sense of pretending otherwise about this. A sense that important details of my life are determined by obscure power struggles between people who are incompetent or ill-intentioned, or both. A sense of people going insane, and feeling proud of it all the while. A sense of nihilistic chaos lurking at the door, and people saying “Would it be so bad to let it in?” Meanwhile the internet accelerates countless forms of absurdity. It instills a surveillance mindset. It destroys old forms of reverence, and creates new, bizarre ones. Now you can see the most pathetic aspects of politicians and artists and intellectuals laid open on social media. Now you can see regular people turn themselves into grifters, beggars, and compulsive performers. It would almost be more dignified if people did this due to explicit government repression, or out of purely mercenary ambition. Instead of out of a more basic human, animal sense of precarity. Am I important? Am I safe? Do I have enough? Do I belong? Do you like me? Do you like me? Do you like me?

Former markers of respectability are losing their meaning. Respectability itself is losing meaning. And quite possibly these things deserve to be destroyed, perhaps this is just normal cultural turnover, but it’s not yet clear what is waiting to grow out of the rubble. For a while, maybe a decade, there was a swing towards authenticity. Fetishistic authenticity usually, but authenticity nonetheless. Hipster natural material aesthetics–being into leather, wood, iron, pickling. Relatability, parasociality, confession. This all still exists to some degree, but has lost much of its awkward earnestness, some genuine desire to be post-ironic, some kind of novelty. The fakery of amateurism rather than cynicism. Now fakery and authenticity are so intertwined it starts to feel like both have lost their meaning. Performance and entertainment are endemic, except they’ve never felt less like entertainment, or more like narcotics. Performance gains its power from its tension with truth, reality. Without reality, performance is impotent. And yet it’s never been more important. Absurd.

The internet simultaneously creates an unprecedented awareness of reality, and an unprecedented detachment from it. There have long been ways in which one could be awash in information and entertainment from waking until sleep. Television, books. There have been means of stupefaction for even longer. Intoxicants of all kinds. But the internet is more than just a stream of information in which people can lie down, open their jaws, and passively drink. It is interactive, frequently intensely so. The information, unlike in a book, is often related to what is happening right now. And unlike in a paper or on the news, the information is often delivered by people in one’s social circle. Suddenly one is aware of a thousand different things, horrible and otherwise, and not only that, the awareness comes along with the opportunity for action–money, publicity, simple acknowledgement–and hundreds of people one knows can see that action. You can live your life in a holodeck world. Yet down the line, reality keeps being real, and is affected by that holodeck world–mortally and trivially. These are not new observations really. Still, that combination of interactivity, intensity and detachment turns “reality” into something that is both omnipresent and intangible. Absurd.

It’s always been absurd. “Reality” has always been both obvious and ineffable, something to philosophically struggle with. “Truth” has always been difficult to grasp, and difficult to represent. Map and territory, forever locked in combat. But just as circumstances made this fundamental absurdity feel closer to the surface in the mid-20th century, so does it feel closer now. Theater of the Absurd arrived on the heels of decades of talk of perfectibility. Nazi perfectibility, Soviet perfectibility, even the perfectibility of the liberal, capitalist order. Promises of surmounting the lesser aspects of humanity. Purge or plan society in the right way, and you’ll be on the way to becoming better than human. Yet time and again, those lesser aspects had a way of revealing and reasserting themselves. Murder, cruelty, exploitation. Pettiness, cowardice, selfishness. All of these things, it turned out, could thrive regardless (or because) of a system’s stated ideals. And perhaps we’re in another phase of finding out that the latest means of elevating humanity is simply enabling new and twisted manifestations of the same old problems.

Idealism loses many times over in Tango. And each time it deserves to. The traditionalists repress, the rebels create listless chaos, and Artur’s anti-rebellion leads to repression once again, but this time with even less meaning behind it. Yet when crudeness without idealism–reality without idea–wins, it’s even more horrifying. So what’s the answer? Is there an escape? Will Godot ever appear?

Tango proposes the pessimistic view. Yes, the endless generational cycles of rebellion and counter-rebellion can end. The search for meaning and selfhood can end. History can end–in nightmare. Perhaps that’s not a productive view to live by. Certainly one could write an entire other essay about the persistence of human virtue. But sometimes it is a view that is worth inhabiting for a while.

[1] And because, it must be said, I did not know Polish at the time I started the project. The two previous translations were both written in 1968. One is by Ralph Manheim and Teresa Dzieduscycka, published by Grove Press. It can still be found in print as part of The Mrożek Reader, or used. The other translation is by Nicholas Bethell and Tom Stoppard. It is not in print that I know of. I was able to find it used in the collection Three East European Plays. Both translations have their strengths and weaknesses. Overall though, I wasn’t a huge fan of either one. They each do the job in their own way, but I also found them to be a bit wordy in a way that blunted the tight, biting quality of the humor of the original. If I had to choose, I would lean towards the Bethell and Stoppard translation for reading and the Manheim and Dzieduscycka translation for performing.

[2] See Marketa Goetz Stankiewicz in “Slawomir Mrozek: Two Forms of the Absurd” for a good discussion of this. Both as it applies to Theater of the Absurd generally, and to Mrożek specifically. [jstor] [scribd]

[3] From Martin Esslin’s introduction to The Theater of the Absurd:

It must be stressed, however, that the dramatists whose work is here discussed do not form part of any self-proclaimed or self-conscious school or movement. On the contrary, each of the writers in question is an individual who regards himself as a lone outsider, cut off and isolated in his private world. Each has his own personal approach to both subject-matter and form; his own roots, sources, and background. If they also, very clearly and in spite of themselves, have a good deal in common, it is because their work most sensitively mirrors and reflects the preoccupations and anxieties, the emotions and thinking of many of their contemporaries in the Western world.

[4] From Stankiewicz, “Slawomir Mrozek: Two Forms of the Absurd”:

to the Warsaw audience Ionesco and Beckett are felt to be political writers. Their characters, like Mrozek's slogan-spouting little men, are seen as victims of a specific way of life forced upon them. The ‘enemy’ can be identified, or rather he is discovered, while the laughter still echoes through the theater.

[5] Take this from The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz, describing the mental shock of conquest in WW2 Poland:

[A man’s] first stroll along a street littered with glass from bomb-shattered windows shakes his faith in the ‘naturalness’ of his world. The wind scatters papers from hastily evacuated offices, papers labeled ‘Confidential’ or ‘Top Secret’ that evoke visions of safes, keys, conferences, couriers, and secretaries. Now the wind blows them through the street for anyone to read…he stops before a house split in half by a bomb, the privacy of people's homes—the family smells, the warmth of the beehive life, the furniture preserving the memory of loves and hatreds—cut open to public view…overnight money loses its value and becomes a meaningless mass of printed paper….Once, had he stumbled upon a corpse on the street, he would have called the police…Now he knows he must avoid the dark body lying in the gutter, and refrain from asking unnecessary questions…Everyone ceases to care about formalities, so that marriage, for example, comes to mean little more than living together....Respectable citizens used to regard banditry as a crime. Today, bank robbers are heroes because the money they steal is destined for the Underground….The nearness of death destroys shame. Men and women…copulate in public, on the small bit of ground surrounded by barbed wire—their last home on earth.

[6] See Daniel Gerould’s interpretation from The Mrożek Reader:

Tango takes the family as a microsociety, or scale model, for studying the history of modern Europe. The disintegration of the three different generations of the farcical Stomil clan, each representing a further step in the historical debacle, charts the decline and fall of European civilization from turn-of-the-century liberalism through interwar avant-garde experimentation to the present-day triumph of totalitarianism. By the use of parody and allusion (citations come from Shakespeare and the Polish romantic and modernist traditions), Mrozek creates a multi-layered work—a museum of modern European art, manners, and morals—which serves as a prism for viewing the relations of culture to power and for assessing the intelligentsia’s responsibility for glorifying force as the ultimate value.

[7] The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco, trans. Donald M. Allen.

[8] Even compared to much of Mrożek’s work prior to Tango.

[9] Written in 1901, Wesele (or “The Wedding”) is one of the preeminent works of Polish theater. It tells the story of a wedding party celebrating the mixed-class marriage of a young city poet to a peasant girl. The party is made up of guests from all walks of Polish life, and they mingle uneasily over the course of the night. Ghosts from Polish history and mythology appear, exacerbating the social tensions.

[10] See The Captive Mind for a description of the experience of living in a political and intellectual atmosphere in which Soviet dialectical materialism was the dominant philosophy. It’s difficult to pick any one particular quote, but here are a couple:

Dialectics is the ‘logic of contradictions’ applicable, according to the wise men, to those cases where formal logic is inadequate, namely to phenomena in motion. Because human concepts as well as the phenomena observed by men are in motion, ‘contradictions contained in the concepts are but reflections, or translations into the language of thought, of those contradictions which are contained in the phenomena.’ [...] The Method exerts a magnetic influence on contemporary man because it alone emphasizes, as has never before been done, the fluidity and interdependence of phenomena. Since the people of the twentieth century find themselves in social circumstances where even the dullest mind can see that ‘naturalness’ is being replaced by fluidity and interdependence, thinking in categories of motion seems to be the surest means of seizing reality in the act. The Method is mysterious; no one understands it completely–but that merely enhances its magic power. Its elasticity, as exploited by the Russians, who do not possess the virtue of moderation, can result at times in the most painful edicts. Nevertheless, history shows us that a healthy, reasoning mind was rarely an effective guide through the labyrinth of human affairs. The Method profits from the discoveries of Marx and Engels, from their moral indignation, and from the tactics of their successors who have denied the rightness of moral indignation. It is like a snake, which is undoubtedly a dialectical creature: ‘Daddy, does a snake have a tail?’ asked the little boy. ‘Nothing but a tail,’ answered the father. This leads to unlimited possibilities, for the tail can begin at any point.

Paradoxical as it may seem, it is this subjective impotence that convinces the intellectual that the one Method is right. Everything proves it is right. Dialectics: I predict the house will burn; then I pour gasoline over the stove. The house burns; my prediction is fulfilled. Dialectics: I predict that a work of art incompatible with socialist realism will be worthless. Then I place the artist in conditions in which such a work is worthless. My prediction is fulfilled.

SOURCES

This list is not academically exhaustive, and isn’t trying to be. I was limited by what I could read in five months–both in terms of personal interest and ability, and in terms of what I could get access to. But it should give a general idea re: what has informed this post.

Plays & Fiction:

The Bald Soprano (Eugène Ionesco, trans. Donald M. Allen), The Lesson (Eugène Ionesco, trans. Donald M. Allen), Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett), Endgame (Samuel Beckett), The Maids (Jean Genet, trans. Bernard Frechtman), Tango (Sławomir Mrożek, trans. Ralph Manheim and Teresa Dzieduscycka, trans. Nicholas Bethell and Tom Stoppard), The Police (Sławomir Mrożek, trans. Nicholas Bethell), The Elephant (Sławomir Mrożek, trans. Konrad Syrop), The Memorandum (Václav Havel, trans. Vera Blackwell), The Horse (Julius Hay, trans. Peter Hay), Hamlet (William Shakespeare), Macbeth (William Shakespeare), Pygmalion (George Bernard Shaw), The Wedding (Stanisław Wyspiański, trans. Noel Clark), The Marriage (Witold Gombrowicz, trans. Louis Iribarne), Dziady, Part III (Adam Mickiewicz, trans. Google, trans. Count Potocki of Montalk), The Moon is Down (John Steinbeck), Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, trans. David McDuff), War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude), 1984 (George Orwell), Chekhov: The Major Plays (Anton Chekhov, trans. Ann Dunnigan)

Filmed adaptations:

Tango (1999, dir. Maciej Englert), Wesele (1972, dir. Andrzej Wajda), Wesele (2019, dir. Wawrzyniec Kostrzewski), Dziady (1997, dir. Jan Englert), Ślub (1992, dir. Jerzy Jarocki)

Non-fiction:

Anonymous, trans. Philip Boehm. A Woman in Berlin. 1954.

Juliette Bretan.“‘Life Makes Most Sense at the Height of Nonsense’: Interwar Polish Absurdism.” October 2020. [link]

Jan Bończa-Szabłowski. “The young one spoils everything.” November 3, 2010. [link]

Robert Brustein. “Foreword”, Chekhov: The Major Plays. 1982.

Michał Bujanowicz. “On Sławomir Mrożek - Playwright’s Tango.” April 2004. [link]

Michael Childers. “The Direction and Presentation of Tango.” 1977. [link]

Martin Esslin. Theater of the Absurd, Third Edition. 2001.

Martin Esslin. “Introduction,” Three East European Plays. 1970.

Daniel Gerould. “Introduction: Mrożek for the Twenty-First Century,” The Mrożek Reader. 2004.

Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward. Journey Into the Whirlwind. 1967.

Malwina Głowacka. “Tango.” Więź, No. 11. November 1, 1997. [link]

Joanna Godlewska. “Tango.” Przegląd Powszechny, No. 9. 1997. [link]

Jacek Kopciński. “Sleep and awakening.” March 2019. [link]

Jan Kott, trans. L. Krzyzanowski. “Introduction: Face and Grimace, ” The Marriage. 1969.

Janusz R. Kowalczyk. “Tender Irony.” Rzeczpospolita, No. 14. June 19, 1997. [link]

Magnus J. Kryński. “Mrozek, Tango, and an American Campus.” The Polish Review, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring, 1970). [jstor]

Keith Lowe. Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II. 2012.

Wojciech Majcherek. “The Last ‘Tango’ in Warsaw.” Express Wieczorny, No. 140. June 17, 1997. [link]

Czesław Miłosz, trans. Jane Zielonko. The Captive Mind. 1953.

Michael C. O’Neill. “A Collage of History in the Form of Mrozek’s Tango.” The Polish Review, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1983). [jstor]

Jerzy Peterkiewicz. “Introduction: The Straw Man at a Wedding,” The Wedding. 1998.

Jacek Sieradzki. “The author of ‘Tango’ dances with us.” Polityka, No. 37. September 13, 1997. [link]

Marketa Goetz Stankiewicz. “Slawomir Mrozek: Two Forms of the Absurd”. Contemporary Literature

Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring, 1971). [jstor] [scribd]

Mardi Valgemae. “Allegory of the Absurd: An Examination of Four East European Plays.” Comparative Drama, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 1971). [jstor]

Jacek Wakar. “Great ‘Tango’ for the opening of a new stage.” Życie Warszawy. June 16, 1997. [link]

Piotr Zaremba. “Important ‘Wedding’ Anno domini 2019.” February 19, 2019. [link]

“Tango.” FilmPolski.pl. [link]

#posts: art #movies: tango #slawomir mrozek #tango

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brummiereader · 2 years ago

Text

PREVIOUS PART

A Ghost Of A Man (PART FIVE)

Summary: Things take a turn for the worse when the reader goes back to visit Tommy in the abandoned building.

Warnings: Language, supernatural themes, angst, violence

For the past few weeks you had regularly found yourself back at the abandoned building. Juggling between work, Uni and the dreaded assignment that you finally got finished, you would visit Tommy most days. During your time with him he would talk to you about his family and childhood growing up in Small Heath. You would often ask questions about the Peaky Blinders and the war in France, which at first he reluctantly opened up about. You had spent hours alone with Tommy in the old offices, at ease enough to confide in him your hopes and wishes for the future, he in turn had entrusted you with his gold pocket watch when you insisted on taking it to a Watchmaker after seeing it was no longer working. Often giving the other small touches, a hand on his arm, his palm on the small of your back, you were both now comfortable and content being within each others presence, grateful of the growing bond you had built. It was coming close to the date of Tommy's brutal death, soon he would be going back to 1922. You mentioned it to him once, only for him to get rather agitated, quickly putting an end to the conversation. For now this was your routine. But for how long could this last before one of you got frustrated with the way things were?

For the past few days you had been mulling over the idea of trying to find something...anything that could help Tommy for when he goes back to his time. He had told you rather hostilely to not go looking for any information which confused you, did he not want to live again? Being rather stubborn you walked into work with only one objective in mind.

" Hi Janette" you said as you turned on your computer.

"Hello you" she said giving you a huge smile.

" Erm, i have another favor to ask"

" It wouldn't happen to be about that gang, would it?" She said as she started stamping a stack of books on her desk.

" It's the last time, I promise"

" You know anything you need for Uni you're always welcome to go and do the research you need" she said smiling to you warmly.

Not exactly Uni research anymore with your assignment having been handed in over a week ago, this time it was personal research. You needed access to the newspaper articles upstairs, so with that in mind you nodded and thanked your boss as you headed up to the second level. To say Tommy wasn't consuming your life right now was an understatement. You was no longer frightened of the man you first met instead you felt drawn to him, you wanted to spend every hour of every day with him, did he feel the same?

Upstairs in the small storage room there was an old computer, and it looked like Richard had finally started photocopying and categorising all the books onto it. This would make your research easier, the only thing was, you didn't know where to start. There was very little recorded info about Tommy's death, and you was having trouble figuring out what to type into the search bar. The folder belonged to Campbell so you typed his full name in first. There was a few articles about the arrival of a new police officer coming to Birmingham to clean up the city, but nothing more. Then you remembered what Tommy said about how he was hired by Winston Churchill. You vaguely recalled your boss talking about how in London they recently discovered some old letters of correspondence from Churchill from the 1920's, now part of history they were published online for anyone to see. With nothing to lose you clicked on the article and downloaded them. There was over a hundred letters, sighing in desperation you painstakingly read through each one. After what felt like forever you came upon a letter with Campbells full name at the top. It was indeed a letter to the man himself. Reading through the correspondence it talked about a certain someone who could be of use. And then you saw it, the now familiar initials T.S. You knew it was about Tommy, it was too much of a coincidence to not be. If Campbell needed Tommy for something then maybe he could stop the attack by Sabini and his men. You knew by giving Tommy this information you would potentially never see him again, and with that you felt a huge wave of sadness come over you. Brushing away a tear you wrote down the information on a small piece of paper and placed it in your pocket. The real question now was, were you going to give it to him? You had grown fond of him and your visits to the abandoned building, you had developed a closeness to eachother, an understanding of who the other is. Could you really keep this information from him though, forever damning him to live between two worlds?

Arriving back home you felt drained with the knowledge that you had the potential missing link that Tommy needed to save his life. Trying to distract yourself you decided to do something nice for your friend, your lack of socialism the past month was evident, and you felt guilty for forgetting everyone else in your life, you hadn't even visited your 90 year old Nan in nearly over a month something you deeply regretted. She was the only family you was in contact with nowadays, your parents who you had a strained relationship with, living far from Birmingham. Taking out a bottle of red wine you had been saving, you decided to drown in your sorrows as you waited for your friend to come back home.

" Hey!" Your friend said as she opened the door.

" Oh hi, you ok?" you answered sitting up straight to face her.

" Good, good. Surprised you're home feel like I have barely seen you lately" she said sitting down on the sofa kicking her shoes off.

" I'm sorry Louise, I don't know where my head's been at lately. I'll make it up to you" you said with overly exaggerated pleading eyes.

" Fine, buy me food first" she said with a small giggle.

" Already done, and here " you said as you passed her the biggest glass you could find full of her favourite red wine.

"Ooh thanks, nearly forgiven" she said with a massive grin as she took the glass from you.

"And i promise, any movie you pick i won't give a running commentary the entire way through"

" Deal, but one last thing. You come for a night out"

" Fine" you said with a huff and a laugh as you handed her the remote control.

As your friend started flicking through movies, you arranged the food that arrived just 5 minutes before. Handing her plate to her you sat down getting comfy as you rested your plate of food on the cushion laying on your lap.

" Found one" your friend said.

" Ghost!?" You said dropping your fork, the title in large capital letters across the TV screen.

" It's a movie about a woman who's boyfriend is a gho..."

" Yeh yeh I know what it's about" you said cutting her off feeling a little flustered as you remembered the story line.

"Hey! You promised you wouldn't comment" your friend replied as she pressed play.

Sinking back into your seat, your appetite now gone, you reached to the side table taking a rather large gulp of red wine, you was going to need it.

A few days later you had reluctantly agreed to go with your friend for a night out, as promised. Before you did you wanted to visit Tommy. With a heavy heart you had come to a decision. You was going to give him the information on Campbell. You wanted the man you had begun to care for to live again, you would never forgive yourself keeping it from him, letting him spend eternity in that dilapidated building knowing he would always refuse to move on. Deciding to get dressed for night beforehand, you picked out a long black sleeved turtleneck top that you tucked into a camel coloured high wasted mini skirt, matching it with a pair of opaque black tights and your trusty black heeled ankle boots. You loosely curled your hair and put on a modest amount of makeup. Tommy's pocket watch now fixed you placed it in your coat pocket along with the paper of information on Campbell.

" You look hot!" your friend said as you walked into the kitchen. " But early though, it's only six"

" Yeh I just need to pop out somewhere, I'll meet you there" you said as you put on your long black coat and headed for the door.

" Alright, but you best be there!"

" I will, I promise" you called out as you shut the front door.

Sitting in the bus, you looked out the window at the darkening sky. Passing by Watery Lane you thought about the old lady, you wanted to go back and see her. You was curious to know more about her and why she would claim to be Tommy's grand daughter, and how she inherited the abandoned building after Tommy insisted it was not possible. Twenty minutes later you arrived at your stop, getting out you made your way to the building. You would never normally come this late, the lack of daylight was making it hard for you to navigate up the old stairs. Once you made it to the top you was thankful for the orange glow of the streetlights beaming through the second floor windows.

"Tommy" you called out as you made your way over to his office door, which was unusually shut. Opening the door, you jumped back almost falling over.

" Boo" Tommy said in a flat tone, a cigarette hanging from his mouth.

"Jesus Christ Tommy! You scared the hell out of me" you said clutching your chest.

" Isn't that what I'm supposed to do?" he replied a smirk forming on his lips.

" Yeh well... Can you save it for the teens that come up here to drink their WKD. You said pushing past him breathless.

" WKD?" He mouthed confused.

Sitting on the edge of his desk you straightened out your coat recomposing yourself. Turning around to face you, Tommy's eyes widened.

" What the hell are you wearing?" He said brows furrowed.

" What? What's wrong with it " you said looking down at your outfit.

Lost for words, Tommy forcefully gestured with his hand up and down your body.

" Jesus Tommy, it's the twenty-first century, women can wear what they want. I'm going out with my friend tonight, I can't go out in jeans and T-shirt" you said slightly annoyed. Tommy's eyes locked on the visible shape of your legs he let out a scoff.

" You look like a whor.."

" Don't... don't you dare say it!" you said interrupting him as you pointed a finger at him.

Huffing he took a drag of his cigarette shaking his head still glaring at your legs.

" You know if a girl walked down the street like that back in my day she would have been.."

" Tommy!" You said, your eyes widening as you started to lose your patience. This was a great start to the night, Tommy's apparent mood becoming more evident by the second.

A small silence filled the room. You could feel his eyes on you as you picked at the edge of his wooden desk.

" So where you going?" He asked finally giving in.

"Just some bar in the town center"

" How long will you stay out?"

"Huh?" You said slightly amused at Tommy's question. " I don't know Tommy, until I want to go home. Would you rather I not go out?" you questioned sarcastically.

" Yes" he huffed under his breath as he exhaled a puff of smoke.

" Why are you being like this?" You said squinting your eyes as you tried to understand him.

"Just go Y/N, I didn't ask you to come tonight , you clearly have other plans" he replied annoyed, avoiding all eye contact.

Defiant you stayed seated. Ignoring his request for you to leave you took out the piece of paper from your coat pocket.

" Tommy I know you said not to look into it, but I think I found something that might help you for when you go back"

" Don't want me coming back, is that it?" He said cocking an eyebrow, a slight bitterness in his voice.

" Tommy... I didn't mean it like that" you replied slightly confused.

Another unbearable silence filled the room as you sheepishly looked at Tommy waiting for him to talk.

" I checked what you asked. The Garrison, it's no longer there, it's been turned into a corner shop, Tommy?... Tommy?" you said trying to catch his line of view.

" What is this Y/N, hm? What are we doing?" he said finally turning to face you, uninterested in the information you had.

" What are you talking about?"

Scoffing Tommy stared at you as he exhaled a cloud of smoke once more, his cigarette now hanging from the corner of his mouth.

"Tommy, I think you should at least read it, it's about Campbell...I think it could wor"

"Just fucking stop alright" he said interrupting you, as his frustration grew. Standing up straight he let out a huff as he abruptly walked over to you.

" Tommy..."

" Look I have enjoyed your visits, they have been amusing" he said as he tilted his head. "A way to past the time, but now you need to go" he added coldly.

You stood there shocked, your eyes full of confusion. Why was he acting like this? Everything had been going fine. His hurtful words piercing you like a knife, you found your anger against him building up inside, about to burst at any given moment.

" What the fuck!" You said angrily as you pushed him away from you." I just told you that I have found something that may help you and then you tell me that this has all been a game for you" you said throwing the piece of paper at him." Amusing? Is that all I have been to you, a way to past the time as you said. You're lying Tommy".

"Stop Y/N" he warned you, pointing a finger at you as you approached him, so close your bodies were almost touching.

" What is wrong with you? Is this how you treated everyone. Use them, then discard them when you got bored. Like you did with the old lady on Watery Lane? For weeks I have convinced myself that you was more than the man I read about in those files, but you're just an angry sad bitter ghost of yourself" you replied your voice raising with each sentence, tears starting to fill your eyes.

"ENOUGH!" he shouted at you making you stumble as your back hit the wall.

" You've given up" you said tears now streaming down your cheeks. " You're a coward Thomas Shelby" you added as you clutched your arms around your stomach trying to comfort yourself.

" What the fuck did you just call me eh?" He said grabbing you by both your arms, pushing you back against the wall. " A fucking coward!" he fumed, his eyes now black, full of an anger that you had never seen before. The room suddenly getting colder...darker, you was petrified, his grip on your arms tightening.

" I'm not the one too afraid to live their fucking life" he seethed, as you looked down at the whites of his knuckles.

" You are afraid Tommy, afraid to move on... afraid to live again, what...who, are you waiting for? You sobbed.

His eyes narrowed at you as his squeeze got tighter.

"Tommy you're hurting me" you cried looking at his hold on you.

" You're just a stupid girl, bored with your own life. Why do you come here, hm? To fucking taunt me is that it, I think you like games too Y/N" he said clenching his jaw as he watched streams of tears fall down your cheeks. With little courage you had left, you looked up into his angry eyes, pleading him with unspoken words to let go of you. Suddenly snapping out of his anger Tommy looked down at his vicelike grip on your arms and let go stumbling back as he pushed your arm's away from him.

For a moment all you did was look at him, tears burning your skin, you was in utter shock. Tommy could barely look at you. Pushing past him you grabbed the paper you gave him out his hand and ran out the door not looking back. Just as you did you heard him call out after you.

"Y/N" he said quietly, shame riddled in his voice, as he sheepishly brushed his hand over the top of his head.

Ignoring him you ran down the stairs and out onto the street. You had just been a fun game to him. Just an amusement. What made him get so angry? His demeanor changed so quickly, you had never seen him so furious, not even the first time you encountered him in his office did he look like that. Were your words too much of a bitter pill for him to swallow? Or was Tommy the first one to inevitably crack, becoming too frustrated with the scenario you both found yourselves in?

Walking to the bus stop trembling from the cold air, your tears sticking to your checks you checked the times with blurry eyes. Realising you had missed the bus and with no one around to ask directions, you started walking the route back home. Alone in the dark, the cold chill of February numbing your hands you walked and walked the only thing on your mind, Tommy.

Wiping your eyes with the back of your hand, you realised you had walked onto Watery Lane. Slowly making your way down the street you stopped at the old ladies house, the warm light of her window welcoming you in. You approached her door and knocked twice. A few minutes later, she opened her front door and greeted you with a warm smile.

"Hello dear"

NEXT PART

Tag list: @theshelbyclan @babayaga67 @sysymei @nataliewalker93

#peaky blinders #tommy shelby fanfic #tommy shelby x reader #tommy shelby x y/n #thomas shelby #peaky blinder fanfic #peaky blinders fanfic #tommy shelby #A Ghost Of A Man

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