#the rolling stone book of women in rock trouble girls

[louderfade]

Patti Smith wasn't butch, but she was definitely macho, albeit in a kind of goofy way--consciously overstated tough guy. It was. a redolent punk pose that came naturally to her, as well it should have: she helped invent it.

She sings like a woman, dresses like a boy, fronts a band of all-male pals and covers not only Lou and Mick but Pete, and when she does Van she doesn't even switch the gender, chanting, "I'm gonna make her mine make her mine make her mine make her mine!" as if that were the most natural thing in the world.

Now, it wasn't like women had never worn unisex hair or little black vests before. What this skinny weirdo offered wasn't androgyny per se but a new use for it: to cut a niche in the music that was neither sexual invitation nor sexual confrontation, like, "Hi! I'm Patti Smith. I'm going to be charismatic. But not sexually charismatic! That way we can be friends."

from Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock, 1997

[cinematic-literature]

10 Things I Hate About You (1999) by Gil Junger

Book title: Like Mother, Like Daughter: How Women Are Influenced by Their Mother’s Relationship With Food-And How to Break the Pattern (1997) by Debra Waterhouse

Ten Stupid Things Men Do to Mess Up Their Lives (1998) by Laura Schlessinger

Dancing in the Street: Confessions of a Motown Diva (1994) by Martha Reeves and Mark Bego

The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock: Trouble Girls (1997) by Barbara O'Dair

Film Fatales: Independent Women Directors (1997) by Judith M. Redding and Victoria A. Brownworth

[thedistantdusk]

Invisible Stranger

Written for @clarensjoy‘s Hinny Fic Fest! Prompt #28: “Just... talk to me. Please.” Thanks to Ina for the quick beta :D Summary:  When Ginny Weasley is eleven years old, Tom Riddle changes the course of her life. But she’s only eleven, so she doesn’t see it at first.  TW: Coded/implied assault. Mild smut (later excerpts).  ________________________________________________________ When Ginny Weasley is eleven years old, Tom Riddle changes the course of her life. 

But she’s only eleven, so she doesn’t see it at first. 

All she knows is that Tom talks to her when she’s lonely, although to say they merely talk would be a staggering understatement. She hears his voice more than anyone else’s. She sees his face when she sleeps. She cries to him, bonds with him, pines with him. She thinks of him so often — regardless of if they’re actually talking — that it doesn’t even occur to her that some of these thoughts might not be her own. 

She doesn’t even realize he’s entered her until it’s too late. Until he’s done it. Until he’s made her do things… shameful things. Things she’d been embarrassed to report to her parents. She knows full well she’d only be met with reprimands for making herself vulnerable in the first place. 

When she tries to ask her brothers for help, a tiny part of her is happy they don’t. How can she possibly explain this without feeling a hot, aching brand of shame deep in her soul? She’d have to answer some ghastly questions, ones that would make the whole situation even harder to believe. The thought of taking Veritaserum makes her shudder; she’d have to admit — perhaps to a Ministry stranger — that she did enjoy parts of this. 

She’d have to watch even more of her agency slip away, right in front of her eyes, as her body betrayed her yet again. The mere thought of the sort of mortifying confession that might slide off her tongue is enough to shut her up… enough to keep her from being even more persistent. 

Ginny just lies awake at night and grasps at the straws in her spinning mind until her head pounds from the exertion of trying. She’s desperate to remember something — anything — from the swaths of time that just disappeared. She eventually reaches the conclusion that perhaps she’s forgetting on purpose; perhaps she’s protecting herself. 

She just hopes and prays that the memories won’t slam into her sometime in the future with the force of a freight train.

She ultimately decides it’s a blessing, really, that she doesn’t get help. After all, she’s spent eleven years trying to convince everyone that she’s not a baby. It would be the worst kind of setback to ask for help now, just as she’s gained some independence. 

When she chucks the diary in the toilet, she’s confident she’s handled it herself. Her mother wouldn’t be thrilled that her only daughter found herself in this situation, but Ginny likes to think she’d be proud of her resourcefulness. Proud of her only daughter, who’s finally taken control. 

Still, Ginny keeps her head down, keeps her face impassive, keeps her cloak pulled tightly to hide the deepest blush of regret that crawls up her chest whenever she thinks of Tom.

Then the worst possible thing happens: Harry gets ahold of the diary. The second she sees it with his books, she can almost hear the entire world crumbling beneath her feet. 

She only has a single thought: No. She can’t let him. She can’t let Harry, of all people, have open access to the thoughts that have plagued her for months. The thoughts (the lurid, inappropriate thoughts) that she’s had about him. 

So she steals up to Harry’s room and snatches it back, her heart pounding in her throat. She’s long past the point of needing the diary itself to hear Tom’s voice, but seizing it again — letting him inside of her again — doesn’t exactly help. 

Because right from the off, this time is different. The diary hums against her fingers, throbbing in her palm; Tom hasn’t said a word, but she knows he’s going to punish her. She lets out a strangled choke, her eyes rolling back in her head. He’s going to make her regret her little stunt of chucking him in the toilet, isn’t he? Yes. He’s going to make her rue the stupid, impulsive part of her that thought she’d find a way out.  

Her last thought as she loses consciousness is that maybe death will end it. Maybe in death, she’ll truly be free.

Ginny doesn’t die, though — and to her surprise, she can’t even hear Tom when she wakes in the Chamber. All she knows is that Harry’s there. And Ron. And… Lockhart? Seriously? 

Shit, maybe it would’ve been better if she died. Then she wouldn’t have to endure the remnants of this mortifying, twisted nightmare. Then maybe she wouldn’t have to sit there and sob as Dumbledore and McGonagall explain this to her parents. 

She just lets the tears flow as her father yells, as her mother makes incredulous sounds. With every intonation and raised voice, a single word thumps against her skull: Weak.

Weak. Weak. Weak. 

She’s weak. 

But at least for now, she’s alone in her own mind. At least for now, it won’t happen again… not like it has. In retrospect, she reckons she should’ve known better to think he’d ever truly left. Because Tom Riddle has already become her past, present, and future. She just doesn’t know it yet. _______________

Tom takes a different form during her second and third years at Hogwarts. He isn’t entering her or forcing her to do things or beguiling her with his charm and feigned interest, but he’s there nonetheless. He’s dancing, taunting her in the edges of her periphery… crawling in when the weather changes and everything grows cold and dark. Whenever she does poorly on an exam — especially in the winter months, the anniversaries of when things went from Vaguely Bad to Horrifically Bad — she swears she can feel his sneering lips pressed to her neck as his high-pitched cackle resonates in her brain. 

“You’re a baby,” he jeers, his face split into a predatory grin. “I can’t wait to see how else you fail.” 

When Ginny catches a glimpse of the way Harry peers at Cho, Tom only reinforces how she’ll never compare. “Look at her,” he taunts, and Ginny can almost see the leer curling his lips. “She’s poised and beautiful and perfect. She looks like a woman. Why would Harry ever want a girl?” 

And he says it so much — and Ginny thinks it so much — that she starts to believe it. He’ll never want her, will he? It’s clear Harry likes girls, women, who don’t need rescuing. Why would he want someone who’s been tainted with darkness? 

So Ginny moves on… slowly. She finds strength in other ways. She uses quidditch to regain trust in her own body, the trust she had before Tom made her question her own muscles and movements. 

She even dates, as she feels a normal teenager would. Not that she breathes a word about Tom to any of her potential suitors. She knows they couldn’t handle it; most boys couldn’t, not that she blames them. She knows untainted boys would respond like her friends have: by awkwardly clearing their throats through a whispered, “Oh” or a strangled, “I’m so sorry.” Then they’d treat her like she’s made of glass, and it would ruin things. 

Because if there’s one thing she won’t tolerate, it’s someone making her feel weak. Weak gets you in trouble; weak ruins your life and makes you undesirable. No matter how much Tom loves to bother her in winter, she’ll never let anyone see the resulting weakness.

_______________

Ginny considers herself fortunate, really, that Tom doesn’t outwardly come up when she ends things with Dean. It’s an accomplishment that she escapes from that relationship relatively unscathed. Her darkness didn’t accidentally show itself or lay there, sprawling and naked, for him to pick apart. 

It’s different with Harry, of course. She knows it will be from the second he kisses her in the common room. He’s the first one who doesn’t need to see her in a mask of normalcy and constant contentment. He’s the first one who understands that she’s not asking for an apology or reassurance when she accidentally drops a sad piece of her backstory into a casual conversation. 

On the few occasions when she does say things like that (because, again, she doesn’t have to watch her words with him) Harry just holds her closer, her ear pressed to his beating heart, as he runs his calloused fingers through her hair. 

And Ginny thinks, for once in her life, that perhaps there’s an unspoken value in sharing that sort of darkness. 

_______________

She tells Harry the full details of Tom pretty soon after they start shagging. She knows the war’s over; she knows they’ve kind of won. She also knows a well-adjusted person would have left this bit behind… but she reckons neither of them will ever be well-adjusted, really. They’re the sort of couple who cries when they hear I love you but remains stone-faced at funerals of their friends. For Harry especially, she knows that love presents as something that makes him feel uncomfortably warm, almost smothered. It can be a prickly, painful, cloying sensation… one he doesn’t always know how to respond to. With everyone else, he’s afraid of saying the wrong thing. Of seeming either too flippant or too mindful. 

But as their bodies connect, as they rock together in the dying sunlight, his fingers digging into her hips as he pulses inside her, he doesn’t have to pretend, either. 

Harry’s angry when she tells him… but not with her. He’s angry Tom ever made her feel that way. He’s especially angry with the worst of what Tom said: that on the off-chance Harry did want her, he’d only want her for sex. 

Harry brings it up several months after her initial admission.

“You know what I think about a lot?” he slurs, his finger tracing the curve of her breast as she lies naked beside him. 

She quirks a brow; no, but it doesn’t seem like a rhetorical question. 

Harry sighs, flopping over to his back. “I mean, I know it’s horrible and everything,” he allows, raising his hand in warning, “but seriously, I can’t help but be confused that Tom thought I’d be good enough at sex to use anyone for anything in the first place!”

There’s a moment of silence. 

And then Ginny cackles, shaking her head against the threadbare pillow in her bedroom. Harry joins her, pressing her against his side.

“I’m glad we’re both fucked up,” she says, when the giggles subside. “I reckon normal people are boring.” 

“Probably,” Harry agrees, his hand unconsciously toying with her hair. “Guess normal isn’t really my type, though.”

“Oh, so you prefer funny and traumatized?”

Harry smirks. “I prefer you.”

_______________

Tom doesn’t come back in full force until she falls pregnant the first time. 

Maybe it’s because they hadn’t planned on this— and regardless of how misty-eyed and excited Harry is, they definitely hadn’t planned on it. 

Maybe it’s because she’s certain it’s a boy, which carries certain burdens as the son of the Chosen One.

Maybe it’s because she’s feeling a similar loss of control, like her body isn’t her own. 

But mostly, she reckons, it’s because she’s plagued with the near-constant thought that she’s doing something wrong. 

She had a glass of wine before she found out (strike one, Bad Mum). She trips on her trainers and lands on her bum (very, very Bad Mum). She starts spotting at 12 weeks after she goes for the only jog of her entire pregnancy (horrifically Bad Mum; utterly unfit to raise a child). 

And all of this spins around in her head, faster and faster and faster, until she sees Tom’s face again one night. “You’re fat now,” he mocks, his voice a cruel whisper that slithers into the space between slumber and consciousness. “The nerve of you, thinking you’d do something so selfish as staying in shape at a time like this. I can’t wait to see Harry’s face when you tell him you’ve lost the ba—“

She bolts upright in bed, her heart pounding, and throws the blankets off to peer between her thighs. A ragged chuckle of relief escapes her lips. Nothing. There’s nothing, the baby’s fine, and—

“Ginny?” 

Shit.

She bites her lip and turns to Harry. He’s peering at her, his expression exhausted but alert. She hates that look, she really does; it reminds her too much of when he’d woken from his own dreams, right after the war. 

“A nightmare,” she whispers, brushing his hair from his eyes. “Only a nightmare. Go back to sleep.”

Harry sighs and grips her hand. He knows better. “Just... talk to me. Please. You don’t even have—“

“—It’s Tom,” she cut across, biting her lip. She feels guilty enough for waking Harry when he’s got work tomorrow; she’d better make it quick. “It’s just… stupid pregnancy shit, taking the form of Tom. Or maybe it just is Tom, somehow. I don’t really know.”

She throws her hands in the air before settling back against the headboard. And then, in a small voice: “He just… he’s so great at making me feel stupid.” 

There’s a beat. 

Harry reaches up to cup her cheek; she leans into the warmth, unsure if she’s finding more comfort in the familiarity or the gesture itself. 

“Well,” he says slowly; she can tell from his tone that he’s biting his lip, even if she can’t see it in the darkness. “You’re not stupid. But it’s also not stupid that he still makes you feel like that sometimes. Does that… make any sense?”

Her lips twitch in a soft smile. “It does. It makes sense. I just... I hate feeling weak.”

Harry chuckles and pulls her against him. She sighs into the crook of his neck, her eyelashes fluttering against his skin. 

“I could use a lot of words to describe you, darling.” His fingers dance on the gentle swell of her belly; he always sounds so pleased when he touches her, especially here, like he can’t help but feel chuffed that he’s actually knocked her up. “But I’m afraid that weak doesn’t make the cut.” 

Ginny giggles. “I’ll just have to settle for mad, I reckon,” she manages through a yawn. What is it about his bloody heartbeat that always settles her?

“Mad it is,” he agrees, kissing her forehead.

_______________

“It’s him again, isn’t it.” 

It’s not a question. But if it were, the answer would be obvious. 

Ginny’s staring out the window, her whole body poised and anxious. Every fiber of her being is taut. If she had a bit more self-awareness, she might compare herself to a hunting dog who’s just sensed a pheasant. 

But self-awareness is the furthest thing from her mind. Not when she’s worried about her babies. And she’s worried about all of her babies, yes — but there’s something especially triggering about the involvement of her little girl. Her only girl. Her girl, who’s exactly the same age as she was, right when—

“He’s here!” 

Ginny scarcely hears the words leave her lips as Pig flies through the air and into their open window. Safe. She hasn’t even read the letter yet, but she can tell from Lily’s messy scrawl across the parchment, from the agreed upon symbol of a tiny dragon, printed in the corner, that she’s safe.

Ginny has to draw a deep breath to stop herself from bawling with relief.

“Told you she’d be fine,” Harry murmurs, wrapping an arm around her waist. He rests his chin on the crown of her head as Ginny rips the letter open, nonetheless desperate for the proof she knows she’ll flnd. Desperate for confirmation that her baby’s made it to school all right. Desperate to know another little girl — her little girl — won’t find herself violated and alone. 

Ginny reads the letter through a veil of tears and presses it to her chest when she’s done. Safe. Her baby’s safe. 

A few minutes later, she turns to Harry with an apologetic shrug, brushing the tears from her eyes. “Ready for dinner?” she asks, gesturing towards the door. “Or did you want to stay inside all day and mope about having an empty house for the first time in ages?” 

Harry rolls his eyes, but a smile plays at his lips. He mutters something under his breath that distinctly sounds like not sure which of us was doing the moping, darling. 

But Ginny’s happy to ignore that as she links her arm in his. She’s pleased to go to dinner and drink too much and laugh too loudly. It’s just another reminder of what she has… and how she almost didn’t have it, at all. 

Because while Tom Riddle might be her past, present, and future, Ginny will do everything in her power to ensure he never defines another little girl’s life like that. 

Ever again.

[bestsongby]

New Thoughts on Old Classics:

Hotel California, by the Eagles. 1976

Is it Essential? 

The Eagles (or, more specifically, Henley and Frey) were often viewed as cocaine-fueled El Lay misogynists. I think the cocaine-fueled and El Lay are indisputable, but is the misogynist tag a little unfair? Could be.

I’ve always been fascinated by Hotel California, the Eagles’ bazillion selling magnum opus, and how it plays with that perception in mind. 

Hotel California is the Eagles stretching their powers as far as the rubber band will allow before it snaps or loses its shape forever, which probably explains why their only subsequent release as an active band was the lackluster The Long Run, a collection of half-assed disco shuffles and by-the-numbers rockers. (aside from barely an Eagle Timothy B. Schmidt’s heartfelt soft rock gem “I Can’t Tell You Why,” and barely upright Eagle Joe Walsh’s catchy as fuck guitar rocker “In the City.”)

For what it’s worth, the stretched rubber band theory is one I apply to most great rock acts who spend any time working under the Album as Art theory of record making. (acknowledging that there have been many, many Not Great bands operating under this theory) The Beatles wisely realized they’d reached that point with Abbey Road, and packed it in before the slope slipped. The Stones began that climb with Beggar’s Banquet, and went from strength to strength until they reached their apex by plunging back down through the depths with Exile on Main St. The Kinks bucked the trend to some degree by releasing one pretty brilliant and one almost pretty brilliant album after their ultimate statement of intent, The Village Green Preservation Society. The Who…well, the Who never really got there. They fooled the world into believing Tommy was their Everest flag-planting, but the truth is Quadrophenia was a better album. All of which obscures the fact that the Who’s greatest album is Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy, a perfect collection of classic singles, few of which managed to tickle the U.S. charts. 

And then there are the Loves (Forever Changes) and Zombies (Odessey & Oracle), who strayed outside their comfort zones long enough to produce single discs that stand up to the greatest of the Greatest, despite neither band ever really being truly among the Greatest. (and, yes, both bands were otherwise very, very good at times)

Whew. I digress.

Let’s start with this: Is Hotel California a great album?

I’d like to say it is, but it might not even be the Eagles’ best album. I think, assuming assessing a “best” of anything Eagles-related doesn’t make your stomach clench, an argument could be made for One of These Nights (the album that immediately preceded this one – which easily wins the battle of cover art, anyway). But Hotel California is the most Eagles of Eagles albums, and stands as the best summation of their moment in the sun. And, it marks that moment when tuneful music produced by strong personalities could dominate the American pop culture landscape like no other medium.

In hindsight, Hotel California, riding shotgun with Fleetwood Mac’s equally mammoth Rumours, stands as a signpost in a pivotal moment in pop culture’s de-evolution from artist-controlled playground to complete corporate takeover. The suits always knew there was money in the music, but, holy shit, this much money?

Hotel California is an arrogant, confident, pretentious, calculated work of fiction, and you can hum along to it. It’s dominated by Don Henley, but it’s the input of the other band members that prevents it from completely collapsing under its own weight.

So, in review, let’s start with the title track, which can almost definitely be tuned in somewhere on your terrestrial radio dial at this very moment.

“Hotel California” started as a killer guitar riff by lead guitarist Don Felder. (Fittingly, Felder, who primarily kept his head down and played the shit out of his guitar throughout the Eagles’ history, eventually became estranged from the band) Once Don Henley grafted his lyrics to the music, the song became the ultimate distillation of the Eagles’ Desert Cocaine Tableau. Most of the group’s biggest hits were pretty direct, lyrically. A woman either pissed them off, or a woman was invited to lay down in the desert with them. Or sometimes the women were left behind while the band wrote their own desperado inspired mythology. But the fragmented imagery in “Hotel California” could only really make sense if the listener has a straw permanently lodged up his nose. The Witchy Woman of the past becomes the hostess of a demonic hostel where pink champagne replaces wine and pretty boys dance endlessly in sweat drenched courtyards. It seems as if the Hotel California is a place to run to and to run from, and we’re pretty sure Henley is only lamenting the “mirrors on ceiling” because all of his coke is now going to wind up on the floor.

With all of that said, the interplay between the guitars is deathless, and even vague descriptions of driving through the desert at night are enough to conjure up personal imagery for anyone confused as to what “colitas” is (are?). (The fact that the Eagles played an acoustic version of this live is either proof that they’re assholes, or that, like Eric Clapton’s tedious acoustic return to “Layla,” they just don’t quite understand the reasons for their own success – Felder trumps Henley here, and that’s that)

With that out of the way, we catch our breath and listen to the gang take it down a notch (with the help of JD Souther – the Eagles were never lacking for talented SoCal co-conspirators, starting at the beginning with Jackson Browne) with “New Kid in Town,” which, damn it, is pretty unassailable, musically. It’s got hooks for days, lush production that never swamps the tune, and a sincere, understated vocal performance from Glenn Frey, backed by great group harmonies. What? The lyrics? Well, okay. The woman is doing him wrong (in the third person, for some reason – maybe it’s not manly to admit you’re the one being cuckolded?), and she’s not living up to her end of the bargain, and…

Okay, you get the point. It’s a Henley/Frey lyric.

“Life in the Fast Lane” (It’s interesting to note the band led the album off with Hotel California’s only three single releases – all smash hits, of course) kicks in next, and we’re reminded overtly of the cocaine. It’s a great radio rocker – guitar licks weaving in and out, featuring maybe the slickest production on the album, and Henley doesn’t spare the dude in the equation this time, letting us know that both parties are feeding each other’s sinful excesses (sex and drugs). It’s a tale as old as Los Angeles, and the spoken “are you with me so far” dropped in by Henley manages to insult the listener almost by accident. (yeah, we’re with you, Don! Sex and drugs go hand-in-hand with rock and roll, brother! Revelation!)

And then we roll into “Wasted Time.” In which Henley (boy, so far, this is really a Don disc more than a Glenn disc) strains to let the poor dumb broad who left him know that she’s done nothing but fuck up her love life by fucking the wrong dudes, and, most importantly, by leaving Henley. It’s definitely this type of sentiment that allows critics to glue the MYSOGYNY label on our heroes. It never occurs to Don that this girl might have made the right choice in leaving a dude who not only plods through an orchestrated piano ballad about the terrible decisions she’s made, but backs it up with an orchestral reprise to hammer the point home. (the reprise actually originally opened side two, just to make sure you couldn’t escape the sentiment by flipping over the album – the fucking Eagles led off side two of their biggest album with an orchestral reprise. Admire their balls)

The sequencing of Hotel California comes across as pretty messy in the era of the compact disc/digital album, with the “Wasted Time(s)” dropped right smack into the middle of things, and “Life in the Fast Lane” book-ending the song(s) with the next track up…

And it’s another Henley rocker (what demons was Frey battling in 1976 that allowed him to take such a backseat to his his white ‘fro-sporting partner?), “Victim of Love.” It’s a catchy rocker about…some poor dumb broad. I hate to harp on the cocaine, but how much of it was Stevie Nicks doing to think Henley was a fun dude to party with? Anyway, this one is another radio staple, despite never being released as a single. Truthfully, all the album really needed was “Life in the Fast Lane” to remind us the boys could rock a little. But here they slowed it down a notch in case you had trouble keeping up with them the first time. 

And then, out of nowhere, we’re dropped into Joe Walsh’s melancholy reflection on life, “Pretty Maids All in a Row.” I can’t say exactly what the Eagles were thinking when they pulled Walsh into the band (”Hey – this dude makes us look sober!”), but I’d be hard-pressed to believe they anticipated his first recorded contribution would be such a beautiful, naked sentiment, punctuated not with his trademark guitar rips, but by piano and synthesizer. It’s a jarring shift in tone, helping the album achieve an eclectic vibe it was struggling to achieve with Henley dominating the proceedings, and all the more powerful for it.

Anyway, great track. And it’s followed by another great track.

Backing up “Pretty Maids” is, for my money, the best track on the album, and one of the most overlooked songs in the band’s catalog. No coincidence it’s a Randy Meisner song. “Try and Love Again” is a soaring, hopeful rocker, punctuated by Meisner’s upper register, and some truly uplifting guitar soloing. It’s a mystery why this track wasn’t released as a single, unless Henley and Frey were still annoyed that Meisner’s “Take It to the Limit” was the band’s first number one single. But it’s the one track from the album I find myself revisiting most often, without apology. It’s also worth noting that while Meisner’s lyric is treading on self-pity, he’s not blaming a chick for his problems. 

At this point we’ve wound our way through a collection of hit singles, timeless riffs, and a couple of contributions from lesser used band members that stand up to the hits. It’s hard to say there’s a definite theme at play here, although California and Los Angeles are definite players on the scene. So it’s up to Henley, again, to hammer things home with the most pretentious track in the Eagles’ entire catalog.

“The Last Resort” answers the question, “What if Randy Newman didn’t have a sense of humor?” A confused history of California (and over seven minutes long, to punctuate its importance as a statement), complete with references to the “Red Man” and Malibu and all of those bright lights that sullied the landscape, presented by a group that pretty actively moved closer and closer to the neon the further their hitmaking prowess ascended. The song starts as a literal travelogue about a girl from Providence (”The one in Rhode Island”), and then slips into a reminder that California has really succeeded at excess, which is evidently a bad thing.

In the end, it’s all the preacher’s fault, anyway. One suspects that Henley (and Frey?) realized he wasn’t really headed toward any logical conclusions with this one, and the lesson we’re left with is that the missionaries traded the Red Man’s peace of mind and started us on the path toward…well…all of that cocaine and colitas, I guess. (it is a pretty tune, though)

And that’s it. Nine songs (split into ten tracks), three hit singles, and 38 million copies sold.

Is Hotel California essential? In terms of understanding the “evolution” of pop culture, it’s an essential landing point for those curious how Los Angeles went from acoustic canyon-dwelling hippie haven to the paranoid personal driveway for limos filled with coke-addled celebrities wearing sunglasses at midnight because the lights fuck with what’s left of their peripheral vision.

But in the battle of juggernaut Los Angeles pop albums, Rumours creams Hotel California because Fleetwood Mac can be heard shutting out the world and wrestling with their relationships while coincidentally at the peak of their songwriting and performing abilities, whereas the Eagles were trying to make statements without much to state. Rumours is essential. Hotel California sounds good when you’re not paying attention too closely. 

[ohblackdiamond]

liner notes/unused joke summaries for kiss fics (part iv)

Despite what my general dislike of the shift key and my tendency to mock all that I love might imply, I actually overthink everything I write to a great extent. I make no claims to these explanations being in any way enjoyable, but if you wanted to know what I was thinking while writing KISS fic… now you do. Part one can be found here. Part two is here. Part three is here. 

little t&a --If Paul had boobs, they would be big and Gene would want to grab them.

>>Title from a Rolling Stones song of the same name; most of the chapter titles are from another Stones song, “The Spider and the Fly.” I started it during quarantine as a means to occupy myself and destress, and didn’t initially plan on posting it at all. Once I’d written five chapters without having posted it or mentioned it to anyone, I figured, well, I guess this might as well go somewhere, so I put it up. I had the hope that it’d give me something to strive for during the stress of lockdown, and I’d assumed that I wouldn’t ever have that much time to devote to a story again.

There were a couple of things that really inspired me. I’ve always enjoyed sexswaps as a bit of a guilty pleasure, but wanted to do a different take on them-- there’s this tendency for sexswaps to either be wacky hijinks or an excuse to write particularly brutal noncon. There’s also a tendency for the sexswapped character to almost automatically start adopting stereotypically feminine traits he didn’t have prior, with no real reason for it. I wanted to try and avoid all that as much as possible.

... There’s also another tendency for the sexswapped character never getting back to normal, and I wanted to avoid that, too. I mean, c’mon, KISS is supposed to start the Love Gun tour a month after the fic. Paul can’t exactly pull the trigger of a love taco. (Maybe gently brush it a bit...)

I had Paul already cursed for five days at the start of the fic because I thought it would make things easier and allow the plot to advance more quickly. I also felt like it would give him more autonomy-- prior to Gene showing up, he has tried (albeit in small ways) to get a handle on what’s happened to him, and while he’s hermited it up, he hasn’t given up. Autonomy in general was pretty important for me re: Paul. (Incidentally, probably one of my favorite things about this fic is that Paul’s made that poor twelve-year-old kid on his bike buy him sanitary napkins.)

I wanted to explore a couple of other things, too, mostly rock and roll’s (and KISS’ in particular) pretty heinous treatment of women. Gene and Paul argue in the eighties that groupies know the score from the beginning, and even postulates that those relationships are more “honest” than just taking a girl out to dinner. They’re not alone in this (and, of course, as married men, these days they try not to discuss those times at all); almost every band/artist from around that time period will give you the same answer. “The girls know what they’re doing.” I think many of them did know. I also think many of them came into those hotel rooms expecting a lot more than they ever received, and I think plenty of girls ended up at the very least disappointed by their encounters, if not humiliated or worse.

I don’t know if this was successful, but I also wanted to at least try to poke a few holes in celebrity/idol worship as well. Carol’s scathing comments to Paul-- “they [fans] think there’s something you’ve got that they can get at, but there’s not” pretty heavily exemplify behavior I’ve seen at conventions, fan meet-ups, etc. At the end of the day, well, there’s no point in putting them on much of a pedestal. I dunno. I’ve seen some weird crap in the name of fan worship, in and outside of RPS. Keith Richards talks about it in his book-- girls urinating on themselves out of sheer nerves/excitement just at seeing the band, etc., which, while disturbing, had to have given them a sense of being something beyond ordinary (and act accordingly, of course).

I don’t know. I like them a lot, but I can’t hero-worship these guys; they don’t live in the real world. They’re not, ultimately, relatable or accessible despite the billions of photos, the twitter posts, the meet and greets-- any more than they were 40-odd years ago. I think there can be a real danger in thinking they are. I wanted to show that, too, but again, I don’t know if it came across properly.

One of the aspects I really struggled with was getting a good handle on Paul’s innately slippery sense of identity without it overtaking the story entirely. Gene’s very stable identity was a good foil, and it helped that most of “t&a” is from his point of view, rather than Paul’s.

Another place I faltered with was Paul’s outing alone at CBGB. The first draft had the guy in the club slip quaaludes into his drink, but I really didn’t like that at all and felt it took too much control away from Paul/punished him for going out on his own. I thought it’d be more interesting if Paul deliberately took what he knew was a dangerous combination (alcohol + quaaludes) in the hopes that would make him feel better about sleeping with someone he didn’t care about.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, having him do that (and the way the scene with the guy at the club ends) also meant that I couldn’t have him hop right into bed with Gene that night, either, so that accounts for some of the delaying. I was also really wanting to make sure in general that when Gene and Paul finally did go all the way, there wasn’t any feeling of being coerced or pressured. Not that Gene would do either of those things, but I didn’t want him or Paul to be doing it out of any feeling of obligation or hurry; I wanted it to be as natural as possible, under the circumstances. And I wanted, again, Paul’s dubious sense of self and Gene’s ambiguous feelings about Paul(’s boobs) to come into play-- yes, Paul, now you, too, can take Gene on the amazing technicolor dreamdate you’ve been fantasizing about for the last seven years! Or, you know, not. Overall, there are some pacing issues and the story slows down considerably after Gene takes Paul home from CBGB, but I like to hope that most of the scenes add something.

There were a couple of secondary plotlines that got scrapped because I couldn’t get them to fit well enough with the narrative. One of them was Paul’s very troubled relationship with his sister, Julia. There’s a fair amount of references to her scattered throughout, and Paul brings her up on several occasions, generally without much provocation, and generally at mildly odd moments (at Central Park and immediately after getting drawn by Gene being the standouts). There was an initial draft of the chapter in which Ace calls Paul, where Julia’s the one calling Paul instead (after having gotten his number from their parents). I wanted to at least get the start of a reconciliation going between them. Ultimately I scrapped it because I couldn’t get it to flow with the main plot and never felt like I’d ever explored it thoroughly enough for it to be worth a detour.

The comparison between Paul and Carol is pretty blatantly obvious, even in the narrative. Paul and Gene both recognize it (Gene, initially, when he notes that Carol doesn’t seem to belong at 54 any more than Paul does), and it makes them highly uncomfortable. (Mary-Anne, Carol’s friend, also notices it-- “she [Paul] reminds me of Carol. Just pitiful.”) They’re both very shy, insecure people that have thrust themselves into a world they’re not naturally suited for (show business) in order to achieve their own ends. They’ve both put great stock in a single person who helped them (inadvertently or not) during a dark time, and are driven by those feelings, despite knowing that person is out of reach.

Physically, they’re intentionally mostly opposite (Carol’s short, with a slight build, lighter hair, blue eyes, vs. Paul being, well, Paul-- tall, fuller build, black hair, brown eyes). But narratively speaking, neither of them are described as beautiful; “cute” and “kind of pretty,” sure, but nothing past that (except when Gene says it towards the end). That was important, too, for a couple of reasons. One, I wanted to further the comparison between them; two, I wanted to at least try and dispel the idea that all groupies were glamorous; many of them were rather ordinary-looking.

Paul not being “playboy material as a girl” was very deliberate. I feel like a lot of sexswaps tend to make the guy in question end up a ridiculously hot babe, which didn’t quite jive with what I was going for (not that I wanted Paul to end up awful-looking, but...). ... He’s probably hotter than he thinks he is though; at least, Gene didn’t mind at all, and Pete thought he was pretty. I wanted him to be recognizable if one knew where to look (face, body language). I didn’t want him to end up a tiny, frail-looking waif-- given what he looks like as a dude, that didn’t make sense to me. So this meant the less perfect attributes had to stay and carry over to a female body. He ended up with big boobs because... well, honestly because if he wasn’t going to end up with a great figure overall, he might as well have great boobs. And I mean, really, his chest’s already pretty all right as-is.

I didn’t want there to be a love triangle, but I did want it obvious, at least in an offhand way, that Peter and Paul had had sex (Ace mentions it in the car with Peter, with his “how long did it take you”). I wanted to incorporate Ace and Peter to as great an extent as possible in general.

Marbas is an actual demon from The Lesser Key of Solomon, although other than the few sentences Paul reads off from that grimoire, there’s not much more information on him to be found. 

[rumbelleshowdown]

Unpathed Waters, Undreamed Shores

Author: Moody Orange Prompt: This gifset

The rain was steady, constant. A thick curtain separating Belle from the safety of the village. The nearing sounds of thunder and flashes of light were promising that it was only going to worsen.

The cave they’d found shelter in was spacious enough, but the walls were damp and the air muggy and thick. The cave wasn’t the problem. The rain, only a symptom. No, her current issue was the man she had been forced to take shelter with: The Light One, Purveyor of Truth, Peace Bringer and Hope Maker, the Exalted One and Only Rumplestiltskin of the Front Lands.

As far as Bell is concerned, the man was nothing but trouble.

If not for him, she would’ve already tracked down the Yaoguai and defeated it, like she promised Mulan she’d do. If not for him, she would have made it back to the village before the storm hit, and be curled up in the inn with her book and a cup of tea, content on a job well done.

If not for him she’d have never found cover, either, but considering it was his fault she got caught in the storm to begin with she was electing to ignore that. It was all the Light One’s fault. All of it.

Thunder sounded in the distance, closer than before. The Light One stared straight ahead into the curtain of rain, unseeing. There was anxiety at the corner of his eyes, in the squeeze of his hand on his hilt. At every flash, every rumble, his grip tightened.

Belle, sitting as far into the cave as she could, was tired of pretending not to see him flinch.

“Not a fan of storms?” she asked.

He answered with the glare. Rumple was at the mouth of their shelter, leaning against the wall. If she were feeling charitable, maybe she’d offer to sit with him, or invite him closer to her.

“You have magic,” she pointed out. “You could whisk the storm away with a thought.”

“The price isn’t worth it,“ he sniffed.

Right. She rolled her eyes. He was always going on about how magic had a price. A steep one too, if you weren’t careful. It sounded very arbitrary to her.

“What’s the price for something so simple?“

He snorted. “Simple.”

“It’s just a storm,” she said, resisting the urge to throw a rock at his stupid head. “You’re said to be the strongest user in all the lands.”

“It’s not a matter of—look, it’s the logistics of the thing, okay?”

Belle stared at him. She was wet, sore, and trapped in a cave with the last person she ever wanted to see again. She was not in the mood for his half-answers. “Logistics.”

He sighed. With the forced calm of someone explaining for the thousandth time, he said, “The storm has to go somewhere, doesn’t it. Contrary to popular belief, things whisked away by magic don’t just disappear into nothing. They all go somewhere.”

“But that would mean you can’t create, either” Belle said, interested despite herself. “If, say, I wanted a book, or an apple, or—anything—magic couldn’t create it for me.”

“That’s...trickier.” He rubbed the side of his face. “Far easier to summon what you need. Less costly, too.”

“So what’d be the cost of ending this, then?”

“It’s not just a sprinkle of rain.” He grit his teeth as thunder sounded, loud and crushing above them. “Maybe I could wave my hand and break the clouds up, but this is the elements we’re talking about, a literal force of nature. It would take a lot of magic to even touch it. And—” he said, before she could interrupt. “Magic doesn’t take the price outright. It’s not a previously agreed upon transaction. Any number of things could happen, the least of which being I cause a drought because my magic is keeping any storm from forming at all.”

Belle leaned back against the wall, a frown deep on her face. It made a lot of sense, really.

“So you’re telling me that the great and mighty Light One can’t do away with a simple storm. Hm.” She hated how petulant she sounded but couldn’t do anything to stop it.

“I am saying,“ he said with exaggerated patience, “it’s best to just let things be as they are.“

“Right,” she scoffed. “Because that’s the most important thing.”

“Belle…”

“Don’t call me by my name as if—“ she swallowed, throat tight. “—As if we’re. Friends.”

The Light One turned away, saying nothing.

For a little while, at least.

“How is your leg feeling?“

Belle shifted. “No worse than before.” The pain wasn’t gone, but the makeshift brace he had put her in was holding. She could tell it was going to heal straight, at least. That deflated her a little—here she was, trying to pick a fight after he carried her to the cave and bound her leg. He had used magic, too, must have for the pain to have receded so much in the time they had been here.

“So elemental magic isn’t worth it,” she said, happy to hear her tone was less waspish, more genial. “But Mr. Best-To-Let-Things-Be thinks healing magic is fine?”

She waited for him to explain, perhaps to explain that the shock and pain of the injury was enough to pay for anything, let alone a little faster healing (it made sense to her), but he kept staring moodily out into the rain.

“What am I paying for it, anyway?” She tried again.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

She pursed her lips, starting to get annoyed. “It’s my leg, I should know the cost.”

“My fault.”

She scoffed. “So is us getting caught in the rain but you’re not doing anything about that.”

“Belle, please. I’m happy to pay for this myself.”

She sighed. Bickering was only worth it when the other person was willing to engage. So what if he wanted to pay some nebulous price for healing her broken leg. Which he broke. Indirectly. She was the one who slipped.

But if he hadn’t been there, appearing in the woods of the East Lands, of all god damned places in the world just when she was finally—

“Why did you come back?”

His brows drew together in confusion. “This is my first time in the Cherry Oak Woods.”

Belle made a frustrated sound in her throat. “I mean—”

She waved her hand, gesturing between them as if that was the answer. He continued to look at her, not catching on.

That was just as well. What a stupid question; why come back. He never did come back, that was the problem, had always been the problem.

God, she was so foolish. So stupid. What a stupid girl.

Belle bit her lip to keep it from trembling. No more tears, she promised herself. Not over him.

And she wasn’t stupid—it had taken quite a lot of smarts to make it this deep in the woods, this close to where the Yaoguai was hiding. Quite a lot of bravery, too. The only one willing to come with her had been Mulan, but she couldn’t leave her post at the village, not when she was the only one defending it.

The Light One was still looking at her, waiting.

His hair was longer, a little more grey, but otherwise he looked exactly the same as when he appeared at her town. Same leather jerkin, same deerskin gloves. He didn’t look like a knight, certainly not like a powerful magic user. But his eyes were hard as steel, and warm as a summer rain. He knew such amazing things, could tell her stories of far off lands and kingdoms she had only read about in her books.

It was inevitable she’d be drawn to him like a breeze to an open window. She needed to stop blaming herself for that.

But it hurt when he’d walked away as if nothing between them mattered. As if she didn’t matter, like she was just another face in a long line of admirers.

“If you didn’t want me, you could have just said so.” She spoke to the cave wall in front of her, the stone craggly and uncaring.

He sighed, like he was expecting this. She was more than happy to deliver. “Belle—”

“You didn’t have to kiss back.”

“It’s not like that.”

“If I offended you somehow by inviting you to my room—”

“Just surprised me, not—”

“You shouldn’t have agreed to meet me if you were just—”

“I couldn’t take that from you!” He shouted, voice filling the space around them.

“Take what? I was offering!” She snapped back.

Belle turned to look at him. His face was red, his mouth open, teeth bared. She had liked his teeth, how they were a jagged line. She’d wondered what it would feel like to have them nip at her neck or shoulder, had wanted desperately to find out.

Rumple was the one to break the silence. “I didn’t want you—“

“Clearly.”

“I didn’t want you,” he said again, forcefully, “to give me something so precious out of misplaced gratitude.”

If Belle could stand, she’d have stormed out of the cave right then and there, weather be damned. “I did not,” she said, voice cold, “invite you to my room because I was grateful.”

“You don’t know what you were offering,” The Light One insisted. “What it’d have done to you.”

“Done to me.”

His blush was deepening, his eyes looking everywhere but at her. “I don’t make it a habit to leave ruined women in my wake. Just because I saved your town from the ogres doesn’t mean I get to bed the first pretty maiden who—”

“Ruined me?” her mouth opened, then closed. Of course that was the issue. Somehow she thought him above man’s fixation on a woman’s purity. “What makes your dick so special?”

It was his turn for his mouth to open, then close. He opened it again, but the only sound to come out was a very confused, “Ah?”

“I haven’t had a maiden head in years, Rumple,” Belle said. She narrowed her eyes. “You knew that, though. You were there when Gaston called me—”

“I know what he called you.” He shrugged, looking lost. “But—but Belle—you were a lady! The heir! The woman that everyone looked to for strength and guidance! Far too good for a man like me to—to—”

“To fuck?”

He made a distressed noise in the back of his throat.

“...Have sex with,” Belle amended. She watched him pull at the neck of his jerkin, likely questioning his high collar.

“It was wartime,” she explained. “Our land had been ravaged and despite what my father would have us believe, our stronghold couldn’t last. That kind of thinking tends to mellow even the most straight-laced traditionalist.”

Rumple nodded. He swallowed. “I didn’t, uhm. Realize the full. Nng. Circumstances. I apologize. I made a choice for you, and—I shouldn’t have.”

Belle looks down at her lap. She flexed the toes of her broken leg, first forward, then back. No pain at all.

“Think of all the fun we could have had if you’d just talked to me instead of running off.”

He huffed. “I do.”

She blinked. “What?”

He turned to look at her, his eyes soft and warm like sand pooling in her hands. “I’ve missed you,” he admitted, his voice a breath louder than the rain.

Something inside her chest unclenched. “I’ve missed you too.”

He stood, his figure impressive in the small cave. He walked over to her, slid down the wall so they were side by side. Rumple held out his hand, hesitating as if unsure she’d take it.

Belle wasn’t about to let this opportunity slip through her fingers, so that’s exactly what she did. That is, slip her fingers through his. She squeezed. He squeezed back.

“You’ll be safe to walk in another hour or so,” he murmured, leaning down to place a gentle kiss to her temple.

She hummed, pleased. They sat for a long moment, Belle leaning into his side, him leaning into hers. He didn’t flinch when the thunder rumbled.

“How did you come across the Yaoguai?” she finally asked. “It doesn’t seem quite your style.”

Rumple raised his eyebrow. “King Hubert of the Rose Kingdom got in touch. His son disappeared around the time the first reports of the beast came through.”

“Did he try his hand at hunting it?” Belle sit up a little straighter. She loved a good mystery. “Wait, the Rose Kingdom? Do you mean Prince Phillip?”

“Yes. You didn’t happen to meet him…?”

“No, sorry. But I know a friend of his. Mulan said he was visiting her when—when he vanished. She was distraught.” It took a lot to crack Mulan’s outer shell.

Belle bit her lip. “If only we had been sooner. The Yaoguai is a fire demon. It won’t come out for days after a downpour like this.”

“We’ll wait it out, then go back to the village. We can regroup there and decide our next action.”

Belle kissed his jaw. He let her linger before turning his head and capturing her lips with his.

“Together?” she asked when they broke apart.

“Together.”

[otheroutlandertales]

This story is a little different than what we usually write. We're starting a new series based on the time-traveling premise in Audrey Niffenegger's book The Time Traveler's Wife and we'll be expanding the story with various Outlander characters. This first installment features Jamie and a time-traveling Claire. 

The Time Traveler’s Family

by @abbydebeaupreposts

Strange the things you remember, the people, the places, the moments in time burned into the heart forever. Jamie Fraser has lived a life different from other men, for most men don’t have wives and children with temporal displacement disorder.

Part One: Chapter 1 - Lallybroch 1729

Jamie is 8, Claire is 27

The first time it happens after Craigh Na Dun, Claire is terrified. A bone-deep fear she hasn’t felt since she was five years old-- not since the very start of her temporal dissonance disorder. Since becoming a nurse, she has thought of her condition in clinical terms-- it makes her feel less of an oddity-- but no better prepared now than she was 22 years ago.

Her uncle Lamb had unceremoniously dropped her off at the boarding school he’d selected, handed her suitcase to the Matron, a starchy woman with an imposing bosom and shoes so well polished Claire could see the lights reflected in the tops of the toes. Then he’d patted her back and driven away. She’d followed the Matron to the long ward of beds that would be her new home. Claire didn’t want to live in this place with its screaming girls and unsmiling faces. She wanted her Daddy to rock her to sleep in the special chair by the fire, to feel her Mummy brush a kiss on her forehead and say “Night, night bug!” But they were gone and in that moment, her only thought was her own wish to be gone, too.

Claire’s next coherent thought was that it had all been a dream, a terrible awful dream. For here she was back in her bed, snug as a bug in a rug. She sighed deeply, only vaguely noticing that she was dressed in the same outfit she had been wearing in her nightmare about the boarding school. But Claire was too tired to slip on her nightie. As she rolled over she saw her own head on the pillow right next to her. She smiled thinking this was still part of her strange dream, closed her eyes and fell asleep again.

She was startled awake when the door of her room sprung open. She rolled out of the bed onto the thin strip of floor between the window and the bed frame. Claire looked back at the bed and saw that she hadn’t imagined it, there really was another Claire. She heard her Grandmere crying and noted the shocked expression on bed-Claire’s face, all of it felt far too familiar. Claire started screaming as if she could forestall her grandmother’s words. Yet, she knew them by heart.

“There’s been an accident, Julia and Henry are dead.”

The next thing she knew, Claire was back in the long ward, prostrate on the floor and unable to stop crying. She threw up all over Matron’s shiny shoes but even that didn’t end her hysteria. It only ended when Lamb came to get her and promised she can come stay with him.

Over the years, Claire has adapted to her rare condition. In fact, when she fell through the stones at Craigh Na Dun, she believed that it was just another time jump into her past.

Well, it certainly was that. Except this time, she didn’t just go back to her past, but The Past. A whole new century, as a matter of fact. But Claire was used to living in the impossible. The answers would come, as they always did, in time.

She’d spent two days riding now, in the company of these highlanders, and mile after mile, she kept waiting to snap back into her own time, certain at any moment she would awaken on the floor of Mrs Baird’s B & B, feeling nauseous, hungry and trying frantically to think up an excuse that Frank might accept.

Frank. Her heart squeezed when she thought of him and how frantic he would be. They’d married so quickly and spent so little time together during their marriage thus far, that it had never come up. She’d jumped a couple of times when with him, that was true, but in both cases she’d been missing from her own time only a few minutes. It had been easy to manage a plausible excuse on her return-- a bathroom visit, a forgotten item that had to be attended to in another room.

From previous jumps, Claire learned that time didn’t always move in a linear pattern in her present and past. Sometimes she’d discover that no matter how long she’d been in her past, upon her return to the present only five or ten minutes had elapsed. Other times, she’d come home to find the mail piled up for days.

Claire usually jumped to a familiar place-- her house, school, an archeological dig she’d been on with Uncle Lamb a few years ago.  On very rare occasions, Claire might find herself hundreds of miles away from anything recognizable. Up until the stones, those jumps were the scariest ones. For she knew no one, sometimes didn’t speak the language, had to be quick on her feet. She had three choices: blend in, flee or hide.  

There was no rhyme or reason to when, where or for how long she’d need to endure until she could make her way back to her own life in the present. She’d never jumped so far in the past, though and, in any case, Claire had no way to judge whether time was moving the same in Frank’s world. She had always known that at some point she’d jump and be gone for long enough that there would be a reckoning. Claire was quite certain that this time, her absence had not gone unnoticed.

Claire tries in vain to remember where she’s been and what she has just been doing before coming to this meadow. Ah, she remembers. She’d just finished tending to Jamie MacTavish’s shoulder. She’d been sitting in his lap and crying about her husband who was, most certainly, not alive. The feel of Jamie’s hands coming around her body, stroking her back, soft Gaelic words whispered in her ear. The smell of wet wool fading from his rapidly drying kilt and her burning cheeks as their eyes met in the firelight. The smirk on his lips as she’d leapt to her feet at the realization of a growing hardness underneath her. He told her to get some rest and closed the heavy door behind him. She’d seen the cot in the corner, thinking to take Jamie’s advice when the dizziness pulled at her. Thank God! She’d thought as the candles of Mrs. Fitz’s spare room faded from her vision, she would be home, back to Frank and the 20th Century in no time.

But she’d come to in this meadow instead, lying on all fours, retching in the dirt. She is wearing her torn, mud-splattered white dress, she can see, looking down her body. Her sturdy walking shoes that mark her, more than the dress, as an outsider...a sassenach.

She always arrives when she jumps wearing what she had on the second before she goes. That gives her trouble occasionally. Like when she was wearing trousers, a new fashion for women in the UK borne of necessity in the war for certain tasks, and jumped back to her own childhood where even little girls still wore petticoats under skirts, or worse, when she is taking a bath and makes a jump arriving in her birthday suit. That only happened once, though.

Yet, despite the clothing she instinctively knows she isn’t in Inverness. That her choice of dress will become problematic shortly. For it is too quiet in this meadow, and the air smells crisp and clean in a way it never does in her time. Claire needs water and food and something appropriate to cover herself in.

“Are ye well, mistress?”

Claire’s head snaps to her left and she sees a young boy, bright red hair and cat-like blue eyes. The eyes are familiar.

“No, no I’m not.” She manages, trying her best to place the face.

“Do ye need help, shall I call for my Da?” His face is full of freckles and concern.

“Uhmm, perhaps not just yet,” she says with more strength.

“Yer English!” It sounds like an accusation.

“I am,” she admits, smiling at his shocked expression.

“How come ye to be here, if I might ask?”

“Jamie! Jamie, lad did ye get the milk?”

Claire hears a voice ringing with the authority of a mother, but it’s far too high pitched in register to actually belong to one. She looks at the boy once more and places him immediately.

“Are you Jamie MacTavish?” Claire asks, happy to know at least this much.

“Nay, mistress, I’ve not heard of any by that name. I am Jamie Fraser, well, James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser, to be precise. At your service.” The boy executes a very impressive formal bow. Claire stares at him once more. Those eyes she’d know anywhere, having spent the better part of the last two days glued to the man on horseback and staring back over her shoulder at him as they talked for hours and hours to pass the time on the ride.

“Jamie, ye wee gomerel!” The voice again.

“Coming Janet!” he shouts back, then gives the woman a sad smile. “My sister,” he tells her. “Ever since Mam died she’s been bossing me sunup to sundown.” There is something in his tone, a catch that makes her realize his grief is still fresh

“I am sorry for your loss,” Claire tells him. “My mother died when I was just a bit younger than you.”

Jamie doesn’t know what to say to that and his ears start to go pink.

“Do ye hide in the barn, lass, I’ll find you a blanket and you’ll be hungry?” He guesses and at that, her stomach growls which makes him laugh.

Claire is now positive that James of the many names Fraser is indeed her Jamie MacTavish, for he has the exact same glint of humor in those cat eyes, the same ready grin and charm. Jamie waits until Claire is kneeling upright before he turns to go. He makes it five feet before he spins back around on his heels and faces her again

“Oh, but mistress, here I’ve gone and introduced myself to ye but yer still a stranger to me. I dinna even ken yer name.

“Jamie!” His sister’s voice is much closer now.

“Hurry, Jamie!” Claire implores, hoping not to get caught for she hasn’t even been in this century-long enough to know what year it is, let alone had time to concoct a plausible excuse for her being there.

“Yer name!” he insists, with what she will only later come to recognize as Fraser stubbornness.

“You can call me Sassenach,” she tells him, “I’ll fill you in when you come back to the barn with food and a blanket.” She sighs in relief when that satisfies him enough to run back and cut his sister off before she can spot the woman hiding in the high grass behind the barn. Too late, Claire realizes she should have asked Jamie what year it was. Claire turns to head to the barn, not more than twenty feet away, when she feels light-headed. She doesn’t fight it, hoping that she’ll wake in Inverness in 1945.

Claire is jolted back to consciousness by the unmistakable voice of Mrs. Fitz.

“Up, up! The MacKenzie will be wanting a word wi’ ye. There is no time to waste!”

She recoils as Mrs. Fitz flings the bed coverings aside, flooding the room with daylight. Claire groans and falls back against the pillows as realization dawns. She is back at Leoch and lost in time.

[caroline18mars]

A Man On Fire - Chapter 17

“So, I guess that means I've still got a job?”, he rolled his eyes and took a deep breath “getting me on the next plane to New York is still part of your notice, which is still a couple of weeks by the way! I'll be gone a couple of days, so use them to think really hard and long about what you've done, and try not to destroy anything else, is that clear?”, stupid, stupid, arrogant girl! “I just don't understand why you're following her to New York, I mean..”, what? Really?. “That's none of your fuckin' business, Shayla! Besides who said I'm following anyone? I need a break and I'm gonna spend some time with a friend, that's all you need to know! Just make sure my room at The Bowery is booked” he disconnected the call and had to stop himself from throwing his phone out of the window, that's how frustrated he was, PA my ass, godawful tormentor more like. Anyway, he was on his way to New York, he bit his thumb, she had a point though, was he going for Harper or for Coco, did it matter? Why not kill two birds with one stone? he needed to find out Harper's address, a last name would be nice too, but first Coco, he would deal with the rest later. His phone vibrated in his pocket, she never disappointed, did she? Whaaaatttt??? oh it's so on, girl! So fuckin' ON! Get me on that plane right now! He had another day to recover from the jetlag and then...oh he had so much to look forward to all of a sudden, I'm on my way, Coco, I'm on my way! And just like that the thought of Harper was being pushed to the back of his mind, how much longer to that goddamn airport?

8 hours by yourself in a metal tube in the sky, with nothing else to do than overthink stuff was a long time..didn't matter, she was home, or at least closer to home than she was hours ago, come on, grab your bag, look forward to your own, warm and comfy bed and sleep off this horrendous jetlag that was already kicking in. Waiting for customs, she switched her phone back on that lit up like a christmas tree with notifications of Sean..Sean again,and more Sean..and of course, the one she had been waiting for, Joe, don't cancel on me, Joe, don't you fuckin dare!

From: BJLCubbins

To: HCDeRobiano

Subject: Re: re: Trouble? Who? Me?

Coco, sweet, funny, magical Coco,

1PM, I would tattoo it on my body straight away if I could, but I can't as I'm on my way to New York right now and needles and liquids are still prohibited on a plane last time I checked. Talking about tattoos, the best idea just popped up in my head, I want to get a tattoo of one of your paintings, like you could draw something and I'll get it tattooed? Just imagine, I would walk around with a real Coco De Robiano on my body, who else gets to say that?

I gotta run too, I'm on my way, Coco, on my way to...YOU!!!

Excited much? I am!

Joe

Oh thank god, he wasn't cancelling, she just couldn't handle any more disappointment right now, “thank you, Miss..Countess De Robiano..” the customs officer checked the name on her passport and raised his eyebrows checking her rock 'n roll attire with heavy combat boots, her khaki army pants, ripped Slayer T-shirt and her eternal leather jacket. Yeah, take a good look, not everyone with a noble title lives like a queen or is a stuffy old fuddy duddy, “ok..if you could just stand on the right for me?” the officer looked at her and before she could move, two gorillas walked up to her “right this way, Miss” and steered her towards another custom's desk where her bag was thoroughly searched while being questioned about the title on her passport, don't you think I would erase that stupid hereditary title on my passport if I could?

Helllooooo home! She nearly wanted to kneel and kiss the ground as the door slammed shut behind her, for a second there at the airport she thought they were never gonna allow her into the country again. She shuffled the bag off her shoulder and let it fall wherever it wanted as she stomped over to her fridge, and poured herself a glass of wine before she dropped down on her couch, hmmm, how good it was to be home again, just her, everything that could be fucked up safely out of reach. The silence, that incredible silence here..was gonna drive her crazy soon enough so she was going to enjoy it as long as she could, sipping her wine she looked at her painting, she should be checking her bank account, hopefully he had deposited the money, because she was running low on paint, and something good had to come from all that stupid mess. Her stare drifted further to the picture of her and Sean that she kept on the huge fireplace, did she miss him? In a funky way, yeah, he was always good company, and he was the only one who knew most of her secrets, but now after what he had done..she just couldn't forgive him, part of her wished he didn't come back, that once he got off the road, he would stay in LA with Shayla. On the other side of the ocean, Sean was finishing up securing the rods for the lights after the last test run of the day, finally he was alone, no Shayla who kept constantly nagging him to dump Harper as a friend, ok he had crossed a line and yes he regretted doing it, he had called her countless times to apologize..he could only hope she would find it in her heart to forgive him because he missed her..and knowing he fucked up a close friendship was..unbearable, that and the fact that Jared was now flying home to look for her..urhggg, so what if he was jealous? With a little bit of luck, he wouldn't find her or if he did she would just tell him to get lost.

And..touchdown..in this amazing city that was a home away from home, he so needed to start looking for an actual house here, imagine things going really good with Coco, then he could go out for breakfast or dinner with her, clubbing, shopping..didn't matter, as long as he was close to her..he unclicked his seatbelt, stop thinking about her, there's Harper to consider as well, torn between two women..typical! Right, pull your hood up and get your ass off this plane, the most amazing woman was waiting! He switched his phone back on that melodically overflowed his screen with notifications, but none from Coco..hmm..please don't try to get back at me, not now, not ever, I need to see you, woman!

Huh!? What? Where was she? Couch, NY, phone..right..message..she rummaged, oh there it was, sighing she pulled the phone from behind her back

From: BJLCubbins

To: HCDeRobiano

Subject: Hellooooo???

Coco,

Is everything ok? I guess I'm not used to not getting a quick reply from you..Please tell me you're in New York and you're looking forward to us meeting up, as much as I am? I've just landed and I was about to sleep off this gruelling jetlag, so I'm going to bed thinking that you might be right across the street from my hotel, or two blocks down and that is a happy thought.

Let me know you're ok, yeah?

Regards

Joe (who can barely oontain himself anymore)

Yeah, yeah, he could write whatever he wanted, but was what he said really true? Was he actually here or was he just in need of attention? What if she stood him up this time and gave him a cookie from his own dough? Nooo, no, of course not, she couldn't do that, but what she was gonna do was protect herself, this time she wasn't gonna stand around and wait for him, no she would wait at a safe distance, because then if he didn't show up she wasn't gonna look like such a fool. She snuggled back into the couch while on the other side of the city, a man did exactly the same, two hearts and two souls staring at a ceiling, hoping not to get their hopes and heart smashed to pieces, because without realizing it, each other was all they had right now.

After a couple of hours of tossing and turning and a mind that was spinning out of control, she got up and jumped back on her scaffolding, painting would take her mind off things, but crawling up there, she heard a loud 'crack', and just when she looked around, the scaffolding started swaying dangerously, what the...? oohhh, this wasn't good, not good at all, but before she could jump off again, one of the boards dissapeared from under her feet and with a bloodcurdling scream she crashed a few metres down to the floor, together with the scaffolding, landing flat on her back. AAAWWWWW, oooooh, my back..my back..she could hardly breathe, stay calm, how could someone stay calm with what felt like a broken back and being buried under steel and wooden boards? Slowly she tried to move her hand, she needed to call someone, him..she..but the pain overpowered her and everything around her went black. Ok, this wasn't normal anymore, still no mail from her, did he fly all the way down here to be stood up by her? Or maybe something had happened? “earth to Jared, something on your mind?” his friend who he met up with each time he was in New York, asked him. “What? no..yes..it's complicated” he came back to reality and nodded and shook his head at the same time, “what isn't these days?..so, come on, out with it, who is she?” his friend asked, coyly sipping his coffee, wait, how did he know this was about a woman? “she's a painter..she's..just amazing..look” he quickly scrolled through his pictures and showed him one of her paintings. “Oh-kay!! how come I've never seen this? First this Harper who's so talented with light? And now this one? Who the hell is she? She could be the next big thing in my galery” he nearly drooled over the picture. “Her name is Coco..and we're meeting up tomorrow” or at least he was hoping they were, with the current radio silence he wasn't so sure. A dull ringing penetrated her thumping skull, what happened? It was really difficult reaching for her phone with the collapsed scaffolding still on top of her “Harper? Oh thank god, listen..I'm sorry and..” Sean launched right into a series of apologies but she couldn't care less about who she was talking to right now. “Sean..I fell..I can't move” he heard her say and he felt his blood run cold when he heard her stutter and stammer about what had happened, “you can't move at all? Just try, Harper, try and move your leg, come on, you can do it”. Closing her eyes, she tried to focus and with a deep groan she was finally able to pull her leg from under the boards, “aww, ohh, awawawaw” oh thank god, she wasn't paralyzed, but her back, oh, her back was killing her. “Who are you talking to?” Shayla came walking out of the bathroom, raising her eyebrows when she noticed the distressed phonecall her lover seemed wrapped up in, why did she even bother? It was painfully clear that he was talking to Harper, the one and only reason her job was hanging in the scales right now, oh no there was no way that vixen was getting her claws back into her man. Sean felt the phone being yanked out of his hand and turned in shock towards Shayla who barked “you leave my man alone, I'm not telling you again, you little piece of shit” and disconnected the call.

[ladywinchester1967]

Off the Beaten Path I Reign:

Chapter 8: Unconditionally

Warnings: Language, witches, transportation to a fairy tale world, arranged marriage, SMUT, drinking.....I think that’s it. 

A/N: This chapter is a doozy! It came to me very suddenly and took me a long time to write; but it’s one of the pieces I’m most fond and proud of, so I REALLY hope you guys enjoy it!! Per usual, unbeta’d, all mistakes are mine, but pictures are not. This chapter is long, so grab your snacks and drinks!

Wondering what this is? Think you missed something??

Catch up HERE!!!

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

"So, come just as you are to me, don't need apologies; know that you are worthy. I'll take your bad days with your good, walk through the storm I would do it all because I love you." - Katy Perry

*Two Months Later*

"Would you hurry with that lock already?" Dean asked

"Lose the attitude and hold the flashlight steady." Kat said as she picked the lock on the book store's back door.

"God, you two bicker like an old married couple." Sam said, rolling his eyes.

"Shut up." Dean said and the door unlocked. Kat stood up and they walked inside.

"What are we looking for exactly?" Sam asked as they moved among the books. Kat went first with Dean behind her and Sam at the back.

"Any clues to where these people might be," Kat said "they were all last seen here, other than that, I can't find any notable connection."

"Has this place been anything besides a books store?" Dean asked "Maybe that has something to do with it."

Kat shook her head as they walked up to the register.

"It's changed hands a few times, but it has always been a bookstore," she told them "And if I'm causing trouble and people are going missing, it has to be somewhere in here."

"I'll check the back room, you two check the shelves for anything weird." Sam said.

They split up as Sam went behind the register; Kat went to the left and Dean went to the right.

"What's something any person could pick up and go missing?" Kat asked as she checked the books, nothing even remotely weird jumped out at her. Dean shrugged

"It could literally be anything in here, so this is going to be like looking for a needle in a haystack." he said.

"Fantastic," Kat said sarcastically "We'll cover as much as we can tonight and then pick it up again in the morning."

They searched for over an hour with no luck. Sam had cleared the back room and joined them in the store. Kat climbed a latter to check a high up shelf with Dean searching just below her. She ran her hands over the books, looking for a trick entrance.

"Find anything?" Dean asked.

She looked down and saw him looking up at her, smirking.

"Are you even looking for clues or are you just staring at my ass?" She asked with a laugh.

"A little of both," he said and she rolled her eyes "What? It's right there and you're wearing tight jeans, I'm gonna look.”

She shook her head and tutted at him, her cheeks going pink. Dean suddenly furrowed his brows "What's that?" He asked, pointing his flashlight at the shelf below her. Kat climbed down a rung on the latter and he moved his flashlight away. The book in front of them, the title written in Dutch, was glowing purple.

"Sam!" Dean called and Sam came over to them.

"Yep, definitely weird." Sam said

Kat grabbed the book and pulled it off the shelf as the purple glow got more intense.

"What's it say?" Dean asked as she opened it.

"I don't know," she said, leafing through the pages "I can't read Dutch". Suddenly, the book began to shake, and Kat dropped it. It landed face down in front of Sam and Dean, and then Dean flipped it over, the purple light grew blinding. The three of them covered their eyes and Kat suddenly felt like she was getting sucked down a drain. Before she could call out to either of the guys, she suddenly felt like she was falling. When she moved her hands away from her eyes, she saw that she was indeed, falling steadily towards a churning ocean with rain and lighting all around her. She screamed as she plummeted head first into the ocean.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Dean's head came above water and he looked around for land. Fortunately, he realized he didn't have very far to swim to get to shore. While he made his way toward land, he looked around for any sign of Sam and Kat, but didn't find any. He climbed on to the beach, coughing and sputtering, completely soaked to the bone.

"Sam?!" He called out, looking around the beach. On either side were large rocks that obscured part of the shore line.

"Right here!" Dean heard from behind him, he turned and saw Sam climbing out of the ocean, as he pushed his wet, dark hair out of his face. He was wearing a long sleeved white shirt and brown pants.

"Where's Kat?" Dean asked "And what the hell are you wearing?"

Sam looked down as he kept walking up out of the water.

"I don't know, but you're one to talk." Sam said as he coughed.

Dean looked down and saw he was wearing an outfit similar to Sam's, but his shirt was a dark blue, black pants and black boots that came up to his knees. As Sam climbed out of the water, Dean realized, he too was wearing similar style boots.

"We have to find Kat and figure out where we got zapped to." Dean said.

Sam thought and said

"The title of that book said something about fairy tales, so if I had to guess, that's what we're in."

"Wait, you can read Dutch?" Dean asked, wiping his eyes.

"A few words here and there." Sam said with a shrug.

"SAM?! DEAN?!" They heard Kat yell over the waves.

"Where's that coming from?" Dean asked.

"That way," Sam said, pointing to the left. They ran over to the other side of the rock that blocked the view of the other side of the beach.

"DEAN?!" Kat yelled

"We're coming!" Dean yelled as he rounded the rock and his mouth dropped open. Sam came up behind him, nearly knocking him over.

"What's wrong?" Sam asked and looked down

There was Kat, laying on the beach with a purple mermaid tail where her legs should be.

"Houston, we have a problem" she said, as she propped herself up on her elbows and pushed her tangled, red hair out of her face. The boys rushed over to her and Dean asked

"What the hell happened?"

"I don't know, but get me in the water," she said "I'm starting to feel sick."

Dean scooped her up and walked her into the water where she could sit with her tail covered.

"Better?" He asked

"Yes," she said "thank you. Why are you two dressed like that and why do I look like one of Ariel's sisters?"

"It had to be the book," Sam said "I'm willing to bet this is where all the missing people are too."

"I haven't seen anyone besides you two," Dean said "And we haven't left the beach yet."

"So, we're stuck in book world? We got full on Wishboned!" Kat said

"At least it's obvious what story we're in now," Dean said "How many fairy tales do you know of that have mermaids?"

"Not many," she said "but hey, free clam shell bra" she said, showing off the teal colored bra that had intricate patterns as well as pearls and precious stones sewn into it and slapping her tail on the water. Dean looked at Sam

"How do we get out of here and get her back to normal?" Dean asked

Sam shrugged

"Good question, I don't know," Sam said and looked around "Maybe we can figure something out once we get off the beach."

"And leave her here alone?" Dean asked.

"I'm fine," Kat said "I'll stay out of sight."

"Then how are we supposed to find you?" Dean asked

Kat thought and said

"I'll stay close enough where I can see the shoreline and I'll keep an eye out for you two."

Dean looked at Sam, who shrugged "It's an idea." he said

"I can't help with the research so it's better to have two sets of eyes than one," Kat said "Plus I can't leave the water anyway."

"I don't like it, but okay," Dean said and kissed her quickly "Be careful." he told her

"You too, both of you" she said and scooted further into the water. They watched as she swam deeper into the water and with a flick of her fins, she was gone.

"Let's hurry and figure a way out of here before she ends up being a science experiment or something." Dean said, then he and Sam walked around the other side of the beach.

There, they found a group of people scouring what looked like ship wreckage. There were planks of wood, sails and barrels all over the beach. One, a woman in her 40's, looked up and gasped in shock.

"Prince Daniel!" She shouted and the others looked up as well. They rushed over to Dean and immediately started fussing over him.

"Are you hurt your highness?"

"Did you hurt your head at all sire?"

"I'm fine, I'm fine," Dean said, attempting to swat them away "What happened?" He asked

"A hurricane sire," an older gentleman said "we were so worried we'd lost you."

"Get him inside before he catches a cold," another woman, this one had blonde hair, said. The first woman took Dean by the arm and they all walked up the beach. Sam looked back and saw Kat's head poke up out of the water, she swam in the same direction as them.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Once inside the castle, the older woman rushed Dean up the stairs while Sam and the blonde girl followed.

"Samuel, go get changed out of those wet clothes at once." the older woman said to Sam.

The blonde grabbed Sam by the arm and said "This way sir, I'll draw you a bath."

Sam and Dean exchanged looks as they were shoved into separate rooms by the women.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

An hour later, Sam and Dean emerged from their rooms, now freshly bathed and wearing dry clothes. Their outfits were similar to the ones they had been wearing previously, with Dean wearing a rich, dark red shirt, black pants and black shoes, while Sam wore shades of brown and white.

"Dude, I'm not sure what that lady put in my bath, but I've never been so relaxed in all my life." Dean said "What about you?"

"The blonde girl?" Sam asked "Teresa? Yeah, she gets a little" he trailed off "handsy.” he said picking a word and grinning, which made Dean laugh.

"Think we can get away long enough to check on Kat?" Dean asked

"Maybe," Sam said "You go, I'll keep them busy."

After some wandering around the massive castle, Dean found some stairs that led directly into the ocean. Much to his surprise, Kat was there waiting for him.

"Finally," she said and got a good look at him "Wow! You look amazing!"

"I'm a prince," Dean told her "At least according to the five chuckle heads I have following me around at all times. Sammy's keeping them busy."

Kat smiled

"Very nice" she said "Have you figured out where we are?"

"Haven't had a chance," Dean said as he climbed down the last few stairs and sat down "I'll wait until everyone goes to sleep and see what I can find. I passed a library on my way down here so that's a start."

"Good, and I think I found something that'll help" she said and reached into the ocean. She pulled out an amber colored bottle that had a cork in it. She handed it to him and he held it up. Inside was a rolled up note.

"You realize this could be anything right?" He asked, skeptical.

"That's what I thought too, but look at the bottom of the bottle." she told him.

He turned the bottle upside down and on the bottom was a plastic sticker that read "Product of China"

"Good old China," Dean said and busted the glass open by slamming it on to a near by rock. He quickly picked up the note, then he and Kat read it over.

Follow the clues and you will see,

Playing the part will set you free.

You can try to resist, but know this

Each choice has a consequence of great importance.

The Sisters Three hold the key,

They will show you where you ought to be.

3 days you will have, this is true

After 3 days, this will be your tomb.

Kat grabbed the paper and read it again.

"So we have 3 days to figure out how to get home or we're stuck here forever?" she asked.

"That's what it sounds like to me," Dean said "Who are the Sisters Three?"

Kat shrugged

"I don't know, but this is not good" she said and pointed to the first two lines "We have to play our parts. If we don't, it sounds like we could totally screw with something that doesn't need to be screwed with."

Dean read it over again

"We've established we're in The Little Mermaid, so that at least gives us a launching pad" he said, this didn't seem to make her feel better. "What's wrong?" He asked

"This isn't the Disney version of the fairy tale Dean, this is the original story." She told him

"What's the difference?" He asked

"I have to go trade my voice to the sea witch for a pair of legs," she told him "She's going to cut out my tongue and when I do get legs, I'm going to be in excruciating pain when I walk."

Dean's eyes went wide

"Well, maybe don't do that." he said.

"I can't NOT do it," she told him "You read the note."

"How long do we have before that happens?" Dean asked and looked at the sky. The sun had fully set, leaving behind a blue, pink and orange stained sky.

"Until the morning? Maybe?" she said "You two see if you can figure out who the Sisters Three are and we can get the next clue."

"What are you going to do?" Dean asked

"Hold off going to see Ursula's predecessor as long as I can" she said, flicking her fins in the water.

"So how's being a mermaid?" He asked, hoping to get her mind off of their predicament for a few seconds.

"Pretty cool," she said "I can communicate with ocean animals, but I haven't seen any other mermaids."

"I'll get going on this," Dean said and held up the note "You stay out of trouble. We'll come check on you before we start researching."

"Okay." she said and he kissed her.

"Don't worry okay? We'll figure out a way out of this" he said, his thumb stroking her cheek. She nodded and they kissed again. Kat slipped back into the ocean and said

"I'll be hanging around here, give me a signal when you need me."

"We will, be safe." he told her

"I will" she said and disappeared beneath the water.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Once he was back inside, Dean was forced into a dining room where people he'd never met bowed and curtsied to him as he made his way over to Sam. He quickly filled Sam in and handed him the messaged Kat had found in the bottle. Sam's eyes widened as Dean told him what would happen to her.

"That isn't even the worst part." Sam said

"It gets WORSE than her tongue getting cut out?" Dean asked in shock, to which Sam nodded.

"If she doesn't get the prince to fall in love with and marry her, she'll turn into sea foam and cease to exist," Sam told Dean "Of course that doesn't happen, the prince marries someone else and breaks her heart."

"Perfect," Dean snorted "Why does she want to fall in love with the prince anyway?"

"She wants to be human," Sam told him as they both kept checking to make sure they weren't being eavesdropped on. He read over the note several times "Humans have immortal souls, so if she marries the prince, some of his soul will be transferred into her."

"So, a soul STD?" Dean asked and Sam raised an eyebrow at him. Dean cleared his throat and went on "Keep going."

"Well, if I remember the story correctly, the mermaid's sisters get a knife from the sea witch and tell the mermaid, to kill the prince. When some of his blood drops on to her feet, she'll be a mermaid again."

"Does she do it?" Dean asked

"I can't remember honestly," Sam said and rolled up the note "I don't think she does but I'm not sure."

Dean mentioned the library he had seen earlier and Sam said

"I'll slip out and start looking, you do whatever princes do."

"Shake hands and kiss babies?" Dean asked

"Sure, why not?" Sam asked and slipped out of the dining room.

After dinner; Dean found Sam in the library. He was reading by candle light and had at least a dozen books in front of him.

"Any luck?" Dean asked and Sam shook his head.

"I've gone over everything I can think of that might involve three sisters, from the Bible to Macbeth, I got nothing" Sam said, frustrated.

"Come on, let's go see if Kat has found anything else or maybe she has an idea." Dean said.

Dean showed Sam the staircase where he had met Kat before, but she was no where to be seen this time.

"She said give her a signal but I'm not sure what kind of signal." Dean said.

Sam whistled a little tune and waited. He did it again and Kat came from around the corner.

"How did you do that?" Dean asked.

"It's from the Hunger Games." Sam said.

"Find anything?" She asked and hoisted herself up on to the last step.

"No dice," Sam said "All I could find referencing three women was Macbeth."

"Maybe we're taking it too literally," Kat said "Have you heard of three of one thing? Maybe "sisters" is just a general term."

"Three French hens?" Dean asked.

"Three card trick?" Kat asked.

Sam shook his head

"No, none of those make sense." he said and tilted his head back and looked at the night sky. The stars twinkled above them as they tried to think of something. Sam's eyes scanned the sky, searching for constellations he knew. He found Leo and the planet Mars easily as Kat and Dean bounced ideas off of one another. His eyes drifted around. Three bright stars slightly to his left stuck out in his memory.

"Kat," Sam said "What's that constellation?"

"There's lots of them Sam, help me out here." Kat said

Sam looked at her and asked

"Remember when we got stuck on the side of the road when the Impala got a flat? You pointed it out and said that was the first one you always looked for."

"Orion's Belt" she said. She looked up and pointed them out "They're the easiest stars to spot, in fact, they're connected to the pyramids in Egypt."

"Why?" Dean asked

"To represent heaven on Earth," she said "scientists believe that's what they were commissioned for, at least partially."

An idea came crashing down on Sam, he spun around and ran up the stairs without a word. When he returned, he had an astrology book in his hands.

"Found the clue," he said and held it up "The three brightest stars that make up Orion's Belt are called the Three Kings or the Three Sisters" they each took a turn reading the clue, which said

The second clue is yours,

The first you will need to open more doors.

The Sisters Three have been found,

That is not all, however, if you wish to win this round.

The Three Wise men you will need.

Three gifts that were given on a night such as this.

What an interesting twist you will find,

You will be in a bind,

If you do not look below the surface.

"Three Wise men?" Dean asked "Like from the story of Jesus' birth?"

"That sounds right," Kat said "What were the gifts they gave Jesus?"

"Gold, Frankincense and myrrh" Sam said "But there's no way it's that easy." he pointed to the last lines of the clue.

"Let me see that astrology book" Kat said. Sam handed it to her as he and Dean looked over the first two clues.

"Have you noticed that these clues revolve around the number three?" Dean asked

"That's probably part of the pattern," Sam said "Considering there's three of us, I'm not surprised."

Kat spoke up

"The stars in Orion's Belt are tied to the Three Essential Principals" she said, turning the book to them pointing to the paragraph.

"So, what would those be?" Dean asked 

"I think it depends," Kat said, swishing her tail in the water, "If it's from a biblical stand point; it's life, unity and headship."

"Got anything else to go off of?" Dean asked. Kat thought hard for a minute or two and said

"Wait, I remember reading this book about alchemy in the Men of Letters library and it mentioned Three Essential Principals too. Fuck, I can't remember exactly what they were though."

"We'll start looking tonight," Sam said "I hope this library has alchemy books. It shouldn't be hard to come by, especially for him" Sam said, nodding to Dean.

"Me? Why?" Dean asked.

"You're royalty, if anyone in this day and age has access to books, it's you." Kat told him.

"If not, isn't there a book store or something around here?" Dean asked

"Maybe, but I'm not sure," Kat said "At least we're making headway, you two keep looking."

"I'm not leaving you alone," Dean said "You two told me what happens next in the story and I'm not letting some sea witch mutilate you."

"Dean, I have to." Kat said "Remember the first clue? Who knows what will happen if we don't follow the story?"

"That's just too fucking bad," Dean said "You're a princess in this story right?"

"Technically speaking, yes" Kat told him "My father is the Mer-King."

"Then I'll just marry you and call it a day, screw the story." Dean said with a shrug.

"Dean, we can't" Sam said "That witch could come and take her voice if she doesn't go on her own."

Dean looked between the two of them, frustrated beyond belief.

"I'm not doing this," Dean said "Not to her."

"We don't get a choice," Kat said "I can hear her calling to me."

"Katlynn, no." Dean said firmly

"Dean I have to," Kat snapped "I'll deal with it okay? I'm tough, I can handle this."

Dean stared at her in silence, clenching his jaw.

"We'll help her Dean," Sam promised "As much as we can that is."

Dean turned on his heel and walked away from them without a word. Sam looked at Kat and she shrugged.

"I have to go." she told him

"I know," Sam said "We'll be on the look out for you"

Kat nodded and slipped back into the ocean.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Sam eventually found Dean in his room, drinking what looked like whiskey.

"The upside of being royalty is the booze," Dean said and held up the glass "goes down like spring water." he tipped the glass up and emptied it into his mouth.

"Cut her some slack Dean," Sam told him as he shut the door behind him "she's just doing what she has to so we'll be okay."

"That's not her job." Dean said and poured himself another glass.

"It can't always be your job Dean," Sam said and came over to him "the three of us, we're a team. You don't have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders any more. We finally have someone who can help us, that goes above and beyond the call of duty without complaint. Let her help Dean."

Dean downed another glass of the amber liquid, poured another and walked over to the window. He looked outside, his eyes searching the ocean's surface.

"I thought I'd be able to see her from up here, but I can't." he said.

Sam walked over to the floor to ceiling window that overlooked the ocean and looked out at the moon bathed water. Without warning, the surface of the water broke and they watched as a figure did a flip in the moonlight and splashed into the water again. Dean smirked

"Show off." he said, a note of pride in his voice as he drank half the glass.

Sam chuckled "If anyone can do this, it's her" he told Dean.

"Yeah, I know," Dean said "That doesn't mean I like it."

"We both know you don't," Sam told him and clapped him on the shoulder "Get some shut eye, we have a long day ahead of us tomorrow."

"Yep," Dean said "I have to pretend to be surprised when my girlfriend washes up half naked on the beach and act like a prince at this fancy party thing they're throwing me."

"Why?" Sam asked.

Dean shrugged "A "Congratulations, You're Not Dead" party? Hell if I know, but if the food and booze is half as good as it was tonight, I'm in" he said.

Sam rolled his eyes "See you tomorrow."

Dean nodded and knocked back the rest of his drink.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Many fathoms below, Kat swam into the sea witch's cave through the inky black and purple water.

"Hello?" Kat called out

"This way." a musical but creepy voice called out from deep within the cave. Kat took a deep breath and swam inside. The entry way of the cave was lit by an eerie, lime green light. She swam further in, the entry way led into a large, open cave. In the middle was a large cauldron, that bubbled with a lilac colored liquid inside of it. Ignoring the physics behind such a sight, Kat looked around the cave and out of the shadows came, who she presumed, the sea witch. She had yellowish-green skin, elbow length white hair and piercing blue eyes. She didn't look any older than Kat herself, which Kat found refreshing.

"You're here for the potion?" The sea witch asked

"To give me legs and let me dance with the prince." Kat said

"Do you know the price?" The witch asked, looking at Kat curiously.

"No." Kat said, even though that was a bold faced lie.

"I need something in exchange," the witch said "Give me your voice."

"How do I do that?" Kat asked, her heart hammering. The witch cocked her head to the side.

"You already know," the witch said "so why are you asking?"

"What?" Kat asked "No, no I-"

"Don't. Lie." The witch hissed in a dangerous tone.

Kat shut her mouth. She then swallowed and asked

"You're going to cut out my tongue right?"

The sea witch gave her a sneer

"That's better" the witch said. She quickly scooped some of the lilac potion into a small, green bottle and corked it. She held it up to Kat and said "Drink this when you get to the surface, you know the rest."

Kat reached for the bottle and the witch yanked it away.

"My payment first." she said and grabbed a knife that was hanging from the side of the cauldron.

Suddenly very aware of her tongue in her mouth, Kat was now unwilling to give it up. She thought of the clue, of Sam and Dean and realized why she was doing this. To play the part and get home in one piece, hopefully. She stowed her fears away and leaned forward.

"Good." the witch said.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

The next morning, Dean was woken up by the older woman from the day before, whom he had learned was Carlotta. She had been caring for him all his life.

"Morning Prince Daniel," Carlotta chirped "I have fresh bacon and fruit ready for you with plenty of coffee on the side. We have lots to do before the ball tonight."

Dean grumbled, but couldn't lie, being brought breakfast first thing in the morning was something he could get used to. He stumbled out of bed and looked out the window, hoping to see if Kat had washed up. The beach was empty, save for a few seagulls strutting around in the packed sand.

"Everything okay your highness?" Carlotta asked

"Just thinking," Dean told her

"Oh, about the sea maiden?" Carlotta asked and Dean looked at her, shocked "You mentioned her at dinner last night and went very quiet after that." Carlotta followed up with, quickly "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to-"

"No, it's okay," Dean told her "I'm just surprised anyone noticed."

"I notice everything," Carlotta told him fondly "Now, eat and go take your daily walk with Samuel."

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

A few hours later, Sam and Dean met up in the hallway outside Dean's room. Sam had mussed hair and goofy grin on his face.

"You and Teresa huh?" Dean asked

"Shut up." Sam said and smoothed his hair.

"No judgments, I'm happy for you. At least one of us gets to have some fun." Dean said as they walked down the hallway.

"Any sign of Kat yet?" Sam asked as they rounded the corner.

"I checked, but no" Dean said "And heads up, Carlotta knows I'm into the sea maiden."

"But you are," Sam said "Like big time."

Dean shrugged

"She had good aim and a nice rack, what's not to like?" He asked and Sam elbowed him.

"Be serious, I know it's more than that." Sam said

"No chick flick stuff okay? I'm supposed to be surprised when I see her on the beach." Dean said as they headed outside.

As they walked down the beach, Dean got more and more anxious.

"Where the hell is she?" Dean asked

"Let's go check where we all washed up yesterday," Sam said "If I had to guess, that's where I think she'd be"

They headed towards the rocks they were at yesterday but didn't see Kat anywhere.

"Kat!" Dean shouted, but he didn't hear an answer "Damn it, what if she didn't do it? What if something went wrong?"

"Kat wouldn't take a risk like that without telling us," Sam reassured Dean "Let's keep looking."

They walked around to the other side of the rocks and sure enough, there was Kat. She laid out on the shore, wrapped in sea weeds and seemingly unconscious. Dean rushed over to her; wet hair and sand clung to her face and her normally pink lips were purple. Dean immediately started CPR.

"Wake up sweetheart, come on." he said as he pressed on her chest. Without warning, Kat's eyes shot open and she coughed up water as she sat up, hacking. Dean whacked her on the back as she coughed up more ocean water.

"You okay?" Dean asked

Kat took a few deep breaths and nodded as she wiped water and spit away from her mouth.

"Did the witch do it?" Sam asked

Kat held up one finger, telling him to hold on, as she cleared her throat. Once she had regained her composure, she pulled back the sea weed and showed off her human legs where her tail had been yesterday, she shivered in the cold.

"She did it." Sam said

"Did she really cut out your tongue?" Dean asked.

Kat nodded and opened her mouth, more than a quarter of her tongue was gone. The boys looked at her, then at each other and Sam said

"Now the real test is if it hurts her to walk."

"I'm not sure I want to find out." Dean said, looking worried as guilt settled into the pit of his stomach. Kat violently shook her head, no.

"What?" Dean asked

She showed him her upper thigh and her point came across immediately.

"The sea witch couldn't give her a pair of shorts to go home in" Dean said. He remembered he was wearing extra layers, as Carlotta had insisted. He took off his coat and long sleeved dress shirt and handed them to Kat "Put these on, I'll carry you back to the castle."

Sam turned around and gave Kat a second. She quickly buttoned up the dress shirt and tugged the coat on. When she was covered up, Dean scooped her into his arms and looked her over. He got the same feeling he had when he laid eyes her for the first time back in Texas. His heart pounded and his mouth went dry, even though her lips were blue from the cold, she had sand on her face and her hair clung to the sides of her head like wet snakes; he couldn't deny that feeling. She gave him a curious look and he shook his head, as if to put the feeling in the back of his mind.

"Okay, ummm" Dean said and cleared his throat "Let's go."

When they showed back up at the castle with a mute, half drowned looking girl, Carlotta was all over her like a mother hen.

"Here, bring her into one of the guest rooms, I'll run her a hot bath and get a meal started. Poor thing must be cold and starving to death!" Carlotta fussed. Teresa came from around the corner and locked eyes with Sam. They smiled at each other and Carlotta said

"Teresa, run to town and see if Agatha had anything that will fit her. What size do you think she is?"

"About my size I would guess," Teresa said "Shall I see if she has anything for tonight?"

"Oh I don't know, she may not be up for that, this poor dear looks like she's had quite the time." Carlotta said

"I insist," Dean said "Get her something for tonight, just in case."

Carlotta looked at Dean in surprise

"Well, that's that then." Carlotta said and nodded to Teresa who headed out of castle's foyer, with Sam looking after her. Carlotta scuttled ahead and Dean leaned over to Sam

"See if you can find an alchemy book in the library, I'll keep Carlotta busy." Dean hissed to Sam

Sam shook his head, bringing himself back

"Yeah, you got it" he said and looked at Kat "You okay for now?" He asked her

She nodded and snuggled her head into Dean's chest. Dean gave her a crooked grin and Sam gave Dean a knowing look.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Dean carried Kat into the guest room down the hallway from him room where Carlotta was busy in the bathroom, filling up the tub. With her distracted Dean said

"Quick, while she's busy, see if it hurts to walk."

Kat reluctantly nodded and Dean set her on her feet. She took one step and bit her lip, pain etched into her every feature. She quickly fell to the ground and Carlotta practically flew into the room.

"What happened?!" She asked, seeing Kat laying on the floor and Dean crouched by her.

"She tried to walk a little bit, guess she hasn't gotten her land legs back just yet" Dean said smoothly.

"Oh dearie, don't push yourself," Carlotta fussed again as Kat sat up "Sire, I can have one of the men do that." Carlotta said as Dean started to pick up Kat again.

"It's okay Carlotta, I've got her" Dean told her. Dean easily lifted Kat off the ground and carried her into the bathroom. He sat her on the edge of the tub and was immediately shooed away by Carlotta. Kat and Dean exchanged a look and he left the bathroom.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

After a bath, Kat felt some what back to herself. Teresa had come back from seeing whoever Agatha was with an armload of dresses.

"I couldn't decide." she simply said. Teresa and Carlotta got Kat dressed in a light blue dress with short sleeves and beaded flowers on it that hugged in the chest and flowed down to the floor. Kat, unfortunately, had to stand for this procedure, and was in excruciating pain the entire time. It felt like razor blades were embedded into the soles of her feet, no matter how she shifted her weight or tried to stand differently, the pain didn't subside. She was finally allowed to sit, giving her some relief when it was time for Teresa to do her hair. Teresa curled some pieces around her head and pulled the rest into a braided bun sort of thing.

"You'll have to excuse us," Carlotta said as she smoothed out Kat's dress "It's been so long since we've had a woman to dress that we almost don't know what to do with ourselves."

"Not since the queen passed," Teresa said "God rest her soul."

"God rest her soul indeed," Carlotta said. Kat gave her a curious look and she said "Prince Daniel's mother died of consumption about five years ago. The king had been long gone before that."

"He passed right after Prince Daniel was born, isn't that correct?" Teresa asked and Carlotta nodded "Ever since then, Prince Daniel hasn't quite been himself without his mother. Now he's to rule a kingdom."

Kat looked sad

"Oh don't worry darling," Carlotta said "The queen would've been smitten with you the second she saw the way Prince Daniel looks at you."

Kat's cheeks flushed and Carlotta smiled at her.

"You look gorgeous dear; would you care for tea with the prince?"

Famished, Kat eagerly nodded.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Sam and Dean scoured the library as quickly as they could while Carlotta and everyone else was preoccupied.

"I don't see anything about alchemy in here." Dean said

"Let's see if we can sneak away for a little while and check in town," Sam told him "Maybe we can find something there."

"How?" Dean asked "I have literally everyone in this place checking on me every few minutes, I doubt Carlotta will let Katlynn out of her sight and I'm not leaving her behind."

"I'll go then," Sam said "No one will miss me."

"Except Teresa." Dean said with a smirk.

"Yeah, except her." Sam said.

There was a knock at the library door and the head butler, Albert, came through it.

"Tea in the drawing room your highness, Mrs. Carlotta wanted me to tell you that it is at the request of your guest, the young lady from the beach."

This made Dean smile

"Okay, snack break then" he said.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Dean followed Albert down the hallway toward the drawing room while Sam made his exit from the castle. Albert opened the doors to the drawing room where some of the maids were rushing around to set up tea.

"Albert, something a little stronger than tea maybe?" Dean asked, watching the maids scramble around quickly but efficiently.

"The whiskey, perhaps, your highness?" Albert asked

"Albert, you know what I'm talking about and I like that" Dean told him.

"Right away sir." Albert said and went over to one of the maids, a small, mousy looking girl with black hair that was in a bun on the back of her head. The others swiftly left the room while Albert and the mousy maid talked quietly. The maid left the drawing room, as did Albert, leaving Dean by himself. He examined the table that had been set up, there was a tea pot, two cups along with two smaller containers, which he figured out had sugar and milk in them. There was also a variety of cookies, finger sandwiches and tarts. Dean quickly looked around and shoved a tart in his mouth before anyone saw. He chewed quickly as the drawing room doors opened and Carlotta came through them, looking pleased. She stood to the side and Kat stepped out of the shadows and into the drawing room, looking like she had walked right out of a Jane Austin novel with the way she was dressed. She moved with an unnatural grace unlike anything Dean had ever seen. She looked like she was dancing over to him rather than walking. The pain was evident in her eyes but she had hidden it well in her features.

"The Lady Katherine your highness." Carlotta said as Kat stood in front of Dean. Kat extended her hand, which Dean took. He looked at her, confused by what to do next. Carlotta must have seen the panic in his face because she mouthed

"Kiss her hand." to him

With a smirk, Dean kissed the back of Kat's hand, making her blush.

"You look beautiful." he told her and she mouthed

"Thank you." to him. They walked over to the table and sat down as the mousy maid from earlier reappeared with a decanter full of whiskey. Kat did her best not to roll her eyes when she saw it. The maid placed it down on the table, curtsied and left.

"Could I have a minute with Lady Katherine?" Dean asked Carlotta.

Carlotta looked unsure

"Your highness, I'm not sure that would be appropriate-" she was cut off by the look on Dean's face "Of course, excuse me." Carlotta added and left the room in a hurry, leaving the door slightly ajar.

"You okay?" Dean asked in a hushed tone. Kat finally relaxed and slumped in the chair, shaking her head. "Sam went to town, there are no alchemy books in the library."

This time, Kat DID roll her eyes.

"We're going as quickly as we can," Dean assured her "We'll figure this out before the time limit is up."

Kat nodded, she knew they would, being patient while she was in pain definitely wasn't her strong suit. She sat up and shoved a couple of finger sandwiches in her mouth.

"Yeah hurry and eat before they figure out we have no Victorian manners" Dean told her as he poured whiskey into the tea cups. They quickly clinked them together and chugged the whiskey.

"That was classy as hell." Dean said and she grinned.

Just then, Sam rushed into the drawing room and shut the door behind him.

"Dude, what the hell?" Dean asked as Sam wheeled around, he looked like he had run quite a long way with how he was huffing and puffing, one of his cheeks was red.

"Dude, I just got chased by three women and slapped by at least two of them," Sam said "In this time period, I get around like a record."

This made Dean laugh as Sam came over to the table.

"It's not funny Dean," Sam said and poured himself some whiskey "The assistant at the shop almost wouldn't help me because I didn't call on her this afternoon like I said I would."

"So what'd you do? Puppy dog eyes?" Dean asked as Sam knocks back some whiskey.

"Duh," Sam said "How else was I going to find this extremely rare book that we have to have to get home?"

"It was really that easy?" Dean asked

"No; I had to answer a riddle, then she gave it to me." Sam told him. He handed the book labeled Alchemy: A Modern Study to Kat who leafed through it. After a few minutes, and after they had demolished the food in front of them, Kat tapped Dean on the hand. He looked up and she held open the book. She pointed to a chapter labeled Three Essential Principals

"She found it!" Dean said "What are they?"

She pointed to the page and used her fingernail to underline the words mercury, salt and sulfur. She then turned the page and there sat the third clue. Dean picked it up and read it out loud

The third and final clue is yours,

Six ingredients you have found but this not the end of your chores.

There are 2 last ingredients needed.

Three drops of blood from each Winchester

Combine the 7 ingredients in a cauldron of black, stirred thrice with the clock and thrice against the clock in the cold moonlight.

Do this at sea when

The foam of a mermaid whose heart was broken,

By true love's token given to another

Churns in the ocean.

The three of them looked at each other and read it over and over again.

"So, we need gold, Frankincense and myrrh." Dean said

"Mercury, salt and sulfur." Sam added

"Three drops of blood from Sam and I," Dean told him "and sea foam from-" he stopped suddenly and looked at Kat, whose eyes were wide. "No, no, HELL NO!" Dean said, standing up. "No, we're not doing this!"

"Dean this is the only way we'll get home" Sam said

"We'll find another way," Dean said "Do you hear me you son of a bitch?!" He shouted to no one in particular.

"Dean, just listen." Sam started

"No, you listen," Dean said and rounded to Sam "I went along with this up until now," he pointed to Kat "Some witch played Operation on her and she can't walk without being in agony. Now she has to kill herself?! No. Not happening."

"Dean, tomorrow is the third day," Sam said "If we don't do this, we'll be stuck here forever and Kat will be stuck without a tongue and still walking in agony. Do you really want to risk putting her through THAT for eternity?"

Dean looked at Kat who stared back at him with a sad look on her face. Dean went over to her and hugged her tightly. It was his job to protect her and on this case thus far, he had failed. He pulled back from her and cupped her face in his hands. She looked like she had so much she needed to say but couldn't.

"I love you, but I can't let you do this." he said.

She placed her hand on the back of his hand and squeezed it.

"We have to try Dean." Sam said

Kat and Dean looked at each other for a few long seconds and then he asked her

"What do you think?" and released her. She made a writing motion with her hands. Sam and Dean looked around in the drawers and finally found a pen and paper. Kat scratched out an answer and held up the paper.

I'm scared, but I'll do it. Don't fuck this up or I will haunt BOTH of you.

"We won't," Sam said "We have tonight and tomorrow to track down the six ingredients we need."

"There has to be gold and salt somewhere in this castle" Dean said "But where the hell would we find everything else?"

Kat wrote on the paper and showed it to him.

A lot of medicine and hats in this time period have mercury in them. Frankincense is also used in medicine as an oil.

"Hats? Seriously?" Dean asked and showed the paper to Sam.

"She's right," Sam told him after he had read it "Hat makers used a lot of mercury to manufacture them. In fact, this is the time period that the term mad as a hatter was coined because people would get mercury poisoning from wearing their hats."

"What about the sulfur?" Dean asked

"Sulfuric acid is our best shot for that, countries went to war over sulfuric acid in this era." Sam told him.

"What the hell is myrrh anyway?" Dean asked

"It was mentioned in one of the books I read last night," Sam said "Hold on."

When he came back, Sam flipped through the book and found the page he was looking for.

"Myrrh is a gum extracted from a tree, found in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Yemen and Somalia." he said and showed it to them.

Kat scratched out a response on the paper and held it up.

I think it's used in medicine too; maybe check that out?

"Where would we find it? It's not like there's a CVS on the corner." Dean said

"I saw an apothecary on my way out of town, I'll check it out tomorrow." Sam said

"Well I better go, so you don't get turned into a punching bag again" Dean said with a chuckle. There came a knock at the door and it opened, Teresa walked though.

"Sorry to disturb your highness," she said "But we need to start getting Lady Katherine ready for tonight."

"It's all right," Dean told Teresa and extended his hand to Kat. She took his hand and a deep breath, then stood, clenching her jaw. It felt like she was walking on knives as she crossed the room with Dean. When they reached Teresa, Dean said

"I'll see you tonight," and he kissed the back of her hand "my lady."

Kat grinned at him, her cheeks going pink. She gently squeezed his hand and he let go of her. She gave him a wink as she followed Teresa out of the room.

That night, after Carlotta had fussed over Dean's outfit for, in his eyes, an annoying amount of time, he was finally ready for the ball. Dressed in a dark blue, double breasted military jacket, pants that matched, black shoes, a red sash going from his left shoulder down to his waist, where a sword sat in its sheath and military pins adorning his coat. Carlotta swept the shoulders of his coat off and stood back to admire him.

"You look so handsome dear!" She exclaimed "Oh, the gloves!" She added and handed him a pair of stark white, wrist length gloves, which he put on. Dean looked at himself in the mirror and despite being extremely uncomfortable, he had to admit, he looked good.

"It's almost time to go in," Carlotta told him "Albert will come collect you when it's time for you to make your entrance."

"Could you send for Sam?" Dean asked and Carlotta looked at him quizzically "Sorry, Samuel." he quickly corrected himself.

"Of course your highness." Carlotta said, and turned to walk away.

"How's Lady Katherine?" Dean asked.

Carlotta stopped and turned around with a smile "She is fine sire, she is in good hands with Teresa getting her ready." she told him.

"Good," Dean said and buttoned his gloves as Carlotta left the room.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

A few minutes later, Sam appeared in the room, dressed in a coat with tails, a crisp white shirt, black bow tie, black pants and black shoes. He had a few pins on his coat, but not nearly as many as Dean did.

"Dude, you look like Sherlock Holmes" Dean said

"I know and I can't breathe worth a damn in this thing." Sam said, looking physically uncomfortable.

"Your tie is crooked," Dean told him and straightened it out for him "Any luck on the myrrh?"

Sam shook his head

"No, you?" He asked

"Diddly with a side of squat, BUT I did get gold and salt" he said "I found a solid gold coin in the bedside table and I swiped some salt from my lunch."

"Two down, four to go" Sam said "Let's get through tonight and we'll focus on the other four tomorrow."

"Good idea" Dean said "Have you seen Kat at all?"

"No, not since this afternoon." Sam told him.

A knock came at the door and Albert poked his head through.

"Majesty, it's time" he said.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Albert, Sam and Dean walked down the hallway toward the ball room, where they could hear people talking and laughing while music played softy. Albert walked over to one of the men standing outside the doors and spoke quickly, but quietly to him.

"Samuel, if you'll follow me." Albert said and motioned for Sam to follow him.

Dean grabbed Sam's elbow and said in a hushed tone

"Go find Kat, I'll come look for you two later."

Sam nodded and followed Albert through one of the side doors. After a few moments, the music stopped and another tune started playing.

"Your highness, this way." one of the mention said and motioned for Dean to come closer. Dean did and he waited.

"May I present, his royal highness Prince Daniel Rainier." a different male voice said and the doors swung open.

To his surprise, a literal red carpet was laid out for him, with guests on either side of it. They stood up from their chairs as Dean walked through the doors. The women curtsied and the men bowed saying "your highness" as he passed.

Dean walked up to the end of the red carpet, which lead to a table where men dressed as sharply as he was and ladies in full, flowing ball gowns were standing and waiting on him. Dean hurried to his seat and the music stopped. Unsure of what to do next, he sat down. Following his lead, so did everyone else in the ball room. Dean quickly scanned the room but didn't see Sam and Kat right away. Just then, the waiters trotted out with the first course of food, a soup of some kind. As Dean was given his bowl, his eyes finally landed on Sam, who had his head bent down, talking to some one. When Sam moved his head, Dean realized he had been talking to Kat. Dean did a double take before he realized it was her. She wore an emerald green dress that perfectly brought out her pale skin, long cream colored gloves and her red hair was in a bun of some kind with loose curls by her face. She looked up and locked eyes with Dean, a grin crossing her face. He gave her a slight nod and a smirk. Through four annoying courses, Dean would watch as men at her table would openly flirt with Kat. She would smile and nod at them as she tried her best to eat like the ladies around her, which seemed to be hardly at all. Once the fourth course passed, it was announced that the floor was open for dancing. Dean watched as Sam rescued Kat from the men at her table, escorting her to the floor.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Kat gripped Sam's hand tightly, the searing pain bursting up through her feet, calves and thighs.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." Sam whispered hurriedly as they took their places on the dance floor. Kat wanted nothing more than to scream at the top of her lungs with how much pain she was in. Each second she moved felt like an eternity. As if her feet had a mind of their own, Kat moved in perfect sync with the ladies around her, helping Sam through the dance. Sam looked around and saw that nearly every eye in the ballroom was on them. In spite of her moving exactly like the women around her, Kat had a mesmerizing grace about her. Sam had never seen anything like it before. When the first song ended, men were clamoring for a chance to dance with Kat. Sam was reluctant to let her go, and felt a tap on his shoulder. Much to his relief, it was Dean. Sam placed Kat's hand in Dean's and bowed. Kat curtsied perfectly and mouthed a "thank you" to him. Sam smiled and walked away.

"I have no idea what I'm doing," Dean prefaced as her held Kat's hand "But I'm going to try."

She smiled at him as they began to move. Kat felt like glass was embedded in the soles of her feet, each movement sent sharp pains up her body. She bit her lip over and over again as she and Dean twirled around on the floor. The song finally ended, Kat was nearly in tears. Again, men clamored to dance with Kat, but Kat knew she would lose her mind if she didn't have a break. She gave Dean a look, begging him to make it stop.

"Lady Katherine requires fresh air," he said "And I'll escort her."

Kat and Dean quickly walked out of the ballroom and into the shadows where she nearly collapsed on to the ground, breathing hard.

"Oh no, sweetheart." Dean said tenderly as he crouched on the ground beside her.

She took long, shaky breaths as tears rolled out of her eyes. Dean quickly wiped them away and held her close. She gripped him tightly, the mind numbing pain finally ebbing away. Dean did his best to calm her down, speaking to her in a hushed tone.

"I'm right here, it's okay. Just let it out." he said to her. After a little while, she was finally calm enough to look at him. "If it's any consolation, you look stunning." he said and this made her smile. He ran the back of his hand over her cheek and asked

"Are you sure you can do this?"

She bit her lip and then nodded

"I'm worried about you, you know that?" He asked and she nodded again. He kissed her forehead and held her close. "I'm sorry sweetheart, I'm so sorry." he told her.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

After a few more minutes of collecting themselves, Dean and Kat walked into the ballroom where Kat was passed around like a ham at Christmas dinner. Dean swore every man in the room wanted a dance with her, all both he and Sam could do was watch as she was spun, lifted and dipped. She looked amazing, but as the night wore on, the pain in her face was even more evident.

"I can't leave with her again," Dean told Sam "Go grab her and give her a break."

Sam nodded and made his way across the dance floor where he cut in on a man that was half Kat's size. Sam quickly rushed Kat out of the ballroom and out of sight.

"Sire," Dean heard Albert say. Dean turned and Albert said "Your uncle Thomas wishes to make a toast, your presence is required at the head table."

Dean nodded and went back to his seat, his mind elsewhere. He grabbed his glass of champagne as a man he'd noticed at the head table tapped his fork on the glass he was holding.

His attire was like Dean's, but his was in all black instead of blue. The man cleared his throat and said

"For many years, my brother King Rupert, ruled over this kingdom, giving us many years of happiness, peace and prosperity." Dean noticed the man, who he assumed was Thomas, had black hair, thin lips and slightly bulging blue eyes "As acting king, I have done my best to uphold my brother's legacy. I hope nothing for the best now that my nephew, Prince Daniel, has come of age."

Dean nearly dropped his champagne glass as Thomas went on "As most of you know, the day after tomorrow, my nephew will assume his rightful place on the throne as king."

Dean did his best to hold his composure as he saw Sam and Kat make their way back into the ballroom.

"The last thing I would want is for my nephew to have to rule alone." Thomas said "So, in that thread, and also fulfilling my brother's last written wish, Prince Daniel will marry his betrothed tomorrow."

This did make Dean drop his champagne glass. It shattered on the floor as the doors opened, waitress rushed to clean up Dean's mess as Dean caught sight of a couple coming through the door. A man and woman with tanned skin, they were both wearing reds and creams and were arm in arm.

"King Helios, Queen Bernadette, a pleasure as always" Thomas said.

"May I present," King Helios said "My daughter, Princess Maria of Spain."

Helios and Bernadette stepped aside as a girl no older than sixteen stepped forward. She wore a red and gold gown that showed off her tanned skin, her black hair tied back into a bun and her brown eyes wide with fear as they landed on Dean, whose mouth nearly dropped open.

"To the future King Daniel and Queen Maria," Thomas said, raising his glass "Long may they reign."

"Long may they reign." everyone in the room said and clinked their glasses together.

Dean's eyes met Sam's and then Kat's, as they walked back into the room. Sam looked shocked while Kat looked destroyed.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"I can't marry her I don't even know her!" Dean yelled to Sam a she poured himself another glass of whiskey "Sam she's can't even vote, there's no WAY she wants to marry me!"

"Well no woman in this era can vote yet." Sam reminded him.

"You know what I mean!" Dean shouted and knocked back the whiskey. In his panic, he had all but torn of his jacket, sash and gloves, leaving him in his shirt, which he had un-tucked, pants and shoes.

"I can't, I won't. No, this is where I draw the line. I've officially entered into a realm I don't want to be in."

"You're not ACTUALLY marrying her," Sam told him.

Eager to be able to breathe properly, Sam had taken off his coat and tie, un-tucked his shirt and was taking gratuitous, deep breaths. "It's just so we can get on the boat and brew the potion to get us home. It won't carry over into the real world."

"That's what everyone says about marriages I Vegas and we know that isn't true". Dean said and poured another shot of whiskey.

"I don't know what to tell you Dean." Sam said

"And what kind of a lunatic gives away his fifteen-year-old daughter to a thirty-six-year-old man?!" Dean asked.

"Well, they think you're eighteen so it's not so bad." Sam said and Dean gave him a look "Still gross, considering your real age" Sam quickly added.

"They all must have terrible vision because there is NO WAY anyone in their right mind would think I'm eighteen," Dean said and poured another shot "Have you seen Kat at all?" Dean asked

"After the announcement she kind of disappeared," Sam said "Last I saw, Carlotta was walking out of the ballroom with her."

"I better go check on her." Dean said.

"Make sure you get some sleep," Sam said, gathering his clothes "We have a long day tomorrow and we still have four ingredients to get."

"Yeah, yeah." Dean said and knocked back another shot of whiskey.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Some time later, Dean wandered around the dimly lit hallway, not exactly sure where Kat was sleeping for the night. Without warning, a door a few feet to his left opened. He watched from the shadows as Teresa crept out of the room and down the hallway. Dean quickly sneaked up behind her and grabbed her, clamping a hand over her mouth to stifle her scream. She struggled against his grasp, fearing for her life.

"Where's Lady Katherine?" He hissed in Teresa's ear. She turned to see Dean and he said "I'll let go of you promise not to scream."

She nodded vigorously, and Dean released her.

She took deep breaths and said "You gave me a fright your highness." while clutching her chest.

"I'm sorry," Dean told her "I have to speak to Lady Katherine, now."

"This way." Teresa said and showed him down the hallway.

They walked quickly and quietly, and Dean finally asked

"What are you doing roaming around at this time of night?"

Teresa turned, her cheeks flushing

"The same as you," she said "Going to see someone I shouldn't be in the dead of night."

Dean shrugged as they arrived at a door.

"In there." Teresa said

Dean gave her a curt nod.

"You never saw me right?" He asked.

"No sire." she said.

"Good" Dean said and she left him alone in the dark.

Dean opened the door and found Kat sitting in the window seat, wearing a pale pink nightgown and hunched over a book. The lamp she was reading by cast a faint, golden glow on her skin and hair. She looked up and seemed surprised to see him. He closed the door behind him and went over to her. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly. She hugged him and then pulled back. She handed him a black pouch that had been sitting on the window sill. He opened it and inside, he found two small, glass vials of liquid. One was a yellow oil; the other was a sliver liquid.

"Frankincense and Mercury?" Dean asked and she nodded "I don't know how you did this, but damn you're good."

Kat shrugged and grabbed a pen

I sneaked out and went to the apothecary. No dice on sulfur. Four down, two to go she wrote

Dean nodded

"I don't know how we'll get myrrh and sulfur, but we've made it this far," he said "Thank you."

She reached behind her back and held out a small blade. The handle was gold and the black blade that looked like it had barnacles on it reflected in the lamp light.

"What is that?" Dean asked

Kat put the blade aside and wrote

The knife I'm supposed to kill you with

 Dean smirked and said

"Keep that handy in case one of these guys gets a little too frisky." in a joking tone. Kat grinned and nodded and put her pen to the side.

She held Dean's face in her hand and kissed him. When she pulled back, she gave him a wiry smile. He grinned back at her and kissed her again, pulling her into his lap. She straddled him and kissed him repeatedly, she couldn't get enough of feeling his lips on hers, the warmth coming from his body, his scent around her. They'd been focused on getting themselves and Sam home, they had neglected their weakness; each other.

Dean pulled back from her and looked at her as she caught her breath. He picked her up and carried her over to the bed. He decided, as he got on his hands and knees above her, that he would think of something; anything so she wouldn't have to sacrifice herself.

Kat easily slid out of the nightgown and cast it aside as Dean kissed her deeply. She was totally bared to him under the thin gown, her skin immediately irrupting into goosebumps as the cool air around them touched her. He quickly tugged at his layers, shedding them until he was naked too. He moaned softly against her mouth.

“You're not alone.” he murmured “I'm right here.”

She looked up at him, her breath catching in her throat as her fingers gently combed through his hair. Their eyes met and she nodded at him, realizing he'd move heaven and earth to get all of them home safely. He pushed inside of her with a hiss of air between his teeth as she let out a sigh in his ear.

“I'm sorry,” he moaned repeatedly “I love you so much.”

Between the declarations of love and the sensations that flooded through her body, Kat couldn't hold on for long. She dug her nails into his back, clenching around him as he brushed against her sweet spot.

“There,” he moaned as he kissed her “right there, fuck, you feel amazing sweetheart.”

She let out a strangled cry as she tried to warn him that she was about to come, but he went harder into her. “Yes, god, I'm gonna come sweetheart, come for me.”

She moaned into his mouth as she bit down on his lower lip. He immediately let go, his hips giving up the erratic pace they had set as she threw her head back and rode out her orgasm. When they both stilled, breathing hard, they looked at one another, the light from the oil lamps dancing over their skin. They settled beneath the covers, Dean on his back while Kat laid her head on Dean's chest, her fingers drawing patterns on his skin as she started to dose off. He gently captured her hand in his

“I love you.” he said as he squeezed her hand three times.

She looked up at him, smiling sleepily and squeezed his hand four times.

“I love you too, huh?” he asked and she nodded.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Shortly before the dawn, Dean awoke with a start. Realizing he was still in Kat's room, he quietly crawled out of bed and dressed as she slept. When he was ready, he went to her side of the bed and gently kissed her forehead.

“Moon of my life.” he murmured against her skin.

She didn't wake up, she sighed in her sleep and snuggled deeply into the pillows. He smirked and stroked her hair one last time. He grabbed the pouch with the vials inside of it and stuffed it into his pocket. He left Kat's room, quietly closing the door behind him as he did.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Later that morning, while they were on their daily walk, Sam and Dean discussed where they could find sulfur and myrrh.

"Too bad there's no Amazon in this era, this would've been taken care of yesterday." Dean said.

"If only," Sam said and looked up "Don't look now, but here comes your future father in law."

Dean looked up and saw King Helios walking toward them.

"Oh crap." Dean said as he got closer.

King Helios smiled as he approached them.

"Prince Daniel, Sir Samuel; a pleasure as always." King Helios said

"Good morning King Helios." Dean said

"A quick walk before the day's celebration?" King Helios asked

"Yes," Sam said "Gets the blood flowing."

King Helios gave Dean a sly smile

"For tonight right?" King Helios chided

It took all of Dean's concentration not to throw up in his mouth. Sam, struck by the king's boldness, tried to recover.

"Ah, yeah. I mean, yes, exactly." Sam, feeling like the world's biggest creep.

"I'll leave you to it then." King Helios said and started to walk away.

Once he was far enough away, Dean asked

"If I punched that guy in the face do you think anyone would be mad?"

"I wouldn't." Sam said

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

That afternoon, Dean and Princess Maria were sitting in the throne room so that the guests in attendance could present their wedding presents to the happy couple. Sam stood just off to Dean's side and Kat was just a few steps from Sam. The white-hot pain radiating from her feet was enough to bring her to tears, but watching her boyfriend get presented wedding presents brought out a different kind of pain. Though in her heart she knew Dean loved her and had adamantly protested marrying, essentially a child, seeing him pretend to be a doting fiance made her heart hurt and her stomach sick. Guest gave them gifts of fine fabrics, chests of precious jewelry, livestock and priceless paintings. Thomas stepped forward and handed them a painting of the fifty ships he had commissioned for their armada.

"Named for Princess Maria, in honor of your wedding." he had added.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

After the parade of presents, Dean and Maria stood up as Sam walked over to Dean and pressed a small box into Dean's hand.

"Give this to Maria." Sam hurriedly whispered to Dean. Dean gave him a look and Sam said "Don't shoot the messenger okay?" and took his place where he had been standing.

Annoyed and anxious to get home, Dean went along with it and turned to Maria. She turned to him and he opened the box, revealing a diamond ring the size of a marble.

"Fuck me running." Dean said under his breath and handed the box to Maria. She looked at it and eagerly jammed the ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. They held hands and left the throne room as the guests bowed and curtsied. Once outside the throne room, Princess Maria was swept away by a group of women who spoke rapid Spanish to her. Queen Bernadette rushed over to her daughter, speaking a different language and Dean was whisked away by Carlotta.

"Let's get you dressed," she said to Dean as she hauled him off to his room.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

After getting dressed in nearly an identical outfit from last night, except this one was white with gold trim and getting shepherded on to the wedding ship, Dean didn't get a chance to see or talk to Sam. Dean had made sure that he stowed the four ingredients they had in his pockets without Carlotta noticing. He paced in his stateroom as the fully loaded ship left the harbor and sailed out into the open ocean.

Once the ship was going, Sam finally made an appearance. Dressed in a smart, blue suit with tails, he said "I got the sulfuric acid!"

"Dude, how?!" Dean asked in amazement.

"I traded a few of your wedding presents for it," Sam said "There's two barrels of it below deck."

"You didn't happen to trade for some myrrh did you?" Dean asked

"I tried," Sam said "But apparently it's rare to come by in this part of the world."

"Damn it" Dean said "Then we're screwed" then and idea hit him suddenly "Wait, King Creepy!"

"What about him?" Sam asked

"His wife," Dean said "She's not from Spain."

"What does that have to do with anything?" Sam asked

"She was speaking Arabic to Maria this afternoon," Dean remembered "and remember that look he gave me when you mentioned blood flowing?"

"Yeah." Sam said, shuttering at the memory.

"I was reading about Myrrh this morning, it's used in medicine to help with blood flow. Think King Creepy has some myrrh?"

"It's a long shot, and you'll have to ask. That idiot won't even breathe the same air as I do" Sam said.

Dean rolled his eyes

"Great," Dean said "Not only am I marrying his daughter but I'm hitting him up for 18th century Viagra. This is disgusting."

"Hopefully it'll only be a little while longer," Sam said.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

During the ceremony, Kat and Sam sat together while Dean and Maria exchanged vows. Kat had to swallow to keep the rising bile in her throat down. She watched as Dean slipped a ring on Maria's finger, but couldn't hear exactly what was being said. Her heart hammered in her chest as she vigorously reminded herself that this was, for all intents and purposes, fake. However, seeing the man she loved marry another woman right in front of her was enough to make anyone's stomach turn. She felt Sam squeeze her hand.

"I know it doesn't look like it," Sam told her "But he's grossed out by this whole thing and he wanted me to apologize to you for him."

Kat nodded as Dean and Maria sealed their vows with a kiss. Kat quickly got up and left as everyone's attention was on Dean and Maria. She ran to the side of the deck, bent over it and lost her lunch. She breathed deeply and tried to calm herself down as she took her glove off and wiped the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand. The pain of a panic attack rose in her chest as she sat down, her head pressed against the side of the ship. She used all of her concentration to focus on the sound of the waves, her breathing and the feeling of the sea breeze blowing her hair around. After a few minutes of this, she was able to compose herself and briefly wondered if getting hammered at this wedding was acceptable.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

When Kat finally returned to the reception, Sam was waiting on her.

"You okay?" He asked and she nodded. She made motions with her hands to let him know she had thrown up and Sam frowned

"I'm so sorry Kat" he said.

They found their seats and Sam grabbed them something to drink, which Kat gratefully accepted.

"Even though you can't talk," Sam said "And you just lost your lunch overboard, you're one of the better dates I've had."

This made Kat smile a little bit and she clinked her glass with Sam's. Shortly after that, Dean and Maria were introduced and sat at the head table, looking every bit the fairy tale couple they were supposed to be. Kat tipped the rest of her drink into her mouth and Sam quickly got her another glass.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

After another four course meal, the dance floor was opened and, just as last night, Kat was a popular dance partner. Between chugging glasses of wine and doing her best not to look at Dean and Maria too much, the excruciating pain in her feet almost didn't make a difference. After dancing with four different dudes, Dean cut in.

"Hey stranger." he said and took her into his arms.

They spun around on the dance floor and Kat summoned every bit of strength she could not to break down. Dean could see she was hurting, not just physically, but emotionally; however he couldn't help but notice how good she looked. The pink dress she wore draped off her shoulders and had a slightly puffed out skirt.

"You look really, really beautiful Katlynn." he said in her ear.

She pulled back and mouthed "thank you" to him.

Dean went on as he looked at her "You and I should be up there right now," he told her "Not me and this stranger." this made Kat's eyes go wide as he spun her again. "This is what you deserve." he told her in a hushed tone so no one around them could hear him. Kat beamed at him and gave his hand three quick squeezes. He gave hers four quick squeezes back and smiled down at her.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Later that evening, just as the sun was beginning to set, the ship pulled into the harbor and let all the guests off at the docks. Dean and Maria would use the ship to sail on to their honeymoon destination, along with their staff. Sam had stowed Kat away in his room and hoped no one would notice she was gone. Maria's parents were among the last to approach to say goodbye to their daughter and wish her and her new husband good luck. King Helios shook Dean's hand and Dean pulled him close.

"Would you happen to have any advice for getting the blood pumping? I'm not exactly experienced when it comes to..." Dean trailed off and tired not to laugh at his own ridiculous lie.

King Helios pulled back and gave him a knowing look.

"Already taken care of my boy," King Helios said "Check your bedside table tonight, I hid some myrrh there for you."

Struck by his good luck, Dean grinned

"Thank you" he said.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Once all the guests had departed, the sun had long set. The crew pulled up anchor and they left the harbor. Once they were a good distance from shore, Maria was taken away by her ladies in waiting to prepare her for her wedding night. Dean went to Sam's room and saw he and Kat hanging out and drinking wine.

"Look at you two having an after party" Dean said and Kat shrugged, chugging a glass of wine.

"How long before the moon rises?" Dean asked

"Give it a couple of hours." Sam said as he looked out one of the port holes.

Dean filled in the two of them in on how he got the myrrh, Sam and Kat looked at each other, elated.

"Then we can brew the potion and get the hell out of here." Sam said

Kat raised her glass and she and Sam clinked them together.

"I can't go in the room to get it," Dean said "She's in there expecting me to take her virginity and I'm not doing it." Dean said

Sam handed Dean an unopened bottle of wine and said "Get her drunk, then she'll pass out and you won't have to worry about taking anyone's virginity."

"Why is THAT your first solution?" Dean asked

"What else do you want to do? Roofie her? Knock her out with chloroform?" Sam asked as Kat snickered.

Dean shrugged

"Good point" Dean said and took the bottle.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

A couple of hours later, the moon had fully risen, so Sam and Kat sneaked out of his cabin.

"I'll go get the cauldron and sulfuric acid," Sam told her "You go wait above deck."

Kat nodded and did as she was told. When she arrived above deck, the wind was howling and the ocean churned blow her. After a few minutes, Sam and Dean finally appeared. Kat gave them a look and Dean said

"What? She passed out after a glass and a half. I drank the rest."

Not exactly surprised, Kat shrugged and they made their way out on to the deck.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Once up on the stern and hidden from view, they added the ingredients to the cauldron. Kat handed the boys the blade she was given and they both added three drops of blood to the cauldron.

"Last thing is sea foam from you Kat." Sam said.

Kat nodded and went over to the side of the deck. The three of them peaked over it and saw the rough, black ocean slapping up against the hull of the ship. Kat looked at the two of them, paralyzed with fear. She was physically shaking as she climbed up and over the railing, the ship bobbing up and down on the water. She turned around so that she was gripping the railing behind her. She took a shaky breath, her heart hammering out of her chest and looked at both Sam and Dean, her hair whipping around her face. She drew another shaky breath as her eyes locked with Dean's. There was so much she wanted to tell him, in case this didn't work. She bit her lip, looked away from him and prepared to jump.

"Wait, NO!" Dean shouted and grabbed her hand.

Kat turned and lost her balance on the slick deck. Her feet went right out from under her as she slipped off the edge of the boat. She hung thirty feet in the air with nothing but the black ocean below her. She looked up and met Dean's eyes, her fear written clearly across her face.

Dean tightly gripped her hand

"Sam, help me!" Dean shouted to his brother. Sam rushed over and offered his hand to Kat, which she took. Together, Sam and Dean pulled Kat up. She threw her arm around Dean's shoulder and he yanked her up and over the railing. This sent all three of them tumbling down to the deck below. Kat laid on her back, Dean rolled to his side and grabbed her face in his hands.

"No," he said "I'm not letting you go, not like this."

Kat stared at him, her eyes wide as a single tear rolled out of her eye and her mouth hung open in shock. He locked her into a deep and passionate kiss as the wild, sea wind picked up around them, howling with a ferocity that made the ship pitch to and fro, sending Kat's hair flying around both of them.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

With startling contrast, the world around them ceased moving. When they parted and opened their eyes, they were on the floor of the book shop, just like they'd been laying on the deck of the ship. Sam propped up on his elbows a few feet from them. They were all back in their clothes they had been wearing when they vanished, and the sky was starting to brighten outside, it seemed like they had only been gone for the night instead of a few days.

"What the hell happened?!" Kat exclaimed and then seemed startled to hear her own voice. "I can talk, thank the fucking lord!" She stuck her tongue out to make sure it was there, and it was.

"We're home," Sam said and stood up "We were on the boat, I saw this blinding light and here we are."

"How did we get here?" Dean asked as she stood and helped Kat up "She didn't turn into sea foam!"

"You just couldn't play the part could you?" A voice asked.

The three of them turned toward the voice, guns drawn as the mousy girl who had been one of Dean's house cleaners, walked out from behind a book shelf.

"So, you're the one who gets their jollies on by throwing people into stories?" Dean asked

The mousy girl smirked.

"I appreciate the written word," she said, stepping into the light "Unlike most people in my generation, I respect the classics. I don't pervert them into cash cows and marketing ploys for theme parks and resorts."

"And some how trapping people in books isn't perverting them?" Kat asked

"Most people aren't as clever as you three," she said "They can make it out, as long as they play their parts. If they don't, well, they don't make it out."

"You're sick," Dean told her "Really sick."

"Sick? I'm not sick!" She shouted "I'm a genius! I'm giving the world back its imagination."

"Against their will." Sam added

The mousy girl snapped her head in Sam's direction

"Maybe this time I'll fling the three of you into separate stories," she said "Then we'll see who the real clever one is."

"No you will not." came a musical and creepy voice that Kat recognized right away.

From the shadows, came the sea witch she had traded her voice to. Sam and Dean trained their guns on her when Kat said

"No, don't!" And lowered her gun “That's the sea witch!”

Dean was instantly furious.

"This freak cut out your tongue Kat," Dean said "You really think we're going to let her go?"

"Don't!" Kat said to Sam and Dean as the sea witch glided over to the mousy girl, who shook with fear.

"For fifteen years you've held me," the sea witch said "For FIFTEEN YEARS you enslaved me. Now, I'll have my revenge." she extended her hand and placed it on the mousy girl's head.

The mousy girl screamed and then broke into pieces like a porcelain doll that had hit the floor, her very skin and bones then dissolved into dust. The sea witch breathed a sigh of relief as a golden glow surrounded her. Without warning, a crowd of people suddenly appeared in the book store. Every missing person in the area for the last fifteen years was suddenly in front of them. They all looked disoriented at first, but once they realized they were safe, they started to filter out of the bookstore. They recognized people from The Wizard of Oz, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. One guy walked past them covered in blood and Dean stopped him

"What happened to you?"

"The Hunger Games," the guy said "What has been seen cannot be unseen."

When the witch turned to face Sam, Dean and Kat, she was no longer the sea witch they had been looking at. She had long, luxurious brown hair, hazel eyes and olive skin. Wearing a simple shift dress and ballet flats, she wouldn't have been out of place in the modern world.

"Thank you," she said to Kat "For setting me free."

Kat smiled at her

"Glad we could help." she said

Sam and Dean lowered their guns as the sun began to rise.

"Wait, what did we miss?" Dean asked.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

After finding a place to eat, the witch; whose name was Willow, explained her tale over a large stack of pancakes.

"When Rebekah found me," Willow told them "I was alone. My coven had been long gone and she showed an interest and promise in magic. I worked with her to hone her skills. I believed by helping her, I would be passing along my knowledge to the next generation."

"But that didn't go as planned." Dean said as he devoured a bacon and egg sandwich.

"It didn't," Willow said "I quickly learned that Rebekah was a vengeful soul. She sought to make everyone around her as miserable as she was. The only peace she ever found was in books, which is why she trapped people that displeased her into them."

"But you're a powerful witch," Kat said between bites of scrambled eggs and toast "How did she trap you?"

"She used a powerful binding spell on me," Willow said as she devoured her pancakes "I'm not sure where she learned it, but she caught me off guard. I've been stuck in the book realm ever since. Every time I tried to help someone escape and set me free, she would take me out of that story and throw me into another one."

"I don't understand," Sam said "We didn't play our parts at the end of the story, how did we get out?"

Willow gave him an easy smile and then looked at Dean and Kat.

"The three of you did it together, but it was the two of them," she said and nodded to the couple "That brought Rebekah's tyranny to an end."

Dean and Kat looked at each other and then at Willow.

"Come again?" Dean asked as he took a sip of his coffee.

"You two shared the one thing that breaks every curse," Willow said "Across every book written since the beginning of storytelling."

Dean's eyebrows furrowed, and it dawned on Kat.

"The kiss of true love." she said in awe.

"Wait," Dean said "I kissed her a million times while we were in there."

"You did," Willow said "But just like there are different kinds of love, there are different kinds of kisses."

"Such as?" Sam asked.

"When you kissed her on the beach," Willow said "That was the kiss of caring. You did it to show her that you would be there for her. Last night," she went on and Kat's cheeks flushed "That was the kiss of passion. That's the "I can't get enough of you" kiss that everyone associates with true love's kiss, but they aren't one in the same."

"What's the difference?" Kat asked

"True love's kiss, much like true love, isn't ordinary," Willow explained "It isn't just any kiss or just any partner; it's exceptionally rare. It possesses a magic all its own; stronger and more incomprehensible than anything in the known world." She looked at Dean and said "This woman was going to lay down her life despite her fear and hesitation. Then you finally stopped denying your heart's desire. You saved her, knowing the consequences of doing so could be catastrophic."

She then looked at Kat and said

"In spite of everything that has happened to you and the people closest to you betraying your trust, you let him in. When he and Sam bent over backwards to help you in your time of need and you realized that you would do the same for them with no hesitation" Willow finished her pancakes "That was the rawest emotion you ever felt in your life. That naked feeling; of being completely exposed and being loved despite all the physical and perceived flaws and scars; that is what true love is based on."

Willow's words sent a cold chill down Kat's spine.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

After seeing Willow off, the three of them piled into the Impala and went back to the bunker. When they arrived; Sam promptly announced he was going to bed, having had enough adventure to last a lifetime (in his words). Alone in the library, Kat's gaze met Dean's.

"Why wouldn't you let me jump?" She asked him.

"C'mon Kat, you know why, and we made it out just fine. No harm, no foul." Dean said as he poured himself a drink.

"Dean, I was just doing what the clues said," she told him "What if that true love's kiss thing hadn't worked? Then where would we be?"

Dean took a gulp of his drink and said "Look, I didn't kiss you thinking that would do anything."

"Then why?" She asked "Why wouldn't you let me do what I was supposed to?"

"You heard Willow," Dean said "I stopped denying my heart's desire."

"And what would that be?" She asked impatiently. Dean finished off the rest of his drink without looking at her and said "If that spell didn't work or something went wrong," he drew a shaky breath as he set his glass down "I'd never forgive myself. Ever." He finally looked her in the eyes and continued "You're everything I've ever wanted, and I love you more than I ever thought it was possible to love another person. You've always accepted me for who I am, for what I am, and I never want to let that feeling go" he swallowed "And if something happened to you because of me it would kill me."

Deep in her heart and in the corners of her mind, Kat had always hoped he cared about her as much as she did about him. She'd imagined him confessing his feelings for her before, but this wasn't a scenario even she could've dreamed up. She closed the gap between them by wrapping her arms around his shoulders, having the stand on her tiptoes to do so. His arms wrapped around her waist and he held her tightly. They stood like that in silence for a while; when she pulled back she looked at him and asked

"Did you mean what you said? When we were dancing at the wedding?"

He nodded "Every word," he told her "If that's what you want, that is."

"Marriage? Really?" She asked, genuinely surprised.

"What? You don't want to marry me?" He asked, holding her at arm's length.

"I do, I just didn't think you were the marrying type" she said, running her hand through his hair.

"I didn't think I was either," he said "too much could go wrong with this job that we do. With that being said, I can't picture my life without you in it. Not anymore."

"Could you before?" She asked

"I wouldn't say that," he said "When I pictured my future, it would just be me and Sam. When I left you in Texas, I'd have dreams about us together. I tried to push it out of my mind; because at the time I didn't want to think about you like that. You deserved better than what I could give you, I still think you do for the record."

"What?!" She asked.

"You deserve stability," he said "You deserve a normal life outside of this."

"Dean, I had that remember?" She asked "And I enjoyed it for a while, I really did, until I felt like something was missing. I couldn't place what it was until two guys in plaid walked into my diner."

He smirked at the memory "While you were lip syncing Sex and Candy" he said and she laughed

"Yep, exactly" she told him "Hunting makes me feel normal. It's all I knew from the time I was small until I started hunting with Shannon and Dave."

"I know," he said "But I just want to make you happy. That's all I care about."

"I am happy," she told him "You and Sam have given me what I always wanted."

"What's that?" He asked.

"A family," she said "I know we're not bound by blood, but you two are my family. I care about you both so, so much and would do anything to protect you two."

He swallowed and said

"A very smart man once told me that family don't end with blood."

An easy smile crossed her face and she kissed him. When their kiss ended, she pulled back a little bit and said

"I love you Dean." then she kissed him again.

When they parted that time, he wrapped his arms tightly around her. One hand around her waist and the other on the back of her head.

"I love you too Katlynn" he said in her ear.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

I hope you guys enjoyed that!! Kind feedback is always welcomed, feel free to like and share with your followers AND don’t forget to smash that follow button if you wanna keep up with everything I post. My tag lists are WIDE open!!

The Squad:

@waywardbaby @waywardnerd67 @familybusinesswritingbro @ain-t-bovvered @mrswhozeewhatsis @girlborninstorms @dacleverfox @emoryhemsworth @bobasheebaby @deanscarlett @myinconnelly1 @mogaruke @imma-winchester-addict @purpleskiesandcherrypies @dean-winchesters-bacon @animerose96 @l8nit-l0vr @drakelover78 @curly-haired-disaster @roonyxx @snffbeebee @ezilyamuzed @mirandaaustin93 @srsllydunnodoncare @latetothewinchesterparty @emilyshurley @atc74 @midnightsilverafterdark @adoptdontshoppets @biawol @supernatural-teamfreewillpage

Dean/ Jensen:

@spnbaby-67 @akshi8278

[louderfade]

Punk just didn't like bullshit.

... the basic code declared conventional sexual poses uncool, with conventional female sex objects particularly suspect. Amazingly, instead of forcing women out altogether, this had the opposite effect: while boys could be nerds or retards or female impersonators or just deeply uptight, girls could be boys.

The things boys did and didn't do in early punk was so bizarre that what we did or didn't do was dwarfed by comparison. Even in 1975, the weirdest thing about Talking Heads was not its discreet, androgynous, workmanlike bassist who happened to be a woman. The weirdest thing about Talking Heads, in those days, was David Byrne.

from Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock, 1997

[theomnilegent]

2018 Upcoming Queer Fiction I’m Excited For!

This is my top nine for LGBTQA fiction featuring women that I’m most excited to read. All of these books sound like they have wonderful stories to tell, with a refreshing and unique mix of characters in each one. Lady drummers seem to be the theme of this year’s queer fiction, and let me tell you, I am here for it. Who didn’t spend their formative years staring longingly at the school band’s lone female drummer and feeling all sorts of feelings aflutter? Lesbihonest.

Below you’ll find titles, summaries and goodreads links to the above books. I really look forward to reading them, and to seeing what everyone else thinks of them too - this has already been such a great year for representation in literature, and that movement is growing day by day.

Leah On The Offbeat by Becky Albertalli “When it comes to drumming, Leah Burke is usually on beat—but real life isn’t always so rhythmic. An anomaly in her friend group, she’s the only child of a young, single mom, and her life is decidedly less privileged. She loves to draw but is too self-conscious to show it. And even though her mom knows she’s bisexual, she hasn’t mustered the courage to tell her friends—not even her openly gay BFF, Simon. So Leah really doesn’t know what to do when her rock-solid friend group starts to fracture in unexpected ways. With prom and college on the horizon, tensions are running high. It’s hard for Leah to strike the right note while the people she loves are fighting—especially when she realizes she might love one of them more than she ever intended.”    

Out Of The Blue by Sophie Cameron “Ten days after Jaya Mackenzie’s mum dies, angels start falling from the sky. Smashing down to earth at extraordinary speeds, wings bent, faces contorted, not a single one has survived. Hysteria mounting with every Being that drops, Jaya’s father uproots the family to Edinburgh intent on catching one alive. But Jaya can’t stand this obsession and, struggling to make sense of her mother’s sudden death and her own role on that fateful day, she’s determined to stay out of it. When her best friend disappears and her father’s mania spirals, things hit rock bottom and it’s at that moment something extraordinary happens: An angel lands right at Jaya’s feet, and it’s alive. Finally she is forced to acknowledge just how significant these celestial beings are.”

Let’s Talk About Love by Claire Kann “Alice had her whole summer planned. Non-stop all-you-can-eat buffets while marathoning her favorite TV shows with the smallest dash of adulting--working at the library to pay her share of the rent. The only thing missing from her perfect plan? Her girlfriend (who ended things when Alice confessed she's asexual). Alice is done with dating--no thank you, do not pass go, stick a fork in her, done. But then Alice meets Takumi and she can’t stop thinking about him or the rom com-grade romance feels she did not ask for (uncertainty, butterflies, and swoons, oh my!). When her blissful summer takes an unexpected turn, and Takumi becomes her knight with a shiny library employee badge (close enough), Alice has to decide if she’s willing to risk their friendship for a love that might not be reciprocated—or understood.”  

Nothing Happened by Molly Booth “This modern-day retelling of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing takes place at the idyllic Camp Dogberry, where sisters Bee and Hana Leonato have grown up. Their parents own the place, and every summer they look forward to leading little campers in crafts, swimming in the lake, playing games of capture the flag and sproutball, and of course, the legendary counselor parties. This year, the camp drama isn’t just on the improv stage. Bee and longtime counselor Ben have a will-they-or-won’t-they romance that’s complicated by events that happened—or didn’t happen—last summer. Meanwhile, Hana is falling hard for the kind but insecure Claudia, putting them both in the crosshairs of resident troublemaker John, who spreads a vicious rumor that could tear them apart. As the counselors juggle their camp responsibilities with simmering drama that comes to a head at the Fourth of July sparkler party, they’ll have to swallow their pride and find the courage to untangle the truth, whether it leads to heartbreak or happily ever after.”

If I Tell You by Alicia Tuckerman “Seventeen-year-old Alex Summers lives with a secret and the constant fear someone will find out. But when a new family moves to town, they bring with them their teenage daughter Phoenix Stone. When Alex falls for Phoenix, there is no warning. In a small town with small minds, girls don’t go out with other girls, even if they want to. In fear there is bravery – you can either cling to the edge or have the courage to jump. But what do you do when you’re left spiralling through the freefall?”

Drum Roll, Please by Lisa Jenn Bigelow “Melly only joined the school band because her best friend, Olivia, begged her to. But to her surprise, quiet Melly loves playing the drums. It’s the only time she doesn’t feel like a mouse. Now, she and Olivia are about to spend the next two weeks at Camp Rockaway, jamming under the stars in the Michigan woods. But this summer brings big changes for Melly: her parents split up, her best friend ditches her, and Melly finds herself falling for a girl at camp named Adeline. To top it off, Melly's not sure she has what it takes to be a real rock 'n' roll drummer. Will she be able to make music from all the noise in her heart? “

The Brightsiders by Jen Wilde “As a rock star drummer in the hit band The Brightsiders, Emmy King’s life should be perfect. But there’s nothing the paparazzi love more than watching a celebrity crash and burn. When a night of partying lands Emmy in hospital and her girlfriend in jail, she’s branded the latest tabloid train wreck. Luckily, Emmy has her friends and bandmates, including the super-swoonworthy Alfie, to help her pick up the pieces of her life. She knows hooking up with a band member is exactly the kind of trouble she should be avoiding, and yet Emmy and Alfie Just. Keep. Kissing. Will the inevitable fallout turn her into a clickbait scandal (again)? Or will she find the strength to stand on her own?”

The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza by Shaun David Hutchinson “Sixteen-year-old Elena Mendoza is the product of a virgin birth. This can be scientifically explained (it’s called parthenogenesis), but what can’t be explained is how Elena is able to heal Freddie, the girl she’s had a crush on for years, from a gunshot wound in a Starbucks parking lot. Or why the boy who shot Freddie, David Combs, disappeared from the same parking lot minutes later after getting sucked up into the clouds. What also can’t be explained are the talking girl on the front of a tampon box, or the reasons that David Combs shot Freddie in the first place. As more unbelievable things occur, and Elena continues to perform miracles, the only remaining explanation is the least logical of all—that the world is actually coming to an end, and Elena is possibly the only one who can do something about it. “

The Beauty That Remains by Ashley Woodfolk “Autumn always knew exactly who she was—a talented artist and a loyal friend. Shay was defined by two things: her bond with her twin sister, Sasha, and her love of music. And Logan always turned to writing love songs when his love life was a little less than perfect. But when tragedy strikes each of them, somehow music is no longer enough. Now Logan can’t stop watching vlogs of his dead ex-boyfriend. Shay is a music blogger struggling to keep it together. And Autumn sends messages that she knows can never be answered. Each of them wonders: How different would my life be if this hadn’t happened? And now that it has . . . what’s next?”

[filmbutch]

honestly if u got good gay movie recs... i would totally appreciate them! i’ve seen most of the popular good ones but i’d love to hear abt more

Just in case you or other people have missed one of the more popular ones, I want to start by saying But I’m a Cheerleader is my favorite and is at the top of most lesbian movie lists for a good reason. A lot of other lists have included the movies Imagine Me & You, Carol, and The Handmaiden, which are also all great. Almost everyone has heard of Blue is the Warmest Color, which I’ve only seen once a long time ago but would not recommend because of the way the director treated the actresses especially during the filming of the sex scene.

Anyways this list became more detailed than I originally intended so I’m just gonna put my recs below the cut lol

Movies  that aren’t sad (or are only partially sad):

Desert Hearts (1985) - one of the first (if not the first) movies about a romantic relationship between women that  doesn’t end in one or both of them dying or leaving the other to be with a man. Directed by Donna Deitch who is gay.

D.E.B.S. (2004) - probably the most fun/light hearted movie I’ve seen that’s centered around a romance between two women. It’s a cheesy movie about a spy who falls in love with a villain and is written and directed by Angela Robinson who is bi.

The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls In Love (1995) - cute and kinda cheesy teen rom com written and directed by Maria Maggenti who is bi.

The Watermelon Woman (1996) - a lesbian filmmaker works on a documentary about a black actress from the 1930s. The film explores themes of how there are gaps in recorded history, and how race effects relationships. It was written and directed by Cheryl Dunye, making it the first (known/more popular) feature film directed by a black lesbian.

If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000) - explores the lives of three lesbian couples who happened to live in the same house at different periods of time. The first part takes place in 1961 and is sad, the second part takes place in 1972 and is the part all those butch Chloe Sevigny gifs are from, and the last part takes place in 2000 and stars Ellen.

Saving Face (2004) - super cute and good rom com about a Chinese American lesbian and her traditionalist mother written and directed by Alice Wu  who is a lesbian.

The Runaways (2010) - if ur gay for rock n roll please watch this. I love bicon Joan Jett

Cloudburst (2011) - about an older lesbian couple who go on a road trip to get married and the ending is kind of sad but it’s worth watching imo.

Pariah (2011) - about a butch lesbian teenager growing up in Brooklyn. It’s really sad in some parts but by the end she’s very at peace with herself. Written and directed by Dee Rees who is a lesbian.

Life Partners (2014) - cute movie about the friendship between a straight woman and a lesbian and how their friendship changes when the straight woman gets married

Boy Meets Girl (2015) - about a bisexual trans girl (played by a trans actress) who wants to go to college be a fashion designerGrandma (2015) - Lily Tomlin plays a lesbian grandma who helps her granddaughter get money to have an abortion

Dope (2015) - tbh the lesbian isn’t even the main character, but it’s a cute movie and Kiersey Clemons is hot so it’s on here anyway

The Intervention (2016) - Clea DuVall and Natasha Lyonne play a couple again, Melanie Lynskey and Alia Shawkat are also in it. Written and directed by Clea DuVall who is a lesbianProfessor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017) - probably not super historically accurate tbh but it’s about the polyamorous relationship between the creator of Wonder Woman, his wife, and their lover. I was pleasantly surprised that the movie focused just as much if not more on the relationship between the two women as it did on their relationship to the man. It is written and directed by Angela Robinson, a bi woman.

Battle of the Sexes (2017) - I know people on here don’t like Emma Stone but Billie Jean King is cool as fuck, the scenes between her and Marilyn were beautiful, and this movie was underrated

Movies that are pretty sad throughout but good:

Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) - not as gay as the book and the ending (and other parts) are sad, but I would die for the main character (and butch icon) Idgie.

Lovesong (2016) - two women are probably in love with each other go on a road trip but one of them is getting married to a man :( the other one is played by Jenna Malone though who I’ve been wanting to play gay since she played Johanna in the Hunger Games so :) ?

Novitiate (2017) - lesbian nuns, Catholic guilt, idk it’s good though

Movies that didn’t necessarily fit into the other categories because they are either intense, weird, and/or  involve murder:

Born in Flames (1983) - I wasn’t really sure what category to put this movie in since its style is so different from the others, but it’s about activists fighting for women’s liberation in a fictional version of the US where there has been a socialist revolution that promised to make things better, but put off women’s rights in the process. Anyone interested in feminism and leftist politics should check it out. It was made by Lizzie Borden, who is bisexual.

Heavenly Creatures (1994) - a movie about a super intense childhood friendship that gets pretty dark, which I know it’s a trope, but I liked this movie anyway idk

Mulholland Drive (2001) - the most real thing in this movie about surrealist Hollywood was the relationship between the two women

Monster (2003) - based on the life of  serial killer Aileen Wuornos. It’s super violent/depressing/disturbing, but worth the watch imo. Directed by Patty Jenkins who directed Wonder Woman.

Jennifer’s Body (2009) - some people like to argue over whether they were actually gay or not but like…they were…it was also directed and written by women.

Addicted to Fresno (2015) - two sisters accidentally murder someone and try to cover it up. Written by Karey Dornetto who is gay and directed by Jamie Babbit who is a lesbian and also wrote/directed But I’m a Cheerleader.

Women Who Kill (2016) - about exes who are true crime podcasters. One of them starts dating someone and the other thinks her new girlfriend might be a murderer. Super interesting and can be interpreted as a metaphor for internalized homophobia. Written and directed by Ingrid Jungermann who is gay.

Atomic Blonde (2017) - bisexual spy Charlize Theron. I am gay. It falls into some bad tropes but I. Am. Gay.

Thelma (2017) - a Norwegian movie about a lesbian with supernatural abilities. It might be my favorite movie of 2017 tbh.

Documentaries:

Out in the Night (2014) - a really depressing and frustrating doc about a group of black lesbians who were unfairly imprisoned after fighting back against their attacker

Gender Troubles: The Butches (2016) - a doc about butches and gender presentation

Movies that are coming out soon that I wanna see:

Colette

Duck Butter

Hearts Beat Loud

Lizzie

The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Tully

Vita and Virginia

Wild Nights With Emily

[atlaslcne]

━★ ( phoebe tonkin, cis female, she/her ) hey, that’s ( atlas lane ), who’s lived here for ( four years ). the ( twenty-seven ) year old is known to be ( confident & persuasive ) but you’ll find that they can be ( reckless & flighty ), too. i heard they work as a ( bar staff at the balcony ) and ( ruby tuesday ) by ( the rolling stones ) seems to be playing around them. ( long car rides, classic rock, cheap whiskey, late night exploring, chipped nail polish, bad choices ) ━★ 

ALRIGHT SO BACK AT IT. this one is my baby. atlas lane is a dumpster fire of a gal, but she’s got good intentions and terrible follow through. she’s a closed off little shit who likes to pretend she’s an open book but at the sight of real feelings she will quite literally sprint away. little about her.

comes from old money, never really wanted for anything growing up.

definitely a partier in high school, always managed to talk her way out of trouble. (either that, or her family’s reputation got her out of it.)

things blew up her senior year when a sex tape with a girl got leaked? she got kicked out of the house and essentially disowned.

she traded in her car for a shitty 1984 LeBaron, cashed out her credit cards before they could get canceled, and hit the road.

she traveled, living out her car and hotels and wherever she could get a bed for about five years before she settled in seagrove.

doesn’t talk much about her time on the road.

bartender at the balcony, and when she’s not behind the bar, she tends to be on the other side of it.

big fan of whiskey, good music and women.

bi bi bi.

incredibly flirtatious, it’s basically her primary mode of communication. 

on the other hand, terrible with commitment. the last time someone told her they loved her she left town for two weeks without a word because she’s an adult who handles feelings very well.

i have a million wanted connections for her but i’m forever a sucker for brotps and angsty exes? give me all the one night stands okay. more here and here. i dunno just love me.

[disappearingground]

Jenny Lewis Starts Over

Rolling Stone March 5, 2019

After saying goodbye to her mother and a 12-year relationship, an indie-rock icon finds a new clarity in art and life

By Jonah Weiner

There are 19 white stickers arranged across Jenny Lewis’ fridge. Each one carries a stamped date, the logo of Providence Holy Cross Medical Center, the word VISITOR and, in Lewis’ handwriting, a different beguiling little phrase: I taught him how to 2-step; Rosey posey put your snake finger on; You are a sunshine in a fruit. “Every day that I visited my mom in the hospital,” Lewis says, “I’d get one of these and write down something she’d say to me. She got more and more psychedelic as we kept upping the meds, and she’d say the most amazing things.” Lewis points at one — Glue me to the ceiling so you never leave — and sighs. “She had liver cancer. From untreated hepatitis C. She was a lifelong heroin addict and also mentally ill and . . . just a really sad situation.”

It’s a drizzly evening in early January, and Lewis is at her home in Los Angeles, drinking gamay wine and discussing things she’s never discussed publicly before. Some listeners over the years may have noticed scattered allusions in her songs to her mother’s troubles and the painful outlines of their relationship. In 2002, on an early album by her first band, Rilo Kiley, she described a mother who was “insane and high.” In 2006, on her debut solo album, Rabbit Fur Coat, she sang, “Where my ma is now, I don’t know/She was living in her car, I was living on the road/And I hear she’s putting that stuff up her nose.” But Lewis has always been careful to let these lyrics speak mostly for themselves. When people ask about them, she’s frequently emphasized that the line between memoir and fiction in her songwriting is a slippery one. “Sometimes I don’t even remember what actually happened,” she says now, “and the song takes on its own life.”

On Lewis’ new record, On the Line, her mother appears again. This time she is in a hospital bed “under a cold white sheet,” and there’s no fiction at work. The earliest sticker on the fridge is dated August 20th, 2017, and by the end of October, at age 70, Linda Lewis was dead.

“We were estranged for 20 years, so this was the first time we’d hung out in two decades,” the 43-year-old singer-songwriter continues. “She was very sick, but I think she held on so we could have time to reconcile, and it created an opportunity for forgiveness. She didn’t have to say, ‘I’m so sorry’ —she said it by saying, ‘You’re a sunshine in a fruit.’ That was her way of saying ‘I love you.’ ”

Lewis started out as a kid actor, appearing on Eighties-era sitcoms like Life With Lucy, opposite Lucille Ball, and in movies like Troop Beverly Hills and The Wizard, opposite Fred Savage. By her twenties she’d all but quit acting and become a burgeoning indie-rock icon instead, known for her clarion voice, her killer ear for melody and her knack for evocative storytelling in a tweaked Americana style. Whereas Lewis’ last musical project, an ad hoc collaboration from 2016 called Nice as Fuck, was stripped down and upbeat, On the Line contains the most lush and melancholy music she’s ever made. The album has a grand rock sound — stately pianos, swelling strings, fuzzy electric guitar. Lewis cut its 11 songs at the venerable Capitol Studios in L.A. over just a few days last year, but she began writing them in this house in 2014, not long before her 12-year relationship with the Scottish-American musician Johnathan Rice deteriorated. She finished writing them after her bedside reconciliation with her mom.

Lewis gives the fridge a final look before turning out of the kitchen. “I wonder how long I’ll leave these up here,” she says.

Addiction, sobriety and self‑medication are running themes throughout On the Line. There are references to red wine, weed, grenadine, heroin, bourbon, Paxil, Marlboros, cognac, Candy Crush and, on the song “Party Clown,” a hallucinogenic Fuji apple. “Somehow I think the worst one of them all is Candy Crush,” Lewis says with a grin. “My mom started taking heroin when I was two or three, probably. So, growing up like that, there’s a realization that nothing is for free, and everything catches up with you — if you try to numb out, eventually you’re gonna have to face whatever it is you’re running away from.” She pauses. “I don’t have any judgment about it. Even with my mom: She did whatever she had to do, and she wasn’t able to kick it. Most people don’t make it out of heroin addiction. I don’t really blame her for it.”

Wine in hand, wearing a satiny cowgirl shirt and a bandanna tied around her neck that’s nearly the same shade of red as her hair, Lewis shows me around the house. Situated near leafy Laurel Canyon, it was built by a Disney animator in the Forties, and his touch is everywhere — delicate, hand-painted flowers on a wall here, trompe l’oeil flagstones on the floor there. In the living room a projector is playing the X-rated 1968 film The Girl on a Motorcycle, which stars Marianne Faithfull and is alternatively titled Naked Under Leather. Lewis has been on a leather kick recently, she says, showing me a photo-heavy 1977 book called Hard Corps: Studies in Leather and Sadomasochism that she recently scored on eBay. “I keep my whips and chains out in the pool house,” she says with a cackle.

Off the living room is the wood-paneled chamber where Lewis rehearses and writes. There’s a drum kit, a Wurlitzer organ and a little gas stove in the corner. Outside, near the pool, there’s a koi pond and a rose garden, all of it put in by the animator. Down the hall, there’s a roller-derby-themed pinball machine from around 1990 that periodically flashes the words WINNERS DON’T DO DRUGS in LED lights. Opposite the pinball is an enormous old promotional cutout for The Wizard, depicting Savage as an adolescent wearing a Nintendo Power Glove and an adolescent Lewis in acid-washed denim overalls. “This was at the movie theater in Van Nuys where I grew up — my mom made me go in and ask for it,” Lewis says. “My sister had it in storage, then had it framed for me and rented a truck to bring it over here. I wasn’t OK with this for many years, because early on in the history of my band, people would yell video-game references at me from the crowd. Now I just can’t believe that this is part of my weird story.”

She says she loved being on Hollywood sets as a kid, for complicated reasons. “I guess I liked being in that environment because it wasn’t home — it was this pretend-family vibe. My dad wasn’t around, so every time I got a job I kind of fell in love with ‘my father’ on set. I would just want that relationship.” (Her real-life dad, a musician named Eddie Gordon, was absent for most of her life, though he came back into Lewis’ orbit shortly before his own death, playing harmonica on her second solo album, 2008’s Acid Tongue.) Lewis’ off-set life in that era was consistently chaotic: “I think my mother was selling coke in the early Eighties,” she says. “She may have been Ricky Nelson’s dealer. And she was using the money I was making and parlaying it into her business. I’d come home from school and there’d be racks of fur coats, Krugerrands, boxes of Vuarnet sunglasses. All these bulk items in the house, drugs cooking on the stove, people coming in and out. Really interesting characters. I remember we had a Honda Civic, and one day it disappeared. Years later, I learned that someone had torched it as a warning to my mom. There was crazy shit going on.”

Lewis says that her elder sister, Leslie, became something like a proxy mother to her in their actual mother’s stead, and when Jenny co-founded Rilo Kiley with some L.A. buddies in the late Nineties, “that was my first chosen family.” Over the years she’d host jam sessions at home, inviting over members of like-minded acts such as Haim, Dawes and Conor Oberst, here and elsewhere in L.A. “I’ve always brought that jam vibe with me wherever I go,” Lewis says. “I feel compelled to play music, to play with people, or I’ll go crazy.”

In 2015, having split up with Rice for reasons we don’t get into, Lewis went to New York, crashing at the empty apartment of her friend Annie Clark, a.k.a. St. Vincent. “I couldn’t stay in this house,” Lewis says. “Johnathan and I were basically married. When you’re with someone that long, you share consciousness with them. I didn’t finish any of my stories — Johnathan finished every story for me. So part of the reason I went to New York was to find my inner monologue. I wanted to know what that voice was.”

The result, some three years later, is On the Line. Lewis made it with a particularly impressive surrogate family whose members included not only Beck and Ryan Adams, with whom she’d worked before, but also an older generation of studio pros: Rolling Stones producer Don Was, Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench, session drummer Jim Keltner (sideman for John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Steely Dan) and — to her delight and surprise — Ringo Starr. “He was cool — he just showed up one day with a smoothie and did double-drums with Jim on two songs,” Lewis says, adding that she’s not totally sure why the former Beatle came aboard. “I think Don Was showed him some of the songs, invited him to come down, and he was into it.”

[Editors’ note: This story went to press before the February 13th publication of a New York Times report on accusations of sexual misconduct by Ryan Adams. In a February 15th tweet, Lewis made the following statement: “I am deeply troubled by Ryan Adams’ alleged behavior. Although he and I had a working professional relationship, I stand in solidarity with the women who have come forward.”]

A decade-plus into her solo career, Lewis found herself trying new things in the studio. Keeping things spontaneous was a priority: She recorded all her vocal tracks live while playing her instruments, rather than tracking them in later. When Beck inserted a bit of placeholder Auto-Tune on a song called “Little White Dove,” Lewis decided she loved it and kept it in unchanged. (It reminded her of the Detroit rapper DeJ Loaf, whose single “Try Me” Lewis adores.) When it came to mixing, she says she took inspiration from Kanye West’s Ye — clearing out the midrange, focusing on the low end and the highs.

She sits on an oversize armchair in her living room and looks around the house. These days she splits time between L.A. and Nashville, where she jams with a whole other group of friends, including Karen Elson. Three years since her breakup, Lewis says, “I know how to take care of myself. It’s been really lonely, and really hard at times, and to go through the stuff with my mom alone—”

She starts to cry, untying her neckerchief and using it to blot her tears. “This is why I wear a bandanna,” she jokes. “But that’s the thing: I had to visit her, then come home and be alone and process my life with her.”

On the wall in front of her, Marianne Faithfull is making love to Alain Delon, but Lewis isn’t paying attention. “Life is crazy, but it’s incredible,” she goes on. “How amazing to see someone pass over. It’s magical. It’s the most intimate. It’s like a poem, and you don’t know the last line until you get there. But you show up.”

[weekendwarriorblog]

WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND June 21, 2019  - WILD ROSE, TOY STORY 4, CHILD’S PLAY, ANNA

Before I get to this week’s usual column, I want to draw some extra attention to a movie opening this weekend, NEON’s WILD ROSE, a terrific musical drama starring newcomer

Jessie Buckley as Rose-Lynn, a single mother from Glasgow, Scotland who has just got out of prison after spending a year there. She’s a talented singer who has big dreams of being a country star at Nashville’s Grand Ol’ Opry, but she constantly has to choose between this dream career and her two young children.

Directed by Tom Harper (“Peaky Blinders”), the film is pretty amazing, especially to watch Rose-Lynn’s story unfold and how much energy Buckley brings to the role. It’s almost impossible not to love Rose-Lynn’s feisty take-no-shit attitude, which really drives the film but it’s also nice to see Julie Walters as her mother, who is tired of her daughter neglecting her two kids.

This really has been amazing year for musical films between Rocketman, this and the upcoming Yesterday, and I hope that continues since I love inspirational music films. I really hope people seek this one, although I do worry that in some of the places where country music flourishes, audiences might have trouble with the difficult Glaswegian brogue, though I do hope that isn’t a hindrance, since the movie is quite wonderful.

Rating: 8.5/10

Now, let’s get to the other new movies in wide release, and I’m afraid to say that I don’t have a ton to say about any of them other than my actual reviews. Obviously, Disney and Pixar Animation’s TOY STORY 4 (Disney-Pixar) is going to be the big movie of the weekend, and I’ve already reviewed it and loved it. I won’t have a chance to see Orion Pictures and U.A. Releasing’s remake of CHILD’S PLAY until late Wednesday night, but I’m a little trepidatious of it other than the fact it stars the wonderful Aubrey Plaza. (MY REVIEW of Child’s Play is now live.)I guess we’ll see how it goes, but my review will be on The Beat on Thursday at noon.  Lastly, there’s Luc Besson’s new action movie ANNA (Lionsgate), starring Sasha Luss from Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which I actually won’t be able to see before Thursday night but I hope to have a review of that over at The Beat, too.

I talk more about the upcoming wide releases over at The Beat, so do check that column out as well, but if you’re still here, than you know that there’s lots of other stuff to city, especially if you’re lucky enough to live in New York and L.A.

LIMITED RELEASES

Some really great docs opening this weekend, and I want to focus on those first. First up is Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM (Magnolia), an amazing doc about the influential and inspirational author of books like “Beloved,” “The Bluest Eye” and “Sula,” none of which I’ve read, but I’m definitely more intrigued after reading about the influence she’s had on black culture as well as promoting black writers since her editing career began in the late ‘40s. The movie isn’t just about her history or her process, though, and in some ways it reminded me of Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro to show how important Morrison has been to literature and the Civil Rights movement. This movie opens Friday at the Film Forum and Film at Lincoln Center in New York and Pacific Arclight and Landmark 12 in L.A., and I highly recommend it.  I’m hoping Magnolia will be able to get this out there, and it looks like they have a fairly robust release plan, so definitely seek it out if it plays in your city.

Equally enticing is Oliver Murray’s doc THE QUIET ONE (Sundance Selects), which takes a look inside the amazing archival efforts made by Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman. I’m a pretty big Stones fan and have been for decades and the access Murray gets to his archive of pictures and films really helps painting a picture of his time with the Stones. While I think this will be more interest to Stones fans than anyone else, I do recommend it. It will open at the IFC CenterFriday, as well as in Boston, L.A. and San Francisco and then will be on VOD on June 28. Both of the opened played at the recent Tribeca Film Festival.

It’s kind of crazy that Jordan Roberts’ BURN YOUR MAPS (Vertical Entertainment) (based on the short story by Robyn Joy Leff) premiered at the Toronto Film Festival way back in 2016 and it’s finally being released now, but hey, it happens. It stars Jacob Tremblay as an 8-year-old boy -- Tremblay is now 12 – named Wes who has dreams of becoming a Mongolian goat herder, befriending an Indian immigrant (Suraj Sharma from Life of Pi) and they travel to Mongolia together. Also starring Vera Farmiga and Virginia Madsen, it will be in select cities and On Demand.

Matthias Schoenaerts, Léa Seydoux, Peter Simonischek, Max von Sydow and Colin Firth (woo, what a cast!) star in Thomas Winterberg’s THE COMMAND (Saban Films). It tells the story of the Russian flagship nuclear submarine K-1413 KURSK  that sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea in August 2000, and like Saban’s other films, it will get a nomination theatrical release but mainly be seen on VOD.

Let’s get to some fun genre stuff….

A new horror anthology worth checking out is NIGHTMARE CINEMA (Good Deed Entertainment), which premiered at last year’s Fantasia Fest. The premise that ties the five chapters together involves five strangers who come to an abandoned theater to face their greatest fears with Mickey Rourke playing a mysterious character called the Projectionist. The episodes of the anthology are directed by Juan of the Dead’s Alejandro Brugués; the legendary Joe Dante; David Slade, who has directed “Hannibal,” “American Gods” and “Black Mirror” (including Bandersnatch!); Japanese filmmaker Ryuhei Kitamura and the man who put it all together, Mick Garris. It will be in theaters and On Demand Friday.

A late addition to the weekend is Israeli director Guilhad Emilio Schenker’s Madam Yankelova’s Fine Literature Club (Rock Salt Releasing), which premiered at Fantastic Fest last year. It’s about a woman named Sophie who is getting older but who only has to seduce one more victim in order to achieve the rank of Lordess.

Lastly, there’s Carolina Hellsgård’s “post-apocalyptic feminist gothic fairy tale” Endzeit Ever After (Juno Films) follows two young women who develop a friendship while trying to survive after zombies overrun the Earth as they’re stranded in the Black Forest.  This opens at the IFC Center Friday and in L.A. at the Laemlle on June 28.

STREAMING AND CABLE

Streaming Weds on Netflix (and opening at the IFC Center in New York) is Petra Costa’s documentary THE EDGE OF DEMOCRACY, which I’m mainly interested since I have family in Brazil who are quite political and this looks at what happened that cause two Brazilian presidencies to unravel.

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

On Friday, Metrograph Pictures releases a 4k restoration of Jack Hazan’s 1974 film A Bigger Splash, an intimate portrait of British artist David Hockney at a pivotal time in his life after he breaks up with his boyfriend and muse Peter Schlesinger and is trying to complete his painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)”, which sold last year at auction for $93 million (!!!) The Metrograph will have all sorts of guests and QnAs at the screenings of the movie over the weekend.

This week’s Late Nites at Metrograph  is the influential Japanese thriller Battle Royale (2000), while Playtime: Family Matinees  will screen Tim Burton’s 1995 family comedy Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. Over the weekend, the Metrograph will also screen two films by Juleen Compton, 1965’s Stranded and 1966’s The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean, neither which I’ve seen so I don’t have much to add.

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

Besides the Weds. matinee of Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966), starring Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, the New Bev is doing a double feature of Lady in Cement (1968) and Pretty in Poison (1968) on Weds and Thursday, then Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) with Cactus Flower  (1969) on Friday and Saturday. Friday’s Midnight movie is Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, while Saturday’s Midnight is something called Candy (1968), co-written by Buck Henry.  The KIDDEE MATINEE this weekend is one of my personal childhood favorites Chitty Chitty Bang Bang  (1968), starring Dick Van Dyke. Sunday and Monday, the theater is showing the Shirley MacLaine/Bob Fosse film Sweet Charity (1969) and Monday is a matinee of Ocean’s 11. No, not the one from 1960 as that would screw up the Bev’s late ‘60s motif.. it’s Steven Soderbergh’s movie from 2001 starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Matt Damon. The Tuesday Grindhouse is off next week replaced by a double feature of Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn’s There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970) and Don Knotts’ The Love God? (1969).

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):

Out in Astoria, they’re beginning the series Grit and Glitter: Before and After Stonewall in conjunction with the 50th anniversary with screenings of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures  (1962) with two George Kuchar shorts on Friday, Tony Richardson’s 1961 film A Taste of Honey and Kon Ichikawa’s 1963 An Actor’s Revenge on Saturday and Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason  (1967) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Taorema on Sunday. (All of these are screened separately with separate entrance fees.) On Saturday and Sunday, MOMI screens a special The Muppet Movie 40thAnniversary Celebration, as well as a screening of 1979’s The Muppets Go Hollywood on Saturday. As part of the See It Big! Action series on Saturday, they’re showing Shaft director Gordon Parks, Jr.’s 1974 film Three the Hard Way.

FILM FORUM (NYC):

A new restoration of Jennie Livingston’s 1991 film Paris is Burning continues to play as part of Pride Month and the 50thanniversary of Stonewall, and Alain Resnais’Last Year at Marienbad will continue to play through Thursday. This weekend’s Film Forum Jr. is Gurinder Chada’s 2002 film Bend It Like Beckham starring a very young Keira Knightley. Next Tuesday night, the Film Forum is screening a double feature of Dean Hargrove’s 2015 film Tap World along with his 2004 short Tap Heat.

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):

On Thursday, the never-ending Scorsese/Cassavetes series continues with Faces  (1968) and Mean Streets (1973)  and maybe this is the end of that series. Friday night is a screening of Eric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse (1967) and on Sunday, the Art Directors Guild Film Society screens Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

AERO  (LA):

On Thursday, Cinematic Void is screening a double feature of Brian De Palma’s The Phantom of the Paradise (1974) and Dwight Little’s 1989 The Phantom of the Opera (with Little in person). Friday starts a Tying the Coen Brothers Together series in conjunction with Adam Layman’s fantastic Coen Brothers book with double features of No Country for Old Men and Blood Simple on Friday, The Big Lebowski and The Man Who Wasn’t There on Saturday and Fargo with A Serious Man on Sunday. Adam Nayman will be in person for the first two and actor Fred Melamed will be there for the latter.

QUAD CINEMA (NYC):

On Friday, the Quad premieres a new 2k restoration of Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg’s 1984 film Before Stonewall as well as a new series called Queer Kino playing through June 27, including Frank Ripploh’s German film Taxi zum Klo (1980), Wieland Speck’s Coming Out (1989) and more.

ROXY CINEMA (NYC)

This weekend, the Tribeca theaters is showing Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 film Funeral Parade of Roses, the Wachowski’s Bound (1996), a 20thAnniversary screening of the thriller Jawbreaker with director Darren Stein and a few more recent movies including Booksmart. Not a bad line-up for this upstart arthouse theater.

IFC CENTER (NYC)

This week’s Waverly Midnights: Parental Guidance is David Lynch’s Eraserhead (again) and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook,Weekend Classics: LoveMom and Dad screens Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life  (1959), while Late Night Favorites: Springscreens Pulp Fiction, Alien (again) and Jaws.

FILM OF LINCOLN CENTER (NYC):

The Ermanno Olmi series continues through June 26.

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART  (LA):

This week’s Friday midnight is Stanley Kubrick’s classic The Shining.

Next week, the month of June closes off with the threequel Annabelle Comes Homeand Danny Boyle/Richard Curtis’ musical rom-com Yesterday.

[writerspink]

K-12 Words

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1.1

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2.1

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3.2

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4.1

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5.1

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5.2

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6.1

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6.2

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7.1

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7.2

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8.1

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8.2

exclude civic compact painstaking supplement habitat leeway minute hoax contaminate likeness migration commentary extinct tangible originate urban unanimous subordinate collaborate obstacle esteem encounter futile cordial trait improvises superior exaggerate anticipate cope evolve eclipse dissent anguish subsequent sanctuary formulates makeshift controversy diversity terminate precise equivalent pamper prior potential obnoxious radiant predatory presume permanent pending simultaneously tamper supervise perceived vicious patronize trickle stodgy rant oration preview species poised perturb vista wince yearn persist shirk status tragedy trivial snare vindictive wrath recede peevish rupture unscathed random toxic void orthodox subtle resume sequel upright wary overwhelm perjury uncertainty prowess utmost throb pluck pique vengeance pelt urgent substantial robust sullen retort ponder whim saga sham reprimand vocation assimilate dub defect accord embark desist dialect chastise banter inaugurate ovation barter muse blasé stamina atrocity deter principal liberal epoch preposterous advocate audacious dispatch incense deplore institute deceptive component subside spontaneous bonanza ultimate wrangle clarify hindrance irascible plausible profound infinite accomplish apparent capacity civilian conceal duplicate keen provoke spurt undoing vast withdraw barrier calculate compose considerable deputy industrious jolt loot rejoice reliable senseless shrivel alternate demolish energetic enforce feat hearty mature observant primary resign strive verdict brisk cherish considerate displace downfall estimate humiliate identical improper poll soothe vicinity abolish appeal brittle condemn descend dictator expand famine portable prey thrifty visual

9.1

stance vie instill exceptional avail strident formidable rebuke enhance benign perspective tedious aloof encroach memoir mien desolate inventive prodigy staple stint fallacy grope vilify recur assail tirade antics recourse clad jurisdiction caption pseudonym reception humane ornate sage ungainly overt sedative amiss convey connoisseur rational enigma fortify servile fastidious contagious elite disgruntled eccentric pioneer abet luminous era sleek serene proficient rue articulate awry pungent wage deploy anarchy culminate inventory commemorate muster adept durable foreboding lucrative modify authority transition confiscate pivotal analogy avid flair ferret decree voracious imperative grapple deface augment shackle legendary trepidation discern glut cache endeavor attribute phenomenon balmy bizarre gullible loll rankle decipher sublime rubble renounce porous turbulent heritage hover pithy allot minimize agile renown fend revenue versa gaunt haven dire doctrine intricate conservative exotic facilitate bountiful cite panorama swelter foster indifferent millennium gingerly conscientious intervene mercenary citadel obviously rely supportive sympathy weakling atmosphere decay gradual impact noticeable recede stability variation approximately astronomical calculation criterion diameter evaluate orbit sphere agricultural decline disorder identify probable thrive expected widespread bulletin contribution diversity enlist intercept operation recruit survival abruptly ally collide confident conflict protective taunt adaptation dormant forage frigid hibernate insulate export glisten influence landscape native plantation restore urge blare connection errand exchange

9.2

feasible teem pang vice tycoon succumb capacious onslaught excerpt eventful forfeit crusade tract haggard susceptible exemplify ardent crucial excruciating embargo disdain apprehend surpass sporadic flustered languish conventional disposition theme plunder ignore project complaint title dramatic delivery litter experimental clinic arrogance preparation remind atomic occasional conscious deny maturity closure stressed translator animate observation physical further gently registration suppress combination amazing constructive allied poetry passion ecstasy mystery cheerful contribution spirit failed gummy commerce prove disagreement raid consume embarrass preference migrant devour encouragement quote mythology destined destination illuminating struggle accent ungrateful giggle approval confidence expose scientist operation superstitious emergency manners absolutely swallow readily mutual bound crisp orient stress sort stare comfort verbal heel challenging advertisement envious sex scar astonish basis accuracy enviable alliance specific chef embarrassed counter tolerable sympathetic gradually vanish informative amaze royal furry insist jealousy simplify quiver collaborate dedicated flexible function mimic obstacle technique archaeologist fragment historian intact preserve reconstruct remnant commence deed exaggeration heroic impress pose saunter wring astound concealed inquisitive interpret perplexed precise reconsider suspicious anticipation defy entitled neutral outspoken reserved sought equal absorb affect circulate conserve cycle necessity seep barren expression meaningful plume focused genius perspective prospect stunned superb transition assume guarantee nominate

10.1

install reticent corroborate regretfully strength murder concise cunning intention holy satire query confused progression disillusion background mundane abrupt multiple enormously introduce emulate harmful pragmatic pity rebut liberate enthusiastic elucidate camaraderie disparage nature creep profitability impression racist sobriety occupy autonomy currently amiable reiterate reproduce cripple modest offer atom provincial augment ungratefully expansion yield rashly allude immigration silence epitome exacerbate somber avid dispute vindicate collaborate manufacturer embellish superficial propaganda incompetent objective diminish statistics endure ambivalent perpetuate illuminate phenomenon exasperate originality restrict anxiety anthropology circumstances aesthetic manufacturing conventional dubious vulnerable reality precedent entity success term critical repair underscore stepmother republican hesitantly classic wary contents prediction immediate invoke notorious implicit excluding input skeptical foster element punish frank humanity profound dessert orthodox substance disappear encourage neighborhood elder superfluous naive ascertain complacent resilient deafening military tend prudent glare acceptance skillfully induce monster beam gullible conciliate vessel petty cantankerous disclose archaeology anecdote disdain electronics substantiate subjective tourism advisable joyful incredible provocative psychological ruins discipline condone indifferent misfortune judgmental industrialize tasty assume astute mission mar protective definitely escape oppress shocked virtual zealous endorse qualification hostile eccentric abstract disparate geographical scrutinize generalization tolerate activity claim dogmatic influential obsolete extol implausible subsequent resource chronic benevolent improve confidential ambiguous seriously dearth perplex hatred throughout dine contemporary evoke essentially economic flagrant obscure alleviate eloquent dreaadful clumsy sympathy victim condemn vigor condescend spontaneous quell reprehensible substantially sleeve equivocal ironic decry errand articulate progressive eradicate refreshments elicit aspiration recently exemplary bribery theoretical disingenuous partisan revere particle nostalgia self-aggrandizement debunk tyranny rhetoric hierarchy warning whimsical venerate commend assert miserable awful vibe constrain undermine explicit differentiate compliment scrupulous contempt erroneous ideal refute imply cynical rash presume insight revival vary delay renounce indignant offensive temperate circumstantial export peep logo advertise suppress distort chunk convoluted denounce overwhelming fertility rigorous acquire arrogant university antagonize profitable indulgent strategic breathing idiosyncrasy profession frugal discern accommodation adversary incredulous disturbance digress social belie roam smug continual pertinent voluntarily elite subtle blame sincerity lick horror censure involvement candid infer futile impetuous exploit bewilder sustain diligent sincere protect sealed musical empathy callous parenthetical insure acorn sarcasm seize sacrificially allege emphatic irrelevant progress diplomatic stunned improvise deride reconcile meticulous deject scientifically incontrovertible pressure justify gloomy depict supplant endurance analogous diary bolster slip contemplate pesticide glow religious advocate negligent creator lament fundamental embrace throne inherent inferior valuable thrive trivial pretense reserved capricious refresh refusal flight boost explanation coherent prevalent tenacious official royalty assassin rub poach delete

10.2

warrant circumscribed somewhat explosive optimistic mandate previously detract opinion intuitive feasible intimate persistent humble simplicity tempt deliberate painful unethical fundamentals discrepancy remorse pessimistic possibility conclusion acknowledge impregnate soberly creation paralyze suitability oblige tranquil medal arbitrate pacify illusory susceptible vibrate vengeance infection democratic stressful grave speculative sample identification stifle obligation revenge organization namely mediocre practical scream weaken consensus affectionate deficient treacherous console isolation ingenious memory melodrama despair awestruck composition regret recommendation celebrity decision devoid opaque ornamentation longevity participate dread restore interrogate aid accordingly mislead embarrassment optimism domestic apt funds virtue geography fundamentally thoroughly press despite horrible chilling rental esteemed disappointment innovative contemplation assign popularize haunt deafen serene percent estrangement suffer extravagant throng estimate comment priesthood mass dreadfully promote periphery animated saying relate clarity triple derivative succeed distortion register suicide improvement discreet inquisition probable curative incident praise convenience baffle covet dreadful genuinely weary undisturbed disgruntled humility renown nonchalant monopoly comedy vague decisive inconsequential announcement fabricated nevertheless vigilant scarce neglectful hushed attainment tedious explode snatch pslm agency sentimental tension adhere meanwhile sacred avert conformity likewise challenger accessible responsibility peril contact event roast fallible catastrophic competitor violate resolute deceive exaggeration discredit intolerable approve paste dimly novelist demeanor norm politician satisfaction obvious vehicle reservation defer involve restoration crush audible assistant backpack attain inanimate commemorate confrontation emigration parasite disperse quantitative laughter policy vulgar occasionally repay effective eulogy starvation empty therapeutic overall immortal encompass inappropriate opportune engagement illustrate turmoil observatory classification expression reminiscence comedian invention depress remedy protagonist gesture texture diplomatic election prolong conducive emotional invigorate curiosity expressive %

K-12 Words was originally published on PinkWrite