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jessicalprice · 2 years ago

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Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (1. Preface)

I often tell people that there's a book they should read on the subject of a particular discourse, but I doubt they do--after all, I rarely follow through when random people on the internet tell me to read a particular book.

So I'm going to break down and summarize Denise Kimber Buell's Why This New Race?: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity, because I think it's a really important read in understanding Christian hegemony, Christianity's relationship to whiteness, and antisemitism in Christianity throughout its history.

But before I talk about Buell's book, I have a few prefatory remarks of my own.

Sorry, but the Book of Context is quite a tome.

"Fake" Christianity and the fall from grace

In particular, Buell challenges the narrative lurking behind so many contemporary discussions of Christian hegemony, white nationalism, Christian racism, etc. that there was some sort of original, "pure" Christianity and that modern Christianity's issues are due to corruption from this prelapsarian ideal.

Or put another way, Christianity doesn't just posit a human fall from grace. The meta-narrative offered--when Christians don't deny that Christians are doing horrible things--is that those people are following a distorted form of Christianity that has fallen away from its original benevolent form.

This is the reactive form of a long-standing trope in Christian culture (that is, basically the entire West) that equates Christianity with goodness. If you read American or British books prior to about 1990, they are replete with people saying things like, "it's the Christian thing to do," to reference performing some basic act of human decency.

"More Christian than most Christians"

It was also popular for some time--although thankfully, it seems to be fading (at least on social media, as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and other members of non-Christian cultures push back) to state that a Jew or other non-Christian who'd performed some sort of exemplary act of compassion or said something wise was "more Christian than most Christians."

This accolade, while almost certainly well-intentioned, is actually deeply insulting. The implication is that this Jew, unlike almost all others of their kind, has managed to catch up to Christians in compassion, that the universal standard of compassion is Christianity, and that it is surprising and unusual that this non-Christian has managed to overcome the moral inferiority of their people to meet or even exceed the Christian standard.

These assertions of Christianity (or at least "true" Christianity) as the moral standard for humankind largely go unquestioned, as do basic antisemitic tropes like the idea that the problem with Christians behaving cruelly is that they're getting too much of their Christianity from the Old Testament and not enough from the New.

Quite to the contrary, people who are purportedly not (or no longer) Christian are usually the first in line to denounce whichever Republican politician is proposing starving children in the name of Jesus as a "fake Christian." Progressive Christians, still more invested in protecting Christianity's brand than actually cleaning their own house, are often just as loud.

This No True Scotsman-ing is preservation of Christian supremacy and hegemony, and deeply intertwined with the idea that there is a single, pure, original Christianity that was unquestionably benevolent.

There is no One True Christianity

But the truth of the matter is that it is impossible to wring any sort of single, consistent moral philosophy from the New Testament without ignoring parts of it.

Christians that most of us might perceive as wielding their Christianity in cruel or unjust ways usually aren't more ignorant of the text or history than Christians (or ex-Christians) who see "real" Christianity as simply "love your neighbor" and understand Jesus as a beatific, gentle pacifist.

Both of those groups have to ignore large swaths of the New Testament to get to their ideology, and interpret the same passages differently (a Christian attempting to use the law to relegate non-Christians to second-class citizen status or refuse aid to non-Christians can interpret passages commanding kindness as applying to people within the Christian community only with as much textual support as one insisting they apply to all humankind).

Christians you don't like aren't "fake." You just disagree with them about what Christianity should be.

But in the west, Christianity generally holds the unique status of demanding that it be judged only on what it states its ideal form is, and not on what it actually is.

No such largesse for non-Christian cultures

Jews generally don't try to claim that other Jews who engage in bad behavior aren't Jewish. Much as we might wish Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller weren't members of the tribe, and much as we might say that they are bad Jews, their bad behavior didn't trigger a flood of opinion pieces about how they're "fake" Jews. (Ivanka is a special case, but that's about anti-convert sentiment within some Jewish communities.)

Neither was there a flood of articles about how the 9/11 attackers were "fake" Muslims. The meta-debate in the US and much of Western Europe after 9/11, in fact, was about whether all Muslims were terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, as Michael Hobbes recently noted on an episode of Cancel Me, Daddy. He went back and did a survey of journalism in the wake of 9/11, and almost all the coverage, on the opinion page and in purportedly objective journalism (where it was generally presented in question form, or as simply "reporting" on a national debate) was about whether only some Muslims were bad, or whether it was the entire culture.

When there was pushback, it was almost always in terms of the views of the terrorists are not representative of what most Muslims think or feel, not they aren't actually Muslim.

The myth of Christian innocence

As my Twitter friend Chrissy Stroop continually hammers home, the "fake Christian" framing upholds "the myth of Christian innocence" and is harmful to everyone except practicing Christians. It gaslights both members of non-Christian cultures who have experienced centuries-long structural and institutional (as well as individual) harm at the hands of Christians, and former Christians who experienced individual abuse in their families and/or communities of origin.

To tell queer people who grew up in authoritarian Christianity, or Jews who are missing entire sections of their family trees due to Christian genocide, or Indigenous people taken from their families as children and abused in the name of Jesus, that they have not been harmed by Christianity, that it was a few bad actors and not the religion itself, that it was all a misunderstanding, is to be more interested in protecting Christianity's reputation than facing real human pain.

As Chrissy Stroop often says, Christianity is what Christians do. It does not deserve special status among human cultures in which it is judged only by its imagined ideal form, and not by its actual effects upon actual living humans.

How does this relate to this book?

All of this is context for what Buell does in her book, which shouldn't be radical, but unfortunately--due to the habit of taking Christianity at its word about what it is and what it was originally--is unusual at best.

Buell decides to investigate how early Christians understood their own identity, and not to simply accept the prevailing Christian understanding that "ethnicity and race were irrelevant to early Christians—an argument that has been used to accomplish important modern antiracist work yet relies on and perpetuates anti-Judaism in the process."

Scholarly work on Christianity, especially early Christianity, is a trip. Most of it, obviously, has been done by Christians, which--when it comes to studying antisemitism and other harms in Christian history and how they might come from Christianity itself--is leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse.

(This is a subject for a different post, but Christian academics often say the most deranged things about how first-century Judaism functioned and the relationship between first-century Jews and Christians. They cite sources, of course, but if you look up those sources, you find that they're citing other sources, and if you trace it back to the original source, it's usually some Victorian preacher just... making up something to fit his parable exegesis.)

If you challenge some of this Accepted Scholarly Consensus, you are often met with spluttering indignation and insistence that any challenge to it is a "fringe viewpoint" and not accepted by any "real" NT scholars. It's always fascinating how often "fringe" usually means "written by people who weren't Christian."

So anyway, Buell decided to do something that, if you're not invested in Christianity, seems pretty basic and non-controversial: she decides to look at how early Christians understood their own identity.

I revisit scholarship and early Christian texts that destabilize the prevailing view that Christian universalism can be understood as mutually exclusive with “particularity”—a split that is often correlated with the nonethnic/ ethnic binary... To understand the elusive but entrenched presence of race in contemporary scholarly models, we need to cultivate a prismatic vision that can reimagine the relevance of race and ethnicity to ancient articulations of Christianness in light of the continued political, social, ideological, and theological challenges posed by modern racism and anti-Judaism.

Prismatic vision

I want to dig into that concept of "prismatic vision" for a moment, because it's a beautiful metaphor.

To aim for diffraction in how one sees—to see prismatically—is to value the production of patterns of difference and to resist the “false choice between realism and relativism.”

One of the things I often struggle to get people from Christian backgrounds to understand about Judaism is that, in having a culture without centralized authority, in having a relationship to the text in which authority lies in the discussion itself and not in any one voice, Jews usually don't privilege the idea of some Objective Truth the way Christians do.

I'd say most of us probably believe there is objective truth out there, but we also understand that we can only perceive and understand it subjectively.

We might all be looking at the same star, but we're all standing in slightly different places on the planet.

"Moral relativism" was a big bogeyman for Christians in political discourse from about 10-20 years ago.

In the most basic sense, they have a point when it comes to constructing rules for a society. We do need some basic, agreed-upon rules to live together. (I don't think we need nearly as many as Christians seem to think we do, but I am absolutely in favor of having systems for addressing harm, for ensuring that people can get their basic needs met and have their personhood acknowledged and respected, etc.) In service of not having to negotiate absolutely everything about every single interaction we have with other humans, both rules and accepted norms are a useful shorthand and safeguard (which is a statement of general principle--obviously individual rules and norms can be bad or misused, entire systems can be corrupt or badly designed in the first place, etc.).

Every moment is infinite

But when it comes to understanding the reality of something as fuzzy-edged and ambient as culture and viewpoint, there is no such thing as one objective truth that any of us can understand.

I was thinking about this as I paused for a moment on a corner during a walk yesterday. The intersection was in a quiet residential area, and I stood there and fell into a soft gaze, looking at the square of sidewalk I was standing on.

The air was chilly and damp, holding the scent of wet leaves, of the grass next to me, of someone smoking pot somewhere, of dog waste on someone's lawn, of a faint chemical sweetness that I think came from the school they were building about a half mile away, of the tar patching cracks in the street, of the laundry soap I use lingering between the fibers of my sweater, of the coffee smell from the coffee shop I'd been at clinging faintly to me, of the pile of fallen cedar needles across the street, of someone cooking onions somewhere, of the silly brave daffodil opening a blossom far too early in the lawn beside me, of the cut grass on that lawn, of the sap in the broken pine branch on the tree next to me and the wet bark of that tree, of... of... of...

And that was only the scents I noticed. That is only about what I could perceive of reality with a single sense.

I don't often fully open any of my senses that way--I have trouble ignoring stimuli as it is, and being overwhelmed by sensory input triggers my migraines. I spend most of my life doing my best to block out things. But every so often, when I'm somewhere relatively quiet, I drop that constant effort and just absorb. Not for long--while I was standing there, passively attentive rather than focused, the plane on the horizon became painfully loud--but just to stretch.

And then I closed all that up and pulled back into myself and thought about the things I couldn't perceive with my senses.

I did not know exactly when the houses that were around me were built, what the social and economic forces that willed them into being were. I don't know what the people inside them were doing at that moment, let alone all the social and personal context shaping their behavior and feelings and thoughts and thought-feelings.

I didn't know the billion-year history of each molecule of water creeping out in a dark aureole from the decaying leaf-litter on the edge of the sidewalk, or what the life of each leaf had been (some trees are functionally immortal, did you know? they call it phoenix regeneration). I didn't know the story of any of the pebbles embedded in the cement, what rock they had come from or where it had formed or through where it had traveled or how long it had been small. I didn't know when or by whom this square of sidewalk had been installed, how it had affected the area and the people who lived in it to have a sidewalk there, if there had been a street there before there was a sidewalk, if this was the original or a replacement.

Even if I narrowed my focus just to the square of sidewalk on which I stood, the truth of it was infinite. Merely what I could perceive with my own senses standing in that one spot and what background knowledge I have of things like the area the corner was in and how cement gets made and what streets do was too much to hold and synthesize. How much bigger, everything I didn't know and couldn't perceive?

We say there are as many Judaisms as there are Jews. But there are as many Christianities as there have been Christians and people who have ever interacted with Christians.

If there is any objective truth about it, it is made up of all the subjective experiences of it, and is beyond anyone's ability to comprehensively understand.

Which is why I find Buell's metaphor of "prismatic vision" so compelling: the idea of looking at a thing and seeing components of it and also knowing that there are parts of the spectrum that you can't see.

resist the “false choice between realism and relativism.”

Realism isn't the opposite of relativism, in these things--it's the sum total of all the relativisms. It's a point that may or may not exist, that we can only, hopefully, use as a direction to head in.

On to the Introduction.

#christian hegemony #christian hegemony library #antisemitism #early christianity #judaism #denise kimber buell #ethnic reasoning in Christianity

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whileiamdying · 1 year ago

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“Kiss of the Spider Woman” ’s Voices in the Dark

The Argentinean writer Manuel Puig’s novel-in-dialogue forces the reader to be both director and detective, interpreting how the lines will be spoken and searching each sentence for clues as to what is going on.

By Isaac Butler December 11, 2022

icki Baum, the author of “Grand Hotel,” once wrote that “you can live down any number of failures, but you can’t live down a great success.” After witnessing the fall and rise of his novel “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Manuel Puig likely would’ve agreed with her. Originally released to critical dismissal—Robert Coover called it “a rather frail little love story” in the Times—the book landed with a thud, managing to make Puig a celebrity in the gay enclave of New York City’s Christopher Street, but not much else. Yet “Kiss of the Spider Woman” had a remarkable afterlife. A play adaptation, co-authored by Puig, became an international success, and led to an Oscar-winning film starring William Hurt and Raul Julia as well as a hit musical written by John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Terrence McNally. Puig disliked the film, and, shortly after a disastrous workshop of the musical at suny Purchase, died from a heart attack, at the age of fifty-seven. Yet for all his frustration with the adaptations of his novel, they guaranteed its longevity. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is the only book of Puig’s in English that remains steadily in print—his first novel, “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth” was recently issued for the second time this century by McNally Editions—and the cover of the Vintage International paperback boasts the same typeface and image as the playbill of the Broadway production.

The film and musical so overshadowed their source material that, when I first encountered the book, in a course called Subjectivity in Literature my freshman year of college, I thought that my eccentric professor had assigned a novelization to us as a way of challenging our assumptions about which books were worthy of study. Within a few pages, I realized my mistake. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is a mysterious, formally inventive, beguiling work about two prisoners during the Dirty War in Argentina: a Marxist guerilla named Valentín and a gay window dresser named Molina, who develop a transformative relationship as the latter narrates the plots of his favorite movies to the former. When I was nineteen, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” struck me as a work about finding love and preserving one’s humanity in the most inhumane of places. It is in some ways the opposite of Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden,” a play in which the psychic scars of the Pinochet regime in Chile prove a universal solvent, dissolving any attempt at decency, or humanity, or truth. Reading the novel in the period between the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act and the repeal of sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas, I believed it to be a work of protest art, one that defiantly asserts Molina’s personhood even amid the Dirty War’s depredations. Reading “Kiss of the Spider Woman” today, the prison seems less like a real place, and the novel seems far trickier, and far harder to nail down to any one meaning. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” slips between different interpretations, just as its late-night conversations wander from the most frivolous of trivialities to the deepest of truths.

Puig would likely have objected to the idea that frivolity was opposed to truth. His sensibility was rooted in cursi, a word that lacks a direct English translation but is key to the consciousness that underlies his work. Cursi is the Blanche DuBois to machismo’s Stanley Kowalski, passionately insisting “I don’t want realism, I want magic!” Its closest equivalent in the United States is camp, but the two are not exactly the same. There’s a yearning to cursi, and a nostalgic fabulousness. Puig was the great twentieth-century writer of the cursi sensibility. He disdained the self-seriousness of many of his contemporaries in the Latin American Boom, particularly Gabriel García Márquez, who he felt had been ruined by critical praise. “Every sentence pretends to be the maximum phrase of all of literature,” Puig griped, about the future Nobel Prize winner’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” “and each one ends by weighing a ton.” Puig’s novels are deliberately playful and provocatively effeminate. They often ride the line between satire and sincerity, producing a result that is somehow both sincerely felt and heavily ironized. As Puig himself put it once in a letter, “that’s the real me: Cursi and truthful.”

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” grew out of Puig’s frustrations with the politics of his era and his contemporaries. He eschewed explicit polemic in his work, which led to his being viewed with suspicion by both the left and the right. His first novel was panned by the center-right magazine La Nacíon for using colloquial Argentinean Spanish and accused of having Peronist sympathies. Living among fellow exiled Argentinean intellectuals in Mexico City, Puig found that he “was still a reactionary for not having joined the movement. Worst of all my book had been banned by the right wing and the Argentinian left didn’t care.” From this pain, he began taking notes on a novel in which two men—one straight and one gay, who “doesn’t have much education, but a great fantasy life”—would “meet through a mediator—movies.”

Puig, who wanted to be a screenwriter and only turned to writing novels after his thirtieth birthday, all but grew up in a movie theatre. According to “Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman,” a biography of Puig by his translator and friend Suzanne Jill Levine, his home town of General Villegas, in the Argentine Pampas, had one movie house, which showed a different film every day. Beginning in 1936, his mother, Malé, with whom he would remain extremely close throughout his life, took him to see “mostly American stuff” almost daily, at 6 p.m. Staring at the screen, he fell in love with the female stars of the thirties, constructing a pantheon out of Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, and others. “I understood . . . the moral world of movies, where goodness, patience, and sacrifice were rewarded,” he later said. “In real life, nothing like that happened. . . . I, at a certain moment, decided that reality was what was on the screen and that my fate—to live in that town—was a bad impromptu movie that was about to end.” Malé had initially only intended to stay in General Villegas for a year and passed her frustrated dreams of cosmopolitan life down to her son. “It was like living in exile,” he would later say, and, in his first two novels, he would create a thinly veiled version of his home town, called Colonel Vallejos, and treat it unkindly. As Clara, his fictionalized aunt in “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” puts it:

When I got off the train, my first impression was awful, there’s not a single tall building. They’re always having droughts there, so you don’t see many trees either. In the station there are no taxis, they still use the horse and buggy and the center of town is just two and a half blocks away. You can find a few trees that are hardly growing, but what you don’t see at all, anywhere, is real grass.

The Puigs left Villegas, moving to Buenos Aires by 1949, and it’s unclear whether Manuel ever returned to his home town, except in his imagination. Much of his life was lived in one form of exile or another, particularly after his novel “The Buenos Aires Affair” was suppressed in Argentina in 1974.

“Betrayed by Rita Hayworth” highlights again and again the contrast between the magic of cinema and the tawdry doldrums of everyday life. Puig preferred melodramas, which he called “the language in which the unconscious speaks,” along with screwball comedies and, once he got over the trauma of seeing “Bride of Frankenstein” at too young an age, cheap horror films. In his essay “Cinema and the Novel,” Puig wrote that the films of the thirties and forties had such lasting power because they “really were dreams displayed in images. . . . When I look at what survives in the history of cinema, I find increasing evidence of what little can be salvaged from all the attempts at realism.” He disliked much of Italian neorealism and the films of Martin Scorsese (“so much pretension and slowness”), and called Meryl Streep, Ellen Burstyn, Jill Clayburgh, and Glenn Close “the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse” for ushering in a more realistic femininity onscreen.

Escape into the dream world of cinema was an obsessive quest. Later in life, he would write his friend Guillermo Cabrera Infante a long list of the authors of the Latin American Boom as Hollywood starlets. Borges was Norma Shearer (”Oh so refined!”), García Márquez was Elizabeth Taylor (“Beautiful face but such short legs”), Mario Vargas Llosa was Esther Williams (“Oh so disciplined (and boring)”). Among the eighteen names was Puig’s own. He was to be played by Julie Christie, a “great actress, but since she has found the right man for her (Warren Beatty) she doesn’t act anymore.” Years later, after his writing had brought him money and international acclaim, Puig would buy television sets and VCRs for friends, and then cajole them into recording classic films for him, eventually amassing a library of more than three thousand movies on upward of twelve hundred video cassettes.

Popular culture at its most cursi undergirds Puig’s work. It’s there in his titles— “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” “Heartbreak Tango,” “The Buenos Aires Affair,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Pubis Angelical,” “Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages,” “Blood of Requited Love,” “Tropical Night Falling”—which feel as if they could be printed in the most lurid of fonts, accompanied by the most sensational of exclamation points. His frustrated attempts to work as a screenwriter gave birth to his signature style, in which dialogue, stream of consciousness, and fake secondary sources like diary entries, surveillance reports, and newspaper articles bump up against one another. This marriage of high modernist experimentation with low cultural reference points and subject matter frequently led to his dismissal by Argentinean literati. He struggled for years to publish “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” and the accusation that he was a lightweight shadowed him even after his death. Reviewing Levine’s biography in the Times, Vargas Llosa wrote that “of all the writers I have known, the one who seemed least interested in literature was Manuel Puig,” before sniffing that “Puig’s work may be the best representative of what has been called light literature . . . an undemanding, pleasing literature that has no other purpose than to entertain.” Vargas Llosa’s estimation couldn’t be further off the mark. While Puig’s novels are entertaining—often riotously so—his formal techniques aren’t mere games, and his experimentations with dialogue still seem radical and groundbreaking decades after his death.

The novel in dialogue form is not new—authors from Diderot to Woolf and Gaddis have experimented with it—but there is something eternally transgressive in its austerity. To work only in dialogue is to limit or altogether renounce such pleasurable tools as point of view, description, free indirect discourse, and narration. Playwrights know that their dialogue will be mediated through a production, through the choices and interpretations of a director and actors, and they can leave instructions in the form of stage directions and notes explaining their intent. But the novel in dialogue forgoes all this. It forces the reader to be at once director and detective, interpreting how the lines will be spoken, and searching each sentence for clues as to the basic facts of what is going on.

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” takes place in prison, yet it is six full pages of testy back-and-forth before the reader gets any glimpse of where the story is situated. Even these clues are related briefly:

The next movie Molina swoons over is “Destino,” a Nazi film about the evils of the French Resistance. The movie, a composite invented by Puig, is an inversion of the Hollywood film “Paris Underground,” its female protagonist rather unsubtly named Leni. Molina knows that it’s Nazi propaganda but loves it, “because it’s well made, and besides it’s a work of art.” The stage appears to be set for an extended dialogue about the relationship between art and truth, aesthetics and politics, naïveté and logic, and so on. Yet Puig shifts gears again, introducing footnotes written in parodic academese that trace a post-Freudian theory of homosexuality. The footnotes grow so extensive that they take over the book, drowning out the prisoners for pages on end. These give way to stream-of-consciousness asides that take us into Molina and Valentín’s thoughts, the former self-pitying and sentimental, the latter obsessive and fevered. The text becomes marked with ellipses to denote physical actions that would normally be described, culminating in a sex scene composed solely of the words spoken by the two men:

I can’t see at all, not at all. . . . it’s so dark. . . . Slowly now . . . . . . No, that way it hurts a lot. . . . Wait . . . no, it’s better like this, let me lift my legs. . . . A little slower . . . please . . . . . . That’s better. . . .

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” moves from an avalanche of verbiage to a space where language is inadequate, and out again, with the two characters, having physically joined their bodies, finding new selves beyond the limits of their roles. It’s not entirely clear whether, were the book written today, Molina would even be described as a man. He often identifies as a woman throughout “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and at one point says, “As for my friends and myself, we’re a hundred percent female. . . . We’re normal women; we sleep with men.” Here, Molina is contrasting his social circle with “the other kind [of gay men] who fall in love with one another.” The objects of Molina’s desires are straight men. “What we’re always waiting for,” he says—she says?—is “a friendship or something, with a more serious person . . . with a man, of course. And that can’t happen because a man . . . what he wants is a woman.” Molina is filled with self-loathing, and unable to form any kind of real community or engage in political action, because “you see yourself in the other ones like so many mirrors, and then you start running for your life.”

Molina and Valentín’s prison cell, a filthy space of isolation surrounded by the threat of torture and execution, becomes a nearly utopian arena where identity can be transcended. The two characters live, briefly, in a world beyond the self, beyond sexuality, beyond gender, beyond language. Molina describes this as feeling like “I’m someone else, who’s neither a man nor a woman” while Valentín describes the feeling as being “out of danger.” The novel that began as a series of oppositions—gay and straight, woman and man, naïve and political, dream and reality, cursi and honest—hasn’t resolved any of its conflicts so much as called into question whether these categories, and many of the others we use to organize our lives, aren’t arbitrary, as limited as they are limiting. Among the book’s many insoluble contradictions is how it demonstrates these categories being overcome but only in a prison cell and only through a near-total deconstruction of the self. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” refuses to neatly suit any kind of political program—Puig called gay readers offended by his portrait of Molina “Stalinist queens”—instead burrowing deeper and deeper into what its author called “the struggle for human dignity.”

As with Puig’s other novels, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” requires far more work on the reader’s part than we are accustomed to, but the result is a profound imaginative and emotional investment. We have, to an extent far greater than normal, created the world of the story we are reading. We are in that jail cell with Molina and Valentín, eavesdropping on their conversations, witnessing their slow transition from antagonistic cellmates to friends to lovers to something that cannot quite be put into language. Our struggle to piece together the action of their scenes together mirrors their struggle to understand each other and, perversely, the struggle of the secret police to determine what Valentín may know about the resistance unit he has until recently been leading.

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” further confounds as it goes along. Just when you think you have a handle on it, it wriggles away and changes shape. The book begins with voices in the dark, as Molina relates the real-life 1942 film “Cat People” from memory, waxing rhapsodic in his micro-detailed descriptions of clothes, lighting, faces. Soon we learn that the two men have agreed to an experiment. To help pass the time after lights out in their cell, Molina will recount films to Valentín. These movies—there are six of them in all—form the book’s backbone. As he narrates the story of “Cat People,” Molina is expansive, romantic, and charming. Valentín is the opposite: terse, controlling, and analytical. When Molina describes the protagonist as “not thinking about the cold, it’s as if she’s in some other world, all wrapped up in herself,” Valentín responds, “If she’s wrapped up inside herself, she’s not in some other world. That’s a contradiction.” (Later, Valentín establishes the rules of their talk, demanding that Molina’s stories contain “no food and no naked girls.”) Valentín only likes the movie once he is able to interpret it in Marxist and Freudian terms. The highest praise he can offer is “it’s all so logical, it’s fantastic.” Our sympathies are drawn toward Molina. He’s the dreamer, the romantic, the sincere one, and Valentín—who studies all day and cannot even tell his girlfriend that he loves her, because the resistance needs them both more than they need each other—feels almost inhuman in his discipline, incapable of recognizing that his dream of Marxist revolution is a romantic fantasy of its own.

It is no wonder, then, that the adaptations, which reduce the story to a romance between two seeming opposites amid a backdrop of degradation and fantasy, proved so much more successful. Ultimately, however, it is the book that will survive. The musical hasn’t been produced in New York since its hit Broadway run ended in 1995, and the film today feels painfully, at times hilariously, dated. William Hurt, an often wonderful actor, was miscast as Molina. Puig had objected to Hurt, responding to his signing on to the film with “in my bed maybe, but not as Molina!” And even though Hurt won an Oscar for his performance, Puig was right. Hurt, physically too large and obviously impersonating rather than inhabiting a fabulous gay character, somehow overacts and underplays at the same time. The director, Hector Babenco, primarily known for documentaries, lacks the sense of visual style the film demands, and the movie seems embarrassed by the two men’s sexual relationship. The screenplay reduces Molina and Valentín’s affair to a one-off favor that Valentín does for Molina, and the camera cannot even show us the titular kiss between the two characters, on which the ending hinges. The film is a work of compromise, between director and stars, between screenplay and Hollywood mores, and between Puig and his pocketbook—one that reinforces the very categories that the novel sought to break down.

Unlike the movie, which feels fixed in time, the novel of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” feels timeless, or perhaps newly relevant again and again. Its meaning has already shifted for me over the decades, from a moving insistence on gay personhood to a prescient and acutely felt dramatization of how the gender binary imprisons us all. Who knows what it will mean when I revisit it again in a decade—but it will be waiting, provocative, defiant, cursi, and ready to challenge whatever boundaries we put around ourselves. ♦

#The Kiss of the Spider Woman #Manuel Puig

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bropunzeling · 1 year ago

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Mm top 5 comfort/vacation reads?

Top five tropes (to write or to read or both!)

comfort reads:

the brothers sinister series by courtney milan! great little romance series, solid sex scenes (the one in the governess affair novella is actually literally to die for), a delightful cast of characters. courtney's books are always solidly rooted in a mix of period detail and thoughtful politics, and i like how everyone likes each other!

kj charles generally but probably specifically think of england and proper english. i love very few things more in life than murder mysteries. i especially love when people initially at odds fall in love during mystery solving. it warms the cockles of my heart.

protector of the small quartet by tamora pierce - all the tortall books are comfort reads to me but this is THEE comfort read for me. i love kel with my entire body! she is precious to me! tall and buff and even-tempered but as stubborn as a mule. she and dom should have kissed!!!

agatha christie - i powered through every single one of her books available at the start of the plague times. i love the poirot books but i think for general consistency miss marple ones are almost always more solid. miss marple herself is a great outsider detective and i think there's few enough books that agatha couldn't grow to be tired of her lmao

i just powered through the goblin emperor books by katherine addison (had read the first but not the next two) and those are great fantasy books! the lingo is admittedly a bit opaque and hard to parse at first, but once you're in you're in, and the stories are really about human decency and kindness (while also providing political machinations (book 1) and murder (2 and 3), which as we all know are very comforting to me lmao)

tropes (this was really hard lmao and is for sure not definitive):

soulbond/mark/etc aus - a well done soulbond au is my jam. my artisanal preserves. the questions it raises about free will and fate? about someone being meant for you? i think there's really fun angles about like, how even relationships with this extra something still aren't going to be easy and smooth. there's also the aspect of like, strong or weak bonds? romantic or platonic (lol)? can you hear inside someone's head? or do you just feel better around them? or do you just have their name or first words to you sitting on your skin? what happens if it's one sided? what happens if it's unrequited? what happens if you're not ready? what happens if one of you wants it more than the other? what if you fall for someone you're not meant to fall for? these themes are SO fun and i love to explore them.

historical or period aus - i love aus, so jot that down, but when an author clearly loves the historical period and has taken time and care? i am there with my spoon. ALSO codes of conduct and manners just create such fun restraints to force characters who would just fuck it out to do other things because they CAN'T just fuck it out due to SCANDAL

slow burn - none of that 7k shit. but like a proper slow burn? a "takes 10k before they physically touch" slow burn? a "we're 50k in and they might actually kiss oh god please let them kiss" slow burn? mmm!!!! mmmMMMMMMMMMM

break up/make up - the thing is. the thing is!!!!! i like when characters have a history. a past. when they were something really important to each other and then that was ruined and now due to fate and or author contrivance they have been tossed together once more. like a salad. and then! the airing of grievances! the bad decision sex! (oh, the bad decision sex). the realization that there are things you know about them that they haven't told anyone else. you were the one who was there. you're the one who knows!!! in some ways you still might know them best! but right now you are worse than strangers because you may never become acquainted! until suddenly perhaps??? unless??????

arranged marriage / woke up married / marriage of convenience - i am combining all of these because the fact is i love when people get married for stupid reasons (or reasons that are not because of their ~heartfelt feelings~) and then they fall in love with the person they married and have big ol' feelings about it. i'm sure this comes as a shock.

#ask meme

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sillybub · 2 years ago

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Can you talk more about Anchovy? He's such a cool OC, and I'd love to know more about him and his relationship with Bustopher!

Yea sure!!

So Anchovy is an ex-henchcat who used to run evil errands for Macavity. He was was scrawny, skittish, flea-bitten scrap of a cat who ran with Macavity's crew out of desperate self-preservation.

One day while he was rummaging through trash bins, a very handsomely rotund gentletom approached him, asking asking directions. He looked way too fancy and clean to have been from around that part of town, and judging by the way he was squinting, Anchovy figured he was probably lost.

The gentlecat spoke very politely and kindly to Anchovy, and they were the first friendly words he'd heard in a very long time. Overcome by emotion at being treated with basic feline decency, Anchovy led Bustopher Jones back to the nicer part of town.

Bustopher remarked on how horribly skinny he was, and insisted on treating him to dinner at one of his favorite clubs. Bustopher's fancy friends helped him get all cleaned up, and he felt like a brand new tom.

See, Anchovy was polite. He was polite to other cats because that's how you generally avoid getting the shit beat out of you if you're lucky. Bustopher was being polite back, Anchovy realized, because he thought that everybody ought to be treated with respect and dignity. Even scrappy strays like himself.

Overwhelmed by the kindness he'd been shown, Anchovy swore to leave behind his life of crime. He starts camping out in Bustopher's giant yard. He gets introduced to the Jellicles. His life turns around completely in 24 hours.

But he shows up at the Junkyard and him and Demeter point at eachother because they have DEFINITELY seen eachother before. And that's actually the first time anyone becomes aware that he used to be associated with Macavity. Before then he was just "a very fine chap who needs more meat on his bones." Everybody kept hearing that Bustopher had a new tomfriend and they were not expecting that roadkill looking dude to show up let alone literally one of Macavity's lackeys.

And since Bustopher seemed to be completely unaware of that part of his history, everybody was grilling him super hard. Like, "how do we know this isn't some trick huh?? What are you lying to Bustopher about your past for?"

And it's not that Anchovy was lying per se; just omitting certain details about where he lived and what kind of business he got up to. See, Bustopher was just being so nice to him, and Anchovy figured if he knew that he worked for Macavity, he wouldn't want to hang out anymore. But he really did quit the gang--just for Bustopher.

It takes a big for the rest of the Jellicles to really warm up to Anchovy, and it helps that Bustopher was so insistent that he was a perfectly fine cat, and how dare they be so uncouth!!

Not to say that Bustopher Jones is naive. After all, Anchovy stopped to help a lost stranger get back home when he really had no good reason to. He saw that Anchovy was jumpy and hesitant and dirty, and figured that life probably hadn't been kind to him. But just because life can be cruel doesn't mean that cats have to be.

I think that Bustopher also sees like. Some of a past life of his in Anchovy. Bustopher has such a blessed life now that surely this is the result of having been the Jellicle Choice in a past life. It's all well and good to become the Jellicle Choice if you truly need it, but Bustopher could help this cat make and better life now, before it was too late for him. And Anchovy was such a clever, funny, well-mannered cat! And, well, quite the romantic, too...

Anchovy hangs out around Bustopher's big house, but he's still uncomfortable going inside, or really interacting with humans beyond eating their food. He's pretty awkward when it comes to talking to other cats (he appreciates manners and politeness because it gives him a script to work from), but on his own? He knows how to rough it like the best of them. He knows how to open bottles and cans that humans need to use tools for, and he knows how to climb into high places that you're not supposed to be able to get to.

All in all, they're definitely a mismatched couple. But Bustopher is very fashionable, and he thinks they look good together, and Anchovy is inclined to agree with him.

#bustopher jones #anchovy

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worldwatcher3072 · 1 year ago

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"Constitution Matters"

The Eighth Amendment's Role in Upholding Justice and the Warning Against its Erosion"

Welcome once again to "Constitution Matters," where we delve into the core principles of the United States Constitution and the significance of its amendments. In this segment, we continue our exploration of the Eighth Amendment, a cornerstone of justice and human rights, while also considering the warning it carries against potential erosion.

The Eighth Amendment: A Pillar of Justice and Humanity

The Eighth Amendment, found within the Bill of Rights, stands as a testament to our commitment to justice and human dignity. It reads:

"Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

This amendment, concise yet profound, plays a pivotal role in shaping a just and humane society. Here's a recap of its critical importance:

1. Protection Against Cruel and Unusual Punishment:

Central to the Eighth Amendment is its prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishments." It serves as a moral compass, preventing the abuse of power and ensuring that our criminal justice system respects the inherent dignity of every individual, even those who have committed crimes.

2. Curbing Excessive Bail and Fines:

The amendment also addresses the issue of excessive bail and fines, ensuring that financial penalties remain proportionate to the alleged offense and that bail is not used as a tool for punishment rather than securing a defendant's appearance in court.

3. Adapting to Evolving Standards of Decency:

The language of the Eighth Amendment adapts to changing societal standards of decency. It reminds us that what was once considered acceptable punishment may no longer align with our contemporary values of compassion, fairness, and respect for human rights.

4. Upholding Human Rights:

Beyond its legal implications, the Eighth Amendment underscores our commitment to upholding fundamental human rights. It sends a resounding message that, even in the face of criminal actions, we stand firm in our values of compassion, fairness, and respect for the dignity of each person.

5. Challenging Injustice:

The Eighth Amendment empowers individuals to challenge harsh or degrading treatment within the criminal justice system. It provides a legal pathway to address punishments that cross the boundary into cruelty, holding authorities accountable for their actions.

6. Encouraging Rehabilitation:

By discouraging excessive punishment and cruelty, the Eighth Amendment encourages a focus on rehabilitation within the criminal justice system. It acknowledges that our goal should be to help individuals reintegrate into society as responsible, law-abiding citizens.

A Warning Against Erosion:

While the Eighth Amendment stands as a beacon of justice, its interpretation and application have been a subject of ongoing debate and legal scrutiny. Perhaps even more concerning is the growing call by some to amend or weaken its protections.

Such attempts to "amend" the Constitution to eliminate or dilute these essential protections should serve as a clear warning. These actions run the risk of undermining the rule of law, eroding the principles of justice and human rights that our nation was built upon, and compromising the very essence of our Constitution.

In conclusion, the Eighth Amendment is not only a pillar of justice but also a reminder of our commitment to upholding human dignity and the rule of law. It carries an unequivocal warning against any attempts to weaken its protections, urging us to defend these fundamental principles that form the bedrock of our society.

As we continue our exploration of "Constitution Matters," let us remain steadfast in our dedication to justice, human rights, and the preservation of our constitutional safeguards.

Join us in our next installment as we delve further into the enduring significance of our Constitution.

#ConstitutionMatters #EighthAmendment #Justice #HumanRights #RuleOfLaw #LegalProtection #Amendment #BillOfRights #CriminalJustice #Fairness #HumanDignity #Safeguards #Warning #ConstitutionalRights #LegalPrinciples

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aaroncutler · 10 months ago

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On Trying: An Exchange About Essayistic Film Writing

January 6th: The link above leads to an exchange of letters between me and the German film critic and programmer Patrick Holzapfel, which was originally published in print form in a special edition of the magazine Jugend ohne Film (aka Youth Without Film) during the most recent edition of the Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival) in October of last year. The occasion was a launching of a young film critic’s workshop (coordinated by Patrick) within the festival, and the theme of the exchange was the current state of essayistic film writing, around which we shared with each other a total of eight letters (four from each of us) sent by e-mail between the beginning of September and shortly before the Viennale’s start.

I had known and admired Patrick’s writing for some years, principally through the beautiful series of English-language articles called “Full Bloom” that he and Ivana Miloš co-authored for the web publication MUBI Notebook. What struck me most about the Austria-based critic’s writing was its quality of what Thom Andersen once called a “militant nostalgia” – a certain dedication to using art as a way to preserve the memory of human decency, and one which goes beyond the world of art to embrace the entire surrounding world in its deployment. Within Patrick's very personal approach, dissatisfaction becomes a necessary tool in the work of helping the world become a more wholesome place, and the Self appears less as an agent than as a witness that can usefully recall how aspects of it once were. I identify both with the style of writing and with its sensibility, and it strikes me as hardly coincidental that we both greatly value Straub-Huillet’s films and the vision of cinema that they represent – one in which the past is a living, breathing, tangible thing that works to make the future better.

Our dialogue and the shape it took grew out of Patrick’s initiative, which I believe was inspired by conversations that we were already holding with each other. The initial challenge that I felt to my participation was a basic one founded on a question: What on Earth is there to say? The broad nature of the topic at hand, combined with my narrow range of experience, at first led me to feel that the premise of the thing was somewhat farcical, and I chose to deal with my feelings by thinking of myself as a clown character who might gain courage enough to take off his make-up as the conversation progressed. An irony of such a move, of course, resided in how my effort to eventually reach a point of seriousness led me to making multiple claims that I regretted almost instantly after publication. Yet with that said, I also understood some regret to be an unavoidable outcome of any exercise that involves sharing oneself, which one could inevitably always do and have done better. The point was to try.

As I look at the exchange again, two components of my participation strike me in particular as being hopefully useful. The first is the emphasis that I placed on the necessity for a writer to reach out to voices beyond his or her own for reference and inspiration, together with the importance of feeling dissatisfied with too much self-regard. This is a point that I don’t think should be belabored, due to the difficulties of being specific about something general and the impossibilities of resolving a broader problem with a single quick fix (for instance, if Patrick had invited someone more ostensibly different from him in my place). At this moment, I feel comfortable saying that it involves a work of constant searching, which likely no one has the energy to do always, but which often leads to edifying results. I also think that it’s important to say that one should not need to look purposefully for value in that which is different; if one simply casts a net wide enough, that value will emerge on its own.

The second component is the emphasis that I placed on hope as something that both keeps us alive and propels us creatively, outside of questions of simple survival. I find hope to be embodied in my contribution through the figures of two people named Mariana and Ava, whose special qualities exist for me in ways far beyond the realm of words.

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ofherbalisms · 1 year ago

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𝑪𝑶𝑵𝑵𝑬𝑪𝑻𝑰𝑶𝑵 𝑺𝑻𝑨𝑹𝑻𝑬𝑹 ! The following is a closed starter to 𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑨𝑴𝑶𝑬𝑩𝑨 connection, of which is ( 𝐎𝐏𝐄𝐍 / 𝐂𝐋𝐎𝐒𝐄𝐃 ). Any muse is free to respond to this starter, provided it is tagged as open, as doing so will secure the connection for your character. Please read the full connection excerpt before contacting me with interest. Please do not respond to this starter if it is tagged as closed or you do not intend to fill the connection. Setting: A river approx. 30 min outside of the compound

𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑴𝑶𝑶𝑵 𝑺𝑰𝑻𝑺 cool and high in a sea of meteors, alight some lightyears away. There is a chorus of crickets sharing stories amongst the overgrown vegetation. No longer are yards mowed into polite lawns; trees do not get ripped up from the ground by their roots, to preserve some idea of what the world should look like. No, the world is exactly as it is now. Save for the small speck of gardened plots their compound serves, the map is devoid of humanity's reign. In its place sits reminders of a life now passed: cars veered off roads with windows burst through by triumphing weeds; signs erected in fields pointing that way to the hospital, the McDonald's, the closest gas. The last decade of Reuven's life has felt like some strange, ever-unfolding fever dream. It reminds him of a book he read to his children, in the nursery so the baby could be read to sleep, about an island full of wild things and the child that lived amongst them. Only, in this grim reality, the wild things are feral and terrifying and unforgiving in their violence. And there are no children that live amongst them. Not really.

Palpable is the duality of man forced into survivalism. He re-imagines his life before, himself before, as some pleasant and funny clipshow where fathers ran around disinfected rooms, playing airplane with toddlers, and the worst anxiety that could be borne was from property taxes and falling out of love. How simple and menial it all seemed now, beneath this waning gibbous. How heavily the man yearned to beg his children to stop fighting over the remote during a phone call. Or to try performing a miracle to get his baby to eat mushed peas. Or to bicker with his wife about who would be the one to do the dishes tonight, one last time.

Now, it all really was just so complicated, wasn't it? This heaviness in his heart. Some days he wasn't sure how he could go on, and why he should. Some nights he stayed up staring at the smooth blankness of the ceiling from his springy bed, and dissipated into it. Other nights, he felt restless, body ready to fight against a threat that was not coming. At least, not right then. Some nights he would resort to pushups, or pullups, or jogging aimlessly around the compound. Others, he would purge the grief from his body through an unbecoming violence: he would venture out into the privacy of the forest to untether from his decency. Axe would beat into trees, bullets would hurl through unsuspecting infected and sometimes, accidentally, wildlife, though once his little rampage was finished he would feel guilty enough to go back and honor the latter's death through burial or meal-making. Other nights, he would sneak out of the compound for an opposite unbecoming: to go resign to himself; to who he truly was, deep down. To go rediscovering himself, amongst the forest. As he was set out to do now, sleuthing out of the compound from some underused section where a tree's branches had overhang past the wall. He could have just walked out the front gates, but he didn't want anyone worrying, or... searching, if he decided on a whim not to return. It was a steep drop, but nothing he hadn't successfully done before, and then a relatively quiet hike without much pest control to be done, until the trees opened up upon a river, untouched by the hands of the living or the dead. Its waters were unperturbed by the world around it, and it had become Reuven's secret sanctuary since he'd discovered it a few months prior. The previous missions to find solace here had all proved successful, but unbeknownst to the man, this time he'd gained a plus one. He'd been followed, and hadn't noticed.

The moonlight cast a long greyed hue down the surface of the water, illuminating clusters of lilies and algae and mosses climbing up surrounding trees. Reuven stripped to his boxers and carbine, unwilling to part with it even during a swim. It rested across his back, and he stepped into the water, allowing its icy lull to slowly climb up the longitude of his stature, until the ground had disappeared beneath his feet and the bottom few inches of his dark beard had been soaked through. Some lifetime ago, he'd been taught of leeches and whirlpools and brain eating amoebas. Their danger was so far from him now; the idea that any one of them could be his demise now, after so many years of surviving the worst that life could serve, it was inconceivable. The night pressed in on the man in the most soothing of ways. A deep inhale brought in a lungful of cool, refreshing oxygen before he disappeared into the river's darkness. When Reuven re-emerged, he filled his lungs again, feeling the comfort of the water's familiarity; of his own trueness, within it, and how it had made him free again in this moment, just as it had done so many other times in his life.

He was leaning back, eyelids dropping closed, to face the moon in spirituality; in truce; as if to tell it: I am you, and you are me, and I stop pretending otherwise. A few minutes passed in his meditation, as his form floated gently, carried along the calm sway of waves. The years' long ache of so many long days seemed to dissipate from his body and into the river. Reuven felt the peace of it all begin its nourishment, and he sighed almost as if in relief from the most vicious of pains, and then suddenly eyes snapped open and he drew his rifle's buttstock into the nook of his shoulder. Heart thudded with the shiver of surprise, as a voice had suddenly interrupted this agrestal scene.

Drenched in his own authenticity, the man fumbled to ground himself back into the danger of the moment. He was exposed raw in vulnerability, physically but also mentally, and he suddenly felt as if he were a trapped animal, waiting for the incisors of a predator twice his size. "Hello?" he called out, uncharacteristically tentative, after he didn't hear an encore. Dark eyes cast into the unlit forest, wondering if it had all just been his imagination. He stayed there, treading water, gun still drawn and pointing at nothing in particular because he could see nothing. Then, his company spoke again.

"Hello," they responded softly.

#connection starter!#open starter #endurestarter #if you would like to pick up this connectin you can message me to plot but you don't have to :)#tw grief #tw unhealthy coping #tw hunting #tw ptsd #featuring: the amoeba.

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acloudofsparklingdust · 1 month ago

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I understand the fury that some women's choices can awaken, but to say you no longer care about women's well-being as a collective feels like punishing women for the errors of men.

There are severe social consequences for women who leave their men. Leaving a rapist, as horrible as he is, can have very bad consequences for the woman who leaves him. If not the obvious threat of domestic violence, there's the quiet threat of losing your social circle because of that decision. Leaving an abusive man can lead to social isolation, from his family, from one's own children, from the community you're inserted in. Social death is very debilitating for women.

Things are not ever as black and white as we want them to be.

Don't get me wrong, women need to be held accountable for the decisions they make for themselves and for how they affect kthers, but I would never think what I or you perceive as stupidity, selfinhness, or shortsightedness (which is often what these women may perceive as self preservation) should be punished by the systemic mysoginy women face as a whole.

The punishment of male violence doesn't fit the "crime" of perceived stupidity imo. Even the worst woman, the one I least agree with, still deserves decency and to be treated as a human. The punishment for women's mistakes shouldn't be constantly 10x worse than the punishment men get. If even evil men do not get treated as bad as the nicest woman, why should evil women get treated worse than the worst men?

If we can't even wish women well, or at least a neutral standing in society, without even going out of our way to help them directly, just wishing them to be okay and to have better circumstances to lead to better choices in the future... I understand that the situation is dire, but that's losing your own humanity for the sake of others.

You don't need to give women you disagree with your time or energy, but to fully turn a blind eye to their suffering is probably going to have a long term negative effect to your own well-being, if you actually care or cared about feminist ideals. I can only imagine what a dark place the world is for you rn if you actually feel this way.

I understand the internet-guided desire to make blanket statements, especially in the face of such atrocities as the ones linked to the Gisele Pelicot case. But holding on to our own ability for empathy, even as we process how fucked up the world is, is a favor we do to ourselves.

as much as I hate to admit it. women as a collective are fucking stupid and uphold patriarchal practices because they believe it's in their best interest

#idk this is half cooked #but im wishing op a moment of clarity #misogyny #male violence #august rants

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separatist-apologist · 2 years ago

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A Fragile Little Flame

I know places we won't be found

Summary: Cassian has survived two wars and knows a thing or two about going up against a powerful adversary.

Nothing can prepare him for Nesta Archeron

my submission for @nessianweek

Read more on AO3

Warning: Dragons, mentions of past SA, human men

Mate. Mate. Mate.

It was all Cassian thought of. Day and night, ever since he’d first been hit in the face by her iron poker. Cassian ate, slept, and breathed Nesta Archeron. He thought he’d still want her, even if she hadn’t been his mate—Nesta was terrifying and fierce, an unstoppable force of nature he had no ability—or interest—in controlling.

He wanted her so badly it made his teeth ache. Nesta wasn’t like her sisters and Cassian likened her to a human General. There were rules she expected him to abide by and Cassian, by virtue of his birth and training, did as he was told. She wanted to be courted, to get to know him. And he came as often as he could with little gifts, hoping something might please his mate enough that she’d finally agree to let him mark her with his scales.

Nesta wasn’t the only thing Cassian was supposed to be thinking about. Five hundred years before, the humans wiped all dragons from the face of existence—or so they thought. He’d led one of the last battalions, had planned final last stand. There were enough to take down the humans, but not enough they’d last when the continent finally sent reinforcements.

And the king was dead, his son, too. Cassian’s friend. Rhysand.

It had been an agonizing decision. Did he preserve their dwindling ranks, or did he exact retribution? In the end, Cassian retreated and ordered utter silence. Let the humans think them dead. Perhaps, he’d reasoned back then, things would calm. They would become more tolerant.

With Rhysand and his father gone, Cassian had picked up the helm. Windhaven became his domain and for those five hundred years, Cassian had ruled as best he could. He wasn’t built for it—he did it because he loved his home, his people.

To learn that Rhysand had been alive the entire time, masquerading as a human king—messing with their minds so they never realized the same monarch had been overseeing them—well, Cassian was struggling with his grief.

His anger.

Rhysand wasn’t sorry. He offered no apology. He merely slaughtered his father and ordered Cassian to reassemble his army and fall into line. All of which Cassian had done. For him, it came at a massive personal cost. Some little piece of Cassian’s soul chipped away when he flew from Windhaven to Velaris. To Rhys, who merely embraced him. He couldn’t discuss it with Azriel, who was so wrapped up in his own mate he failed to see Cassian’s misery.

And not with Nesta, who resented him from taking her from that miserable estate when Eris Vanserra stole the continent's princess, risking outright war. Though Cassian was surrounded on all sides by people, he’d never felt more alone in his life. Cassian lay in bed, listening to Nesta down the hall pacing by the window like she always did. She was debating running away and he almost hoped she would. It would give him a reason to snap his teeth and snarl at something.

She settled but Cassian didn’t. And this night, he couldn’t force himself into sleep. He kicked off his blanket and dug out a pair of pants in the dark, hauling them over his hips and buttoning them just in case Nesta decided to peek into the hall. He’d heard her and Feyre talking about Rhysand’s nakedness and how off-putting it was. And he knew Nesta had been born to be some great lady.

A human males wife.

Not his mate.

She didn’t want to see his cock no matter how badly he wanted to show it to her. He’d done everything he thought he was supposed to. His whole life, Cassian acted with honor, with compassion and decency. For all the good it had done him, at any rate. Maybe he should have kidnapped her, too. Maybe he should have taken her up to his home hidden in the mountains, the place he went when he needed to think.

Cassian thundered down the stairs, not stopping even when he heard her door creak open. She was listening just as surely as he was. He cocked his head while pushing into the inky night air. Crisp and cold and drenched in pine. Just as he liked it. Cassian wouldn’t go far. Frustrated or not, Nesta was still his mate and still defenseless. Terrifying as she was, Nesta was still fragile.

Still his.

Cassian shifted, huffing steam into the chill as he stretched his wings. He’d been about to propel himself into the night when the window overhead opened and Nesta leaned out. He turned his head when she called his name oh so softly, tall enough he could bump his nose against the glass.

Nesta reared back, her silvery blue eyes wide.

“Are you leaving?”

He couldn’t respond. Cassian watched her.

Ask me to stay.

Nesta hesitated, a delicate hand on the latch of the window. Whatever war she fought with herself died abruptly. “Try not to be too loud when you return.” Cassian snarled at her words, his decision made when she tried to shut him out. No more. Either she rejected him or she accepted him. No more in between. Somewhere in the last vestiges of his rationality, Cassian knew he was venting his frustration over everything into his situation with Nesta. He couldn’t calm himself down, not as he all but destroyed the second floor of his home dragging a screaming Nesta into the cold. He held her tight, taking flight before someone could come investigate.

Az would know where he’d gone, would maybe even understand why he’d done this.

“Cassian,” Nesta pleaded as he rose higher towards that crescent moon. He held her tight in his clawed foot, a truly terrifying way to fly. He knew if he set her on the ground she’d bolt and he’d have to shift to chase her down.

“Cassian!” Nesta tried again, fingers gripping him roughly. “I’m sorry, just…please. Put me back down.”

He couldn’t. He could merely make this as painless as possible. His heart pounded erratically in his chest at the sound of her terror, her fear wafting towards him with every beat of his wings. They had to go higher still, to the highest mountain peak. Only he could take her down, unless she wanted to climb a winding, narrow staircase of ten thousand steps. He very much doubted it—Cassian had managed it on a few rare occasions he thought to try, burning his unrelenting anger on the stone until he was broken apart and reforged anew.

Technically, the mountain home is a palace. And if Cassian wanted to be even more technical, it belongs to Rhysand. He abandoned it five centuries ago, and Cassian moved in. If Rhys wanted it back, he could physically fight Cassian for it. Especially now, as Cassian landed on the open air bridge made of iridescent moonstone to drop Nesta onto the sleek black marble floor. She hit her hands and knees, panting desperately for a steady breath of air.

Perched on the railing, Cassian bellowed out a warning to anyone who might have thought to come after him. Snarling a blast of burning fire, the scent would linger in the air for days. Come no closer.

His mate was here and for the first time since he’d met her, Cassian gave way to instinct. He was trying so hard to act as if he were one of the human males that she’d been bred for.

Nesta had been born for him. He was wasting his time trying to sell her on the merits of the two of them together because Cassian would always be a dragon.

He shifted, dropping to the ground beside her with a casual grace she lacked. Nesta rose to her feet, shoving him hard in the chest. He was unmoved, though he grabbed her wrists one after the other when she tried to slap him hard across the face.

“Don’t,” he warned her.

“Take me back,” Nesta demanded. Little tendrils of her golden brown hair danced around her achingly lovely face. Cassian was tempted to do as she said. It wouldn’t make her any happier.

Dropping his hold on her before he pulled her closer and kissed her, Cassian shook his head.

“No.”

He turned his back to her, intending to let her follow him inside where he could show her to her room.

“I’ll reject the bond!” she yelled after his back. He went so utterly still, his heart splattering to his feet.

Anger flared through him. “Do it,” he dared, turning to face her down. Nesta, with her iron spine, jutted her chin in the air as he approached. He wondered if it irritated her that she had to look up at him, head and shoulders shorter than him. “Say the words.”

“And you’ll take me back?” she asked, a distinct tremble in her voice.

Cassian’s smile made him feel feral. It would kill him to do it. He thought he’d have to throw himself in the sea rather than live another five hundred years without her. He swallowed.

“I’ll deliver you to whichever human lord you desire,” he told her hatefully. “Is that what you’d prefer? A mortal male to lock you in another pretty estate? To breed you as he likes?”

“Compared to being locked in your pretty estate and bred by you?” she whispered in response.

He exhaled a breath, stepping away from her. “If that’s what you think of me after everything, then I wish you would reject the bond.”

It was risky, turning his back on her. It went against every instinct and yet Cassian couldn’t stand another second in her presence. His legs trembled, his throat tight. He was seconds from throwing himself at her feet and begging forgiveness.

His words were no way to treat a mate.

Cassian waited for those words— I reject the bond. I reject you.

Instead, Cassian heard Nesta’s clipping steps behind him, all but jogging to catch up with his longer gait. Relief flooded through him. Angry or not, Nesta didn’t want to sever what existed between them.

Elain Archeron had told him she couldn’t feel the thread her and Lucien shared until she agreed to complete the mating rite. Nesta couldn’t then, either. Cassian had always been so cognizant of that, so careful not to overstep. Hope bloomed warm in his chest all the same as he glanced down at her. Nesta’s cheeks were blotchy, stained red against her fair skin.

“This room,” he told her, taking her up a flight of stairs and down a marble floored hall. “It’s yours.”

“And yours?” she demanded, crossing her arms over her chest. Cassian opened his mouth to argue, but in truth, he wished it was. He merely shook his head.

“Downstairs,” he all but whispered. “If you need me…just yell.”

He thought she might reach out and touch him. Thought she might ask him to stay. Cassian would have done whatever she asked of him, even if it broke his heart. Nesta bit her bottom lip, nodding.

“I’ll need…I need my things, Cassian.”

He sighed. “I’ll get them for you.”

He turned his back not for the first time that night. He needed sleep and to reevaluate this entire plan. Needed to take her back before she stabbed him through the throat while he tried to sleep.

“Cassian?” Nesta called after his retreating back. He turned so fast the dark strands of his hair all but slapped him in the face.

“Yes?”

Her eyes flashed—not with anger, but hurt.

“Don’t yell at me ever again.”

It was the way she spoke those words that made his body run cold. The fear that laced through those eyes, the way her shoulders slumped. Another male had harmed his mate.

“Tell me his name,” Cassian whispered, daring one step towards her.

Nesta slammed the door before he could come any closer.

Cassian would learn this. He would teach her she could trust him, he would mark her with his scales.

And then he’d punish every male who had ever put their unworthy hands on her.

All in that order.

NESTA:

It wasn’t the first night she cried herself to sleep. Sometimes, Nesta thought she hadn’t stopped since her mother died, though she knew that wasn’t entirely true. She’d kept it together long enough to make sure Ferye and Elain were okay. Had taken over that miserable, crumbling estate when their father died, leaving no heir and no one but her to manage things. And she hadn’t let a crack show when Graysen had Elain dragged away in that cart, sacrificed to a monster she’d later married.

She cried that night, though. She cried thinking about the anger in Cassian’s usually kind hazel eyes and the way he’d spat those words at her. He hadn’t raised his voice, hadn’t tried to strike her or grab her or any of the things Nesta expected. It was all on his face. His usual careful yearning was gone, blinked out and remade into something that hated her.

And even though Nesta wasn’t sure if she wanted what Elain and Gwyn had, she was certain she never wanted Cassian to hate her.

She waited until she heard his heavy boots fade before she burrowed her face in the pillow and wept. She wasn’t sure why. For the first time in her life, Nesta didn’t feel the crushing weight of the world bearing down on her. She felt free and had ever since Cassian had insisted she join him in Windhaven.

Nesta didn’t understand why she was making things so difficult. Not just on him—Gwyn and Emerie didn’t trust her, either. Not entirely, anyway. They watched her with wary eyes even as they included her and Nesta couldn’t blame them. She’d spent so long willing herself to be made of ice that even when flames licked through her veins, it burned cold.

She fell asleep to fraught dreams where Cassian made good on his promise. Where he took her back to Velaris.

Back to Tomas.

Nesta didn’t dare tell anyone what was waiting for her. Elain had been allowed to tell Graysen no because their father died before a contract could ever be drawn up. Feyre had chosen Tamlin, poor match as he was. But Nesta had been gifted to Tomas, and only luck had kept her from fulfilling her end of things. Some nights, Nesta wondered if he and his horrible father hadn’t figured out that a dragon had snatched her away—more likely, they thought she’d run if they noticed her absence at all.

Tomas was supposed to keep his distance after the night in the garden. It had been Lord Graysen, of all people, who had answered her call for help. Elain had been gone by them, sacrificed to the beast and Nesta had been desperate. Tomas was her fiance and a lord to boot. She’d gone promising him anything in exchange to get Elain back.

Foolish. It hadn’t occurred to her he wouldn’t want money. Nesta had just barely escaped a fate her friend Gwyn had not, and it had been another villain who intercepted her. Lord Graysen, obsessed with their lands, had banished Tomas. He was dead, beheaded and buried. She’d watched Lucien do it from her bedroom window.

All the while wondering how long before Tomas came back.

He wouldn’t find her here but gods, she knew he’d try. She was just another pretty trinket for his collection. He would absorb the Archeron lands and then it would be just as Cassian had said. He’d breed her until there was nothing left of her.

Nesta woke to hazy sunlight filtering through a gauzy curtained window. She was still in her dress from the night before, hair still braided in a crown around her head. She forced herself up, cracking her stiff joints as she made her way to the door. She needed something to wear and meant to cajole Cassian into taking her back.

As it turned out, there was no need. Her wooden trunk was placed right outside the door. Cassian had gone, just as he said he would. Why she doubted him, Nesta would never know. Cassian had honor, was a man of his word. Her chest ached thinking of his face from the night before.

So alive with rage.

Tell me his name.

Nesta was so tempted.

Instead, Nesta unwound her hair and bathed in a chamber big enough for a muscled man with wings, practically swimming in the bubbled water. It was the happiest she’d been in a while and when she emerged, hair damp from the towel, her body clad in a soft silver dress with buttons down the front, Nesta thought she might seek out Cassian and see what he was doing.

Needle him a little. His presence was soothing.

As it turned out, Nesta didn’t need to. She pulled open the door, fingers sliding through her hair to rebraid it, and found Cassian waiting on the other side. His eyes widened at the sight of her unbound hair and too late, Nesta realized he’d never seen it. His own dark hair was half pulled from his ruggedly handsome face, the facial hair against his jaw neatly trimmed to stubble. She wondered, as she studied his face, what had given him the scar that cut through one of his eyebrows or the faint slice over the bridge of his nose.

In broad hands, Cassian held a tray of breakfast food. He meant to feed her? Nesta blinked, suddenly unsure what to say to him.

“I…” he trailed off, nostrils flaring. “You look nice.”

She swallowed, drinking in the brown of his skin and how nicely it offset the hazel of his eyes. He wore a dark tunic and his fitted pants and was perhaps more casual than she’d ever seen. No weapons or strapped leathers.

Just Cassian.

She couldn’t tell him that, so instead, Nesta nodded. “Thank you,” hating how her voice sounded so clipped and bothered. It killed the softness in his eyes. Walls up. She saw the way his spine straightened when he handed her the tray, how he no longer tried to touch her hand with his fingers. Why did he even want her anymore? She’d been making courting so utterly miserable.

Any other man would have given up. There was nothing to gain from her—Tomas was set to take it all. All Cassian would get was her.

Nesta walked the tray to a little table facing the window, curious about their new arrangement. “Am I supposed to stay in here?”

“You may go wherever you like,” he replied softly from behind her. Practically pleading. She knew what he wanted and some small part of her wanted to give it to him. Nesta couldn’t be nie and she couldn’t be compliant.

“But only in the house.”

She spun, catching the hard glint in his eyes. “There are ten thousand steps down the mountain, if you’d like to try your hand,” he replied. “Be my guest—”

“I still want to see Gwyn and Emerie,” she interrupted, cutting him off before he could say something they’d both regret. “Azriel promised to train me.”

“They can come here, then.”

“And my sister Feyre still needs my help with her wedding. I’m responsible for her dowry. You promised,” Nesta added, reminding him of what he’d said to convince her to come to Windhaven in the first place. His expression softened.

“I remember the agreement.”

“Do you?” she hissed, looking around the room. Cassian turned his back without a word, leaving her alone in that room, having made exactly no headway at all. Nesta sighed, arching her neck in an attempt to alleviate some of her stress.

Tell me his name.

She’d tell him and Cassian would kill Tomas and Feyre would lose what little standing she had left. Feyre and Tamlin were supposedly a love match. Feyre was already tainted by Elain’s association with a dragon. Two sisters mated to two dragons was intolerable and Nesta didn’t believe for a moment that Tamlin would stand beside her.

Especially if he learned Feyre technically had her own mate—the dragon king.

Nesta ate what Cassian offered gratefully before making her way through what could only be described as a palace. The man himself was nowhere to be found which suited her just fine. She was still warring between confessing everything and just ending things entirely. She didn’t want to. Cassian was all wrong. The opposite of what she’d been trained for and yet Nesta wanted what he was offering, certain it would feel like peace.

Nesta swallowed those feelings, just as she always had. Instead, she mapped out the palace. She found a large, empty dining room with a table big enough for twenty people. She wondered how often Cassian ate alone here. The image made her heart ache.

Nesta found a pool on the lower level, steam curling as it overlooked the sloping mountainside. She could picture Cassian here, too. She could picture him everywhere—in the bedrooms, the study, the lounge and finally, the library. The library made Nesta reevaluate every harsh thing she’d ever said to Cassian. He couldn’t have known the comfort books offered her and yet he still had this large, two story space.

Squashy, leather furniture draped with crocheted blankets broke up stacks that stretched floor to ceiling. A trailing staircase took her to the second level, the railing overlooking the bottom. There were books on every topic she could imagine—including Nestas favorite.

Romance.

She could remember sneaking her very first when she’d been ten years old and hiding it beneath her pillow. It had been too grown up—so many quivering bosoms and men’s appendages described as swords. And yet, it was all so thrilling to her, despite the sex. Stories of men willing to risk it all and women who were genuinely cared for.

Loved.

That was not the future promised to her, which only made Nesta want it more. She wanted someone like the heroes in those stories. A man who loved her beyond reason, who would have done anything for her. And she wanted to be that kind of woman, too. Nesta felt fragile as she pulled down a stack of covers that seemed interesting to her before tucking herself beneath a blanket.

She spent the morning tucked into a chair, reading something new until she forgot where she was. It was Cassian’s boots on the floor that drew her back to reality. He pushed into the library, a little basket in hand. He cocked his head, his expression unreadable and she wondered if they were about to have another fight.

“This is for you,” he murmured, striding into the library to offer her the basket. Nesta set the book face down on the arm of the chair, leaning forward to take the basket from his hands. It was her fingers that brushed his hand that time, touching the soft red scales that covered his wrist.

Cassian’s eyes fluttered shut.

“What is this?”

“For you,” he said gruffly, putting space between them. Nesta waited until he retreated before pulling aside the blanket atop the basket. Nestled inside was a fragile music box. Made of what she assumed had to be real silver, and shaped like a pretty, circular ball and when she slid her nails against the crease to open it, a familiar melody sang through the air.

How Cassian knew this was her favorite, Nesta would never know. She swallowed thickly, tears rising hot in her throat. How had he known? Who had told him? Holding it close to her chest, Nesta stormed from the library, her hurt threatening to spill out of her like a broken dam.

He wasn’t far. She found the general hovering just outside the door with a wary expression.

“Who told?” she demanded.

He huffed out a breath. “Are you angry with me?”

She was trembling. “Who told you, Cassian?”

“No one told me!” he snapped, closing the distance between them. Gripping her arms in his broad hands, Cassian stared down at her with the same overwhelming hurt that was all but drowning her. “I know you like I know myself.”

She shook her head. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Nesta wrenched from his grasp. She meant to give him back the music box, to make him regret having ever offered her this at all. She couldn’t do it. No one had ever given her such a thoughtful gift. Something for her, no strings attached. Cassian watched, that hurt softening into a wholly different emotion.

“Nes,” he whispered. She backed away, eyes burning.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Nes,” he tried again, watching her walk away from him. Nesta had to force herself to turn her back.

To walk away entirely.

CASSIAN:

Cassian woke in the dead of the night to utter silence. His body was tense—tight, like a threat was looming in the dark. He sat up, trying to recall the dream he’d had. Maybe that was what had pulled him, he thought. Rubbing the heels of his hands against his eyes, Cassian forced himself to breathe, to relax.

It didn’t work. Instinct said something was wrong, was urging him to fight. He pushed himself out of bed, fumbling for a pair of pants. He’d just slung them up over his hips when he heard what must have pulled him from sleep the first time.

Loud, terrifying screams filled the air, reverberating off the vaulted ceilings. Nesta. His mate was screaming with fear, was calling him for help. Cassian reached for a curved blade on the edge of his nightstand before running from the room. She was a floor above him, an offering he’d made so she didn’t feel like he was hovering over her shoulder.

It seemed like a mistake. What was in there? In the seconds it took him to reach her, every terrible scenario played out in quick succession in Cassian’s mind. Something had crawled through her window, was attacking her, was going to kill her—

He shoved open the door, blade outstretched, to find Nesta thrashing in her sheets. A sheen of sweat shone against her beautiful face, her too-thin body tangled in the blankets. He set his knife down when he realized the only foes she fought were in her mind. What haunted is mate? Who had harmed her so irrevocably that she was trapped in her own mind?

Panting with anger and hatred, Cassian went to her. She still needed him, even if she didn’t want to. He knew she’d wake up and shove him away, would cut him into bloodied ribbons for the crime of seeing her so vulnerable.

“Nesta,” he whispered, hauling her body up against his. Her cheek pressed to his bare chest, her arms sliding around his neck. “Nesta, you’re safe. Wake up.”

She clung to him, sharp nails slicing against his skin.

“Cassian?” she whispered, her voice so small. So fragile. He couldn’t stop himself from pressing a kiss against her unbound hair.

“I’m here,” he agreed, heart pounding.

Don’t send me away. I love you.

“Did I wake you up?” she asked, her voice wavering. Her whole body trembled against him. It might have been funny, had she not been so scared and sad.

“No,” he lied, thumb stroking over her cheek. “I was still up. What were you dreaming about?”

She stilled. “Nothing.”

Nesta reminded him of the wildlings out east. Of Lucien, even, from the forest. Alone and uncared for for so long, she didn’t know how to trust him. Maybe she had trusted a male once and he’d hurt her.

She let him hold her, stroking her hair until her wild heart slowed. He knew he needed to go before she came to her senses. Before she realized he’d witnessed something vulnerable and meant to punish him for it. Cassian’s heart was already bruised when it came to Nesta—he couldn’t take any more rejection.

Pressing one last kiss to her head, Cassian began untangling himself.

Nesta grabbed his bare bicep. “Wait,” she whispered, her voice practically a whimper. It made his chest ache. What haunted her?

Who hurt his mate?

“Yes?” he managed, his voice trembling. She looked up, those silvery blue eyes glowing in the dark. Beautiful—she was so stunningly beautiful, even when she was sad. Even when she hated him. Cassian still couldn’t believe she belonged to him at all. He couldn’t fathom what he’d ever done to deserve her.

“Stay with me?” she asked, scooting on the bed to make room. “Please?”

“You…” he swallowed. “You do not need to beg me. I’ll do anything you ask.”

Her scent was everywhere, burning his nostrils. His body reacted and Cassian, terrified his cock would ruin this moment for him, settled on his back and drew her against his chest so there was no danger of anything touching her that shouldn’t. Nesta trembled even beneath the blanket, even with his body radiating heat.

Cassian stroked hair from her face. “What do you dream of?”

She said nothing. He supposed he should have expected that. He took a breath. “I dream of the first war.”

She twisted, arms resting on his chest. “The first war? You were alive for that?”

He nodded. “I was young…barely older than you are now, when they came. We weren’t prepared. I was lucky that day. I was up here with Rhysand…my mother was in Windhaven.”

“How did they get up here?”

“There used to be a path. It was crossable in the spring and summer months. We traded between us. It was tense at times…but peaceful during others.”

“What shifted?”

Cassian didn’t know, could only shrug his shoulders. “I think there was frustration brewing among the humans. It was a dry season—everyone was hungry. I suspect they were looking for someone to blame and were tired of resource sharing. They did not burn any of our crops but raided them instead.”

Nesta rubbed his chest soothingly. “You dream about that?”

He laughed humorlessly. “No. I merely think about it. I was too young to be in charge of anything back then. My mother still made dinner for me each night.” Gods, but how he missed her.

“I dream of the aftermath. Of the bodies of children and females…how they used to rip off our wings and staple them to posts in warning. How many we lost…and how I became general by default. It was my decision to back down. To hide.”

He swallowed hard.

“I never wanted to have to make that decision.”

Nesta lowered her mouth, kissing his chest. It was the first kiss she’d ever offered him. Cassian had been so afraid to tell her that story, that she’d think less of him.

“You did what you had to do, Cassian. There are no good decisions in war.”

He blinked back his own tears, swallowing his regret. No one had ever told him that. Azriel had merely nodded tightly, falling in line obediently, though Cassian knew he hadn’t liked it. Azriel had wanted retribution.

Azriel didn’t want to lead. Rhysand chose to hide with his traitor father among the humans, biding their time for five hundred years. And Cassian was alone, shouldering the burden of those decisions silently. He resented it, though he was trying not to. Rhys expected him to fall back in line, but Rhys had lived in a palace.

Rhys had let those males send human females to die, appeasing their lust for blood and their hatred of their own kind. It had taken a human female to motivate the prince to finally act. Cassian had a lot of regret about that, too. He felt like a failure across the board—a failure to his people, a failure to his mate and her family, and maybe worst of all, a failure to himself and his own values.

“It’s not your fault, Cassian,” she whispered, drawing him back to the present. “You’re one man. You can’t be responsible for every decision someone else makes.”

“Someone has to,” he whispered. “Someone has to take care of them.”

Nesta exhaled warmly against his body. “And who takes care of you?”

He almost said his mate. He didn’t dare, not when he was holding on to her by a thread. At any moment, Nesta might quit altogether, might demand he release her. Take her back. Cassian took her wrist in his hand and pressed a kiss to her palm.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said.

Nesta swallowed, twisting so her cheek was back on his chest. “Cassian?” she whispered.

He held her tighter, catching the quaver in her voice.

“Yes?”

He could feel her heart pounding in her chest, thudding wildly with fear. She reeked of it. He was so desperate to know what scared his iron-spined mate. What could make his lovely female quake with fear? She’d stared him down with an iron poker, after all. She’d looked their king in the eye with nothing but disdain.

“Feyre is getting married,” she said, her lips dragging over his skin. Cassian forced himself not to react, to only hear the words coming out of her mouth.

“Perhaps,” he agreed. He very much doubted Rhysand would let his mate marry another male without some sort of fight.

“She loves him,” Nesta tried to explain. “He…he helped us, when Elain was taken. He kept Graysen from all but taking the estate. He’s…he’s decent enough.”

Hardly high praise, and yet Cassian didn’t argue. Nesta was working herself into something and he wanted to hear it. He merely stroked her back, waiting for her to continue.

“Being here with you…being with you…it could ruin that marriage.”

His stomach splattered in his chest. “Oh.”

He didn’t know what else to say to her. Cassian needed to step away. He knew what was coming. She was going to reject him, reject their bond. He couldn’t even fault her for it—the reasoning was good. Compassionate.

He pulled his arm from beneath her, sitting up. Nesta lunged, that scent of fear stronger than before. “Please don’t go,” she pleaded.

“I can’t…” his voice was raw even to his own ears. “I’ll take you home in the morning.”

He swung his legs off the bed but Nesta was quicker, holding his bicep in both hands, her nails slicing against his flesh.

“Cassian, please listen.”

He paused, daring to look over at her. Her eyes glimmered with water, rimmed red from those unshed tears. Cassian swallowed his own grief and sat back on the bed. He still wanted to help her, despite his fractured heart.

“I’m listening.”

“I’m engaged.”

The world seemed to rip open. Blood roared through his ears, drowning out any sensible, rational words he might have said in response. She was his mate. He’d been courting her for months. How could she possibly be engaged to another male?

“How could you not tell me?” he said, voicing his thoughts out loud.

Nesta let go of his arm, hugging her chest tightly. “I thought you’d leave.

Cassian was falling to pieces. “Leave my mate?”

“I didn’t understand! I just…a lot of men have courted—”

“You’re my mate,” he repeated. “That…engaged?”

“My father arranged it before he died and my fiance…our estate is worth a small fortune, Cassian. I’ve put him off, but…”

Cassian couldn’t stand it. It wasn’t her fault and still she was breaking his heart. He rose to his feet quickly. “You intend to marry him.”

“I have to marry him,” Nesta whispered. “I have no choice.”

He almost fell to his knees and begged her to let him kill the male. Kill his whole family, even. Cassian could spare her, he reasoned. Could fix this the only way he really knew how. And

Cassian understood that Nesta didn’t understand that Rhysand was going to have her sister one way or the other and her sacrifice would mean nothing. Her sisters would find happiness and she, it seemed, would doom herself to a small life with some human male.

Cassian only wanted to know one thing.

“Is he kind?”

Nesta looked down at her hands. Cassian thought he could survive it if he knew she was being cared for.

“Does he love you?”

She didn’t answer. The last pieces of his heart ground to dust, leaving him empty and wrecked. She couldn’t even lie to him. Couldn’t promise she’d find peace in this marriage. Cassian turned his back to hide his own sorrow.

“I’ll take you home tomorrow.”

He left her in her bed, all but running from that room.

Cassian left his heart with her.

NESTA:

Nesta paced back and forth. She hadn’t expected Cassian to agree so easily. She’d hoped if she told him, he would offer to help her. Would think of some solution Nesta had missed, something that would preserve Ferye’s engagement while freeing her.

He’d just…let her go. And it angered her, at first. Filled Nesta with a rage so white hot and cold that she’d almost followed after him to scream in his face. Why didn’t he fight back? He said he wanted her and then he just…let her go. She wanted him to react, to refuse to send her back. That’s what Azriel would have done, she reasoned.

The fire had banked to nothing by the time Nesta understood why Cassian walked away. He’d told her, hadn’t he? When he’d explained the war and what haunted him—all those decisions he’d made that he didn’t want to in service of some greater good.

Cassian was never going to force her to stay and she’d been too cowardly to tell him what she wanted. She needed to just ask him for his help.

No one had ever helped Nesta. Not her mother, who had often taken a switch to her knuckles when she spoke back—training Nesta to remain silent. To be obedient. And certainly not her father, who had never once cared if he made a decision on her behalf that hurt her. Her sisters were too young and Nesta had never put that burden on them. She’d merely been the shield. If someone needed to put their body in front of the firing squad, it ought to be her.

She knew where his room was without ever being told. She just knew. Nesta pushed open the door and found him standing in front of his window. Still shirtless, his golden brown skin edged with blood red scales. Cassian was beautiful. His hair was unbound, hanging in soft, dark waves that brushed over his shoulders. What would it feel like to run her fingers through it?

He turned, his expression guarded again. She wanted to see him like he’d been in her bed. Vulnerable and open.

She had to meet him somewhere, she reasoned.

“I don’t want to go back,” she whispered, closing his bedroom door quietly behind her. “Please don’t take me back.”

Cassian crossed the room in an instant, sweeping her off her feet to hold her against his chest. He fell into his bed, arms around her so tight it stole the breath right out of her lungs. He had his face pressed into her hair and his body shook silently. She didn’t dare look up to see if he cried or not. She merely let him hold her like she was something precious. Something he cherished.

Cassian got himself together with several loud gulps of air. “Tell me what you want, Nesta. Tell me what you need.”

“I can’t be responsible for ruining Ferye’s wedding,” she whispered. She didn’t believe for a moment that Rhysand would somehow scoop Ferye up at the last minute. He’d had several chances with Feyre—including a night where he’d been entirely naked—and Feyre remained unmoved. Ferye could be stubborn that way.

Cassian tangled his fingers through her hair, tilting her head until she was looking at him. His expression all but smoldered, his eyes slightly reddened from the tears he’d shed. She reached up to caress his face.

“I can’t marry him.”

He lowered his mouth and Nesta didn’t stop him. Didn’t want to stop him. Cassian’s lips found her own, gentle and soft. A perfect rebuttal to the kiss Tomas had forced upon her. There was nothing disgusting about the moment and instead of fear and revulsion, Nesta felt undiluted want.

She let herself run her fingers through his hair, let her nails graze against the neatly trimmed stubble of his jaw. He moaned softly, pressing his luck to let his neck kiss slide into the first. They were on dangerous ground. Attraction had never been their problem.

It was everything else. Nesta didn’t stop him even when she knew she ought to. Even when he shifted her so her legs straddled his lap and his hands held her hips firmly. She could feel his desire through his pants and her nightdress. She didn’t stop him when his tongue slid over her lips, begging to be let inside and certainly not when she did what he wanted.

Cassian tasted like the cold air smelled. It was Nesta’s turn to moan, to kiss him with that same frantic need. Nesta clung to him like a life raft, her own tongue finding his own to taste, to touch. Her body seemed to understand what to do instinctively, rolling against him in search of friction. An ache was building between her legs and no amount of rubbing against him would fix it. And while Nesta’s hands roamed over his skin, touching his scales, his muscles, his skin, Cassian kept his hands firmly on her face.

She understood why. She was carried away which meant he had to stay in control. But oh. How she thought she’d like to see him wild like he’d been when he’d come to rescue her. Cassian had been terrifying in his beast form, wings flared in defense of her.

Cassian was the one who broke the kiss, gasping roughly as he held her face in both hands. “Nesta,” he panted, her name a prayer on his lips. “Nesta.”

She swallowed hard. No one spoke to her like that. Spoke about her like that. Cassian thumbs stroked her face, forehead resting against her own.

“Don’t leave me, Nes,” he whispered.

She curled her arms around his neck, burying her face against him. Nesta didn’t want to leave him. She wanted a way out of her fathers mess. She didn’t know how long they sat there like that, wrapped up in the other. Holding each other like a lifeline. That’s what he was to her—Nesta’s head stayed above metaphorical water so long as she could count on Cassian.

“Surely there is a way out,” Cassian finally murmured, kissing her temple. “Tomorrow, I’ll speak to Rhysand about it.”

That made her nervous. “If he interferes—”

“Do you trust me?”

The words robbed her of breath. That was what it all boiled down to, wasn’t it? Did she trust Cassian to uphold his word and help, or did she assume she’d have to do this by herself? It was so dangerous to be vulnerable, to risk getting hurt. He might disappoint her. Might hurt her.

Nesta’s heart pounded erratically in her chest as anxiety rose in her throat. It was not in her nature to yield an ounce of control.

“I trust you,” she replied. Cassian’s eyes fluttered shit, his relief palpable. He kissed the corners of her mouth before sliding her out of his lap. Cassian pulled her into his bed, arms wrapped around her body, face nuzzling against her neck.

“I’ll keep you safe, Nesta.”

She turned to look at him. To ask him the same question she’d asked mere hours before. “And who takes care of you?”

The faintest hint of smile danced over his beautiful face.

“My mate.”

#nessian #nessianweek #nesta archeron #cassian #cassian archeron #cassian x nesta #nessian supremacy #yay cassian!#probably the best dragon of the group tbh #he is doing his dragon best #itll be fun to watch him become feral over the course of the next few chapters

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