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wlntrsldler · 4 years

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unrequited (draco malfoy/cedric diggory series)

PROMPT: You and Cedric grew up together. After the tragedy of the Triwizard Tournament, you’re left feeling empty without your best friend. Draco Malfoy steps into the picture. Will the feelings be reciprocated? Or will it be unrequited?

WARNINGS: MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH, angst, fluff, sadness???

PAIRING: draco malfoy x reader and cedric diggory x reader; hufflepuff reader

WC: 2.2K+

UNREQUITED MASTERLIST

PART 1

“You know you're my best friend, right?” Cedric muttered from beside you, nudging the side of your rib with his elbow. “Always will be.”

The final stage of the Triwizard tournament was creeping up behind you. It was said to be one of the most dangerous obstacles in history. Cedric acted smug about it, acting like the idea of death didn’t phase him one bit. In front of other Hufflepuffs, he let out an empty chuckle, declaring that the TriWizard cup would be home on the mantle of the Hufflepuff common room by the end of it all. But during the moments where only he and you existed in the world, his lips quivered and his breath was broken as he explained to you how much he loved you.

During Cedric’s first two years at Hogwarts, he would come home and tell you all about his year. He would teach you spells in secret and make potions with you so by the time you entered as a first-year, you were already ahead of everyone else. He would spend his days and nights with you when he wasn’t at Hogwarts. Fellow students would make fun of him for how often he would receive owls with your name attached to the back of the envelope.

Cedric was your best friend. Always will be.

“Of course, I know, you silly man.” You huffed, turning your head to face him. He was staring at you, eyes twinkling under the soft glow of the lonely moon. The air was crisp and the winds were quiet. The only thing that could be heard was the soft whispers between the two of you and if one were to focus enough, the incessant beating of Cedric’s heart rattling in his chest and the breaking of your heart in yours. “Why are you telling me this?”

He sighed, gulping down any sign of false bravado. He knew he never had to fake with you. You always did understand him, better than anyone ever could. “Y/N… Tomorrow’s obstacle is said to be deadly. I just wanted to tell you how much I love you in case it’s the last thing I’ll ever say to you.”

“Nonsense,” You replied, waving a hand in front of his face. You shook your head, not accepting the venomous words that slip past his lips. You blinked away the tears pricking your eyes, fearing that if you even let one drop slip, it might become a reality. “You’re Cedric Diggory. Nothing can break you.”

Cedric laughed a hearty laugh, startling the small animals finding sanctuary within the bushes that stayed static beside your bodies. His finger absently traced the scar on your hand, one that you got a few years back as you hid behind the Whomping Willow before you knew of its capabilities. Cedric rushed over to you once he heard you yelp in pain, a few meters away from the irritated creature. You ended up with Madam Pomfrey for a night and a half and the scar was the constant reminder you had of the memory. “Can you at least say it back?”

“Fine,” You playfully rolled your eyes, grinning at the sound of his laugh. It was your favorite thing. “You, Cedric Diggory, are my best friend. For now and for always.”

Cedric beamed and slowly started to sit up. You followed his actions and took his arm once he offered it to you. He led you a few steps towards the secret passageway that you both took most nights to get away before stopping. You cocked your head to the side, shooting him a puzzled look. He suddenly hugged you, tightly as if you were his lifeline, and mumbled incoherent, sweet, nothings into your ear. Cedric placed his chin on the top of your head, a single tear landing on your crown, making you shiver. “I’m scared, Y/N.”

You let out a broken sigh, digging your fingertips into the muscle of his back. You feel his warmth radiating on the side of your cheek, suddenly feeling wet. You hadn’t noticed the tears slipping from your eyes. It was quickly, too quickly, starting to feel like a reality. “Me too, Ced.”

“What do we have here?” A smug voice sneered from behind you. You and Hermione twisted your heads to look at the man harboring the posh voice. Malfoy. “A Hufflepuff and a mudblood. Pathetic duo, if you ask me.”

The boy was dressed in all black, a hint of emerald green in the silver pin that he sported on his vest. Crabbe and Goyle stood behind him, smiles reaching their eyes as they followed the Slytherin prince around. Draco’s hair fell perfectly to frame his face, loose strands looking intentional as they landed on the areas that made him look ethereal. It was unfair really, how beautiful Draco Malfoy was. He was like straight out of a painting; pale skin, soft hair, pink lips, that often contrasted his dark exterior and his detestable character.

“Get out of here, Malfoy.” You spat, narrowing your eyes at him. “Why are you even here? I’m sure all of us would have a lovelier time if you went on your merry way.”

“You’re a courageous little Hufflepuff, aren’t you?” He teased, words dripping with distaste. “I’ll have you know that I’m here to watch Potter crumble into pieces. Although, I’ll also settle for Diggory if it comes down to it.”

You let out an angry huff, “Oh, you little shi-”

“Y/N, don’t.” Hermione placed a hand on your shoulder, holding you back. “He’s not worth it.”

Draco chuckled, crossing his arms over his chest. “A mudblood telling me my worth? Comedy. Where’s your boyfriend? Did Dumbledore finally get tired of housing the neverending line of Weasley scums?” He turned to Crabbe and Goyle. “Took him long enough.”

“Sorry to burst your bubble, Malfoy.” Ron chirped up from behind the three boys, three butterbeers in hand. “But I’m still here and I’m not going anywhere.”

Draco rolled his eyes but left without another word, the two boys following him as soon as he took his first step. Ron took his spot beside you and Hermione, passing you the butterbeers. The three of you looked down to where Harry and Cedric stood, the two boys in deep focus before the final round started.

Cedric’s eyes wandered the arena, stopping when his met yours. He smiled, teeth uncontained behind his lips and raised a thumb up. You mirrored his actions, raising your butterbeer in celebration of him making it this far. Dumbledore called for Cedric’s attention, letting him know that it was soon to begin. He nodded and got ready. Before the sound of the cannon, he turned to look at you one last time and mouthed, “I love you.” Just as you were going to reply, the cannon went off and Cedric disappeared into the darkness.

You heard disgruntled mumbling from a few people beside you. You turned and saw Draco with his eyebrows furrowed, staring at you. His cheeks were dusted with the mellowest shade of pink when he saw that you caught him staring. He quickly turned away, bottom lip caught between his teeth. You continued to stare, unable to decipher the look on the boy’s face. His eyes darted back to look at you, awkward under your intense fascination.

“Y/N?” Hermione’s voice pulled you out of your daze. She waved her hand in front of you, growing concerned. “Hello, Y/N?”

You snapped your attention back to her, blinking a few times to adjust your view. “I’m sorry, what?”

Ron laughed, taking a sip from his butterbeer. He motioned to where Cedric stood earlier, “She asked if you finally told Cedric how you felt about him.”

You shook your head, eyes growing wide. “I told you guys. I’ll never tell Cedric how I feel. It’s not like he’ll return the feelings anyway.”

“Have you seen the way he looks at you?” She asked, a slight irritation to her voice. “Sweetheart, that’s how every girl wants to be looked at. He’s so in love with you. It always baffled me how you never noticed.”

“Hermione,” You groaned, staring at your stubborn friend. “He doesn’t look at me in any way. He sees me as his best friend, nothing more.”

“Are you bloody stupid?” Ron responded, backing Hermione up. He ran his fingers through his ginger hair, tugging at the ends in frustration. “We’ve known the two of you for a fraction of the time you two have known each other and even we can see that you two are madly in love!”

“We agree.”

You looked past Ron’s shoulder to see the Weasley twins, grinning and nodding in agreement with their brother.

“You two don’t even know Cedric.”

Fred cocked an eyebrow, “We’ll have you know, we have Potions class together. He always wants to partner with us.”

“So yes, dear Y/N. We do know Cedric.” George chimed in.

“Well perhaps you do know him,” You trailed off. “But that doesn’t mean you guys know what he’s feeling. You’re just guessing.”

“It’s not guessing when he said it himself.”

Your eyes widened at the twins’ revelation. As you were about to question the two boys, a loud commotion caught everyone’s attention. All of you turned to the source of the sound to find Draco and a shattered glass of butterbeer pooling at Crabbe’s feet. His eyes narrowed, shooting daggers in your direction.

He spat, “Are we here to gossip or are we here to watch the Triwizard tournament?”

All of you remained silent, not knowing the reason for his sudden outburst. The words that the twins let slip danced in your thoughts the entire time. Everyone’s patience ran thin as the competition seemed to drag on. People left and returned upon hearing any sign of movement. You stayed, however, no matter how long it took for anyone to come back. You looked down at your yellow sweater, the initials “C.D” embroidered on the left sleeve.

Cedric got you the sweater the summer before your first year at Hogwarts. He picked it up at a shop at Hogsmeade, in yellow, confident that you were going to be placed in the same house as him. He knew you were always scared that you were going to be separated into a different house so he did little things to put your mind at ease. ‘I’ll be by your side no matter what happens but in your heart and mine, you’ll always be a Hufflepuff.’

You smiled at the memory, rubbing your thumb over the golden thread. You looked up at the sound of shuffling feet, moving away from you. You saw Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle making their way out, growing impatient with the lack of gore, you assumed. The blond boy disappeared behind the doors, slipping away from your line of vision.

You were on your third butterbeer, eyes slowly fluttering closed when you heard an audible gasp coming from everyone in the crowd. Your eyes shot open and watched as Harry and Cedric appeared in front of everyone. Harry’s body was covering Cedric.

You stood up, wanting to get a better look. You couldn’t wait to hug Cedric and congratulate him. Then you heard someone wail. Mr. Diggory.

Your knees buckled as you heard him yell and scream as he rushed down the steps to meet Cedric. The breath was knocked out of your lungs as you leaned against the barricade for support. You felt Hermione and Ron hold you up, stopping you from falling through. You were breathing unevenly, chest rising rapidly.

“Y/N?” Mr. Diggory called, head twisting in every direction trying to look for you. “Where’s Y/N?”

You shoved Hermione and Ron away, apologizing in your head for your roughness and ran down to meet him. You tripped over your own feet a few times, eyes not being any help as tears clouded your vision. The cold air was hitting your overly bitten lips, the cracks and scars growing sensitive with each breath. You pushed past everyone and fell to your knees when you got a good look at Cedric.

“Y/N…” You heard Harry say. “I’m so sorry.”

“W-why are you apologizing, Harry?” You questioned, stuttering over your words. “He’s okay. He’ll wake up.”

You didn’t realize that Ron and Hermione followed you until you heard Hermione’s broken cry after you said those words. You turned around and saw her face buried in Ron’s shoulder, a protective arm wrapped around the small of her back.

“Y/N…” Harry tried again, reaching out for you.

You pulled away, nearly crawling over to Cedric. You leaned close to him, a broken smile on your face. You whispered, “Ced, I’m here. Wake up, Ced. You did it. Ced?”

“Y/N..”

“No!” You yelled, shaking Cedric's body. “Ced, wake up.”

“Miss Y/L/N.” Dumbledore called for you, looking down at your pleading face. His eyes pooled with tears. “He didn’t make it.”

You crumbled into Cedric’s unmoving body. His eyes were still open, blankly staring back at you. The love and adoration that once swam in his pupils were gone and replaced with a gray smoke. Death. You sobbed into his chest, clinging onto his lifeless limbs. Your piercing cries shook everyone to their core, the entire arena falling silent as Mr. Diggory wrapped his arms around you and his son.

You placed your left arm under him, clutching him closer to your body. His blood stained the embroidery of his initials on your sweater, a painful memory overpowering your once sweet one.

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azapofinspiration · 4 years

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The Princess and Her Knight

Summary: It's been declared that Princess Ruby's hand will go to whoever wins the tournament, as the regent wishes for her to be at least engaged and comfortable with her partner before the time to take the crown comes.

Unfortunately, Ruby's heart is already set on the court minstrel, Weiss.

And yet, at the same time, a mysterious White Knight can't help but draw her attention as the tournament continues.

White Rose Week Day 7: The Princess and Her Knight

@white-rose-week

[AO3] [FF.Net]

“You know, most people would be flattered to have so many people fighting over her.” Yang bluntly said, ignoring Ruby’s pout.

“Easy for you to say,” Ruby grumbled. “You got to marry the love of your life.”

Ruby knew that Yang was in a different situation. After all, she and their father had married into the royal family so she wasn’t the heir despite their father having taken over as regent after the death of Ruby’s mother. She had a lot more flexibility when it came to her choices.

And if the love of her life was the daughter of Menagerie’s chief and their marriage helped secure an alliance between their kingdoms then that was merely a happy happenstance. If their dad had said no, Yang would’ve just run away with her probably.

But Ruby was the heir to the throne. Within a few years, she would have to step up and take the crown, and her dad wanted her to at least be engaged and familiar with her partner by that time. And according to the laws, which he had tried to change but was shot down by the council, she had to marry either another royal or a noble.

So now a tournament was being held, with nobility and royalty from their and the surrounding kingdoms. The winner would receive Ruby’s hand in marriage.

It didn’t matter that Ruby’s heart was set on another.

“They don’t want me. They’re all here for honor or glory or status or…other stuff.” Ruby gestured at the armored contestants milling about. “Even if they know me, none of them really know me.”

“What? Like Weiss?” Yang’s voice had softened with sympathy, even as Ruby’s heart gave a discordant twang.

Yes, Weiss actually knew her. She was Ruby’s best friend.

However, Weiss was just the court minstrel.

Weiss had arrived in their court right about the same time Ruby had begun her training to become queen. She could play pretty much any instrument presented to her and her voice was akin to that of angels. Ruby had been intrigued by her from the start. After all, it wasn’t everyday you encountered a girl with hair and skin as white as snow, much less a girl with a scar marring her face. Some would call it ugly, but if anything, Ruby had always thought it made her even more beautiful, showing her will to survive despite getting slashed open right over her left eye.

Yang suspected that Weiss was to some degree of noble birth, given how her manners rivalled those of the haughtiest lord or lady of the court, but Ruby found that to be unlikely. Though those manners and sense of propriety may have been why Weiss had tried to keep a certain distance between herself and Ruby at the beginning, despite Ruby trailing after her like a puppy in her free time.

Weiss could be sarcastic and distant, but as Ruby had watched, she noticed the kind and caring person underneath the chilly veneer. And before they knew it, they’d gotten closer and closer until Ruby could hug her and call her her best friend and only get a roll of the eyes instead of a gentle push away and a lecture on proper etiquette.

Then somehow, without even noticing it, Ruby had fallen in love.

Ruby desperately wished to tell Weiss her feelings, but she wasn’t about to risk her most precious friendship. Besides, even if her feelings were returned, they wouldn’t be able to marry due to Weiss’s commoner status.

It wasn’t fair.

And Weiss wasn’t even here at the moment!

“Yeah…” Ruby mumbled, slumping in her seat despite her mental Weiss lecturing her on her posture. “Why did she have to leave and attend family business now of all times?”

Shortly before this tournament’s announcement, Weiss had received a letter that apparently urged her home for some emergency. Ruby had been upset at the time, though understanding as she of all people knew the importance of family.

Now she was despondent as by the time Weiss got back she’d surely be engaged and unable to ever reveal her feelings.

“It sucks, but that’s how it is.” Yang shrugged but gave her an understanding smile. “I’m sure things will be fine when she gets back.”

“No they won’t. I’ll be engaged.”

Yang sighed. Ruby could understand that she was trying to cheer her up, but it just wasn’t happening. “Let’s at least check out the competition, shall we?”

“Fine.” Ruby sighed and she cast her gaze over at her potential suitors.

Jaune Arc was from a large noble family with a history of turning out fantastic knights. Jaune himself was fairly decent but Ruby would never be able to get over her first impression of him where he vomited right on her shoes as she trained with her family’s knights. Overall, he wasn’t the worst person she could get married to, but there were plenty of powerful contestants.

Pyrrha Nikos, for example, was a strong contender. She was considered to be one of the strongest fighters on the continent, the Gladiator from Argus. She could probably trounce every single person here, but Ruby already knew that she wouldn’t as she was just participating out of obligation and she was sweet on a certain knight who was prone to blowing chunks when nervous.

Penny Polendina was someone that Ruby was fairly familiar with. She was one of the best knights that served the Ironwoods, the royal family of Atlas. She and Ruby trained together during a diplomatic mission in Atlas several years ago and they had kept correspondence since. Ruby was sure that she could count her as a friend. Maybe not necessarily one of her closest ones, but a friend all the same.

Oscar Pine was currently being trained by one of the most powerful mages in the world, Ozpin, but he did some knight training as well. He always seemed nice enough, but Ruby really didn’t consider him to be romantic interest material.

Neptune Vasilias and Ilia Amitola were both knights from Menagerie and close friends of Blake’s. Ruby knew them more by reputation and Blake’s stories than personally interacting with them. Neptune was a bit of a flirt but usually pulled through when it counted while Ilia was more serious and quite stealthy in her work, able to slip in and out of situations easily. Ruby figured they’d be okay partners if it came down to it.

Mercury Black on the other hand was a hard no. He served Lady Cinder Fall, who was herself known for her devious and power-hungry tactics, having married into the nobility and her husband almost immediately dying under mysterious circumstances, and Ruby did not trust him a bit. She didn’t like the sly looks he kept throwing her way. He was only allowed because her father had made this an open invitation so they couldn’t technically turn him away.

And the eighth participant…

Ruby frowned as she took them in.

The eighth participant wore white armor and unlike everyone else who was getting in their last fresh breaths before the tournament started, they already had their helmet on. They stood next to their horse, feeding her a sugar cube as they inspected their lance. They weren’t that big, probably even shorter than Ruby, and had a slight figure. A rapier was at their hip, clearly their weapon of choice.

Ruby had no clue who they were.

She was familiar with most of the royalty and nobility, as one in her position as heir to the throne should be, but she didn’t know who the White Knight was.

She glanced at the knight’s standard and felt her eyebrows rise.

“Huh.” Yang said, clearly also noticing the symbol. “Well, what do you know.”

A white snowflake on a blue background.

The Schnee insignia.

Ruby narrowed her eyes.

The Schnees were one of the most powerful noble families in Atlas. However, ever since the Duchess, Willow, had taken ill years ago, her husband, Duke Jacques, a former commoner, had mostly taken over control of her duties. And there was not much good to be said about how he ran things while she continued to be indisposed. He was a merchant at heart and still conducted his business, tying it into the Schnee affairs, and he was as cutthroat as the worst of them. Ruby had frequently heard of him and King James butting heads before coming to begrudging agreements. The family never came to events, isolating themselves with usually only Jacques emerging to conduct business.

The Schnees had three children. Ruby had only heard talk of the eldest and heir Winter, mainly because she had chosen to take a knighthood from the Ironwoods. The Schnees were infamous for their skills in magic, making them highly desirable in courts, so everyone had been jealous of Ironwood snagging one of them despite the family’s isolation. Jacques had been insistent on the family relying on only their own power, so now they took on no knights and had no mages, members of the family undergoing rigorous training and tutoring within their castle walls. So Winter had caused quite the scandal with apprenticing herself out, though given that the Schnees served the crown just as much as anyone else, there had not been much that Jacques could do.

Ruby knew that the other children were a girl and a boy, but only rumors were whispered about them. They said that the middle child had been maimed by Jacques and shut up in a tower for daring to disobey him. Or that she’d been left in the woods to die after refusing to marry who her father had picked to secure more power. Or her father had tricked her with a rigged test of skills and she was long dead, though no one knew for sure. They said that he’d tried to make the boy the heir after Winter left and the other daughter was silenced, but the king’s council had stopped him. It was hard to tell what was true with how little the family was seen in public. It was all too easy to imagine horrors behind the doors of the coldest noble family in the world.

And yet, here was a member of that mysterious family, vying for her hand in marriage.

“D’you think it’s the girl or the boy?” Yang asked as she sat up and squinted at them. Her eyes flickered over to where King James and his entourage had set themselves up, Winter Schnee clearly by his side as she was rumored to always be. “Which would you prefer?”

Ruby scowled. “Neither.” She firmly said.

A Schnee was a fascinating prospect, but given the head of the family’s reputation, it did not bode well for one of them to be participating.

Yang hummed, tilting her head to the side. “Well, this should be interesting…”

“What should be interesting?”

Ruby glanced over as Blake took her seat at Yang’s other side. She too was glancing over the competition, and her gaze eventually settled on the Schnee. Though surprisingly, she didn’t look too shocked, which stuck out to Ruby. The Schnee business ventures had a lot of dealings with Menagerie, mostly to Menagerie and the Faunus’ detriment, and Blake was well known for her low opinion of Jacques.

“So you noticed the Schnee, too?” Yang pointed out the obvious. “We were just talking about them. What sort of scheme do you think Jacques is up to, trying to win Ruby’s hand?”

“Not much probably.” At Ruby and Yang’s surprised blink, Blake continued. “You haven’t heard? New evidence was brought forth of all of the Duke’s underhanded dealings and presented to the king. He’s been arrested and is still awaiting trial.” Blake took a sip from her goblet, ignoring Ruby and Yang’s slack-jawed expression.

“Holy cannoli…” Yang muttered. “So is this one of them trying to regain the family’s honor or something?”

“Considering it was the second daughter and the Duchess who provided the information, I think they’ve proved that some people in the family do have honor.” Blake dryly replied. “Apparently Jacques had been drugging the Duchess for years to take over her duties?”

“Whoa…” Ruby breathed out, impressed despite herself. The second daughter did sound pretty awesome, but then again, as she glanced back at the White Knight, there was no guarantee that this was her. It could just as easily be the son, and rumors said he took more after his father than either daughter. “Still, that doesn’t mean they’re not suspicious.” She crossed her arms and fixed her pout on her face. “They probably aren’t really interested in me, just like more than half of the others participating.”

“You’d be surprised.” Blake muttered, taking another sip and rolling her eyes at Yang’s attempt to steal her drink.

Before Ruby could ask what she meant by that, the trumpets sounded to signal the tournament’s start.

It proceeded much as Ruby thought it would once the bracket’s were announced.

Pyrrha wasn’t able to go all out on Jaune, clearly holding back, but she still easily won. Likewise, Penny won out over Neptune, and poor Oscar hadn’t stood a chance against Mercury.

Ruby kept a close eye on the bout between Ilia and the White Knight, but the Knight proved to be the superior of the two. Though Ruby was impressed by the Knight stopping to help Ilia up after it was over, showing a kindness she didn’t expect due to the Schnees’ reputation.

In the second round, Penny just barely won. She and Pyrrha had to resort to hand-to-hand combat to determine the winner, and in the end, Penny’s throwing knives allowed her to stay out of the range of Pyrrha’s spear.

On the other side, Ruby was sure that Mercury had tried some tricks, as she saw Mercury approaching the Knight before their bout and whispering in their ear with a sly smile all too similar to his mistress’s. Given the way they’d jerked back and she could practically feel them glowering at him through their helmet, it certainly sparked Ruby’s curiosity. However, Mercury ended up getting knocked out without too much trouble.

And that left for the final round…

“So who do you want to win? Penny or Mystery Schnee?” Yang asked as she snacked on some treats. Ruby had been so caught up in the fighting that she hadn’t even noticed her leaving to get food.

Ruby sunk back into her chair as she looked over at her final two choices.

Penny was her friend and Ruby cared for her dearly. But she was just a friend. Ruby had never thought of her in a romantic or partner-type way. Sure, Ruby could probably marry her for the good of the kingdom, but…

And the White Knight, the Schnee seemed to be pretty alright. As much as one could glean personality from someone who they’ve only seen fighting and is wearing a helmet besides. At the very least, it’d be fun to spar with them. Which gender they were wasn’t really a factor to Ruby, as usually actually knowing someone was what really made someone attractive to her, which is why…

This wasn’t what she wanted.

If she had a choice, she’d choose Weiss.

But Weiss wasn’t an option.

Yang sighed and ruffled her hair a bit. “Yeah, I know.”

“Hey!” Ruby smacked her hand away and scowled at her. She quickly fixed her hair but paused as she felt the prickle of someone’s eyes on her. She turned her head to see the White Knight facing her. She blinked a bit in surprise, but they quickly turned away.

Blake chuckled. “It might not be as bad as you think.”

Yang glanced at her, eyes narrowed. “Do you know something?”

“No.”

“I think you do.”

“Well, even if I did, I wouldn’t say anything.”

“Well - “

“Shush!” Ruby finally interrupted their flirting. “It’s starting.”

Penny and the White Knight were well matched. They kept on coming out even after each run until finally it came down to hand-to-hand. The White Knight drew their rapier and Ruby couldn’t help but be slightly impressed by their skill. They clearly were someone who relied on technique and skill and they still managed to do so even with the bulky weight of full armor.

But Ruby knew Penny was one of the strongest fighters she knew. This match was already decided before it began.

It was as much a surprise to her, as it was to the rest of the audience, when the White Knight managed to evade the last of Penny’s knives, knock off her helmet, and held the tip of their rapier to Penny’s throat.

A clear victory.

Applause thundered around her, but Ruby could only stare in shock.

All her preferences aside, she had thought that Penny would win. And she would’ve accepted it, despite her misgivings, but now…

Ruby didn’t know what to do with this.

Her dad, Taiyang, stood from where he’d been seated on the throne to watch the proceeding and ignore his daughters’ chatter about the events. He’d been surprisingly quiet, not even joking around with Uncle Qrow during the tournament like he usually would, and Ruby had forgotten that he was even sitting beside her this whole time.

“Congratulations, champion!” Her dad’s voice boomed over the waning applause as the White Knight collected their horse and came to stand before the royal box. “You have bested your peers and proven yourself a knight capable of protecting the royal family. As per the rules of the tournament, you have won the hand of our fair princess Ruby. Do you accept your prize?”

The White Knight was silent for a moment before reaching up to take off their helmet.

“I will gladly take her hand - “

Ruby’s breath caught in her throat as the White Knight spoke. That voice -

“But only if she gives it of her own free will.”

As the helmet came off, long white hair came tumbling down from the high ponytail on their head, blue eyes shone as they gazed up towards Ruby, and a slight smile tugged at the scar going through their left eye.

“So,” Weiss smiled up at Ruby, as smug as the cat who ate the canary, “what do you say, your highness?”

“Weiss?!” Ruby erupted in shock, just as her face exploded in red.

“Holy crow…” Yang muttered, just as surprised as she was.

Blake continued eating, completely indifferent. “Are you going to answer her or not?” She flatly asked.

“Oh, uh,” Ruby floundered a bit more as Weiss just chuckled a bit, “yes!” She shouted, before recovering her royal composure. “I mean, yes. Of course, I would love to give you my hand.”

She extended her hand to show her sincerity and Weiss took it. Weiss clasped her hand before bringing it before her face and giving it a light kiss.

“Gchk!” Ruby practically choked as she felt her face heat up even more if possible.

Weiss smirked, eyes dancing with mirth over her reaction. “Then I guess we’re engaged.”

“Yep.” Ruby’s father grinned as well, before projecting to the audience once more. “It is now official! Her highness, the Crown Princess Ruby Rose, is engaged to the White Knight, Lady Weiss Schnee of Atlas.”

The crowd roared around them but Ruby was feeling faint from the whiplash of everything that happened.

How were you supposed to feel when one minute you’re about to be locked in a marriage you don’t want and the next you’re getting everything you want with the person you want?

She felt a slight tug on her hand. Ruby looked down to see the teasing expression gone, replaced by the concerned look on Weiss’s face. “Are you alright?” She frowned a bit. “It’s fine if you don’t want to do this.”

Ruby’s heart skipped a beat. “I do. Trust me, I do.” She smiled at her and squeezed her hand back. “But an explanation would be nice.” She admitted.

Weiss nodded. “Of course.”

Somehow, Ruby knew this was going to be a doozy.

“Your dad tried to have you killed?!” Yang’s jaw dropped and Ruby felt hers dropping right with hers.

They’d gathered in the library as the feast celebrating the end of the tournament and Ruby’s engagement began to wind down. It was the place they had always hung out together, but for once their meeting was a bit more urgent than usual.

Weiss hummed, much too at ease with such a horrific fact. “I should’ve thought there was something suspicious when he said that if I managed to complete the quest I’d be allowed to leave the manor as I wished. As it was, I did complete it and I managed to have my sister secretly arrest my attacker, but I didn’t come away unscathed.” Like she didn’t realize she was doing it, her fingers lightly traced her scar.

“So it was better to have him think me dead. Part of the reason why I wanted to leave was to become a knight like my sister and to restore our family’s honor that my father had tarnished. The attack made me realize that simply doing good would not be enough, I had to take out my father as well.” Weiss continued. “So I fell back on my other talents. Music has always been a passion of mine, one that my father actually encouraged, so becoming a minstrel was an easy task. No one looked twice at me, allowing me to gather all the evidence I needed. Only King James, my sister, and my family’s loyal head butler knew of my task back in Atlas, and of course, I did inform Regent Taiyang when I ended up here.”

“And you knew this entire time?” Yang rounded on Blake.

She didn’t even blink. “The Faunus and Menagerie have been the victims of most of her father’s crimes. Well, most of the ones not done to his own family.” Blake glanced over at Weiss before returning to looking at Yang. “I was aware of all members of the Schnee family, so of course I recognized her right away.”

“Blake has been invaluable with my investigations.” Weiss shot her a smile before catching the disappointed frown on Ruby’s face.

“So the important family business?” Ruby prodded.

Her expression softened. “I’d finally gathered all that I needed, but I had originally intended to wait to confront him. I wanted to reveal the truth to you first, but I received news from Klein that my father had been acting more suspicious than usual so I had to go after him much sooner. He was making alliances with factions that sought to overthrow King James and later attack the other kingdoms. Unfortunately, even with my intervention, his conspirators escaped.” Weiss scowled. Ruby knew that she was always harder on her own flaws than anyone else, and this untidy wrap-up of the incident was most likely weighing on her.

Ruby took in her sister’s thoughtful expression as they both mulled over this new information. Truthfully, it was a lot to take in. Ruby was almost overwhelmed with how much she had learned about Weiss in such a short amount of time.

Weiss was a noble, of the infamous and powerful Schnee family.

Weiss was not only a musician and minstrel, but also a knight.

She could almost be considered a spy, given that she’d somehow been able to go undercover to investigate her own family, her own father.

Weiss was somehow even more talented than she had ever imagined.

Yang clapped her hands together. “Well, that’s good enough for me.” She smiled as she apparently recovered all the revelations. “Blake, how about we give the lovebirds some alone time?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Blake returned the smile as she took her arm and led the way out.

Weiss sputtered, her composure finally broken. “We’re not ‘lovebirds!’”

“Keep telling yourself that.” Yang waved at them as they left. “You guys just got engaged. The honeymoon period’s officially started.”

“Yang!” Weiss facepalmed once more before turning back to Ruby. “Ugh, Ruby, your sister - “

“Weiss.”

Weiss blinked at her. Her eyes searched hers for a moment, looking for something, though Ruby didn’t know what. “Yes?” She cautiously replied.

“I just - I just wanted to know if - “ Ruby paused, the words tripping from her mouth. “I know you said that you wanted to tell me, but was everything else just - just - “

“Oh.” Luckily, Weiss understood her better than she knew herself. “Ruby, I may not have told you about my family or about my personal mission, but it wasn’t a lie.” She hesitated before taking Ruby’s hand in her own. “I know why you may think that, but I never tried to hide who I was or tried to get close because I thought it would benefit me.”

“If anything, you tried to push me away.” Ruby chuckled and Weiss joined her.

“Yes.” She smiled. “Now that all of my family drama is over with, I can now focus on other things.”

“I know you asked me if I really wanted this, but do you?” Ruby couldn’t help but ask.

“Ruby, I only joined the tournament for your sake.”

Ruby looked away, feeling a blush rise once more in her cheeks.

“Your father even ensured that I was knighted before I joined. The moment I returned he told me what was going on. And I knew that I at least wanted to protect you from those who weren’t actually interested or those who were interested but for all the wrong reasons.” Weiss scooted a bit closer as she said that until their knees were touching. “And now that we know that this is what we both want…”

Weiss held both of Ruby’s hands and brought them up, squeezing them tight. “Ruby, I promise to protect you to the best of my ability. I will follow your lead wherever you go and my sword is yours to command. I want you and I love you. Will you have me?”

Ruby felt herself getting a bit teary-eyed. “Of course,” she replied, “but isn’t it a bit too soon for the wedding vows?”

Weiss huffed and looked away, her face a bit flushed, “I just want you to know how I feel and assure you that I’ll be here for you. Is that such a crime?”

“No,” Ruby laughed and then she leaned in and pressed her forehead to Weiss’s, making her freeze in place, “just as long as you know I’ll be here for you, too.”

Weiss was full out blushing now, and while red was usually Ruby’s favorite color, she found this to be her favorite shade yet.

“May I kiss you, my knight?” Ruby asked in a slightly teasing tone.

Weiss smiled. “You may, my princess.”

And as they finally came in for a kiss, Ruby couldn’t wait for the ballad that Weiss would surely write about them.

The Princess and Her Knight.

Ruby liked the sound of that.

AN: KNIGHT WEISS! KNIGHT WEISS! KNIGHT WEISS!

I know that Weiss is set-up (by both her circumstances and her fairy tale analog) as the princess-type, but as the series continues Knight Weiss has truly begun to rise. I just love Weiss in the role of the knight. It's great so that's what I did here.

When I originally thought up this fic, I had it ending after Weiss's reveal as the White Knight and her asking for Ruby's hand only if it's willingly and Ruby accepting. Typical fairy tale ending, right? But as I re-worked it and added in elements, like how the Schnees fitting into this AU, their role (like at one point they and the Ironwoods were the dual rulers of Atlas but I decided to just make the Schnees like top-tier nobility instead), and how Weiss fits into that (plus her supposedly still being on family business was a good excuse to not be by Ruby's side like she would've been otherwise), I realized that I probably should explain what was going on with that and I ended it on a note that was just as sweet.

Oh, and as mentioned, the Schnees, including Weiss, do have magic in the form of their Glyphes in this world. Ruby remembers this fact at like 3 AM the next morning and burst into Weiss's room to ask if she had magic as well and promptly gets magicked out, as Weiss can do that to the princess now that they're engaged and she hates being woken up.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed! I know I didn't do as many fics this year, but I had fun with the ones I did do.

#RWBY #White Rose #White Rose Week #Ruby Rose #Weiss Schnee #Yang Xiao Long #Blake Belladonna #Whiterose #Background Bumblby #Day 7: The Princess and Her Knight #The Princess and Her Knight #RWBY fanfic #my fanfic tag

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hedwigstalons · 4 years

Text

High Expectations - Ch20

I’ve been a little quiet for a bit because illness hit me hard (although thankfully not for too long). I’m back though and I bring another chapter of the beast that keeps on growing.

Extra thanks to @willow-salix who had to deal with my post-fog writing going back a few stages and who helped beat this into some sort of coherency.

Earlier parts: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen

AO3 chapter link

Chapter Twenty

The mood in the plane was buoyant and the air was charged with testosterone and bravado. The transport flight was filled with Air Force personnel and their destination was Fort Hood, Texas. Scott hummed absently, his fingers drumming out a little beat on his knee, feeling relaxed for the first time in weeks, normally being a passenger on a flight made him agitated as he itched to be in the pilot’s seat but today was different.

The Army was the designated host of this year’s United States inter-service sports tournament and Fort Hood was the location where, for the next few days those selected to represent their respective services would compete in their chosen sports.

The tournament was supposed to be a friendly coming together of the various United States forces plus the various World Security Patrol branches, and for the most part it was friendly although it would be a lie to suggest there wasn’t a certain amount of posturing and goading underneath the surface. For those taking part it was a chance to uphold the honour of their chosen service and score some one-upmanship, for those like Scott who had been selected before it was also a chance to settle old scores.

For Scott it would be a blessed interlude between missions; after his last assignment he was in desperate need of some R&R but with taking leave off the cards this came a close second for allowing him to decompress and see the good side of military life. It would be a chance to indulge in some physical activity that he didn't have to think too hard about, recently his life had been nothing but one exhaustive mission after another. For once he was happy to be free from the burden of command for a while, his primary mission now was to run fast, fight hard and add as many points as possible to the Air Force tally.

His thoughts turned to last year’s competition; he’d done well and never placed lower than fifth in any of his events despite one Seaman Jeffries of the World Navy tripping him in 1500m, an action that by rights should have seen the man disqualified. Unfortunately the rankings were upheld with Jeffries placing second while he had struggled to regain ground and claim fifth. The injustice still rankled and he wondered if he would have to face the nefarious Jeffries again this year.

“Sir,” Scott called across to the Major who had been designated at team captain and was in charge of the Air Force contingent, “do you have a copy of the events list I can take a look at?”

“Sure Tracy, I brought some spares just in case” Major Ellis replied, passing a sheaf of papers across the aisle. “You’re up on the Wednesday afternoon for your track events and then Thursday afternoon for the martial arts. See any familiar names?”

“One or two” Scott replied as he checked out the list of competitors. “The US Army have put Moran in the hurdles again. I’d love to beat him this time and wipe that smug smile off his face. I’ve never met anyone so gloating.”

Having scrutinized the running order and competitors for his own events, no Jeffries, thank God, Scott began idly flicking through the rest of the programme. As he scanned the lists he spotted a familiar name, wanting confirmation of his suspicions he pulled out his phone and sent a message.

How far out of Fort Hood are you?

About 40 minutes came the response. This was quickly followed by How did you find out? Everyone at home promised not to tell you. I wanted it to be a surprise. If it was Alan I’ll kill him.

Competitor list. See you soon.

Scott let out an involuntary chuckle knowing Gordon would be mad at giving himself away and thus depriving himself of the element of surprise in any pranks he had planned.

“What’s tickled your funny bone?” asked Ellis.

“It looks like you’re going to get to meet my kid brother.”

“Really?” Ellis asked curiously, opening up his own copy of the events list. “Is he on the other flight?”

“No, Gordon isn’t Air Force, he joined WASP.”

“You’ve got a brother in WASP? That’s a bit of a polar opposite to the Air Force. I bet that didn’t go down too well at home.” Scott had worked hard to build his own reputation but it was still well known who his father was and the Air Force pedigree he was following. “Is he another sprinter like you?”

“Dad took a little persuading” a frown furrowed his brow at the memory of Gordon’s journey into WASP; ‘a little persuading’ really didn’t do it justice but he wasn’t going to have the family’s dirty laundry aired in public, “but WASP was the natural choice really, Gordon’s a swimmer.”

Major Ellis found the relevant page and looked over the listings. The name Ensign G. Tracy leapt off the page again and again within the WASP entries.

“He’s all over the pool like a rash! Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket. Is he really that good?”

“You evidently don’t follow swimming that much. I should’ve realised WASP would jump at the chance to put him on the squad. It’s not often anyone gets to field an Olympic medallist.” He couldn’t help the smile that split his face at the thought of seeing his brother swim again for the first time since the Games. Gordon had dedicated so many years to his sport and had achieved glittering success that gave Scott a rush of pride at the memories.

In the confined space of the plane their conversation was beginning to attract attention.

“What’s that about an Olympic medallist?”

“Dunno, ask Tracy.”

“Hey, Tracy, who’s got a medal?”

“My brother, Gordon.”

“You’re kidding!”

While Scott’s own unit might have been well versed in his sibling’s success story the competitors were pulled from across the Air Force, most of them complete strangers before boarding the flight. There was a flurry of movement as a couple of people pulled out their phones and plugged the name into a search engine. By now most of the plane was taking an interest. It didn’t take long for someone to dig out one of the news reports; Gordon’s Olympic win had taken place less than two years previously and coverage was easy to find.

“Here, listen to this.”

Team USA continue their race to the top of the medals table with a successful day in the pool. The crowning glory came from Gordon Tracy, a rising star in the swimming world, who not only achieved gold in the 200m butterfly but set a new world record in the process. This achievement is made more remarkable in that Tracy is just 17 years old.

“That’s your brother! And now he is on the WASP team? Heck Tracy, can’t you do something like hide his trunks so the rest of us stand a chance?” one of the Air Force’s own swimmers exclaimed.

“No can do. There is no way I’m sabotaging my own brother and don’t any of you think of trying anything either. If you had ever met Gordon you would know that wouldn’t work anyway, he would probably just do the race butt naked.”

xoxoxox

Gordon gazed listlessly out of the window of his own transport flight, the clouds forming an unbroken blanket below them, the vista bland and uninspiring. After 4 fours in the air he was feeling bored, cramped and fed up. He’d started the flight all keyed up at the thought of competing again but the long hours in the company of strangers was starting to wear thin. For one thing there was too much trash talking for his liking, he’d never gone in for the verbal sparring side of sport but it seemed his companions very much viewed the other services as the enemy at this event. It wasn’t an attitude he had encountered elsewhere in WASP and he hoped the bad mouthing would be constrained to these few days, it also wasn’t behaviour he could join in with in good conscious and so he had stayed quiet and kept himself to himself, trying to get back into competition mode after so long off the elite circuit. A vibration in his pocket startled him and he pulled out his phone.

How far out of Fort Hood are you?

Without thinking he typed About 40 minutes and hit the send button. Only when it was too late did it register who had sent the original message and he realised his mistake. He had wanted to surprise his oldest brother, the one who was hardest to meet up with due to their differing military commitments. He’d been able to tell the wider family about his selection during his period of leave over Alan’s birthday but with Scott away on his mission he’d been able to keep the news secret from his eldest sibling.

How did you find out? Everyone at home promised not to tell you. I wanted it to be a surprise. If it was Alan I’ll kill him.

Competitor list. See you soon.

Well, he supposed Scott would have found out in a few hours anyway and at least this way they would both be looking out for each other. He wasn’t quite sure of the format of the event or how easy it would be to break away and hunt down a member of one of the other services.

xoxoxox

Gordon wasn’t sure what he had been expecting from competition or from Fort Hood but it looked like finding Scott wasn’t going to be easy. Outside of their own events the personnel were able to watch the competition but there was very little free time beyond that. Even if he could get away, finding his brother was going to be like finding a needle in a haystack; the different services were billeted all over the base and by the end of the first day all he knew was that WASP was sharing a dorm block with the Coastguard Service and a mess hall with the US Navy.

Not that he had much time to brood, the swimming was taking place on the first day of the competition proper and after a hurried breakfast Gordon found himself hustled towards the pool.

He was looking forward to the chance of some competitive swimming again. The specialist training on the Merlin had been intensive and the extended time beneath the waves had ignited a passion for marine biology but the cramped space of a submarine had hardly been conducive to physical exercise. This competition would give him the opportunity to indulge in his first passion, he just hoped he was up to the task having been entered into far more events and across a wider range of disciplines that he was used to.

Aside from his trunks lacking the Team USA branding the competition was much like any other Gordon had attended. A fair crowd had filled the viewing gallery but Gordon couldn’t tell if Scott was amongst those in dark blue. Events were called, heats were swum (and usually won) and Tracy was once again a name to be reckoned with in the pool. It felt good to be cleaving through the water again. Despite not being in peak condition for swimming he was still in fine physical form over all and the muscle memory from all those races past carried him along to victory time and again. The main difference to his usual style of competition was the lack of medal ceremony at the end and at the conclusion of his last race Gordon was able to wend his weary way back to the changing rooms where he flopped down on a bench.

Pressing his shoulders against the cold tiles, eyes closed and head tipped back, the last of his energy was spent. It had been a long time since he’d pushed himself to those lengths in the water and normally his race card was rather more sparse, one elite athlete among many, each responsible for their own specialisms. The problem was, despite the high physical standards demanded by the military, elite athletes were in short supply and his pool times had placed him as primary candidate across more events than he was really comfortable taking on but he hadn’t felt able to say no to his superiors this early in his WASP career.

He concentrated on his breathing, listening to the hum and chatter of the other competitors around him, a cluster of WASPs gloating about their healthy position in the league table were his nearest companions. He knew he ought to be getting dry, knew he ought to be digging out the tracksuit he’d been issued for the event, but his limbs felt leaden. He wanted to be collapsed on his bunk but that involved moving and right now moving felt an impossible task.

“Gordon, eat something.”

He sensed a dimming of the light levels through his eyelids as a figure stepped between him and the harsh lights of the changing room. The voice was commanding but his eyes stayed firmly shut and his body refused to obey.

The figure in front of him was causing quite a stir but then that was typical of Scott. He tended to exude an attitude as though he owned a place and this evidently wasn’t going down well with the WASPs around him who bristled with resentment at the young figure in Air Force blue invading their section of the changing rooms. There were muttered jibes, reminiscent of those from the flight over, but the intruder wasn’t giving the WASP delegation the rise they so clearly desired. Having failed in their goading one of his team mates decided to square up to the man they evidently viewed as the opposition.

“And who the hell are you to order us around, flyboy?”

Scott’s eyes glittered at the challenge, a warning look that Gordon would have recognised from his own childhood had he been fully cognizant of the situation, Scott was not in any mood to be pushed.

“That’s Captain to you” there was a pause as he took in the insignia worn by the other man, neither were in traditional uniform but the competition sports kit still had a place for rank slides; after all, the military thrived on hierarchy “Chief Petty Officer, although I accept you may not be familiar with the rank structures of the other services”

Scott turned his attention back to his brother, ignoring the WASP who was now brisling after being firmly put in his place. He was well aware of the animosity being directed towards him but his focus was his sibling, not some jumped up sardine with a chip on his shoulder. He’d been concerned at the amount of events Gordon had pulled, and now, seeing his brother in the aftermath, he knew that concern had been justified. The figure in front of him was breathing a little too shallowly for comfort and hadn’t moved from the moment Scott had spied him from across the changing room. It had been a long time since he’d seen his brother swim himself to this level of stupor, years of competing had made Gordon pretty well attuned to his bodily needs, but evidently today he had neglected his post-race routine.

Gordon had gotten as far as taking off his swim cap but no further, water dripped down his torso from the flattened hair that was still slick from the showers. Even accounting for his time under the waves his skin was far paler than Scott was used to seeing. He’d come down with the intention of congratulating his brother on his success in the water but now his primary concern had turned to Gordon’s basic wellbeing.

Scott knew he had to get his blood sugars back up again. He grabbed his brother’s kit bag and rooted around in the end pocket. He allowed himself a small smile of triumph as his fingers closed around the packet of glucose tablets it appeared his brother still had the sense to carry. He extracted two tablets from the tube and, crouching down in front of his brother, placed them in Gordon’s palm before closing the lax fingers over them.

“Gords, you still with me? You need to get these into you.”

He paused while Gordon’s body processed the order, then let out a little breath of relief as the arm jerked up and Gordon began to suck on the tablets.

He hadn’t seen his brother crash this bad since he was about twelve. An early promotion to senior squad had seen the pre-teen eager to please his new coach while trying not to show anything that could be construed as weakness by his new and much older team mates and so the kid had forgone his post-race refuel. The result then had been Gordon turning a grim shade of grey and falling off the medal podium in a dead faint.

With the glucose tablets administered Scott turned his attention back to Gordon’s kit bag and pulled out a celery crunch bar, a firm favourite for the swimmer. He opened it and placed it in Gordon’s now empty hand. This was evidently an imposition too far for the WASP already disgruntled at being put in his place by the young captain.

“With all due respect Sir” there was a distinct sneer behind the formality “there’s no eating allowed in the changing rooms.”

If Scott’s eyes had glittered before, now they blazed with anger and contempt. Rising from his crouch in front of Gordon, he drew himself up to his full height and positively loomed over the belligerent WASP.

“With all due respect I would have thought you would rather your team mate got his blood sugars up, or does your first aid training not cover hypoglycaemia?” He took a step towards the WASP, encroaching into the man’s personal space in a clear display of dominance. “Not that you seem to be acting as a team right now. Would half of you even be here if it wasn’t for the relay events, or maybe you tried to enter him for all four legs of that at well?”

With the glucose hitting his blood stream Gordon became more aware of the increasing commotion around him. Voices that had once been jubilant now had a dangerous and angry edge and…yes...most of the anger seemed to be coming from Scott.

Something tripped blearily in his brain; what on Earth was Scott doing here and why did he suddenly feel so cold? Amber eyes cracked open and he forced his head open off the wall. The movement was clocked by Scott who was back in front of him in an instant.

“Hey Fish, you back with me?” All traces of anger had gone as he turned his attention back to his Gordon, the Air Force Captain replaced by the brother of old; the caregiver with the ready supply of band aids, ice packs and gentle admonishment as he presented yet another injury for inspection.

“Yeah, I’m...I’m good.” He looked down in confusion at the crunch bar in his hand, not entirely sure how it had got there, but took a bite anyway. “Guess I should have known better than to skip refuel.”

“Yeah, you should”

Yup, that was the Scott he knew from Kansas. Gordon felt like he was 9 years old again, being told off for being an idiot in the same ‘I told you so’ tone that had made it quite clear that of course jumping off the shed roof or using the frayed rope swing had been a bad idea.

“Yeah, thanks for that” A snort, an eye roll, and a re-emergence of the same attitude common to his past nine year old self.

“You’re okay now though, right? You’ll finish your bar and get dressed? Glucose tabs are back in the end pocket if you need more.”

“I’m fine, honest.” Okay, the slight whine was a little too much like a kid but he was tired and there was something about Scott’s familiar care that had him regressing 10 years. He forced protesting muscles to obey and hauled his back off the wall, rolling his shoulders to try and loosen the muscles that were rapidly seizing up. He tried to suppress a groan at the exertion, he wasn’t quite ready to try standing until after the crunch bar was finished but he also knew Scott would not be pacified until he saw some sort of response. The skeptical look he was given showed that Scott still wasn’t entirely convinced. Mustering up his remaining energy he returned the look with a grin which seemed to appease the elder Tracy.

“Hmm”, Scott didn't sound like he believed him but couldn't argue it, “well, get dry and get your kit on. You did good out there. I’ll be on the track tomorrow afternoon; I’ll see you there.” Without waiting for an answer Scott turned and exited the changing rooms.

The departure of the Air Force officer was followed with an outburst of grumbling from the WASP delegation.

“Asshole. Who the hell does he think he is, ordering us around?”

Gordon still hadn’t found his footing among the other swimmers, or the wider WASP delegation. He might be the highest ranking of those at the pool but he was also by far the youngest and with the shortest amount of service under his belt by a country mile. Rank structures overall seemed to be treated differently during the competition and these particular team mates seemed to have little regard for authority. He was conscious that a wrong move now could make life distinctly unpleasant for him, he might never see these men again after the competition was over but he still had to get through several more days in their company. He decided to play it for what it was; Scott being an irritating older brother.

“That was Scott. I think he got the whole older brother thing hard wired in at birth.”

“You’re related to that?” There was a contemptuous sneer aimed at Scott’s retreating form that set Gordon’s hackles raising but he knew sniping back would be an error.

“Yup. Of course, I got blessed with the good looks while he got the height.” He flashed a grin, trying to diffuse the tensions.

“Is he always such a jerk?” a Seaman sat to his right piped up, finding his voice now the imposing Captain was no longer practically standing on his toes.

Gordon shrugged; evidently the tensions were still there. “Only when he needs to be. I should’a thought to grab the glucose tabs myself after that many races. It’s been a while since I hit the pool competitively.”

There was a slight shuffling from the other swimmers, signs of guilt at not looking out for the young Ensign that had carried the team. Scott’s words about the rest of them only being there to make up the numbers for the relay, while not wholly accurate, weren’t far off the truth. They were all back in their dry kit while Gordon was still in his trunks, his skin still pale from the exertion even if his eyes had regained some brightness.

“Anyway,” he scruffed at his hair before drying off the rest of his body ready for dressing, “I need some real food after that and then I need to find out where the track events are being held.”

A snort. “Well we’ll be watching the shooting tomorrow. You can join us, or are you really going to do what big brother tells you?”

There was a challenge in the tone but Gordon was feeling more alive again and less tolerant of their needling. “I’m not going because he told me to, I’m going because he’s my brother and I want to. In my family we support each other and Scott, well, he’s done a lot for me.”

Decision made and allegiances stated he swung his kit bag over his shoulder and headed out to find some food.

#High Expectations #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #Scott Tracy #Gordon Tracy #Military brothers #Family comes first #swimming

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tabloidtoc · 4 years

Text

National Enquirer, January 18

You can now buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: Bill and Hillary Clinton

Page 2: Katie Holmes’ friends are warning her to wise up about her hot-tempered beau Emilio Vitolo Jr. after he went on a profanity-laced rant -- Emilio’s been in an edgy mood over his family New York City restaurant losing money while they’re forced to stay closed because of the pandemic and he’s definitely let his nice guy mask slip and it’s affecting their relationship and everything was all peaches and cream before but now it’s strained and difficult at times -- Emilio showed his ugly side when he raged against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for shutting down indoor dining on his Instagram Stories

Page 3: Tom Cruise’s chemistry with his latest Mission: Impossible co-star Hayley Atwell has spilled over to real life but it’s no surprise because the British beauty is the mirror image of Tom’s ex-wife Katie Holmes and Tom deliberately hunted down a Katie clone to be his on-screen leading lady and Hayley is everything Tom is looking for in a partner and more -- physically Katie was Tom’s definition of total perfection which is brunette with an athletic build and he’s been quietly looking for a girlfriend for some time who had the features he loves which is brown hair and a squarish jaw and hazel eyes

Page 4: Stressed-out and scandal-scarred Ellen DeGeneres in binge eating her way toward an early grave and Ellen is burying her sorrows by bingeing on junk food and milkshakes -- she’s packed on 30 pounds in 30 days after Kelly Clarkson beat her in the ratings for the third week in a row -- Ellen is convinced the world has turned on her and hides in her dressing room and locks herself in her bedroom and eats until she can barely breathe and it’s the only thing that gives her any comfort these days and the results speak for themselves because she’s bursting out of her clothes

* Radio shock jock Howard Stern has blasted back at former staffers who painted him a cheap and petty monster -- the King of All Media said at the end of night he sleeps fine

Page 5: Concerned mom Andie MacDowell is fearing for the safety of her starlet daughter Margaret Qualley after she was caught canoodling with accused abuser Shia LaBeouf -- no one can understand why she’d be with this guy after he’s been accused of such horrible things and Andie is beside herself with worry and she fears Shia may have staged his PDA with her daughter to polish his tarnished image

Page 6: TV couple Chip and Joanna Gaines have prepped for the reboot of their wildly popular Fixer Upper reality show by undergoing extensive renovations on their looks and they spared no excuse in getting personal makeovers for the show’s return -- they are splurging on trainers, stylists, new clothes, designer makeup, at-home spa days and pricey hairstyling plus other indulgences

Page 7: Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani have called of their spring wedding plans after they were caught on camera in a vicious street fight -- they’ve been fighting about everything since they got engaged and all that tension finally exploded in a brutal screaming match -- the ruckus erupted over groomzilla Blake’s feeling that Gwen has given him little support after he’d spent endless hours and millions of dollars planning their over-the-top nuptials and after all his plans Gwen suggested they simply elope and Blake blew his stack -- Blake was already bristling because Gwen seemed more focused on jump-starting her career than their wedding plans

* Jennifer Lopez recently confessed she and retired slugger Alex Rodriguez are mulling never getting married after benching their wedding plans amid the coronavirus crisis and she’s been spotted without her engagement ring

Page 8: Barbra Streisand and James Brolin have bounced back from the brink of a $400 million divorce and now they’re even talking about making a movie together with Babs feeding him directing tips -- they’ve had their ups and downs but they’re getting a second wind and believe doing a project together will give their relationship the kick-start it needs -- James has seen his career revitalized with his role in the sitcom Life in Pieces and directing several TV movies and his recent success is pretty exciting to both of them -- James’ dream is to direct a big-budget feature starring his son Josh Brolin and Barbra wants to help him realize that goal

* Barely a year after leaving Britain broke and beaten Meghan Markle has regained her Markle Sparkle with Hollywood flooding the former D-list actress with movie scripts and big-bucks deals -- the wife of Prince Harry is savoring her triumph as Hollywood’s newly crowned queen and thumbing her nose at the royals -- since leaving the cable TV drama Suits Meghan has missed acting and now she’s looking for the right big-screen project to relaunch her career

Page 9: Sex and the City is on track for a reboot only this time without black-sheep cast member Kim Cattrall -- Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis are all reuniting for what Sarah has called a revisit of the hit series -- Kim who has had widely publicized spats with series star and producer Sarah over the years has complained about the fan backlash she received for bowing out of a third Sex and the City movie follow-up

Page 10: Hot Shots -- Tiger Woods hit the links at a Florida tournament with son Charlie, John Legend and Chrissy Teigen walked hand-in-hand during a hike with pals in St. Barts, Pete Davidson took a stab at knitting, Paris Hilton with white roses

Page 11: Bill Cosby is refusing to shower with his fellow prisoners because an outbreak of COVID-19 in the SCI Phoenix prison has caused the fallen funnyman to steer clear of the showers

* Martha Stewart turns 80 in 2021 but the scrappy senior’s been working her farm like an energetic 20-year-old -- the domestic diva has been riding out the pandemic at her 153-acre farm in Upstate New York but she’s doing anything but taking it easy as she’s up early milking cows, shoveling snow and even chopping wood for the fireplace and she hasn’t ignored her Martha Stewart Living lifestyle empire

Page 12: Straight Shuter -- Ryan Seacrest personally tapped Billy Porter as his co-host on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve because Ryan is Billy’s biggest fan

* Kanye West and televangelist Joel Osteen have parted ways -- Joel loves the spotlight as much as Kanye but he wasn’t prepared for the backlash after they were criticized for their walking-on-water stunt and that was when things started to sour

* The Kardashians’ new show on Hulu promises to spark even more controversy as it will show a much more X-rated version of the family

* New Bachelor Matt James gets in a round of golf near his home in Jupiter, Florida (picture)

Page 13: Michael Douglas was over the moon after becoming a grandfather again at 76 and has big plans for the Douglas family dynasty -- reformed bad-boy Cameron Douglas and longtime partner Viviane Thibes welcomed son Ryder nearly three years after their daughter Lua -- making him a grandfather again is the greatest gift Cameron could have given his poor old dad and Michael hopes he loves to be 103 like his dad Kirk Douglas so he can watch Lua and Ryder grow up

* Reba McEntire’s new beau Rex Linn is a junk food junkie and she’s worried he’s digging his own grave with a knife and fork -- Reba loves Rex and he’s the sweetest guy in the universe but it’s just troubling the way he eats everything in sight -- Reba’s worried he’ll be six feet under if he doesn’t change his ways soon and she’s desperate for him to lose 25 pounds and she’s determined to put him on a sensible mostly vegetarian diet but Rex keeps sneaking chips and sweets when he thinks she’s not looking

Page 15: Four years into their brutal divorce battle Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are entering into a new custody battle this time for their pets -- the fractured couple’s clash over their five youngest children remains at a standstill as Angie refuses to budge on her demand for full custody -- while Brad continues to battle for shared custody of the kids he’s now making moves to ensure he has equal time with their critters as well -- Angie’s house is full of animals many of which Brad helped choose and raise and while he doesn’t want full-term custody of them he’d like to at least have them accompany the kids when they visit because Brad has noticed the children miss their pets when they’re with him and he wants to rectify that and he thinks they’ll want their visits to be longer if they have their pets with them

Page 16: Scandal-tarred Prince Andrew faces a shocking new investigation into how he lives like a billionaire despite being cut off from British taxpayer funds -- the disgraced playboy stripped of royal duties in 2019 over his involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein sex scandal has no steady stream in income to explain his lavish lifestyle of private jets and ski chalets and luxury cars -- but Randy Andy has apparently been secretly trading on his blue-blood roots to sponge off Arab princes and score lucrative deals with shady tycoons and cash-rich international oligarchs like Qatar’s Minister of Economy and Trade Sheikh Mohammed Bin Ahmed Althani and Secretary General Issa Abu Issa -- a probe of his financial dealings could see Andrew further shamed and banished from the royals forever

Page 19: Taylor Swift’s heady brew of mysticism in her new album Evermore has fans wondering is Tay Tay a witch -- in a music video for her song Willow she pursues a magical glowing thread through an enchanted forest and joins in with a witchy circle of cloaked revelers -- Wiccans are rushing to embrace her but others are wondering whether Taylor’s interest in witchcraft is merely to boost sales

Page 22: Devastated Lisa Marie Presley struggled through Christmas as the heartbroken mom is still coming to terms with the suicide of her only son Benjamin Keough -- her holiday was somber after she wasn’t included in her mom Priscilla Presley’s holiday plans -- Lisa Marie arranged to spend one night at Graceland to be with Ben at his final resting place

Page 26: Health Watch

Page 34: Kat Von D has made herself at home in a haunted house -- she left L.A. with her husband Leafar Seyer to give their son a more normal environment and instead they wound up in a seven-bedroom Victorian mansion in rural Vevay, Indiana that has 13 fireplaces and a local reputation as a retreat for ghosts

Page 36: Grateful Dead fans have been dying violent and mysterious deaths for decades sparking fears the hippie band’s superfans are being targeted by a bloodthirsty serial killer

Page 38: John Mulaney chatted up young girls on sex sites and sent nude selfies that suggested he was doing cocaine before checking into rehab -- the married star decided to get help after girls who partied with him online threatened to expose how he’d broken his 15 years of sobriety

Page 40: Garth Brooks confessed his life in lockdown with wife Trisha Yearwood hasn’t been in perfect harmony because he’s driving her bonkers with his nonstop whistling

* Hollywood Hookups -- Joe Giudice showed off his new squeeze who is a lawyer, Tyler Perry and Gelila Bekele split, Ariana Grande and Dalton Gomez engaged

Page 42: Red Carpet -- Duchess Kate Middleton in 2020

Page 45: Spot the Differences -- Tichina Arnold and Beth Behrs on the sitcom The Neighborhood

Page 47: Odd List -- two months after hoofing it from a New Jersey slaughterhouse a runaway goat was captured and given a new lease on life according to the animal rescue that snagged the fleet-footed critter, a Texas man helped his boss turn the page on an old debt by settling his 48-year-old library fine as a joke

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guttedz0mbie · 2 years

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WELCOME TO THE GLASSES-USER-SWAG-SUBMIT 2023!

I'm your host Leo/Cryptix.

In this poll tournament characters will battle for the crown of being the the ultimate glasses user.

Please submit your character you would like to invite to the tournament! The goal is to get at least 30 contestants to participate. Reposts for this battle would be appreciated! See you when the Battle begins!

Our Contestents so far!

1.)Jade Harley(Homestuck)

2.)Walter White(Breaking Bad)

3.)Invisable man(hotel transolvania)

4.)Ralsei(Deltunare)

5.)Tenya IIda(My Hero Acedemia)

6.)Alphys(Undertale)

7.)Connie Maheswaran(Steven Universe)

8.)Willow Park(The owl house)

9.)Miles Edgeworth(Ace Atterony)

10.)Velma Dinkley(Scooby-Doo!)

11.)Twilight Sparkle(My Little Pony Equestria Girls)

12)John egbert(Homestuck)

13.)Raine Whispers(The Owl House)

14.)Ghoulia Yelps(Monster High)

15.)laki Olietta(Fairy Tail)

16.)Sylvester Ashling(Epithet Erased)

17.)Stanley Pines(Gravity Falls)

18.)Stanford Pines(Gravity falls)

19.)Michael Meil(Be More Chill)

20.)Constance Blackwood(Ride the cyclones)

21.)Simon petrikov(Adventure Time)

22.)Nobita Nobi(Doraemon anime)

23.)Milo James Thatch (Atlantis:The Lost Empire)

24.)Clyde McBride(The Loud House)

Sucrose(Genshin Impact)

Espresso Cookie(Cookie Run: Kingdom)

Alchemist Cookie(Cookie Run: Kingdom

Medic(Team Fortress 2)

Merlin Wizard(Bee and Puppycat)

Tang(Lego Monkie Kid)

Bobble(Tinker Bell)

Gordon Freeman(Half-Life)

Edna Mode(The Incredibles)

Simon(Alvin and the chipmunks)

Ryan Akagi(Infinity Train)

Suika(Dr. Stone)

Snork(The Moomins)

Tulip Olsen(Infinity Train)

Berdly(deltarune)

Harry Potter(Harry Potter)

April O'Neil [Rise of the TMNT)

Mr X(Amphibia)

Dendy(O.K K.O Lets Be Heroes)

Richard(Spooky Month)

Lilith Clawthorne(The Owl House)

Toby Mccalister (Word Girl)

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officialtoa · 4 years

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BOOTH 15: BRIARSTONE COALITION

Booth 15 presents The Briarstone Coalition, a neutral-independent organization dedicated to the protection and well-being of Azeroth and her people-- both on and off the battlefield! The majority of proceeds that The Briarstone Boutique gains during the tournament will go towards rehousing efforts of those displaced by war and disaster.

Variety, Value, Vision!

We're here in a shower of glitter and frost! Visit The Briarstone Boutique for magical and glitter-covered goods, and specialty wares such as fabulous, meta-breaking cloaks by the Pavucci himself, customizable crowns of Malorne hand-carved by Y'llae, mysteriously silly mixtures by and concoctions brewed by Mort, wintry draconic pendants from the effervescent Cylida, and a market favorite, button-eyed plushes by the Briarstone Bear, Willow!

Specialized Services!

We'll also have a few special services throughout the week, and rolling sales on special items! The Briarstone Boutique will be hosting the Coalition's own commander, Denareb Grassblade, for custom ironbark armor on certain days, and on others, Dariesh Blackmantle will make a theatrical appearance, offering a seer's narration of the past, present, and future! If Pavuul is at Booth 15 at any given time, feel free to stop by and ask for his fashionista's eye for style advice!

Sales & Services Schedule

- Sunday- One free hot drink after 10 pm!

- Monday- Buy two regular-sized plushies, get one jumbo plush free!

- Tuesday- Denareb will be at the booth, making custom Ironbark Armor!

- Wednesday- Discounted items from the Blackmantle Vault!

- Thursday- Dariesh will be present as a seer of past, present, and future!

- Friday- ? ? ?

We hope to see you out there!

Booth Organizer: Osruth Blackmantle (Osrùth)

Booth Staff: Pavuul, Willowgrey, Yllae, Cylida, Mortarician, Dariesh, Selyndriel

Booth Menu: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UIcnzU5j-GSjGSZDFQVZkrDyPpdun13TGvSwlATS2gQ

some excerpts from the amazing Briarstone menu! All art done by Osruth.

#Briarstone #Briarstone Coalition #Tournament of Ages #ToA2020 #Moon Guard #Moon Guard RP

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lins-fandom-hub · 5 years

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HPHM Masterlist

Just going off the idea that I’ve seen a lot of others do, because things on tumblr get MESSY. And things can get lost very easily! So I’m going to compile a list of all the stuff I made right here so that y’all can access them whenever you like. This list will be updated from time to time, so look out for new additions!

Edits:

merperson duel

life is like chess

all teachers are important!

weasley christmas

deathday party

this is halloween

we are the champions!

secret admirers

festival fun

rakepick’s hair...

rowan and clara

stormy skye

the whomping willow

remember who we’re doing this for

fire crab and unicorn

astronomy

abraxan remake

murphy mcnully!

lin reunion

werewolf!!

divination

the circle of khanna

rowan wallpapers

only us

the wizard in white

for forever

arooooooo!

gryffindor’s new chaser

or will the blood we shed...

yin and yang

the centaur camp

to be or not to be...

we found love where we are

our ‘first’ first date

‘cuteness overload’

the haywood sisters

under a starry night sky

lin and snyde

our creatures! (video)

curse breaking

the life of a poltergeist

animagi friends

welcome to transfiguration!

fight the troll!

a flower crown

a never-ending rivalry

leviosa kid’s success!

OWLs

Charms--spellbinding magic

herbology fun

first to stand, last to fall

flying class!!

my world is where you are

the troublemaking trio

food fight, food flight

girl powerr!

it has always been you...

reach for the sky!

a night to remember

what would I do?

Requested Written Prompts:

It’s a human thing...

you’re cute...but...

speechless

blanket cuddles

I can’t help but blame you for this

rose and talbott fluff/clara and barnaby angst

clara and barnaby fluff/andre and murphy misc

Short stories:

Professor Kettleburn’s Legacy

For all the Christmases lost (Jacob Lin)

Soles Occidere et Redire Ad (Clara and Septimus)

HPHM Reverse Bang 2020

09/01/1998 (part 1)

09/01/1998 (part 2)

the wedding chapter

I’ll always be with you (part 1)

I’ll always be with you (part 2)

To your union (Clara, Bill, Fleur, Tonks, Lupin)

Finding Balance (Clara, Skye)

Dolor Cordis (Clara, Rowan, Barnaby, Ismelda)

Dead!MC AU (Clara, little Em, Merula, Jacob, Rakepick)

Dead!MC AU p2 (Clara, Rowan, Rakepick)

Khanna’s Glow (Clara and Mrs. Khanna)

Murphy’s Comfort (Clara and Murphy)

Sunrise (Clara and Alanza)

A Friend’s Demise (Clara, Sarahi, Ben, Merula, and Rowan)

The Tree of Life (Em, Talbott, Cedric, Dawn)

For the Grief I’d Never Know I’d Feel (Clara)

A Ridiculous Rivalry (Renee)

Vulnerable (Clara and Em)

Thoughtful Handmade Gift (Em, Hillary, Dawn)

Christmas reminiscing (Renee)

A Perfect Merry Melody (Clara, Peeves)

True Happiness (Clara and Sarahi)

I’m not that short! (Clara x Barnaby)

Beaten by the Beater (Clara and Sarahi)

A Special Birthday Package (Clara and Sarahi)

The Day After (Rose x Talbott)

You Decide (Clara and Sarahi)

Willing to Wait (Diego x little Em)

For Family (post HPHM)

Glowing Puffskeins (Clara x Barnaby)

Trial by Blood (Jacob Lin)

Wish come true (Clara x Barnaby)

Music locked away (Clara x Barnaby)

Art Work:

Mistletoe

Clara the Undying

Birthday Picnic

MC sketches part 1

MC sketches part 2

Summer Festival Challenge

Mermay Challenge

HBD Ethren!

Tonks and the Giant Bouncing Bulb

HPHM Design Contest Entry

Alanza Alves

HPHM Pool Party Challenge

Quizzes/Challenges

MC Friendship Quiz (Clara/Em)

Clara XH Lin’s Future

Fluff Alphabet (Clara and Barnaby)

Gameplay GIFs

Year 6 Chapter 35

festival fun!

synchronized broom surfing!

gryffindor vs ravenclaw (season 2)

horntail come at me

I WON

cruppy roll over!

all-wizard tournament fly-out

victory cheer!

dragon sanctuary clearing

gryffindor vs hufflepuff (season 2)

a promising match

gryffindor vs ravenclaw (season 1)

shiet went down

my charms pages!

beauxbatons walk

first hand hold

lin reunion

quidditch season 1

griffin max friendship

#masterlist #hogwarts mystery #hphm #clara lin #barnaby lee #diego caplan #writing #edits #harry potter hogwarts mystery #chiara lobosca #jae kim #talbott winger #so many edits welp #i need to write a lot more do i

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chikaraspecial · 5 years

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The world’s most dangerous trio is paired against one of the tournaments most lively in the opening round, as F.I.S.T faces the reunited Embassy. 2019 marks 10 years since Icarus captured the King of Trios tournament crown himself with Gran Akuma and Chuck Taylor. With new partners by his side, ones who carry the Campeones de Parejas belts around their waists, look to assist in making Icarus a two time tournament winner while claiming Trios glory for themselves. It may be nearly a decade since this iteration of the Embassy were together, but history shows they, like F.I.S.T., are willing to do what it takes to win.

King of Trios 2019, Night 1 - Friday, October 4th - Reading, PA

1. King of Trios Opening Round Match: NDK (Nick Gage, Thomas Santell & Kris Statlander) vs. Team PUMP (Scott Steiner, Petey Williams & Jordynne Grace)

2. King of Trios Opening Round Match: Quack Attack (Mike Quackenbush & The Ugly Ducklings (Lance Lude & Rob Killjoy w/Coach Mikey)) vs. The Colony (Fire Ant, Green Ant & Thief Ant)

3. King of Trios Opening Round Match: The VeloCities (Mat Diamond, Jude London & Paris De Silva vs. The Crucible (Ophidian, Princess KimberLee & Lance Steel)

4. King of Trios Opening Round Match: The Legion of Rot (Hallowicked, Frightmare & Kobald) vs. The Carnies (Nick Iggy, Kerry Awful & Tripp Cassidy)

5. King of Trios Opening Round Match: The Crucible (Devantes, Matt Makowski & E.M. DeMorest) vs. Team Queens (Solo Darling, Willow Nightingale & Freddie Mercurio)

6. King of Trios Opening Round Match: F.I.S.T. (Icarus, Travis Huckabee & Tony Deppen) vs. The Embassy (Prince Nana, Jimmy Rave & Sal Rinuaro)

#CHIKARA #Chikara Pro #King of Trios #King of Trios 2019 #The Embassy #Jimmy Rave #Prince Nana #Sal Rinauro #Icarus #Travis Huckabee #Tony Deppen

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shihlun · 7 years

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Chris Marker - Sans Soleil / Sunless

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.

He wrote: I'm just back from Hokkaido, the Northern Island. Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane, others take the ferry: waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep. Curiously all of that makes me think of a past or future war: night trains, air raids, fallout shelters, small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life. He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. At dawn we'll be in Tokyo.

He used to write me from Africa. He contrasted African time to European time, and also to Asian time. He said that in the 19th century mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the 20th was the coexistence of different concepts of time. By the way, did you know that there are emus in the Île de France?

He wrote me that in the Bijagós Islands it's the young girls who choose their fiancées.

He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo there is a temple consecrated to cats. I wish I could convey to you the simplicity—the lack of affectation—of this couple who had come to place an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery so their cat Tora would be protected. No she wasn't dead, only run away. But on the day of her death no one would know how to pray for her, how to intercede with death so that he would call her by her right name. So they had to come there, both of them, under the rain, to perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken.

He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?

He didn't like to dwell on poverty, but in everything he wanted to show there were also the 4-Fs of the Japanese model. A world full of bums, of lumpens, of outcasts, of Koreans. Too broke to afford drugs, they'd get drunk on beer, on fermented milk. This morning in Namidabashi, twenty minutes from the glories of the center city, a character took his revenge on society by directing traffic at the crossroads. Luxury for them would be one of those large bottles of sake that are poured over tombs on the day of the dead.

I paid for a round in a bar in Namidabashi. It's the kind of place that allows people to stare at each other with equality; the threshold below which every man is as good as any other—and knows it.

He told me about the Jetty on Fogo, in theCape Verde islands. How long have they been there waiting for the boat, patient as pebbles but ready to jump? They are a people of wanderers, of navigators, of world travelers. They fashioned themselves through cross-breeding here on these rocks that the Portuguese used as a marshaling yard for their colonies. A people of nothing, a people of emptiness, a vertical people. Frankly, have you ever heard of anything stupider than to say to people as they teach in film schools, not to look at the camera?

He used to write to me: the Sahel is not only what is shown of it when it is too late; it's a land that drought seeps into like water into a leaking boat. The animals resurrected for the time of a carnival in Bissau will be petrified again, as soon as a new attack has changed the savannah into a desert. This is a state of survival that the rich countries have forgotten, with one exception—you win—Japan. My constant comings and goings are not a search for contrasts; they are a journey to the two extreme poles of survival.

He spoke to me of Sei Shonagon, a lady in waiting to Princess Sadako at the beginning of the 11th century, in the Heian period. Do we ever know where history is really made? Rulers ruled and used complicated strategies to fight one another. Real power was in the hands of a family of hereditary regents; the emperor's court had become nothing more than a place of intrigues and intellectual games. But by learning to draw a sort of melancholy comfort from the contemplation of the tiniest things this small group of idlers left a mark on Japanese sensibility much deeper than the mediocre thundering of the politicians. Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of 'elegant things,' 'distressing things,' or even of 'things not worth doing.' One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of 'things that quicken the heart.' Not a bad criterion I realize when I'm filming; I bow to the economic miracle, but what I want to show you are the neighborhood celebrations.

He wrote me: coming back through the Chiba coast I thought of Shonagon's list, of all those signs one has only to name to quicken the heart, just name. To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it's radiant, and a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid. Here to place adjectives would be so rude as leaving price tags on purchases. Japanese poetry never modifies. There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them all. Newspapers have been filled recently with the story of a man from Nagoya. The woman he loved died last year and he drowned himself in work—Japanese style—like a madman. It seems he even made an important discovery in electronics. And then in the month of May he killed himself. They say he could not stand hearing the word 'Spring.'

He described me his reunion with Tokyo: like a cat who has come home from vacation in his basket immediately starts to inspect familiar places. He ran off to see if everything was where it should be: the Ginza owl, the Shimbashi locomotive, the temple of the fox at the top of the Mitsukoshi department store, which he found invaded by little girls and rock singers. He was told that it was now little girls who made and unmade stars; the producers shuddered before them. He was told that a disfigured woman took off her mask in front of passers-by and scratched them if they did not find her beautiful. Everything interested him. He who didn't give a damn if the Dodgers won the pennant or about the results of the Daily Double asked feverishly how Chiyonofuji had done in the last sumo tournament. He asked for news of the imperial family, of the crown prince, of the oldest mobster in Tokyo who appears regularly on television to teach goodness to children. These simple joys he had never felt: of returning to a country, a house, a family home. But twelve million anonymous inhabitants could supply him with them.

He wrote: Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains, tied together with electric wire she shows her veins. They say that television makes her people illiterate; as for me, I've never seen so many people reading in the streets. Perhaps they read only in the street, or perhaps they just pretend to read—these yellow men. I make my appointments at Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku. The graphic genius that allowed the Japanese to invent CinemaScope ten centuries before the movies compensates a little for the sad fate of the comic strip heroines, victims of heartless story writers and of castrating censorship. Sometimes they escape, and you find them again on the walls. The entire city is a comic strip; it's Planet Manga. How can one fail to recognize the statuary that goes from plasticized baroque to Stalin central? And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down on the comic book readers, pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.

At nightfall the megalopolis breaks down into villages, with its country cemeteries in the shadow of banks, with its stations and temples. Each district of Tokyo once again becomes a tidy ingenuous little town, nestling amongst the skyscrapers.

The small bar in Shinjuku reminded him of that Indian flute whose sound can only be heard by whomever is playing it. He might have cried out if it was in aGodard film or a Shakespeare play, “Where should this music be?”

Later he told me he had eaten at the restaurant in Nishi-nippori where Mr. Yamada practices the difficult art of 'action cooking.' He said that by watching carefully Mr. Yamada's gestures and his way of mixing the ingredients one could meditate usefully on certain fundamental concepts common to painting, philosophy, and karate. He claimed that Mr. Yamada possessed in his humble way the essence of style, and consequently that it was up to him to use his invisible brush to write upon this first day in Tokyo the words 'the end.'

I've spent the day in front of my TV set—that memory box. I was inNara with the sacred deers. I was taking a picture without knowing that in the 15th century Basho had written: “The willow sees the heron's image... upside down.”

The commercial becomes a kind of haiku to the eye, used to Western atrocities in this field; not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure. For one slightly hallucinatory moment I had the impression that I spoke Japanese, but it was a cultural program onNHK about Gérard de Nerval.

8:40, Cambodia. From Jean Jacques Rousseau to the Khmer Rouge: coincidence, or the sense of history?

In Apocalypse Now, Brando said a few definitive and incommunicable sentences: “Horror has a face and a name... you must make a friend of horror.” To cast out the horror that has a name and a face you must give it another name and another face. Japanese horror movies have the cunning beauty of certain corpses. Sometimes one is stunned by so much cruelty. One seeks its sources in the Asian peoples long familiarity with suffering, that requires that even pain be ornate. And then comes the reward: the monsters are laid out, Natsume Masako arises; absolute beauty also has a name and a face.

But the more you watch Japanese television... the more you feel it's watching you. Even television newscast bears witness to the fact that the magical function of the eye is at the center of all things. It's election time: the winning candidates black out the empty eye of Daruma—the spirit of luck—while losing candidates—sad but dignified—carry off their one-eyed Daruma.

The images most difficult to figure out are those of Europe. I watched the pictures of a film whose soundtrack will be added later. It took me six months for Poland.

Meanwhile, I have no difficulty with local earthquakes. But I must say that last night's quake helped me greatly to grasp a problem.

Poetry is born of insecurity: wandering Jews, quaking Japanese; by living on a rug that jesting nature is ever ready to pull out from under them they've got into the habit of moving about in a world of appearances: fragile, fleeting, revocable, of trains that fly from planet to planet, of samurai fighting in an immutable past. That's called 'the impermanence of things.'

I did it all. All the way to the evening shows for adults—so called. The same hypocrisy as in the comic strips, but it's a coded hypocrisy. Censorship is not the mutilation of the show, it is the show. The code is the message. It points to the absolute by hiding it. That's what religions have always done.

That year, a new face appeared among the great ones that blazon the streets of Tokyo: the Pope's. Treasures that had never left the Vatican were shown on the seventh floor of the Sogo department store.

He wrote me: curiosity of course, and the glimmer of industrial espionage in the eye—I imagine them bringing out within two years time a more efficient and less expensive version of Catholicism—but there's also the fascination associated with the sacred, even when it's someone else's.

So when will the third floor of Macy's harbor an exhibition of Japanese sacred signs such as can be seen at Josen-kai on the island of Hokkaido? At first one smiles at this place which combines a museum, a chapel, and a sex shop. As always in Japan, one admires the fact that the walls between the realms are so thin that one can in the same breath contemplate a statue, buy an inflatable doll, and give the goddess of fertility the small offering that always accompanies her displays. Displays whose frankness would make the stratagems of the television incomprehensible, if it did not at the same time say that a sex is visible only on condition of being severed from a body.

One would like to believe in a world before the fall: inaccessible to the complications of a Puritanism whose phony shadow has been imposed on it by American occupation. Where people who gather laughing around the votive fountain, the woman who touches it with a friendly gesture, share in the same cosmic innocence.

The second part of the museum—with its couples of stuffed animals—would then be the earthly paradise as we have always dreamed it. Not so sure... animal innocence may be a trick for getting around censorship, but perhaps also the mirror of an impossible reconciliation. And even without original sin this earthly paradise may be a paradise lost. In the glossy splendour of the gentle animals of Josen-kai I read the fundamental rift of Japanese society, the rift that separates men from women. In life it seems to show itself in two ways only: violent slaughter, or a discreet melancholy—resembling Sei Shonagon's—which the Japanese express in a single untranslatable word. So this bringing down of man to the level of the beasts—against which the fathers of the church invade—becomes here the challenge of the beasts to the poignancy of things, to a melancholy whose color I can give you by copying a few lines from Samura Koichi: “Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound... disembodied.”

He wrote me that the Japanese secret—what Lévi-Strauss had called the poignancy of things—implied the faculty of communion with things, of entering into them, of being them for a moment. It was normal that in their turn they should be like us: perishable and immortal.

He wrote me: animism is a familiar notion in Africa, it is less often applied in Japan. What then shall we call this diffuse belief, according to which every fragment of creation has its invisible counterpart? When they build a factory or a skyscraper, they begin with a ceremony to appease the god who owns the land. There is a ceremony for brushes, for abacuses, and even for rusty needles. There's one on the 25th of September for the repose of the soul of broken dolls. The dolls are piled up in the temple of Kiyomitsu consecrated to Kannon—the goddess of compassion—and are burned in public.

I look to the participants. I think the people who saw off the kamikaze pilots had the same look on their faces.

He wrote me that the pictures of Guinea-Bissau ought to be accompanied by music from the Cape Verde islands. That would be our contribution to the unity dreamed of by Amilcar Cabral.

Why should so small a country—and one so poor—interest the world? They did what they could, they freed themselves, they chased out the Portuguese. They traumatized the Portuguese army to such an extent that it gave rise to a movement that overthrew the dictatorship, and led one for a moment to believe in a new revolution in Europe.

Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window.

This morning I was on the dock at Pidjiguity, where everything began in 1959, when the first victims of the struggle were killed. It may be as difficult to recognize Africa in this leaden fog as it is to recognize struggle in the rather dull activity of tropical longshoremen.

Rumor has it that every third world leader coined the same phrase the morning after independence: “Now the real problems start.”

Cabral never got a chance to say it: he was assassinated first. But the problems started, and went on, and are still going on. Rather unexciting problems for revolutionary romanticism: to work, to produce, to distribute, to overcome postwar exhaustion, temptations of power and privilege.

Ah well... after all, history only tastes bitter to those who expected it to be sugar coated.

My personal problem is more specific: how to film the ladies of Bissau? Apparently, the magical function of the eye was working against me there. It was in the marketplaces of Bissau and Cape Verde that I could stare at them again with equality: I see her, she saw me, she knows that I see her, she drops me her glance, but just at an angle where it is still possible to act as though it was not addressed to me, and at the end the real glance, straightforward, that lasted a twenty-fourth of a second, the length of a film frame.

All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility. And men's task has always been to make them realize it as late as possible. African men are just as good at this task as others. But after a close look at African women I wouldn't necessarily bet on the men.

He told me the story of the dog Hachiko. A dog waited every day for his master at the station. The master died, and the dog didn't know it, and he continued to wait all his life. People were moved and brought him food. After his death a statue was erected in his honor, in front of which sushi and rice cakes are still placed so that the faithful soul of Hachiko will never go hungry.

Tokyo is full of these tiny legends, and of mediating animals. The Mitsukoshi lion stands guard on the frontiers of what was once the empire of Mr. Okada—a great collector of French paintings, the man who hired the Château of Versailles to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his department stores.

In the computer section I've seen young Japanese exercising their brain muscles like the young Athenians at the Palaistra. They have a war to win. The history books of the future will perhaps place the battle of integrated circuits at the same level as Salamis and Agincourt, but willing to honor the unfortunate adversary by leaving other fields to him: men's fashions this season are placed under the sign of John Kennedy.

Like an old votive turtle stationed in the corner of a field, every day he saw Mr. Akao—the president of the Japanese Patriotic Party—trumpeting from the heights of his rolling balcony against the international communist plot. He wrote me: the automobiles of the extreme right with their flags and megaphones are part of Tokyo's landscape—Mr. Akao is their focal point. I think he'll have his statue like the dog Hachiko, at this crossroads from which he departs only to go and prophesy on the battlefields. He was at Narita in the sixties. Peasants fighting against the building of an airport on their land, and Mr. Akao denouncing the hand of Moscow behind everything that moved.

Yurakucho is the political space of Tokyo. Once upon a time I saw bonzes pray for peace in Vietnam there. Today young right-wing activists protest against the annexation of the Northern Islands by the Russians. Sometimes they are answered that the commercial relations of Japan with the abominable occupier of the North are a thousand times better than with the American ally who is always whining about economic aggression. Ah, nothing is simple.

On the other sidewalk the Left has the floor. The Korean Catholic opposition leader Kim Dae Jung—kidnapped in Tokyo in '73 by the South Korean gestapo—is threatened with the death sentence. A group has begun a hunger strike. Some very young militants are trying to gather signatures in his support.

I went back to Narita for the birthday of one of the victims of the struggle. The demo was unreal. I had the impression of acting in Brigadoon, of waking up ten years later in the midst of the same players, with the same blue lobsters of police, the same helmeted adolescents, the same banners and the same slogan: “Down with the airport.” Only one thing has been added: the airport precisely. But with its single runway and the barbed wire that chokes it, it looks more besieged than victorious.

My pal Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution: if the images of the present don't change, then change the images of the past.

He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer: pictures that are less deceptive he says—with the conviction of a fanatic—than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality. Hayao calls his machine's world the 'zone,' an homage to Tarkovsky.

What Narita brought back to me, like a shattered hologram, was an intact fragment of the generation of the sixties. If to love without illusions is still to love, I can say that I loved it. It was a generation that often exasperated me, for I didn't share its utopia of uniting in a common struggle those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth. But it screamed out that gut reaction that better adjusted voices no longer knew how, or no longer dared to utter.

I met peasants there who had come to know themselves through the struggle. Concretely it had failed. At the same time, all they had won in their understanding of the world could have been won only through the struggle.

As for the students, some massacred each other in the mountains in the name of revolutionary purity, while others had studied capitalism so thoroughly to fight it that they now provide it with its best executives. Like everywhere else the movement had its postures and its careerists, including, and there are some, those who made a career of martyrdom. But it carried with it all those who said, like Ché Guevara, that they “trembled with indignation every time an injustice is committed in the world.” They wanted to give a political meaning to their generosity, and their generosity has outlasted their politics. That's why I will never allow it to be said that youth is wasted on the young.

The youth who get together every weekend at Shinjuku obviously know that they are not on a launching pad toward real life; but they are life, to be eaten on the spot like fresh doughnuts.

It's a very simple secret. The old try to hide it, and not all the young know it. The ten-year-old girl who threw her friend from the thirteenth floor of a building after having tied her hands, because she'd spoken badly of their class team, hadn't discovered it yet. Parents who demand an increase in the number of special telephone lines devoted to the prevention of children's suicides find out a little late that they have kept it all too well. Rock is an international language for spreading the secret. Another is peculiar to Tokyo.

For the takenoko, twenty is the age of retirement. They are baby Martians. I go to see them dance every Sunday in the park at Yoyogi. They want people to look at them, but they don't seem to notice that people do. They live in a parallel time sphere: a kind of invisible aquarium wall separates them from the crowd they attract, and I can spend a whole afternoon contemplating the little takenoko girl who is learning—no doubt for the first time—the customs of her planet.

Beyond that, they wear dog tags, they obey a whistle, the Mafia rackets them, and with the exception of a single group made up of girls, it's always a boy who commands.

One day he writes to me: description of a dream. More and more my dreams find their settings in the department stores of Tokyo, the subterranean tunnels that extend them and run parallel to the city. A face appears, disappears... a trace is found, is lost. All the folklore of dreams is so much in its place that the next day when I am awake I realize that I continue to seek in the basement labyrinth the presence concealed the night before. I begin to wonder if those dreams are really mine, or if they are part of a totality, of a gigantic collective dream of which the entire city may be the projection. It might suffice to pick up any one of the telephones that are lying around to hear a familiar voice, or the beating of a heart, Sei Shonagon's for example.

All the galleries lead to stations; the same companies own the stores and the railroads that bear their name. Keio, Odakyu—all those names of ports. The train inhabited by sleeping people puts together all the fragments of dreams, makes a single film of them—the ultimate film. The tickets from the automatic dispenser grant admission to the show.

He told me about the January light on the station stairways. He told me that this city ought to be deciphered like a musical score; one could get lost in the great orchestral masses and the accumulation of details. And that created the cheapest image of Tokyo: overcrowded, megalomaniac, inhuman. He thought he saw more subtle cycles there: rhythms, clusters of faces caught sight of in passing—as different and precise as groups of instruments. Sometimes the musical comparison coincided with plain reality; the Sony stairway in the Ginza was itself an instrument, each step a note. All of it fit together like the voices of a somewhat complicated fugue, but it was enough to take hold of one of them and hang on to it.

The television screens for example; all by themselves they created an itinerary that sometimes wound up in unexpected curves. It was sumo season, and the fans who came to watch the fights in the very chic showrooms on the Ginza were the poorest of the Tokyo poors. So poor that they didn't even have a TV set. He saw them come, the dead souls of Namida-bashi he had drunk saké with one sunny dawn—how many seasons ago was that now?

He wrote me: even in the stalls where they sell electronic spare parts—that some hipsters use for jewelry—there is in the score that is Tokyo a particular staff, whose rarity in Europe condemns me to a real acoustic exile. I mean the music of video games. They are fitted into tables. You can drink, you can lunch, and go on playing. They open onto the street. By listening to them you can play from memory.

I saw these games born in Japan. I later met up with them again all over the world, but one detail was different. At the beginning the game was familiar: a kind of anti-ecological beating where the idea was to kill off—as soon as they showed the white of their eyes—creatures that were either prairie dogs or baby seals, I can't be sure which. Now here's the Japanese variation. Instead of the critters, there's some vaguely human heads identified by a label: at the top the chairman of the board, in front of him the vice president and the directors, in the front row the section heads and the personnel manager. The guy I filmed—who was smashing up the hierarchy with an enviable energy—confided in me that for him the game was not at all allegorical, that he was thinking very precisely of his superiors. No doubt that's why the puppet representing the personnel manager has been clubbed so often and so hard that it's out of commission, and why it had to be replaced again by a baby seal.

Hayao Yamaneko invents video games with his machine. To please me he puts in my best beloved animals: the cat and the owl. He claims that electronic texture is the only one that can deal with sentiment, memory, and imagination. Mizoguchi's Arsène Lupin for example, or the no less imaginary burakumin. How one claim to show a category of Japanese who do not exist? Yes they're there; I saw them in Osaka hiring themselves out by the day, sleeping on the ground. Ever since the middle ages they've been doomed to grubby and back-breaking jobs. But since the Meiji era, officially nothing sets them apart, and their real name—eta—is a taboo word, not to be pronounced. They are non-persons. How can they be shown, except as non-images?

Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race, the only plan that offers a future for intelligence. For the moment, the inseparable philosophy of our time is contained in the Pac-Man. I didn't know when I was sacrificing all my hundred yen coins to him that he was going to conquer the world. Perhaps because he is the most perfect graphic metaphor of man's fate. He puts into true perspective the balance of power between the individual and the environment. And he tells us soberly that though there may be honor in carrying out the greatest number of victorious attacks, it always comes a cropper.

He was pleased that the same chrysanthemums appeared in funerals for men and for animals. He described to me the ceremony held at the zoo in Ueno in memory of animals that had died during the year. For two years in a row this day of mourning has had a pall cast over it by the death of a panda, more irreparable—according to the newspapers—than the death of the prime minister that took place at the same time. Last year people really cried. Now they seem to be getting used to it, accepting that each year death takes a panda as dragons do young girls in fairy tales.

I've heard this sentence: “The partition that separates life from death does not appear so thick to us as it does to a Westerner.” What I have read most often in the eyes of people about to die is surprise. What I read right now in the eyes of Japanese children is curiosity, as if they were trying—in order to understand the death of an animal—to stare through the partition.

I have returned from a country where death is not a partition to cross through but a road to follow. The great ancestor of the Bijagós archipelago has described for us the itinerary of the dead and how they move from island to island according to a rigorous protocol until they come to the last beach where they wait for the ship that will take them to the other world. If by accident one should meet them, it is above all imperative not to recognize them.

The Bijagós is a part of Guinea Bissau. In an old film clip Amilcar Cabral waves a gesture of good-bye to the shore; he's right, he'll never see it again. Luis Cabral made the same gesture fifteen years later on the canoe that was bringing us back.

Guinea has by that time become a nation and Luis is its president. All those who remember the war remember him. He's the half-brother of Amilcar, born as he was of mixed Guinean and Cape Verdean blood, and like him a founding member of an unusual party, the PAIGC, which by uniting the two colonized countries in a single movement of struggle wishes to be the forerunner of a federation of the two states.

I have listened to the stories of former guerrilla fighters, who had fought in conditions so inhuman that they pitied the Portuguese soldiers for having to bear what they themselves suffered. That I heard. And many more things that make one ashamed for having used lightly—even if inadvertently—the word guerrilla to describe a certain breed of film-making. A word that at the time was linked to many theoretical debates and also to bloody defeats on the ground.

Amilcar Cabral was the only one to lead a victorious guerrilla war, and not only in terms of military conquests. He knew his people, he had studied them for a long time, and he wanted every liberated region to be also the precursor of a different kind of society.

The socialist countries send weapons to arm the fighters. The social democracies fill the People's Stores. May the extreme left forgive history but if the guerrillas are like fish in water it's a bit thanks to Sweden.

Amilcar was not afraid of ambiguities—he knew the traps. He wrote: “It's as though we were at the edge of a great river full of waves and storms, with people who are trying to cross it and drown, but they have no other way out, they must get to the other side.”

And now, the scene moves to Cassaque: the seventeenth of February, 1980. But to understand it properly one must move forward in time. In a year Luis Cabral the president will be in prison, and the weeping man he has just decorated, major Nino, will have taken power. The party will have split, Guineans and Cape Verdeans separated one from the other will be fighting over Amilcar's legacy. We will learn that behind this ceremony of promotions which in the eyes of visitors perpetuated the brotherhood of the struggle, there lay a pit of post-victory bitterness, and that Nino's tears did not express an ex-warrior's emotion, but the wounded pride of a hero who felt he had not been raised high enough above the others.

And beneath each of these faces a memory. And in place of what we were told had been forged into a collective memory, a thousand memories of men who parade their personal laceration in the great wound of history.

In Portugal—raised up in its turn by the breaking wave of Bissau—Miguel Torga, who had struggled all his life against the dictatorship wrote: “Every protagonist represents only himself; in place of a change in the social setting he seeks simply in the revolutionary act the sublimation of his own image.”

That's the way the breakers recede. And so predictably that one has to believe in a kind of amnesia of the future that history distributes through mercy or calculation to those whom it recruits: Amilcar murdered by members of his own party, the liberated areas fallen under the yoke of bloody petty tyrants liquidated in their turn by a central power to whose stability everyone paid homage until the military coup.

That's how history advances, plugging its memory as one plugs one's ears. Luis exiled to Cuba, Nino discovering in his turn plots woven against him, can be cited reciprocally to appear before the bar of history. She doesn't care, she understands nothing, she has only one friend, the one Brando spoke of in Apocalypse: horror. That has a name and a face.

I'm writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way the two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what history is to the other: an impossibility.

Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable. Memories must make do with their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector. Madness protects, as fever does.

I envy Hayao in his 'zone,' he plays with the signs of his memory. He pins them down and decorates them like insects that would have flown beyond time, and which he could contemplate from a point outside of time: the only eternity we have left. I look at his machines. I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend.

He wrote me that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory—insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment contains motionless the eye.

In San Francisco he had made his pilgrimage to all the film's locations: the florist Podesta Baldocchi, where James Stewart spies on Kim Novak—he the hunter, she the prey. Or was it the other way around? The tiles hadn't changed.

He had driven up and down the hills of San Francisco where Jimmy Stewart, Scotty, follows Kim Novak, Madeline. It seems to be a question of trailing, of enigma, of murder, but in truth it's a question of power and freedom, of melancholy and dazzlement, so carefully coded within the spiral that you could miss it, and not discover immediately that this vertigo of space in reality stands for the vertigo of time.

He had followed all the trails. Even to the cemetery at Mission Dolores where Madeline came to pray at the grave of a woman long since dead, whom she should not have known. He followed Madeline—as Scotty had done—to the Museum at the Legion of Honor, before the portrait of a dead woman she should not have known. And on the portrait, as in Madeline's hair, the spiral of time.

The small Victorian hotel where Madeline disappeared had disappeared itself; concrete had replaced it, at the corner of Eddy and Gough. On the other hand the sequoia cut was still in Muir Woods. On it Madeline traced the short distance between two of those concentric lines that measured the age of the tree and said, “Here I was born... and here I died.”

He remembered another film in which this passage was quoted. The sequoia was the one in the Jardin des plantes in Paris, and the hand pointed to a place outside the tree, outside of time.

The painted horse at San Juan Bautista, his eye that looked like Madeline's: Hitchcock had invented nothing, it was all there. He had run under the arches of the promenade in the mission as Madeline had run towards her death. Or was it hers?

From this fake tower—the only thing that Hitchcock had added—he imagined Scotty as time's fool of love, finding it impossible to live with memory without falsifying it. Inventing a double for Madeline in another dimension of time, a zone that would belong only to him and from which he could decipher the indecipherable story that had begun at Golden Gate when he had pulled Madeline out of San Francisco Bay, when he had saved her from death before casting her back to death. Or was it the other way around?

In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage of a film I had seen nineteen times. In Iceland I laid the first stone of an imaginary film. That summer I had met three children on a road and a volcano had come out of the sea. The American astronauts came to train before flying off to the moon, in this corner of Earth that resembles it. I saw it immediately as a setting for science fiction: the landscape of another planet. Or rather no, let it be the landscape of our own planet for someone who comes from elsewhere, from very far away. I imagine him moving slowly, heavily, about the volcanic soil that sticks to the soles. All of a sudden he stumbles, and the next step it's a year later. He's walking on a small path near the Dutch border along a sea bird sanctuary.

That's for a start. Now why this cut in time, this connection of memories? That's just it, he can't understand. He hasn't come from another planet he comes from our future, four thousand and one: the time when the human brain has reached the era of full employment. Everything works to perfection, all that we allow to slumber, including memory. Logical consequence: total recall is memory anesthetized. After so many stories of men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost forgetting, and who—through some peculiarity of his nature—instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion. In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait, to tremble at the sound of music, can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history. He wants to understand. He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice, and he reacts to that injustice like Ché Guevara, like the youth of the sixties, with indignation. He is a Third Worlder of time. The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet's past is as unbearable to him as to them the existence of poverty in their present.

Naturally he'll fail. The unhappiness he discovers is as inaccessible to him as the poverty of a poor country is unimaginable to the children of a rich one. He has chosen to give up his privileges, but he can do nothing about the privilege that has allowed him to choose. His only recourse is precisely that which threw him into this absurd quest: a song cycle by Mussorgsky. They are still sung in the fortieth century. Their meaning has been lost. But it was then that for the first time he perceived the presence of that thing he didn't understand which had something to do with unhappiness and memory, and towards which slowly, heavily, he began to walk.

Of course I'll never make that film. Nonetheless I'm collecting the sets, inventing the twists, putting in my favorite creatures. I've even given it a title, indeed the title of those Mussorgsky songs: Sunless.

On May 15, 1945, at seven o'clock in the morning, the three hundred and eighty second US infantry regiment attacked a hill in Okinawa they had renamed 'Dick Hill.' I suppose the Americans themselves believed that they were conquering Japanese soil, and that they knew nothing about the Ryukyu civilization. Neither did I, apart from the fact that the faces of the market ladies at Itoman spoke to me more of Gauguin than of Utamaro. For centuries of dreamy vassalage time had not moved in the archipelago. Then came the break. Is it a property of islands to make their women into the guardians of their memory?

I learned that—as in the Bijagós—it is through the women that magic knowledge is transmitted. Each community has its priestess—the noro—who presides over all ceremonies with the exception of funerals.

The Japanese defended their position inch by inch. At the end of the day the two half platoons formed from the remnants of L Company had got only halfway up the hill, a hill like the one where I followed a group of villagers on their way to the purification ceremony.

The noro communicates with the gods of the sea, of rain, of the earth, of fire. Everyone bows down before the sister deity who is the reflection, in the absolute, of a privileged relationship between brother and sister. Even after her death, the sister retains her spiritual predominance.

At dawn the Americans withdrew. Fighting went on for over a month before the island surrendered, and toppled into the modern world. Twenty-seven years of American occupation, the re-establishment of a controversial Japanese sovereignty: two miles from the bowling alleys and the gas stations the noro continues her dialogue with the gods. When she is gone the dialogue will end. Brothers will no longer know that their dead sister is watching over them. When filming this ceremony I knew I was present at the end of something. Magical cultures that disappear leave traces to those who succeed them. This one will leave none; the break in history has been too violent.

I touched that break at the summit of the hill, as I had touched it at the edge of the ditch where two hundred girls had used grenades to commit suicide in 1945 rather than fall alive into the hands of the Americans. People have their pictures taken in front of the ditch. Across from it souvenir lighters are sold shaped like grenades.

On Hayao's machine war resembles letters being burned, shredded in a frame of fire. The code name for Pearl Harbor was Tora, Tora, Tora, the name of the cat the couple in Gotokuji was praying for. So all of this will have begun with the name of a cat pronounced three times.

Off Okinawa kamikaze dived on the American fleet; they would become a legend. They were likelier material for it obviously than the special units who exposed their prisoners to the bitter frost of Manchuria and then to hot water so as to see how fast flesh separates from the bone.

One would have to read their last letters to learn that the kamikaze weren't all volunteers, nor were they all swashbuckling samurai. Before drinking his last cup of saké Ryoji Uebara had written: “I have always thought that Japan must live free in order to live eternally. It may seem idiotic to say that today, under a totalitarian regime. We kamikaze pilots are machines, we have nothing to say, except to beg our compatriots to make Japan the great country of our dreams. In the plane I am a machine, a bit of magnetized metal that will plaster itself against an aircraft carrier. But once on the ground I am a human being with feelings and passions. Please excuse these disorganized thoughts. I'm leaving you a rather melancholy picture, but in the depths of my heart I am happy. I have spoken frankly, forgive me.”

Every time he came from Africa he stopped at the island of Sal, which is in fact a salt rock in the middle of the Atlantic. At the end of the island, beyond the village of Santa Maria and its cemetery with the painted tombs, it suffices to walk straight ahead to meet the desert.

He wrote me: I've understood the visions. Suddenly you're in the desert the way you are in the night; whatever is not desert no longer exists. You don't want to believe the images that crop up.

Did I write you that there are emus in the Ile de France? This name—Island of France—sounds strangely on the island of Sal. My memory superimposes two towers: the one at the ruined castle of Montpilloy that served as an encampment for Joan of Arc, and the lighthouse tower at the southern tip of Sal, probably one of the last lighthouses to use oil.

A lighthouse in the Sahel looks like a collage until you see the ocean at the edge of the sand and salt. Crews of transcontinental planes are rotated on Sal. Their club brings to this frontier of nothingness a small touch of the seaside resort which makes the rest still more unreal. They feed the stray dogs that live on the beach.

I found my dogs pretty nervous tonight; they were playing with the sea as I had never seen them before. Listening to Radio Hong Kong later on I understood: today was the first day of the lunar new year, and for the first time in sixty years the sign of the dog met the sign of water.

Out there, eleven thousand miles away, a single shadow remains immobile in the midst of the long moving shadows that the January light throws over the ground of Tokyo: the shadow of the Asakusa bonze.

For also in Japan the year of the dog is beginning. Temples are filled with visitors who come to toss down their coins and to pray—Japanese style—a prayer which slips into life without interrupting it.

Brooding at the end of the world on my island of Sal in the company of my prancing dogs I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape. How has mankind managed to remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed.

As we await the year four thousand and one and its total recall, that's what the oracles we take out of their long hexagonal boxes at new year may offer us: a little more power over that memory that runs from camp to camp—like Joan of Arc. That a short wave announcement from Hong Kong radio picked up on a Cape Verde island projects to Tokyo, and that the memory of a precise color in the street bounces back on another country, another distance, another music, endlessly.

At the end of memory's path, the ideograms of the Island of France are no less enigmatic than the kanji of Tokyo in the miraculous light of the new year. It's Indian winter, as if the air were the first element to emerge purified from the countless ceremonies by which the Japanese wash off one year to enter the next one. A full month is just enough for them to fulfill all the duties that courtesy owes to time, the most interesting unquestionably being the acquisition at the temple of Tenjin of the uso bird, who according to one tradition eats all your lies of the year to come, and according to another turns them into truths.

But what gives the street its color in January, what makes it suddenly different is the appearance of kimono. In the street, in stores, in offices, even at the stock exchange on opening day, the girls take out their fur collared winter kimono. At that moment of the year other Japanese may well invent extra flat TV sets, commit suicide with a chain saw, or capture two thirds of the world market for semiconductors. Good for them; all you see are the girls.

The fifteenth of January is coming of age day: an obligatory celebration in the life of a young Japanese woman. The city governments distribute small bags filled with gifts, datebooks, advice: how to be a good citizen, a good mother, a good wife. On that day every twenty-year-old girl can phone her family for free, no matter where in Japan. Flag, home, and country: this is the anteroom of adulthood. The world of the takenoko and of rock singers speeds away like a rocket. Speakers explain what society expects of them. How long will it take to forget the secret?

And when all the celebrations are over it remains only to pick up all the ornaments—all the accessories of the celebration—and by burning them, make a celebration.

This is dondo-yaki, a Shinto blessing of the debris that have a right to immortality—like the dolls at Ueno. The last state—before their disappearance—of the poignancy of things. Daruma—the one eyed spirit—reigns supreme at the summit of the bonfire. Abandonment must be a feast; laceration must be a feast. And the farewell to all that one has lost, broken, used, must be ennobled by a ceremony. It's Japan that could fulfill the wish of that French writer who wanted divorce to be made a sacrament.

The only baffling part of this ritual was the circle of children striking the ground with their long poles. I only got one explanation, a singular one—although for me it might take the form of a small intimate service—it was to chase away the moles.

And that's where my three children of Iceland came and grafted themselves in. I picked up the whole shot again, adding the somewhat hazy end, the frame trembling under the force of the wind beating us down on the cliff: everything I had cut in order to tidy up, and that said better than all the rest what I saw in that moment, why I held it at arms length, at zooms length, until its last twenty-fourth of a second, the city of Heimaey spread out below us. And when five years later my friend Haroun Tazieff sent me the film he had just shot in the same place I lacked only the name to learn that nature performs its own dondo-yaki; the island's volcano had awakened. I looked at those pictures, and it was as if the entire year '65 had just been covered with ashes.

So, it sufficed to wait and the planet itself staged the working of time. I saw what had been my window again. I saw emerge familiar roofs and balconies, the landmarks of the walks I took through town every day, down to the cliff where I had met the children. The cat with white socks that Haroun had been considerate enough to film for me naturally found its place. And I thought, of all the prayers to time that had studded this trip the kindest was the one spoken by the woman of Gotokuji, who said simply to her cat Tora, “Cat, wherever you are, peace be with you.”

And then in its turn the journey entered the 'zone,' and Hayao showed me my images already affected by the moss of time, freed of the lie that had prolonged the existence of those moments swallowed by the spiral.

When spring came, when every crow announced its arrival by raising his cry half a tone, I took the green train of the Yamanote line and got off at Tokyo station, near the central post office. Even if the street was empty I waited at the red light—Japanese style—so as to leave space for the spirits of the broken cars. Even if I was expecting no letter I stopped at the general delivery window, for one must honor the spirits of torn up letters, and at the airmail counter to salute the spirits of unmailed letters.

I took the measure of the unbearable vanity of the West, that has never ceased to privilege being over non-being, what is spoken to what is left unsaid. I walked alongside the little stalls of clothing dealers. I heard in the distance Mr. Akao's voice reverberating from the loudspeakers... a half tone higher.

Then I went down into the basement where my friend—the maniac—busies himself with his electronic graffiti. Finally his language touches me, because he talks to that part of us which insists on drawing profiles on prison walls. A piece of chalk to follow the contours of what is not, or is no longer, or is not yet; the handwriting each one of us will use to compose his own list of 'things that quicken the heart,' to offer, or to erase. In that moment poetry will be made by everyone, and there will be emus in the 'zone.'

He writes me from Japan. He writes me from Africa. He writes that he can now summon up the look on the face of the market lady of Praia that had lasted only the length of a film frame.

Will there be a last letter?

Comparative Cinema > No 3 (2013)

#chris marker #sunless #sans soleil #full text #script

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theredwallrecorder · 8 years

Text

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) pt 4/1 - Steadfast

Haha, I just recently realized that when this post is viewed on the blog it makes the lenny face look like the eyebrows are stabbing the eyes. Accurate.

If anyone’s curious, this is part of an ongoing series of fics about Redwall Hell and its characters. Here is part one, part two, and part three. I really need to catalog these fics since there are so many now.

Somebody *cough cough @thegoldensoundtwice cough* really needed to know about Nivedita’s fighting style... and well how about this? She’s first up in our Redwall Hell unofficial tournament! @raphcrow I hope this pleases you, my queen~

We last left our intrepid babes facing off against the Great Vulpuz himself, but not one to be outdone, the ruler of Hellgates has sent Nivedita and Willow Slay off to fight his lackeys while he gets the Lady all to himself. Smooth move, Vulpuz. Don’t mess this one up.

Do enjoy Redwall Hell: The Anime pt 4.1 - Nivedita vs. the Mask of Malkariss. There is a reason nobeast in hell will cross the Lady’s esteemed right paw, as one unfortunate creature is about to find out.

Here is Nivedita’s theme. Feel free to peruse this translation of the lyrics, for they describe her well. Also, here is the theme for when her shadow rises. How deep the wellsprings of mercy that dwell within her, but if ownage is what you seek... through her, it will find you.

Man I love this AU.

Moments after she had stepped forth into the darkness, Nivedita found herself on the pebbled shores of the black sea of Hellgates. In front of her the dark, frothy waters churned ceaselessly, lapping against the smooth-worn bellies of the dozens upon dozens of gargantuan obsidian boulders scattered across the broad beach like a seer’s divining implements. The pale sun of Hellgates had nearly completed its laborious trek across the sky; it hung suspended just above the expanse of the sea, casting its sickly light over the water’s agitated surface and bathing the area in varying shades of crimson. The obnoxious, salty stench of the surf ruthlessly assaulted the female rat’s nostrils as she gazed at the creature she had chosen to confront.

Framed by the eerie, bulbous sphere of the weary sun sinking into the sea, a polecat stood silently before her, the blood-red waves swirling about his unshod footpaws. Upon his face he wore a half mask of honed white marble, the jagged edge of the mask rearing up above the crown of his head. Nivedita could make out a series of curious patterns carved into it. In one paw he held the thonged whip with which he had threatened the Lady, and in the other was a long prodding spear, of the kind typically used by slavers to keep their wretched charges in line. A soft tinkling sounded when the wind surreptitiously moved the fringe of his chain mail tunic. The strange polecat regarded Nivedita without speaking, his lip curled in a gesture of derision beneath the bottom edge of the mask.

“I am deeply disappointed,” he said finally, the deepness of his voice carrying over the alternating crash and hiss of the surf. “Do you not remember me, concubine?”

Nivedita stiffened. Something dark and heavy stirred deep within her soul and she frowned, staring quizzically at the masked polecat.

“Forgive me, but I’m afraid I’m not sure I know you.” Nivedita offered him a polite curtsy. “Have you come to the Lady’s nightclub before?” she inquired.

Chuckling, the polecat shook his head. “Silly girl, I have never been within a league of the usurper’s indulgent nest. I knew you before, when you were just a frightened slave rat eagerly willing to do all within your power to keep everybeast around you out from under the harsh stroke of the whip.” He paused to study her closely. “What has happened to you? How fierce and terrible you appeared that night, your tortured soul dripping with infinite will and purpose! Whence has the fire fled? Has that vixen truly succeeded in transforming you into a shadow of yourself?” Taking a step forward, the polecat gestured with the point of his spear, indicating her entire body. “Did you forfeit the power I saw once, so long ago? Did the vixen wrest it from you, to claim it as her own? Where is the black knife that struck down the one who paved the way for my kingdom, whose blade scintillated joyfully in the light of the torches of the horde?”

Nivedita’s eyes grew wide, the realization of the meaning of his words dawning upon her. She regarded him with thinly veiled agitation, an uncharacteristic sharpness in her tone when she spoke, “I do not know how you came by this knowledge of me, but I would ask that you stop speaking of that night at once. I no longer wish to remember it.”

The masked polecat seemed to consider her request. Without warning he hurled himself forward, jabbing with the prodding spear. Thinking quickly, Nivedita turned to one side, the spearpoint whooshing harmlessly past her shoulder. She narrowed her eyes and raised her right arm, just in time to receive a lashing from the polecat’s whip as he pivoted on his footpaws, striking at her with the cruel weapon. Nivedita gritted her teeth at the pain, forcing her left footpaw to receive the brunt of her body weight as she retreated out of the polecat’s reach. He began to circle her, his eyes glittering from within the confines of his mask.

“I was there, concubine,” he rasped, the mask failing to muffle the reluctant awe in his voice. “I was there when, in the same breath, you both hailed and cursed our master. I was there when he knelt to receive you, and when he reeled from the murderous blow you dealt him. I was there, rat, when you clothed yourself in his blood and committed his foul corpse to the depths of the earth! Not a soul in the entire horde dared to stand against him, and yet—! You! You, an insignificant trull, struck down his mightiness even as he lounged casually on the proverbial throne of the height of his reign!”

Whirling, the polecat dealt Nivedita a series of swift blows with his spear and whip. She did her best to dodge, ducking and weaving as fast as the mangled side of her body would allow. He watched her struggle to avoid his attacks, frustration and confusion evident in the sloppy nature of his movements. Panting with exertion, the polecat skipped backwards, surveying the new injuries he had inflicted upon her with obvious annoyance.

“Why?!” he snarled, jabbing in her direction with the spear. “Why do you not fight back? Return the pain and suffering to me, blow for blow, gash for gash! Where is your ferocity? Your hatred? Your bitterness and loathing? Where are the indelible emotions that gave you the strength to slay our master?”

Nivedita rubbed the sweat off her nosetip with the back of a paw, wincing as her whiskers brushed against the angry, glowing gashes on her arm. She stared levelly at the polecat, a faraway look in her glimmering eyes.

“You must understand, I let them go when I…” her thoughtful voice faltered. Nivedita’s gaze strayed out over the black sea, taking in the raw beauty of the hellish sunset. “You’re right,” she continued softly. “That anger and hatred once had power over me, but no more. I released them when I forgave him for what he did to the ones I loved… and for what he did to me.”

The polecat’s mouth was agape. “You… you foolish girl!” he snarled. “You willfully gave up the source of your power just to feel better about your miserable past? All that righteous fury you bore was for nothing? Nothing?!”

Furious, the polecat struck out at her with his whip, the stinging barbs catching and tearing off bits of her fur and flesh. Again and again he beat her, bringing the whip down upon her upraised arm with increasing ferocity. Nivedita bore the onslaught without moving, her eyes burning into his as he unleashed a rage born of incredulity.

“How?! How could you just throw away an awesome wellspring of power? Not even our master could stand in your way… and you gave it up! Fool! You could have found immense favor in the eyes of the Great Vulpuz, but instead you grovel at the footpaws of that ragged vixen, playing the games of babes with the rest of the rabble of Hellgates and that traitor mink! How can you stand to linger amongst such rubbish and filth? Don’t you understand you are only titivating their feckless souls, adorning worthless baubles with value they do not deserve? They are nothing to you, and yet you leave your strength in the dust to be with them! Rash! You have wasted your—”

Nivedita had heard enough. She had been monitoring the progress of his assault, biding her time as each wild blow brought him ever closer to her. Finally, the opportune moment arrived. She swung her arm in a wide circle as he brought the whip down for another stroke, and the thongs of the whip entangled themselves in her claws. She tugged fiercely on the weapon, causing him to lose his balance and stumble forwards. With their faces nearly touching, Nivedita smiled wistfully up into the polecat’s shocked eyes.

“I am sorry you think my greatest strength was born from my hatred and anger,” she murmured, odd hints of lingering gratitude in her voice. “You are wrong. I learned of my own strength through forgiveness. Everything I am I owe to those who helped re-shape my heart, bringing me to a place where I could forgive. It is because of love that I fight you now, and it is because of love that I am more powerful than you.”

The sound of a mighty exhale interrupted her. An enormous paw descended from the air above Nivedita, its gargantuan bulk momentarily hovering around the polecat’s head. A barely audible squeak escaped between his lips as the paw gripped his torso and squeezed none too gently. The whip and prodding spear fell forgotten upon the strand as the polecat was lifted bodily off the ground, forced to come face to face with a nightmarish beast. Its features wreathed in shadow, all he could see was a pair of fiery red eyes, twin pools of unquenchable flame. The shape of the monster seemed to pulse and fluctuate, the darkness beneath its eyes parting to reveal a gaping maw lined with saw-like fangs. A globule of foul-smelling phlegm dripped from between the beast’s teeth, splattering across the polecat’s mask. The unfortunate vermin’s nerve completely deserted him.

“N-no… how can… how can this be? I understand, I understand! You are still strong!” he cried, his voice hollow with desperation. “P-please! Don’t let the slavemaster devour me!”

The great beast bowed, bringing its forehead to rest against the polecat’s mask. For one breathless moment, only the sound of the wind and waves could be heard. A low rumbling noise heralded the slavemaster’s stirring, and a terrible roar ripped from its throat, splintering the marble mask into a thousand jagged shards. Drawing its arm back, the monster cloaked in darkness hefted the polecat as though he was naught but a stone unearthed by the tide. With a powerful heave, the slavemaster hurled the polecat far out into the sea, echoes of the vermin’s scream ricocheting off the boulders on the beach even after he had disappeared from sight. Nivedita sighed, turning to glance at her protector with brows upraised.

“You are getting very good at that, but I wish you wouldn’t throw them quite so far,” she admonished gently.

The beast moaned, a guttural cry that culminated in a gurgling trill of contentment somewhat akin to laughter. Gradually, he bent down to Nivedita’s level, nuzzling her with the rough affection of one who is unsure how to mindfully handle his own bulk. She embraced and rubbed his proffered head with infinite tenderness even as his body began to shrink, his immense form merging with the contours of her shadow.

“Thank you for protecting me,” she whispered. “I love you, my son.”

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