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bitsandbobsandstuff · 6 years ago

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A love that never leaves (10)

Summary: Sometimes when you go looking for the past, you find things you never expected. When an accident brings him face to face with something he never knew he lost, Bucky Barnes begins to understand an age old truth – it’s so easy, sometimes, to love the things that destroy us.

Characters: Bucky Barnes x Reader Warnings: Bad language. SMUT, 18+ please.

A/N: Bucky’s reaction surprises her, Sam Wilson might bitch slap Steve Rogers, Bucky makes my favorite sandwich in the entire world because he is a skilled chef, and they have a memorable night together (please stop by if you would like a smut free recap).

But of course, you guys know me, so…I am sorry...

Links don’t work, so if you want to access the full ALTNL Masterlist, just click the MASTERLIST header on my blog.

Previously...

She mourns for Henry and the tragedy of his fate. Loving a soldier was one thing she never expected and the experience nearly killed her. The war trudges on, and sometimes soldiers pass through the village; while she always puts her nursing skills to good use, she keeps her distance.

Sometimes she sits by the creek, washing clothes in the cold water and thinking. She wishes she had the power to scrub her own brain clean, but no.

This is her penance, the one she will pay from now until the end of time.

To remember.

*****

MISSION REPORT

BOTH TARGETS UNEXPECTEDLY INFILTRATED BASE. UNABLE TO SEPARATE AND ADDRESS INDIVIDUALLY. WILL CONTINUE HOLDING PATTERN UNTIL OPPORTUNITY ARISES.

What did they find? Sweat beads along his scalp, freezing drips wetting pale hair. He needs to know, he searched that base from top to bottom, but he knows they found something. The Soldier was skittish, and her - well.

Something happened.

They will tell him. That he can promise.

All in due time.

*****

No one knows this, but sometimes when Bucky can’t sleep, he likes to draw.

Between the two of them, Steve is the real artist, no contest there. For Bucky, it’s not about drawing well, it’s about drawing something that helps him connect with his past.

So occasionally, when the nightmares are really riding his ass, he wanders to the roof of the tower with three things: his pink notebook of “Bucky Facts”, a blank pad of paper, and Steve’s Prismacolor colored pencils. He flips through his notebook and finds something he’s struggling with - and he draws it. For some reason, when he can transpose the memories from a bundle of echoes into a colorful sketch, it cements the idea in his head.

A paint by number puzzle. Words and colors swirled together to reimagine the past he's so desperate to remember.

Now, he sits on the coffee table in front of a woman who has no need to ever remind herself of the past. No need for clumsy outlines and careful colors; the endless infinity of memories locked behind her haunted eyes speaks of every color in the universe and Bucky wonders if he had to paint her memories, what colors could ever convey the horrors of her past.

He thinks she and the Soldier would have a remarkably similar color palette.

God, he hates that fact.

Her voice is hoarse from talking and she keeps swallowing, stubbornly pushing down the lump of tears threatening to melt in her throat. He understands why she was reluctant to tell him, why she said those ridiculous words.

I don’t think you’ll like me very much, when you know.

Everything about her seems so much clearer now. The hesitancy to reveal her past; the strange collection of items he found stashed around her home; her fear he would be angry when he knew her ability. Bucky gets it, he really truly does, but here’s the thing.

It makes no god damn difference.

He loves her. Nothing will change that.

“I’m sorry, Bucky,” he hears her whisper and that’s it.

Scooting forward, he drops from the coffee table to kneel before her. Wiggling himself between her legs, he wraps his arms around her waist and gazes into her miserable expression.

“Listen to me. Do you remember when you told me not to apologize for what happened to me? That is wasn’t my fault? It took me years to even start believing that, but the moment I heard it from you, it finally made sense. You did that for me. So right now, I need you to remember those words and repeat them back to me, alright?”

“I can’t -”

“You can,” he says firmly. “What happened there, what you did - it was not your fault. Do you understand that? It was not your fault. Say it back to me.”

The words are lead in her mouth. It takes several stumbling attempts, but Bucky is patient.

“It wasn’t - it wasn’t my fault,” she finally says, her cold fingers clutching his forearms. Bucky rewards her with a huge smile and buries his face against her belly. He hugs her tighter.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he repeats, his voice muffled in her sweater.

"It wasn't my fault," she says one more time. Threading her fingers through his hair, she drags her nails lightly over his scalp and Bucky leans contentedly into the touch. They sit in silence and let the minutes drift along until he finally feels her tension subside.

A peculiar thought occurs to him, then.

“The base in Poland, where you were held. I think I know it,” he says cautiously. “Awhile back, we got a distress signal from there. I saw that chair, the one you mean. I, um, sort of broke it. Went kinda nuts and tore it apart. They stuck me in rehab after that, but - totally fuckin’ worth it.”

“Good,” she says fervently, wiping her eyes with the heel of her palm. Bucky reaches up and catches her hand, pressing a kiss to her knuckles and trying to lighten the mood.

“Well hey, so - you met Carter then,” he says with a grin. Her lip trembles slightly, but she tries to smile.

“I did,” she confirms.

“Wish you could’ve met under better circumstances, you would’ve had a lot in common. Steve loves telling people how often she’d bust my balls.”

Bucky tickles her and she huffs out a breathless laugh and squirms away. He feels a thousand times lighter when he hears a playful note return to her voice.

“Something tells me you probably deserved it Sergeant.”

“Won’t argue there,” Bucky agrees and stretches up to plant a firm kiss on her lips.

*****

The sun is setting when she asks if she can have some time alone. Bucky can see the struggle in her face - reliving nightmares is exhausting.

“I’ll just be outside,” she says quietly, shrugging into her coat. “Need a few minutes to - think, I guess.”

“Hang on,” he says. Going into the kitchen, he flips on her electric kettle, pulls her favorite purple mug from the cupboard, and plops a teabag inside. Grabbing her biggest quilt, he fluffs it open and wraps it tight around her shoulders; once the kettle sings, he hands her the steaming mug of Earl Grey and drops a kiss on her nose. “There, now you’ll be warm.”

For a long moment, she stares at him. Bucky watches her bite her lip, steeling her nerves to speak. He waits expectantly, his hands running lightly up and down her arms to warm her, but nothing happens. Whatever she wanted to say disappears and she looks down.

“Thank you, Bucky.”

“Anytime,” he says softly and opens the door for her. She steps onto the cold porch and sinks onto the top step, tipping her face toward the setting sun. Bucky shuts the door with a click.

Everything changes.

Stalking to the kitchen counter, white-hot rage fills his chest. Snarling at the offending photos, he snatches his phone and dials Steve, and before the phone finishes the first ring, a blond head appears.

“Whaddaya got?” Steve asks, as he rummages through the fridge.

“Are you ever not eating,” Bucky scowls and Steve grunts.

“I’m a growing boy. So?”

Rubbing his forehead, Bucky tries to organize his thoughts and figure out where to begin. The clink and clatter of silverware keeps coming through the phone and then Steve’s piling leftover containers in his arms and dumping them on the counter and out of nowhere, Bucky loses his shit.

“Steve, can you - can you just - I need you to - god fucking dammit Rogers, sit the fuck down!”

Steve jerks to a stop when Bucky’s voice scales up. Considering him for all of three seconds, Steve dumps the mess of leftovers - which all have THESE ARE SAM’S DON’T TOUCH written on them in black marker - without a word and walks away, sinking into an armchair.

“Sorry. I’m listening.”

The whole thing is insane and Bucky has no clue how to begin.

So he just starts talking.

About the woman who saved his life when he was bleeding out in a blizzard; how she called him Soldier and brought him to her home and sewed him up. How he shoved a butcher knife to her throat in thanks, before she told him the story of how she met him years ago. How her words helped him remember that bloody night in Paris.

He tells Steve about deciding to stay, about her potato soup, about how he remembered Steve telling him about the letters he got from his girl during the war, and how it felt when Bucky realized he was the Jimmy she wanted that night. He relays the story of how they met during the war and Steve sucks in a shocked breath. Bucky tells him she kept all his letters and how she let him read them again and how he asked her to marry him the last time they were in the village and if he sees tears fill Steve’s eyes, he forces himself to ignore it.

He keeps talking.

About discovering the information at the base, photos and information about the original soldier trials and how there must be someone who fired up the signal, because Bucky found recent blood and a clean black glove. He tells Steve about her ability and what Hydra did to her all those years ago and he can hear Steve’s teeth clack together, can see the furious tick in his jaw.

It smooths away for a moment, when Bucky recounts the story with Peggy. Steve always was a sap.

Bucky tells him almost everything, but saves some things for himself; he figures he deserves to have a few memories that are all his own.

Well, not just his. Theirs.

When he finishes, Steve is silent. Bucky can see the thoughts swing dancing through his brain as he works it out. Finally, Steve clears his throat.

“Okay, that’s a lot to unravel. I’m gonna have some questions, but for now I’m just gonna go with it. Sounds great.” Bucky snorts and Steve just shrugs. “What can I say? It’s fuckin’ weird, but we’ve seen weirder. I trust your judgement. Tell me what you need.”

Yes, Steve Rogers can be a massive pain in the ass, but Bucky sure fucking loves him.

“Alright. The first distress signal we got was that base near Krakow, where she was kept,” Bucky says. “They were testing soldiers there and I found more evidence here - it can’t be a coincidence. I think there’s something or someone connected, I just haven’t found the link.”

“Let’s assume you’re right,” Steve says. “What next?”

“I’m going back into town tomorrow to see if I can dig up anything else. Can you look into that Hydra fuck who was chasing her? See if there’s something we’re not seeing?”

“Got it,” Steve answers. “Say the name again?”

“First name Wilhelm, last name Richter, Romeo-India-Charlie-Hotel-Tango-Echo-Romeo,” he rattles off. “I vaguely recognize his face, but I was still new when he disappeared, and those early memories are shit. I think the story was that he deserted, but that’s all I got.”

“Going to the lab now,” Steve heaves himself to his feet and walks swiftly toward the elevators. Smashing the button, he waits impatiently and then looks down at the phone, his expression softening. “Hey Buck?”

“Yeah?” Bucky says distractedly, craning his neck to see out the window. He can still see her sitting on the steps, gazing pensively into the coming night.

“You got your girl back. I’m - hey. I’m really fuckin’ happy for you.” Surprised, Bucky looks down at the phone and sees Steve giving him a crooked grin. “You deserve this. Don’t forget that.”

Bucky nods, feels his face grow warm. “Yeah. Thanks man.”

“I’m coming out to see you both, soon as we get this sorted,” Steve warns. The elevator in front of him dings and Bucky barks out a happy laugh. The idea of his best friend staying at their house like they’re an ordinary couple, with a boring life and annoying friends who crash on their couch - it sends cozy domestic tingles skittering up his spine and he can’t fight the idiotic grin.

“You got it.”

Steve gives him a goodbye salute and the elevator ends the call.

*****

“I was thinking,” Bucky says an hour later.

Dressed in his old sweatpants and ratty Captain America t-shirt, he’s slouched against the arm of the couch. Curled tight against him, her head is tucked into his shoulder. She musters a tiny smile when she looks up. “Should I be nervous?”

“Hey,” he pouts. “It’s like you assume I’d have crazy ideas or something.”

“When the shoe fits,” she murmurs, poking him.

“Very true.” Placing a finger under her chin, he tips her face up and gives her an exaggerated kiss. “But it’s not that crazy. How about I make you supper?”

She perks up at the suggestion, her strained smile morphing into something real. “I’d love that.”

Scrambling from the couch, Bucky grabs her hands and lifts her up. “Come keep me company,” he urges, guiding her to the kitchen counter. Tugging a blanket tight around her shoulders, she shuffles with him and hops up on a barstool. Even through the layers of sadness, he sees a glimmer of happiness spark in her eyes, and honestly?

That’s all he wanted.

Digging through her drawer of kitchen towels, he finds a green polka-dot apron and ties it around his waist with a flourish. Pulling a hair tie off his wrist, he coaxes the strands into a messy bun, and then cracks his knuckles for good measure.

“You definitely look the part,” she compliments and Bucky winks.

“Alright, so this is a Bucky specialty,” he says confidentially. Rifling through the cabinets, he sets a skillet on the stovetop and starts assembling the ingredients: bread, butter, honey, peanut butter, and three bananas. “I make excellent cereal, exceptional frozen pizza, and this - fried peanut butter, honey, and banana sandwiches.”

She wrinkles her nose skeptically. “That doesn’t sound like a real thing.”

“Darlin’,” he says, reaching over and tapping her on the nose with a spatula, “where’s the trust?”

Finally. Finally, he gets the sound he wanted.

A small laugh escapes.

“You’re right. Sorry Buck,” she says, and when he sees the adoration in her eyes, he thinks his heart might explode.

Ten minutes later, he slides the gooey sandwich onto her plate and if she still looks skeptical, she gives him the benefit of the doubt. Taking a small bite, she chews for a moment and looks up in surprise.

“This is fantastic!” she exclaims. Bucky grins and takes a huge, messy bite; peanut butter drips onto the plate, a bit of honey gets stuck in his beard, and a few bananas tumble out.

“Got lots of hidden talents, just you wait and see.”

*****

One bottle of wine, and four sandwiches later, Bucky sees her stifling a yawn and proclaims himself exhausted and ready for bed.

“You go on up,” he tells her, “I’ll be there in a sec.”

While she makes her way upstairs, Bucky does a methodical loop around the small cabin. He checks, double checks, and then triple checks every single lock; every window and every door, even the fireplace flue, gets a thorough review. Once he’s satisfied, he flips the lights off and stands at the living room window, letting his eyes adjust. Feathery snowflakes are swirling again and as he glares into the moonlit night, he finds threats lurking everywhere.

The wind whistling through the trees beyond the front door. The shadows beside the weatherworn walls of the woodshed. The meandering flow of the icy creek down the slope. Before it felt peaceful and idyllic - now it seems harsh and sinister.

It infuriates him.

What does he have to do to have a normal god damn life with her? Why is there always something standing in their way?

“Whoever you are,” he mutters, “and whatever you want, you stay the fuck away from her.”

But the night keeps it’s dark secrets. With a vicious sneer, Bucky heads upstairs.

*****

Flickers of blue and orange dance merrily in the fireplace, casting a warm glow around the dark bedroom. Padding silently to the doorway, he stops.

And he drinks up the image hungrily, slotting it into his newly built box of favorite memories.

Huddled on the bed, her knees are drawn up to her chest and she gazes thoughtfully into the flames, her chin cupped in her palm. When he clears his throat, she looks over with the ghost of a smile.

“Hey, you,” Bucky says quietly. Walking to the foot of the bed, he waits nervously. For what, he doesn’t know, but it feels like the right thing to do.

Sitting up on her knees, she leans forward and skims her hands lightly up his chest, circling his broad shoulders and trailing down his arms. When her fingers brush over his hands, one a little sweaty, one always cold, she picks both of them up together and drops a kiss on his knuckles.

It nearly makes him cry.

Instead, he curls a wide hand behind her neck and finds her lips. The kiss is deep, his tongue rubbing gently against hers and it feels like heaven, sizzling hot and full of fire. God, her kiss could bring him to his knees.

But rather unexpectedly, she breaks away.

And Bucky feels his entire world tilt when she sheds her t-shirt, before eagerly meeting his lips again. Frozen in surprise, he feels her guiding his hands over her body, until his fingers are splayed across her bare skin and this time he breaks the kiss with a strangled groan.

“Are you sure?” he says hoarsely, staring intently while he struggles to keep his hands from roaming. “We don’t have to do anything, I don’t expect - “

“Please, Bucky” she interrupts softly, her cool hands skimming down his chest and he tightens his abs reflexively. “Please?”

There’s no way on earth, he’s telling her no.

Cupping her breasts, thumbs brushing lightly over her nipples, Bucky moves in for another kiss. Metal and human, his fingers circle her breasts, pinching and rolling the sensitive skin until she’s panting into his mouth and he drinks down the sweet sounds. He feels her bunching up the fabric of his shirt, wordlessly asking him to remove it, and he wants to feel her skin on his more than anything, but then his stupid head gets in the way again.

“My - my scars and everything, they’re not - it ain’t pretty,” he warns. “I know you saw them when you fixed me up, but this is different. I know that, you don’t have to - I mean, I can leave the shirt on, if you - you know, if you want.”

“No,” she says fiercely. “I want you, Bucky. All of you.”

The words are magic and Bucky sags with relief. Taking a deep breath, he crosses his arms and and he shakes only a little when he pulls the shirt off. It drops from numb fingers, and the web of thick scars looks surreal in the firelight, smooth and dark pink. He watches her eyes find the pattern carved into his skin, five ropes of raised tissue clearly outlining his attempt to claw the damn thing off in some past life.

Fucking Christ, he hates this part of himself, he really fucking does.

But of course, it doesn’t faze her.

Bringing her mouth to the joint of his shoulder, she presses her lips to his scars, and each line Bucky unwittingly scratched into his body, she memorizes with her tongue. On and on, her mouth moves against him and when she finally stops, the puckered skin feels warm for the first time in his entire life.

In disbelief, he stares at the unfiltered love in her face and he feels the faint burn of tears pricking his eyes.

How the hell did he ever got so god damn lucky?

With a rush, he slants his mouth back over hers, and pushes her back into the fluffy blankets. Crawling hurriedly over her, he settles between her legs, never breaking the kiss, while he reacquaints himself with everything. The tiny noises she makes, the feel of her body beneath him, the insistent way she rolls her hips against him. Every bit feels perfect and Bucky loses himself in her, time immaterial as he does his best to take her apart.

Because if she really does have to remember everything, well - Bucky's damn well going to give her something incredible to remember.

When her fingers trail down and hook in the waistband of his sweats, desire zings straight to his dick and he’s so close to just going with it, he really is, but god dammit, he’s a moron who’s unable to let himself be happy, so once again, he breaks the kiss with a reluctant hiss.

“Fucking hell. Wait, wait, before we do anything, I’m sorry, but I need - I have to tell you, I gotta be honest,” he rasps urgently, cursing himself in every language he knows. “There are - there were - there have been others. Through the years, I’ve been with other people. During - when I was with them. And then a couple others since I came back.”

Okay, maybe Steve Rogers isn’t a cockblock after all.

Maybe Bucky Barnes is his own god damn idiot cockblock.

Shame wells up and he tries to look away, but she immediately turns him back.

“Bucky, no. Don’t. I assumed. It was seventy years. Of course, there were other people,” she gives him a crooked little smile. “There were others for me too, sometimes. When I needed to - to cope. With the loneliness.”

There’s a wild flash of anger at her words, not directed at her, not even directed at the nameless lovers in her bed, but directed at the circumstances that put them on this path; they deserved better than this. But regardless, he needs her to understand something.

Something that shapes everything they are together.

“It was only ever you though,” he promises heatedly. “Deep down inside, it was only you. It’s only ever been you. I need you to know that.”

“I know,” she says, and she tugs him down for another toe-curling kiss.

This time, finally - he goes with it.

“I want to memorize every single inch of your body,” he murmurs. “Don’t want to ever forget again.”

So he starts at the top.

He kisses the curve of her shoulders, the delicate skin over her collarbone; he licks and sucks at her nipples until her skin feels chaffed from his rough beard. He pulls down her sleep shorts as he moves lower, fumbling awkwardly with his own sweats and tossing them both over his shoulder. At first he skips what he really wants, and instead searches out the fragile bones at her ankles, traces the smooth muscle in her calves, nips the skin behind her knee.

He holds himself back until he can’t take it any more.

And then he buries his face between her legs with a groan.

She tastes like heaven. Fuck, how did he live this long without having her on his tongue every single day? He feels her knees tip inward self-consciously and he gently pushes them open, keeping them pinned to the bed because he’s planning to stay here forever if she'll let him.

Looking down, she finds him watching intently. His dark hair tickles her thighs, his bright blue eyes burn her from the inside out, and her entire body begins to tingle. Fingers flex, toes curl, her breath comes fast and rough, and then Bucky sucks her clit hard and pushes two thick fingers into her.

Strung out and floating, she grab fistfuls of his hair and moans.

Bucky grips her leg tight and breaks away for a split second to speak.

“Come on honey, let go for me,” his voice is a low growl and she glances down to see him grinding his hips into the bed, searching for his own relief, and it’s that flex and roll, the way his muscles bunch so beautifully, that tips her over the edge. With a cry, she comes hard, clutching his face to her as the orgasm shivers through every cell of her body.

“Oh god,” she rasps, “oh god, Bucky.”

It thrills him beyond anything, the sound of his name like a prayer on her lips.

“So good,” he murmurs, still continuing the light strokes of his tongue. “You taste so fucking good.”

“That was - that was - god, Bucky” she mumbles, tripping over the words. Mouthing at the curve of her hip, he hums delightedly.

“Just getting started. Can you turn over for me?” he asks gently, and she blinks slowly, before her smile follows. Rolling to her stomach, she stretches languidly, wrapping her arms around a pillow. “I hope you have another one in you,” Bucky says lowly, giving her bottom a playful squeeze.

“I think I can manage,” she says, her voice muffled, and Bucky huffs a laugh. Planting a kiss at the base of her spine, he works his way north, his tongue tracing every bump along the way. Up, up, up, his lips cover the knobs up her back and his fingers follow, warm flesh and cool metal walking up her ribcage, until he reaches the back of her neck. Licking a slow line up, he mouths at the smooth skin behind her ear and her body twitches at the feel.

Nudging her legs open further, he shifts his hips and reaches a hand down to grip himself tight. Willing himself to stop shaking, he rubs himself between her legs, and finds her so wet and so slick from the orgasm he gave her just moments before. With his lips at her ear, he whispers his favorite words in a low rush.

“I love you,” he tells her, before he pushes himself inside.

At the feel, he goes utterly still.

It rattles him down to his god damn bones, this love he has for her - she can feel him trembling above her and she glances over her shoulder to meet his wide-eyed stare.

“I love you too,” she breathes, and her voice is the anchor he needs. Blinking rapidly, he dips down to kiss her cheek.

And he starts to move.

All Bucky knows in this moment, is her. The tight feel of her on his cock. The way her skin holds a hint of salt. The way she shudders every time he bottoms out. Every nuance of her body that he must have memorized in his past life.

Sliding his hand beneath her, his fingers find their way between her legs and he strokes her clit with every slow rock of his hips. Against the backdrop of dim light from the crackling fire, the room fills with the delicious sounds of pleasure, quiet grunts and the sharp catch of breath and the rustle of fabric as a body slides over silky sheets.

Dropping his mouth to the pulse at her neck, he sucks gently, insatiable for the thrumming feel of her heartbeat laid bare on his tongue. When he hears her breathing harder, sees her hands gripping the bedsheets tighter, feels her body beginning that faint tremble again, he abruptly changes his mind.

“Wait, please wait,” he begs, pulling himself carefully from her body and rolling her onto her back. Wide eyes meet his and time stops.

Spread out beneath him, she is sheer perfection.

Before she can speak, Bucky captures her lips again and shoves himself back into her.

And maybe it’s the strangest thing, but even without the memories to guide him, that muscle memory branded into his heart knows what to do. Just like their first time together, Bucky pulls her leg up and hitches it around his waist, thrusting into her harder. Unable to speak, unable to even look away, they watch each other, both devouring the small bits they find, in case god forbid, they ever lose each other again.

When her fingers curl around his neck, drawing him closer, he rests his forehead against hers.

“Bucky,” she whispers, his name catching in her throat, “Bucky.”

“I’m here,” he pants above her. Every thrust comes faster and his control begins to slip. “I’m here, I lo-love you, god I love you so fu-fucking much, never leaving you again, not ev-ever,” he grits out.

Anchoring his knees to the mattress, he slams himself into her again and again, hitting every nerve ending just right and suddenly she finds a universe of stars. Clutching his shoulders, she clings tight to him as her body tenses and she comes one more time.

Bucky stutters out a wrecked groan when he feels her body gripping him, and that familiar tingle hits his belly. Burying his face in her neck, he gives one last, hard thrust and then grinds himself against her, a strangled growl ripping from his throat when he follows her into that blissful oblivion.

Breathing hard, he keeps his eyes shut tight against her, willing his heart to slow. Against her neck, he sucks a wet line up her throat, back to her lips. Warm, lazy kisses ease them both back to reality and their racing hearts find a new rhythm.

One that beats together.

Muscle memory, in the purest sense.

When you cut to the heart of their story, there’s a simple truth: they’re so different from who they were together in 1944. Both have lived multiple lifetimes, filled with all the tragedy and heartbreak the world could dish out; it shaped each of them in ways the other has yet to discover.

But even though time has reshaped them into something new, there are some things that will never change.

Each touch buzzes with forgotten familiarity, the way she trails her fingers up his sweat-slick bicep, like something he remembers from a hazy dream; the way his breath catches with every slow thrust of his hips is a sound she could follow in her sleep; the way their bodies fall easily into a rhythm together, an unconscious muscle memory.

Bucky wants to run into the snowy night, wants to shout his happiness to the heavens. This right here, this is what the poets sing about. Every line, every song, every beat of a lovestruck heart. Here in her arms, he finds everything he ever hoped to have and in the fading firelight, he holds fast to the one truth he knows above all else.

Love like this, is worth any cost.

“You’re the love of my life,” he whispers, and she lays her cheek against his chest and kisses the sweaty skin above his heart.

Right there, Bucky knows he’s the luckiest man on Earth.

*****

The sun is just beginning to creep into the eastern horizon, but he’s been awake for hours.

Laying between her legs, his head is pillowed on her stomach. The sleep shirt she wears is tissue thin and satiny smooth; it smells just like her and keeps taking deep, cleansing breaths, trying to embed that scent into his memory. Bit creepy maybe, but oh well.

Dim rays of light begin to slip into the room, filtering through the tall pine trees flanking the window, and as the world begins to wake, she follows. Like a touch-starved kitten, Bucky nuzzles into her, wordlessly asking for affection and when she scratches her nails along his scalp, it feels so damn good, he gives a blissful little groan.

“I love you,” he murmurs, and she hums.

“I love you,” she mumbles sleepily and there’s a pleased rumble in his chest at her reply.

“Won’t ever get tired of hearing that,” he sighs happily.

“I’ll never get tired of saying it,” she answers with a yawn.

Still half asleep, he feels her relaxing, the comforting strokes of her fingers getting slower, heavier, and he knows she’s drifting back to sleep. Maybe he should let her, but there are these words he’s been practicing under his breath all night long and he’s getting anxious and he just wants to say them, before he loses the nerve.

“Darlin’?” he asks quietly, folding his hands across her chest and resting his chin on them.

“Hmmm?” she says, her voice a bit slurry as she opens her eyes. Bucky fleetingly thinks every bit of light in the world must be concentrated on her, because she’s the only thing he can see.

Heart racing, he tamps down the nervousness and wets his lips. He wants to do this right, wants to make sure it’s perfect.

“Would you do something for me?” he says carefully, choosing those words, borrowing that phrase he gave her back in 1944 and god, he hopes he’s returning them in the way she remembers.

At first, she doesn’t catch it, simply running her fingers down his arm, but her words are so naturally reminiscent of the past.

“I’d do anything for you.” Bucky says nothing, simply waiting. She’s confused by his silence, until he tilts his head and a slow smile curves his lips. Her eyes widen and she blinks slowly. “Bucky -“

The staccato thrum of her heartbeat is suddenly flying against his hands and his blue eyes are so bright, overflowing with emotion when he completes the question.

“Would you marry me?”

Time, normally an unending commodity, freezes. They stare at each other, Bucky holding his breath as he waits, desperate for the same answer she gave him in 1945, knowing it’s a risk, he’s taking a huge leap here, but unable to do anything except go for it.

“I want to marry you Bucky, I do, I want - I want it so - god, I want it so much. You’re all I ever - this is the only thing I’ve ever wanted - “

Blowing out a huge breath, Bucky starts to laugh. Bouncing up, he cuts her off, peppering her face with happy kisses, sloppy wet trails down her forehead, over her cheeks, on her nose, up her neck. Every inch of skin he can find he marks with excited lips.

“Shit, thank god, ugh thank god! I mean it this time, I’m getting you that ring. Soon as I get back to New York I’ll get it, you come with me, we’ll pick it out together, anything you want. Hell, I got decades of back-pay from the army, and I mean, I hate to brag, but I’m sorta rich now.”

“Bucky -“

“Whatever you want for a wedding, I’m game. If you want something big, that’s great. Something small, even better. Only thing I need is to have the team there, and Steve’ll flat out murder me if he doesn’t get to stand up with us, he’s a real bitch for attention sometimes.”

“Bucky -“

“And we can live wherever you want, doesn’t matter to me. I’d love to just stay here if that’s okay, if you don’t mind, I mean it really feels like home and I ain’t had one of those for so damn long, but if you wanna live in New York or hell, anywhere, I can make it work, I’ll do whatever you want.”

“Bucky, I’m - “

“And I’m done with work, that’s it,” he laughs exuberantly “Stark’ll be pissed, he just made me this new arm, but I don’t fuckin’ care, I got you now, I’m staying put unless they get really desperate and -“

“Bucky, stop!”

The panic in her voice is like a wave of ice water. It shuts him down instantly. Silence hangs heavy in the room before he blows out a long breath.

“Shit,” he says softly, embarrassment pinking his cheeks. “Dammit, that was - was that too much? M’sorry, I got carried away, I just - shit, I’m sorry.”

Sitting up on her knees to face him, she reaches up and tucks his messy hair behind his ears and cups his flushed face in her palms. “No, it wasn’t too much, it was - it was perfect, that’s not it.”

“Okay. Okay, so - was it something else I said?”

She says nothing, but instead she searches his face, her eyes slowly roaming over every feature and Bucky thinks for a moment that she’s memorizing him. Licking her lips, she rubs her thumbs lightly over his sharp cheekbones and she swallows hard.

“Shit,” she says under her breath. “Shit, shit, shit. Fuck.”

“Hey now, thought I was the one with the potty mouth here,” he jokes weakly. She doesn’t crack a smile and Bucky feels his stomach swoop uncertainly. “Darlin’, what - what’s the matter?”

Still, she says nothing. Longing is so heartbreakingly clear in her face and Bucky can’t reconcile it. Suddenly, she surges forward, pressing her lips to his and he catches her, folding her up in his arms. She kisses him desperately, twining her arms around his neck and Bucky still has no idea what’s going on, but it doesn’t matter. All he wants, is to soothe whatever terrible thought is upsetting her, because this is his job, this is what he does.

He loves her, no matter what.

When she finally breaks the kiss, he tries to smile. “What was that for?”

Breathing hard, she closes her eyes.

“Just in case.”

With those words, she extricates herself from his arms and climbs from the bed. Walking to the fireplace, she slots her fingers into a tiny groove on the bottom of the third stone above the mantle. It takes no more than a gentle tug, and the stone comes away easily. Setting it carefully on the floor, she reaches into the black space it reveals.

Another hiding spot.

Whatever she collects, she stares at it for a full minute, before clasping it to her chest. Turning slowly, fearful eyes lock on his face and for a fleeting moment, Bucky conjures the morbid image of someone walking to their own execution. Climbing back onto the bed, she sits back on her heels and he sees her clutching a small silver box.

“I want to marry you Bucky Barnes. I want to spend every day of the rest of my life with you, because I’ve loved you every single day since the moment we met, and I hope - I need you to know that.”

“I know, honey,” he says in absolute confusion.

“You’re the love of my life. Please remember that,” she whispers, and she sets the silver box on the bed. The lock has five numbers, and she spins each dial until it pops open. Fingers shaking, she picks up the small piece of fabric inside and holds it out for him to see.

It’s the strangest thing.

In her hand, is a ripped piece of faded blue cloth, with a familiar gray patch sewn into it; smudgy rust-red splotches color the edges like fingerprints.

Wings. Gray wings. Nostalgically familiar, because back in the war, each of the Howling Commandos wore one on their left sleeve, a mirror image tribute to the one painted on Steve’s helmet.

Including Bucky. Who wore one on the left sleeve of his coat.

The left sleeve of his blue coat.

Now, he stares uncomprehendingly at the piece of cloth. “What - “ he starts, but his voice fades. Small shivers are running through her body as she watches him, her face filled with dread. Taking a shaky breath, she whispers.

“There was one other time we met.”

*****

Next Chapter

*****

#bucky x reader #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes #bucky #bucky fic #bucky barnes fic #altnl

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talesofmaehem · 6 years ago

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Bad Ideas

This was a bad idea.

Perhaps it wasn’t his worst idea, but it was certainly up there.

Maybe top ten, Will mused to himself, struggling beneath the weight of the wooden crate he was currently carrying as he teetered up the narrow stairs to the roof. At any rate, he’d certainly done stupider things and come out the other side of them just as witty and handsome as he’d been before, so he figured his luck would probably hold. And it wasn’t as if the Institute was unfamiliar with explosions, what with Henry’s numerous inventive setbacks in the crypt-turned-laboratory. Really, he convinced the voice in his head that sounded suspiciously like Charlotte, this was perfectly tame compared to some of the other alternatives he’d considered.

Besides, it was for Jem, and that settled it.

He swung open the trapdoor and surveyed the rooftop. There. He walked towards the large flat space between two peaked windows. A widow’s walk, his memory supplied, this time in the voice of his mother. He shook his head, banishing the voice to the past he’d left behind. Where it belonged.

Beyond the roof, London stretched out worn and grey and smokey. He watched the sinking sun set the Thames on fire and wondered if Shanghai would be much the same. If people still crowded one another in market squares and merchants shouted abuse about each other’s wares. It probably was. How different could two cities be? Neither was anything like the rolling hills of home. He doubted either could begin to touch the shifting colors of the Welsh sea. Enough, he scolded himself. He’d dwelt on things better forgotten more than enough for one day.

He deposited his box of mischief next to one of the peaked windows and got to work.

An hour later, when the sky just remembered being light though the sun had since slipped past the horizon, he went in search of James.

Will followed the strains of Jem’s violin to the music room. The music was wavery and thin, reedlike and jaunty, not anything he’d heard Jem play before. He slipped into the room, and though he was sure he hadn’t made a sound the corners of Jem’s mouth still tugged upward.

“Will? Will is that you?”

Jem didn’t open his eyes when he asked, so Will took the opportunity to assess his parabatai unobserved. Jem’s once black hair was now streaked with silver. His skin, once tanned from the sun of a foreign city, had paled to the color of parchment. His thin bones protruded sharply from his face and wrists, but his hand was steady and sure, still gracefully pulling the bow of his violin. He stood straight and tall with his back to the fire, light and shadow drawing Will's eye over all his dips and hollows.

Will swallowed, his throat suddenly dry.

“No,” he drawled, remembering himself, “It’s the ghost of Christmas past.”

Jem’s smile spread wider across his face, but he didn’t open his eyes until he was finished playing.

“What was that? I haven’t heard you play it before,” he noted as his parabatai carefully tucked his violin back into it’s case.

“No, it’s a song I only half remember. From China,” he clarified, “It wasn’t written for the violin. I was trying to transpose it.”

Will hummed thoughtfully.

“What was it like? Shanghai?”

Jem turned to look at him. Will didn’t often ask about Jem’s past, the better to fend off inquiry into his own troubled memories, but he was curious. He noticed Jem reach into his collar and touch something. A flash of pale green and Will knew it for what it was: a jade pendant in the shape of a fist. Will had brought it home for Jem when James was still new to London and sleepless with homesickness. Will, too familiar with the feeling, had felt the urge to ease Jem’s suffering, even if he could not ease his own.

“It is loud and crowded and smells,” Jem said, a distance seeping into his voice, “as all cities I imagine,” he added, voicing Will’s own thoughts. “But…the sounds are not the same sounds, nor the smells the same smells. It is brighter, and the sun shines on thinner towers than those that pierce the skies of London.” Jem looked thoughtful now, lost to memory. “Men pull carts and you can smell the spices of cooking food from market stalls. Banners and signs lean out into the street and there is more color than London knows what to do with.”

Jem was smiling by the time he finished and he quirked his head playfully at his parabatai.

“Thinking of visiting?”

“Hmmm? Oh, no. Can’t stand travel, terrible for the constitution.”

Jem huffed a laugh.

“No,” Will carried on, a mischievous light twinkling in his eye which instantly made Jem wary. “I just wanted to make sure the experience was as authentic as possible.”

Jem narrowed his eyes, “What experience? Will, I swear, if you let silk worms loose in Jessamine’s room again, I am not -”

Will waved him away, “No, no, it’s much better than that,” and he sauntered out of the room leaving Jem to sigh and jog after him.

The roof was transformed.

Red paper lanterns hung from string haphazardly draped across the space. Thin rice paper scrolls blew in the soft breeze, adorned with Chinese characters and dragons rendered in bright ink. Witchlight and candles lay scattered across the roof and Jem openly gaped at all of it.

Behind him Will shuffled nervously.

“Do you…like it?”

Jem was lost for words. Like it? It was more than anyone had ever done for him in his life. Well, with the possible exception of Charlotte who had taken him into her home, but the point stood. He stared open mouthed at Will.

“Like it? Will, it’s- How did you even-” Jem shook his head trying to come to some coherent thought.

Will frowned. He was momentarily struck with the mortifying idea that perhaps he had insulted Jem.

“Did I do it wrong?”

“Wrong?” Jem looked bewildered, and then seemed to catch Will’s train of thought.

“No, Will,” he took three quick strides to Will’s side and pulled him into a tight embrace, “it is the single greatest thing anyone has ever done for me.” He turned again to survey Will’s work while Will blinked, evidently still processing Jem’s show of affection.

“Though,” Jem mused eyeing the candles glittering amid the steady witchlight, “it does look a bit like your plotting to burn the Institute down.”

He turned to catch Will’s look of amusement only to find a brighter gleam in his parabtai’s eye.

“Well now that you mention it,” Will grinned and Jem’s stomach tightened as it recognized the look Will got when he was about to engage in a particularly stupid idea.

“William,” Jem started, but Will was already moving towards a wooden crate that Jem hadn’t noticed earlier.

Jem moved up behind Will, glancing over his shoulder as Will rummaged around its contents.

“Are those-”

“Fireworks,” Will agreed smugly, pulling one out from the crate. “Bought them off a pixie down in Whitechapel. Shall we light one off and see how it goes?”

“Will, I really don’t think that’s-” But Will had already set it on the edge of the roof and was striking a match.

He set the flame to the fuse, but it burned much quicker than Will anticipated. Will swore colorfully and Jem only just had time to jerk Will back by his collar, sending both boys tumbling together, as a whining rocket took off in a shower of sparks. They watched, sprawled against each other, as the rocket exploded, coalescing into a phoenix that swooped over the boys and let out a powerful shriek before dissolving into embers. Both boys gaped in silence, the acrid scent of smoke filling the air. A laugh bubbled up James’s throat and Will felt it vibrate against his back. He realized, distantly, that he was practically in James's lap but by then they were both laughing hysterically.

“Again” Jem gasped holding his ribs, and Will gestured for him to choose the next one.

Fire birds and dragons, warriors and horses all burst to life against the night sky. Will watched as Jem stared wonderingly at a tiger that exploded into being and proceeded to leap magnificently high into the sky, as if it meant to swallow the moon. Jem turned towards Will, becoming a slim silhouette as the tiger dripped into a shower of falling stars behind him. Will waited as Jem approached, until his parabatai was standing only a foot away from him. Will’s heart raced, though he wasn’t sure why. This was Jem, his Jem. He told himself it was only the adrenaline of the fireworks.

“Happy New Year James,” he murmured.

Jem’s eyes were dark and unreadable. He took a step closer and reached for Will’s hand. No, not for his hand, his pulse he realized as Jem’s fingers pressed into his wrist. He felt his heart hammer harder. He couldn’t count the number of times he had been this close to James, how many times they'd reached for each other, but none of them had ever felt like this. Jem leaned in closer, impossibly closer, and Will froze with the thought that Jem might kiss him. That he might kiss Jem back.

Jem’s voice was a warm breath against his ear.

“Thank you, William.”

Will shivered as Jem’s voice traced a lazy finger down his spine, and he knew Jem was close enough to feel his reaction. But Jem just tightened his grip on Will’s hand and pulled him towards the wooden crate where the last few fireworks remained. They sat sprawled together on the roof, Will tracing the outline of Jem’s jaw with his eyes as embers danced in parodies of life above them. The acrid taste of smoke laced his tongue and when the breeze off the Thames shifted he just caught the slight burnt sugar smell of James beside him.

He eased back on his hands, so his shoulder just leaned into Jem. Will felt his parabatai’s gaze cut to him, but he didn’t shift away. Will held his breath. A moment passed, and another, both boys’ eyes trained on the fireworks before them.

Then Jem sighed and leaned slowly into Will’s shoulder.

Will felt his mouth curl into a smile.

Bad idea?

This was definitely one of his best ideas. Top ten at least, he thought to himself as Jem’s pinky stretched out towards his own.

#tid fanfic #tid ficlet #will and jem #jem and will #heronstairs #heronstairs fanfic #heronstairs parabatai #twin rings of fire #ao3 #this is one of my favourites #tid

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lazeecomet · 3 years ago

Text

Discord did it again

you know those threads about how people publicly find out in a discord server that they are colorblind. well i had my version of that

Let me say that my spelling mistakes have been the butt of jokes for as long as i've been in the server. i just keep making them and not bothering to fix them. It came up that the reason why i had so many errors was that when i had writing assignments i was told to just skip over words i had trouble with (as i misspelled a lot of words) and would be caught up by the little red underline. I used my computer for a lot of writing assignments because on top of my terrible spelling my handwriting was awful. bad enough that people gave up trying to cheat off my notes/homework. at least on a printed page it was just spelling and grammer errors

and then i did the thing. the watershed moment.

i shared a picture of some notes i had written recently and from a college notebook some 4 years back.

oh boy. the sever looked at that and went......are you sure you dont have a undiagnosed condition?

So today i learned about Dysgraphia

and i probably have a form of it. why does Lazy use capital B and D and P and Q in the middle of words? because when i write them lowercase i struggle to remember on which side of the line the circle goes before its too late

my charactor spacing and sizing is not good

my spelling is awful (in that conversation i spelled cuisine as "quesine")

i use an inconsistant mix of capital and lowercase letters

i have to stop and think to figure out which plane/plain to use and other similar words

my father has dyslexia and i tend to transpose 2+ digit numbers because they "sound better" that way (THAT should have been a real clue)

at least i am good with getting my thoughts out onto "paper" and i tend to (for the most part) write in a straight line, and i dont have full blown dyslexia

#comet tales #so yeah that kinda puts a whole bunch of stuff into perspective #dysgraphia #literally today i read the number 123 looked away and wrote down 132

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saeculorum-amen · 4 years ago

Text

Gaslighting, Otherness, and Gospel

Experiential literature.

The Gospels are not persuasive. Although Matthew may in places attempt to fit Christ into Jewish prophecy in order to place him into the context of the messiah long-awaited, that is at most something necessary, a foundation for the actual argument, and an argument which does not appear explicitly. There is no recounting of facts, there is no framing of what exactly one should do in response to reading them. It feels to me less like they are trying to persuade you about something, and more that they are inviting you into something.

I feel that most acutely in the Gospel of Mark, with its immediacy, and in the Gospel of John, with its intensity of emotion. These are works of experiential writing which try to bring you into the experience that the apostles shared. They cannot name how this will transform you, but they hope that it might, by the experience of it, do so nonetheless, as it transformed each of them in their individual ways. If we imagine the foundation of the synoptic gospels being records of the sayings of Jesus, this is all the more clear: not statements of fact to be absorbed, but the experience of listening at the feet of Jesus, and feeling flashes of insight, glimpses of the Kingdom, as he spoke.

Perhaps the religious as a whole is of that nature, an experiential reality which can be glimpsed, but not measured and recorded — but which can, perhaps, be shared.

I find that in the letters of Paul, certainly, as I enter into his struggle to lead Christian communities, and feel the sense of responsibility that he felt, by virtue of the love that he felt for each and every person. I hear not only what he said to them, and how he told them to live, but what it felt like to say those things, to implore them. What his hopes were, so much more so than his teachings. What he taught is only sometimes relevant to my life, and the lives of those with whom I preach and teach, but the posture of love and hope and concern, of steadiness and urgency, of patience and frustration: that is always relevant. So, too, to imagine what it felt like to be in those communities, and to hear Paul’s letters written to us and our fellow-travellers in this strange and difficult way.

Much of the religious record, indeed, is concerned with the efforts to convey the experience of something which may be universal, or may be profoundly rare, but which nonetheless cannot be collapsed down into a set of facts and figures. The bush which burns and is not consumed. The flood. Ezekiel’s calling. John’s revelation. The experience of being Jonah. The experience of being the crowd which calls for the execution of Christ. We enter into and share of these things, however familiar or foreign they may be. We gain a facility with inhabiting them, whether to find our way to awe, or to gain the conviction required to decide to live differently.

Enlightenment and disappointment.

I am very much a child of the enlightenment, although I am at an age where it feels increasingly preposterous to call myself a child of anything. I was, though: I grew up surrounded by personal computers, in a household led by a deeply gifted engineer who had worked on the Apollo program. My family talk about how I was programming using the macro language of an early text editor before I had even entered school. I tell that story, too, as part of the foundational mythos by which I continually recreate my own life. It captures something very real about who I was raised to be, and perhaps hints at some more elusive things about who I deeply am.

I am no great and gifted historian or philosopher of the Enlightenment, but it seems a meaningful referent for that upbringing. I was taught to see the world in an exacting and scientific way, and to reject things which were mere superstition, or otherwise irrational. I was formed to master language, not as a way to communicate with other people, but as a way to be precise about ideas and facts. If something was true, there would be some evidence for it which could be clearly described, and provably measured — and if it was true, it would be true always and everywhere.

That is a very narrow world, more narrow than the world of Hume or Locke or Spinoza — a kind of fundamentalism of objectivity, in which there was very little room for a person to live, for a person to exist as a subject, rather than an object. The ideal human being was a data logger, not even a flawed individual striving after objectivity.

It grated at me that I could not determine whether other people experienced colours as having the same perceptual quality as I did. I was acutely sensitized to the ways in which adults seemed to be arbitrary and capricious, and to engage in proof by assertion of the legitimacy of all their rules. There was no rigour, no structure which really captured the rough edges I continually ran up against in the course of living. Indeed, I had my own experiences rejected as fabrications and lies, even experiences that would have been readily measurable, like allergies that were present from my early life, and instantly recognized once I sought diagnosis as an adult.

This created all kinds of inward and outward problems. I doubted my own reality, to the point of living with debilitating panic attacks in which my own perspective seemed to fight for control with some other realm of possibilities. I could not trust the ground beneath me, because what if some hidden law, some unknown variable, were to govern it to give way instead. I felt swallowed up in the ocean-like waters of the universe itself, as though there was no way for me to get to dry land, to real life, to the right plane of existence. I had to work hard to learn that the world, and I, would continue to exist as I went from one point to another, rather than disappearing in a kind of unstable variation of Zeno’s paradox transposed into the cosmology of simulation theory.

This introjected doubt was projected onto the world around me, too. How could I know whether what someone else said was true? How could I trust anything which happened outside of my view? Hell, how could anyone know anything?

The politics of doubt.

This pervasive hermeneutic of suspicion was not unique to my objective fundamentalist upbringing. The authority of measurement is almost unquestionable in our society, which prefers technocracy to anything more sentimental. While public debate may take on the rhetorical character of aesthetics, we find a way to turn our rules for action into something you can quantify. You will always be able to know whether or not you can cut down a tree, or dump waste into a waterway, by using a published table of figures. You don’t have to stop and think about whether you should or not, which might be unsettling and subjective, only whether you’re allowed to, which is knowable.

In the grip of my epistemological wounds, I found as a teenager that a certain kind of defiant libertarianism held enormous appeal. Political correctness was a favourite topic in the discourse I was exposed to at home and at school, which is perhaps the ideal target for this politics of sneering contempt and doubt. How was anyone supposed to know what they could or couldn’t say? Who got to decide, who got to make the list? How could someone else tell you not to say a word when they couldn’t give you criteria for deciding so? Where was the proof that words did harm?

You could prove to someone that words were meaningless by shouting the words you weren’t supposed to say, over and over. It’s just a sound, after all. It only signifies something if you let it, and it’s only dangerous if someone does something real and measurable while they happen to be saying the word, at which point the word doesn’t much seem to matter, does it? So you make the sound again and again, while behaving in an upright and respectable manner in all other respects, so that you are above reproach. Whoever hears it and feels pain has inflicted the harm upon themselves.

It’s one of those things that’s true as far as it goes, but doesn’t actually lay claim to as much as it thinks it does. It’s like treating science and religion as overlapping magisteria, as though their claims and methods existed within the same realm and spoke to the same things at all times and in all places. We recognize that doing that does violence equally to religion and to science, because the tools of one are not the right tools for the other. God exists beyond measure, but if God is calling us to build an ark, we had better use tools and measures to guide its construction, and not our ecstasy and wonder. Science sinks in the deep water of religion and vice versa.

This doubting suspicion loves not only to attack what seems arbitrary to it, but to mistake subjectivity for a compromise of objectivity. Hume thought that art was not entirely objective, but that an art critic could, with sufficient dedication, strive for objectivity in how they engaged with their work. You can use your subjective experience to serve something other than your personal biases, albeit imperfectly.

However if someone claims a subjective experience which is outside of the sort of teenage libertarian I was, someone steeped in suspicion and anxiously desperate for the objective, then perhaps it simply does not exist. If a Black person describes their systemic oppression, that seems like a fanciful and implausible explanation for the material facts of their existence. If an Indigenous person describes being shot at by strangers, that seems to border on the fantastic or the farcical. I think of the oft-repeated anecdote about Freud deciding that if all of the daughters of upstanding men claimed to have been sexually abused, this was a sign of rampant gendered delusion, and not rampant sexual abuse by upstanding men. That seemed more likely.

It always seems more likely, to the person who is troubled by the great divide between their own subjective experiences and the subjective experiences of others, that the other is at best confused, but perhaps more likely is lying and being manipulative. It stirs up a cognitive dissonance about the limitations of our own reality, when in fact it is not a threat to the objective reality of our existence, but merely to our omniscience.

So it is that the suspicious person rejects the subjective accounts of others as being inherently untrustworthy. They might engage in what has been called “sealioning”, in which they ask repeatedly for proof, they state their willingness to be convinced, and simply demand that the other person gain legitimacy by finding a way to do so. If their claims were real, after all, they would be able to find some way to do so. The fact that they cannot is not recognized as the game itself being rigged, but as proof that the suspicion was warranted.

To lie and to illumine.

We talk in the information age about information warfare, about the ability of governments to sow doubts about basic facts and to generate confusion about what is true, to the point that coördinated action becomes impossible, and the whole is weakened. We know full well the danger of conspiracy theories, for individuals and for our collective health and well-being, whether it takes the form of anti-vaccine agitation, or paranoid collective fantasies which lead to people ending their own lives, or others’, to stem the tide of global corruption. To someone committed to a politics of doubt steeped in their own epistemological wounds, even this may be a challenging statement: who is to decide who is allowed to make facts, and how? How can you know whether something is a conspiracy theory? How is a conspiracy theory any different to claims of systemic racism? Either they’re all fantastic and unfalsifiable, or none of them are.

The most deeply wounded will not settle for simply resisting belief of others’ subjective accounts, but in fact feel a deep pressure to convince others to lose their faith, too. Governments and market manipulators may know the value of lying, but the wounded make lying itself their weapon. Their goal is not to convince someone of a different truth, but that no one is to be trusted.

They do this by lying, by being disingenuous, to the point of gaslighting, i.e. of trying to get people to doubt their own sanity. They talk about this among themselves as a kind of clownishness, as though they were jesters for the masses, who could bring out uncomfortable truths by defying convention and expectation. It is a chaotic clownishness, however, with no principles and unspeakable truth. There is a reverie in disruption itself.

Some of them end up promoting a kind of sadistic nihilism, but equally common seems to be falling back on an anti-intellectual faith in the status quo. The former seems obvious, but the latter is more surprising. In essence, since there is no grounds on which to make the fuzzy decisions about society, those things should not be changed. There’s no way to engage in creation from a blank slate of how a society should be ordered, but we happen to have a society nonetheless. Therefore there is no position from which action to change society can be taken, except by objective and rational means.

If someone advocates, then, for deviance from the status quo for subjective reasons, it is useful not only to demand that they prove themselves (which they cannot), but to remind them and everyone around them that people are unreliable. They will lie brazenly, even openly, like the teenage libertarian saying a swear word or a slur repeatedly. They want to show you how effortless it is, that anyone can do it, that anyone can make themselves do it. They want to show you that mere words are meaningless, and other people are not to be trusted.

The demands of empathy.

I do experience these people (and I have had more dealings with them than I would like) as wounded, rather than as master manipulators. I think that they are telling the truth, albeit perhaps not intentionally, when they say that they would like to be convinced. They would like to be surprised by an argument, to find out that there is something they have been missing. They do so feel like something is missing, but nothing seems to be able to make it appear.

They watch videos of people suffering, even dying, wondering how it can be that it has ceased to stir up emotion. They read with delight accounts of the stalking of people who don’t seem entirely real to them. In a way, they have fallen into the perennial trap of the gnostic heresy: the belief, perhaps, that there is a divine spark in them, but the suspicion that it is not present in everyone.

Their rhetoric talks about non-player characters, people either not enlightened enough to be fully alive, or who are perhaps not actually people at all. This language comes from the world of role-playing games, in which some characters are directed by the dungeon master or the game itself in order to provide a backdrop for the hero’s life, and to create the difficulties that impede their progress. The non-player character is an explanation both for the seeming absence of the divine spark in others, and also for the frustrations and failures of the individual’s life, for which no other explanation can be accepted.

There is something so innocently wounded at the core of this, like the teenager who discovers at their first kiss that the music does not swell, the lighting does not change, and their perspective does not shift as the camera pans in or out. There is an intensity which is missing from life itself that we know must exist because we see it in movies. Where has it gone, and who has taken it? This leads either to a solipsistic nihilism, or to a politics not only of doubt but of resentment. Someone else is programming the game to be against me, which I know because by every objective measure I should be winning.

The trouble is that the experience of other people’s subjective realities, the thing that lets you glimpse the divine spark in them, is to be open to the experience of them. You have to move beyond the world of ideas and wishes. You have to stop watching from afar. This seems pointless or even destructive, though, when you expect only another disappointment. Empathy comes slowly, and starts with the leap of faith of seeing the other person as a subject like you, too. There is a self-reinforcing structure to these things, and their reality is purely relational. It is not the case that if it were real you’d be able to directly apprehend it against your will.

The pain.

I spent several hours recently dealing with someone engaging in sealioning who was being openly dishonest, with the goal of displacing outpourings of empathy for a marginalized community, and creating a landscape of doubt instead. I thought that that was the end of the story, but as I digested the experience and let myself think about what was going on in the interaction, I found something truly unpleasant come over me. For the rest of that day, I became enraged at interactions which felt emotionally insubstantial, or in which another person seemed to be acting by rote. This caught me by surprise, as although those things might annoy me normally, the intensity of my reaction was wildly out of proportion. Indeed, I found a part of myself almost felt compelled to show that I could act out of proportion.

There were two forces at work there. In the one instance, I had simply spent time exploring a pattern of mind that I then found myself inhabiting a little bit. After all, it wasn’t a world of ungrounded fantasy, but an outlook which has a few kernels of truth that have been massively distorted, and that massively distort the experience of the world in turn. In fact, it was a world view I had known very well, and had worked hard to leave behind, through developing relationships with other people, through my theological development, and through lots, and lots, of psychotherapy.

I have probably even been primed by the pandemic to return to that experience of the world. I don’t leave the house much, I don’t see friends, and I spend too much time in front of computer screens. People exist as ideas, as abstract things I think about. My own feelings feel very far away when my life starts to fall back into that shape, and I normally work hard to keep it from being that way. And yet.

So those old disappointments were present to me, and brought their emotional weight back up to the surface. They were accompanied by a double urgency, however, in the form of a second force: reality testing.

I wanted desperately to remember what it was to feel, to feel empathy, to experience the subjective reality of another person’s life. I urgently needed to remember that the wounded worldview was wrong, and I lashed out in hopes of finding something that would make me feel something. I did — I felt bad. That repeated a few times, until it started to feel almost absurd. I knew better, but it all felt less substantial than I wanted it to.

That was very hard at the time, and it’s very hard to share. It’s still a little challenging, no doubt worsened by the limitations of pandemic life as I have experienced it, but I know what the path back looks like. I’ve let myself talk with friends to remember what other people are like, and I’ve got plans to see some friends for a connection that will be more substantial. Something where my attention isn’t split between a dozen open tabs, or with all the work tasks hanging over my head, or with the task of driving, or thinking about how to respond to a violent troll on social media.

The hermeneutic of curiosity.

It is a core religious value for me that other people exist, and that they have an interior life like mine, and a subjective reality that is every bit as full and real as mine. Jung talks about psychic reality, i.e. subjective reality, as being the most real thing there is, because it is the very thing we apprehend and experience most directly, entirely unmediated. I find that powerfully compelling, and as a religious person I find it enticing.

The religious task, after all, involves that sharing of experiential reality which cannot be reduced to facts. Gregory of Nyssa talks about the inability of the mind to grasp things which are beyond spatial metaphors and reasoning. So it is that I find other people a holy thing: filled with otherness, but enticingly close. But if you engage with another person as an object, you will not find those secret and elusive things: their interiority, their soul. You can glimpse, though, and how glorious it is to glimpse, something of the inner life and the spirit by opening yourself to them, by listening deeply to them, and by engaging in substantive conversation and exploration together. This is the religious task itself.

We might think of the religious task as contemplation of the divine, and looking for something of the divine subject to reveal something of themselves to us, but as the First Letter of John reminds us, we can see one another, and we cannot see God. If we are going to learn how to experience the intersubjective reality of union with the divine, we surely start by being open to doing so with the other person. After all, if you will not experience the interior reality of the other person, who is so like you in every respect, how can you expect to experience the interior offering of the divine, who is utterly unknowable in every respect?

Perhaps it’s easier with God because there’s no material distractions, no illusion that the other person exists primarily to be beautiful, or primarily to frustrate us. There is no possibility that God is a non-player character. A non-player character has substance but no essence, while God is pure essence. God is the energies which make the game go, and is not programmed by anything, as we, ourselves, are at least a little programmed, by language, by culture, by society.

We have rightful yearnings for the other, but they ought to be mutually reinforcing. We are captivated by the beauty, by the difference, or something else enticing about the other, but we are not to mistake them for an object to be possessed, a way to access beauty or something we lack within ourselves. We are called to relationship, to the interpenetration of mind and spirit, by our yearning, and to let ourselves yearn for the transcendent beauty the same way we are enticed by material beauty. The transcendent other, too, loves and made each and every living being, and fills them with breath, so if we are curious about God, we ought to be curious also about God’s people.

This hermeneutic of curiosity has to not only be open to the subjective, but has to not count the cost. Paul talks about this as foolishness, as something which is wise in God’s sight, but which the world will look at and think is absolutely reckless. This is being willing to try to help someone even if it might not work. This is giving of your own resources even if you might get nothing in return. This is being willing to risk believing someone, even though you know that people lie.

Yes, Christ sent the disciples out, and sends all of us out, with an admonition to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves. You can wonder about the motives of others. You should be curious about your own suspicion, even, because it might be telling you something valuable. The question is if you are willing to be transformed for the Kingdom of God: if you would rather believe something which causes you to act more kindly than is required, or if you would rather avoid taking any material risk, even if it causes you to disbelieve someone whose suffering you could have alleviated.

The empty tomb.

Martin Buber shares a piece of Hasidic wisdom which suggests that everything that exists, everything that God has created, has some purpose for the person of faith, some religious value, which must be found, even atheism. The value of atheism being that it calls us to act as though we were responsible for the state of the world, rather than God. It can be so tempting to engage in spiritual bypassing by displacing all responsibility off to God, but we are sojourning together on this little piece of rock, and whether we like it or not, this coëxistence is what we have been called to live rightly within. It’s not about whether we would live well together in the Kingdom of God, but whether we are willing to live as we would in the Kingdom even now.

This brings us to the knife’s edge of disappointment once again. What if it doesn’t feel good? What if it doesn’t feel right? What if it isn’t good enough? Perhaps it is better not to try.

That would be foolishness in the wrong realm. That would be expecting things to feel right, here and now, when in fact it might be very uncomfortable to do what God calls us to. This bitterness may, like the scroll Ezekiel eats, come to taste sweet once we let ourselves enter into it, but it may just be difficult. I think of how many of us in adulthood expect that at some point all the grown-up tasks will become easy and effortless, because they looked that way to us as kids, when in fact they remain a slog and a time-sink, and that’s just part of the sad reality of life.

There has to be something we believe in more than gratification, and more than that our success and our feelings of meaning look like the climactic scenes in movies. For me it is the joy of encounter with God and with other people. It is the substantial beauty of seeing what is real and loving it because it is real, and not because it appears as I wish it would. I do not always manage that. Still, I know that is what I want to give my heart to, even if it’s difficult.

If you love something, you can follow where it leads, instead of perpetually being frustrated that it isn’t going down the path you expected. If you really need to go down that path, go down it, but don’t imagine that something else owes it to you to make the way clear. This is the realm of the Holy Spirit, which may lead you to two divergent paths, not to test you, but because that is what is real. Something which is beyond the spatial things the mind can understand, but which may exist in the reality of God. It may be that the paths will merge after a time, and it may be that we could take either path just as well, and that they really do diverge. Perhaps there is more to us than just one thing.

We are invited to experience the reality of what is, not what we expect. This is what the Gospels call us to: to share in the slow revelation by Jesus of some truths about us, about God, and about the world, and the image of a life which awaits us, and a life which is possible for us here and now. Jesus points out again and again that these things are all the out-pouring of a single truth that cannot be named, but that can be gestured at and felt among us all the same. He tells us that love made us and calls to us, and that we can live according to love, too, but that this is not the path of light and life. Love encompasses all that is, and love leaves nothing out.

You cannot tell someone that. There is no fact to be conveyed. There are a set of truths which must constellate in your mind, and which as soon as they seem settled, suddenly become elusive once again. You can feel disappointment and suspicion, that this thing which should have been true always and forever has changed, or you can let yourself be curious, and follow after it down a different path. It may all at last make sense once more, only to yet again appear fragmented and destroyed. It may not make sense at all except in hindsight. It will probably not all fit in our perspective this side of death itself, but this is the journey we are called to.

So it is that the women who came to Christ’s tomb found it empty. The empty tomb had its own reality to reveal, a baffling revelation, an unnameable experience. Some of the other disciples would not believe it until they saw it themselves, but found that the women’s account had been true all along. The empty tomb could be a disappointment. The empty tomb must be the path to life. That is something that we may experience, by the experiences shared by people we have never met, now long dead themselves. It is something we can never, fully, know. Beyond measure and explanation, so foolishly we place our hope in the absence of something, someone we never met while he was alive.

All of this is in God, as Christ is in God. May we meet Christ in one another. May we yearn across the chasm. May we find Christ in the empty tomb. Amen.

#christianity #theology #politics #philosophy #sealioning #solipsism #nihilism #personhood

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theartscenter-blog · 5 years ago

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Student Work: The Sun Is Hot Because It’s Hot

The following piece, entitled “’The sun is hot because it’s hot’: public speaking in the era of Zoom,” was written by Amy Sayle, one of the students in Julia Green’s recent online class, Writing Through Crisis: Using Memoir to Navigate Challenging Times. The next section of Writing Through Crisis begins Tuesday, July 28th. For more information and to register for this class, visit this link.

“The sun is hot because it’s hot”: public speaking in the era of Zoom

By Amy Sayle

Revised 6/19/20

It’s 10 a.m. on the dot, my webcam is on, and I am live in front of our Zoom audience, when I open my mouth, look at the screen, and completely forget what I’m supposed to say.

The problem is not that I care what I look like. I’ve never succumbed to the hair-makeup-fashion-etc. expectations for women’s appearances.

The problem is also not a fear of public speaking. I make a living presenting to the public at a planetarium, and I am completely comfortable with large, live, in-person audiences.

This is a change from when I started doing this in 1998. Back then, after every planetarium show, I would obsess about anything I’d said that wasn’t perfect. Maybe I’d garbled an explanation of why Polaris hasn’t always been the North Star, or misunderstood a kid’s question about the planets, or said something snarky about astrology. Once, in front of an audience filled with high school students, I was trying to say “planet Venus” and accidentally transposed the initial letters of those two words.

I’d ruminate over these blunders for hours, convinced that the audience members were doing the same. I imagined the adults laughing about my mangled explanations over dinner with their kids, or while side by side on their pillows. I imagined the jokes about my mistakes that the teens would be telling at parties for years to come.

Finally, it occurred to me that it didn’t really matter. The shows were live, with no recording. My words vanished into the ether as soon as they were spoken. Probably no one remembered much of the specifics of what I said or even who I was. No one was there to see me anyway. I was literally in the dark.

But this spring, the pandemic has meant no more shows inside the planetarium. Now it’s all online live sky tours using planetarium software, followed by Q&A. This means my name and my face are also on the screen. Worst of all, the live sessions are recorded from Zoom and put up on YouTube for anyone to see.

So there I am, at 10 a.m. on a Thursday, about to welcome our audience to one of our “engaging learning opportunities, like this live virtual event!”

. . . or something like that. Who knows what I’m supposed to say? I don’t know anymore, because my mind has gone blank. The reason I’m rattled is that we’re training someone new to handle the back-end work for these live videos, and she’s joined the video only a few minutes before 10, having struggled to find the correct Zoom link. Then she’s struggled to figure out how to screen-share our intro slide, and we’ve just realized she also needs to super quickly learn Zoom’s polling feature.

In the Before Time, inside the planetarium, there was lots of technology to deal with. But I’d long become used to talking to an audience while being responsible for the microphone, lights, music, not to mention the entire universe, all while simultaneously having a group late-seated right in front of me or a toddler melting down in the background.

But dealing with a webcam, computer mic, and the weird sensation of talking from a living room to an invisible audience while seeing my own image in front of me—that all still feels very new. It feels like a major accomplishment merely to hit the correct keys at the correct moment to unmute myself and turn on the webcam. Knowing that our new person is wrestling with even more new technology, technology crucial for making this all work, is totally freaking me out.

At 9:59 a.m., the colleague who is training our new person wisely pulls the plug on the training and seizes back the host control. A hastily typed, cryptic message goes out on the chat to all of us. Something like: “you ready.”

It’s now 10 a.m., our live audience is waiting, we’re supposed to start, and this is not the start signal we’ve used with our other presentations. I’m not sure who’s typed this, whether it’s a question or a statement, or who it’s directed at. This unleashes some frantic back and forth typing, with me finally writing, “starting hope you’re ready.”

I successfully turn on my audio and camera. This apparently uses up all the cognitive power I had left, because then I promptly forget what we’re all here for. I think I forget my own name. I stumble though the introduction, then turn things over to my colleague Nick to introduce himself and our theme for the day: the constellations of the zodiac.

I breathe a sigh of relief as everything goes smoothly for the next 25 minutes. Since Nick has to do a lot of work to manipulate the planetarium software that generates the sky, it’s my job to do most of the talking. The topic is one I’ve spoken about many times, I’m in the groove, and I explain everything reasonably competently. I think I even avoid unnecessary snark about astrology, and I forget about my botched intro.

Whenever Nick takes a quick turn to say something, I check the Q&A to see if anyone’s written any relevant questions.

No, it turns out.

There are only a few questions, and they are relevant only in the sense that they relate in some way to some object in outer space. Otherwise, the questions are wildly off topic: “What’s a white dwarf?” (which the questioner has spelled “dorf”) “How long would it take to get to Neptune?” “Why is the sun hot?” Why is the sun hot? What?

We finish our presentation, and it’s time to handle questions. Since attendees can’t see each other’s questions, I decide to ignore what everyone has typed in, in favor of pretending someone has asked an excellent, on-topic question about the zodiac constellations. I answer my made-up question brilliantly.

It’s now 10:28 or 10:29, and I’m expecting Nick to segue into our outro, about following us on twitter and the like. I’m not even really paying attention anymore. I’m fantasizing about the snack I’m going to have as a reward for surviving this. I wonder if there’s still a chocolate bar left in the pantry. Maybe it’s even the orange dark chocolate.

That’s when Nick does the thing we agreed we would never do. Which is to take a question from the Q&A and pose it to the other person.

I am jolted out of my chocolate reverie by this: “So, Amy. Why is the sun hot?”

You know how our president speaks when he’s not reading from a teleprompter? How he often sounds like he has little grasp of either the concept he’s talking about or of the English language itself?

That is what happens to me. What comes out my mouth is incoherent Trumpian word salad. I haven’t dared to revisit the video, but I’m pretty sure I start by explaining the mass of the Sun by using the phrase “the Sun has a lot of stuff.” And I say words like “nuclear fusion” and “hydrogen” and “helium” and “pressure” and “temperature” and possibly I throw out numbers like “27 million degrees Fahrenheit”—but all in a way that is unmoored from logic or meaning.

In the end, I have answered the simple question, the good-if-not-completely-relevant question of “Why is the sun hot?” with a whole bunch of words that basically translate to: “The Sun is hot because it is hot.”

This is mortifying. I have spewed out nonsense, about a very basic question, live on the internet, and it’s all connected to my name and face. Worst of all, this session is being recorded. It will exist on the internet, for as long as the internet exists, available on YouTube to billions of my fellow humans, who can replay it again and again and laugh at what I said.

To recover from this, I have had to draw upon research I remember reading about once, that yes, people do pay attention to us, but no one is paying attention to us in the way that we think.

Therefore, I comfort myself with the thought that most people won’t even notice how badly I mangled that answer. Instead, they’ll notice other things, possibly like how I wear the same black shirt for every live session. Or how my hair is a one giant humido-meter, perfectly preserving a record of central North Carolina humidity from day to day, by the specific diameter and height of the frizz halo.

And I don’t care about any of that.

Though I am convinced that someone, somewhere, is still getting laughs at parties by recounting that time way back in high school when they went on a field trip to the planetarium and the lady pointed out “vlanet penis.”

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youngteenagehearts · 6 years ago

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Dear Bosie,

After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you, or any news or message even, except such as gave me pain.

Our ill-fated and most lamentable friendship has ended in ruin and public infamy for me, yet the memory of our ancient affection is often with me, and the thought that loathing, bitterness and contempt should for ever take that place in my heart once held by love is very sad to me: and you yourself will, I think, feel in your heart that to write to me as I lie in the loneliness of prison-life is better than to publish my letters without my permission or to dedicate poems to me unasked, though the world will know nothing of whatever words of grief or passion, of remorse or indifference you may choose to send as your answer or your appeal. . . .

But most of all I blame myself for the entire ethical degradation I allowed you to bring on me. The basis of character is will-power, and my will-power became absolutely subject to yours. It sounds a grotesque thing to say, but it is none the less true. Those incessant scenes that seemed to be almost physically necessary to you, and in which your mind and body grew distorted and you became a thing as terrible to look at as to listen to: that dreadful mania you inherit from your father, the mania for writing revolting and loathsome letters: your entire lack of any control over your emotions as displayed in your long resentful moods of sullen silence, no less than in the sudden fits of almost epileptic rage: all these things in reference to which one of my letters to you, left by you lying about at the Savoy or some other hotel and so produced in Court by your father’s Counsel, contained an entreaty not devoid of pathos, had you at that time been able to recognise pathos either in its elements or its expression: – these, I say, were the origin and causes of my fatal yielding to you in your daily increasing demands. You wore one out. It was the triumph of the smaller over the bigger nature. It was the case of that tyranny of the weak over the strong which somewhere in one of my plays I describe as being “the only tyranny that lasts.”

And it was inevitable. In every relation of life with others one has to find some moyen de vivre. In your case, one had either to give up to you or to give you up. There was no alternative. Through deep if misplaced affection for you: through great pity for your defects of temper and temperament: through my own proverbial good-nature and Celtic laziness: through an artistic aversion to coarse scenes and ugly words: through that incapacity to bear resentment of any kind which at that time characterised me: through my dislike of seeing life made bitter and uncomely by what to me, with my eyes really fixed on other things, seemed to be mere trifles too petty for more than a moment’s thought or interest – through these reasons, simple as they may sound, I gave up to you always. As a natural result, your claims, your efforts at domination, your exactions grew more and more unreasonable. Your meanest motive, your lowest appetite, your most common passion, became to you laws by which the lives of others were to be guided always, and to which, if necessary, they were to be without scruple sacrificed. Knowing that by making a scene you could always have your way, it was but natural that you should proceed, almost unconsciously I have no doubt, to every excess of vulgar violence. At the end you did not know to what goal you were hurrying, or with what aim in view. Having made your own of my genius, my will-power, and my fortune, you required, in the blindness of an inexhaustible greed, my entire existence. You took it. At the one supremely and tragically critical moment of all my life, just before my lamentable step of beginning my absurd action, on the one side there was your father attacking me with hideous card left at my club, on the other side there was you attacking me with no less loathsome letters. The letter I received from you on the morning of the day I let you take me down to the Police Court to apply for the ridiculous warrant for your father’s arrest was one of the worst you ever wrote, and for the most shameful reason. Between you both I lost my head. My judgment forsook me. Terror took its place. I saw no possible escape, I may say frankly, from either of you. Blindly I staggered as an ox into the shambles. I had made a gigantic psychological error. I had always thought that my giving up to you in small things meant nothing: that when a great moment arrived I could reassert my will-power in its natural superiority. It was not so. At the great moment my will-power completely failed me. In life there is really no small or great thing. All things are of equal value and of equal size. . . .

You send me a very nice poem, of the undergraduate school of verse, for my approval: I reply by a letter of fantastic literary conceits [reproduced above]: I compare you to Hylas, or Hyacinth, Jonquil or Narcisse, or someone whom the great god of Poetry favoured, and honoured with his love. The letter is like a passage from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, transposed to a minor key. It can only be understood by those who have read the Symposium of Plato, or caught the spirit of a certain grave mood made beautiful for us in Greek marbles. It was, let me say frankly, the sort of letter I would, in a happy if wilful moment, have written to any graceful young man of either University who had sent me a poem of his own making, certain that he would have sufficient wit or culture to interpret rightly its fantastic phrases. Look at the history of that letter! It passes from you into the hands of a loathsome companion: from him to a gang of blackmailers: copies of it are sent about London to my friends, and to the manager of the theatre where my work is being performed: every construction but the right one is put on it: Society is thrilled with the absurd rumours that I have had to pay a huge sum of money for having written an infamous letter to you: this forms the basis of your father’s worst attack: I produce the original letter myself in Court to show what it really is: it is denounced by your father’s Counsel as a revolting and insidious attempt to corrupt Innocence: ultimately it forms part of a criminal charge: the Crown takes it up: The Judge sums up on it with little learning and much morality: I go to prison for it at last. That is the result of writing you a charming letter. . . .

There is, I know, one answer to all that I have said to you, and that is that you loved me: that all through those two and a half years during which the Fates were weaving into one scarlet pattern the threads of our divided lives you really loved me. Yes: I know you did. No matter what your conduct to me was I always felt that at heart you really did love me. Though I saw quite clearly that my position in the world of Art, the interest my personality had always excited, my money, the luxury in which I lived, the thousand and one things that went to make up a life so charmingly, and so wonderfully improbable as mine was, were, each and all of them, elements that fascinated you and made you cling to me; yet besides all this there was something more, some strange attraction for you: you loved me far better than you loved anybody else. But you, like myself, have had a terrible tragedy in your life, though one of an entirely opposite character to mine. Do you want to learn what it was? It was this. In you Hate was always stronger than Love. Your hatred of your father was of such stature that it entirely outstripped, o’erthrew, and overshadowed your love of me. There was no struggle between them at all, or but little; of such dimensions was your Hatred and of such monstrous growth. You did not realise that there is no room for both passions in the same soul. They cannot live together in that fair carven house. Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see Life as a whole: by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feed Love. But anything will feed Hate. There was not a glass of champagne you drank, not a rich dish you ate of in all those years, that did not feed your Hate and make it fat. So to gratify it, you gambled with my life, as you gambled with my money, carelessly, recklessly, indifferent to the consequence. If you lost, the loss would not, you fancied, be yours. If you won, yours you knew would be the exultation, and the advantages of victory. . . .

You see that I have to write your life to you, and you have to realise it. We have known each other now for more than four years. Half of the time we have been together: the other half I have had to spend in prison as the result of our friendship. Where you will receive this letter, if indeed it ever reaches you, I don’t know. Rome, Naples, Paris, Venice, some beautiful city on sea or river, I have no doubt, holds you. You are surrounded, if not with all the useless luxury you had with me, at any rate with everything that is pleasurable to eye, ear, and taste. Life is quite lovely to you. And yet, if you are wise, and wish to find Life much lovelier still and in a different manner you will let the reading of this terrible letter – for such I know it is – prove to you as important a crisis and turning-point of your life as the writing of it is to me. Your pale face used to flush easily with wine or pleasure. If, as you read what is here written, it from time to time becomes scorched, as though by a furnace-blast, with shame, it will be all the better for you. The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right. . . .

You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty.

Your affectionate friend

Oscar Wilde

#oscarwilde

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