#first time drawing either of them and woof Amy is hard to draw

[professional-writher]

Metamy doodle!?

[meta-squash]

Brick Club 1.2.6 “Jean Valjean”

Okay, you know what? The past two times I’ve read Les Mis, I’ve always laughed at the sentence about Valjean waking up and then the next paragraph immediately digressing into his life story, but thinking about it, I actually really like it. Since Valjean has entered, he’s kind of been treated like a stranger; we don’t get his internality, and everything about him is narrated to us as if Hugo doesn’t really know anything about him either. And then he wakes up, and with his waking, we are finally able to learn about his past and also, in the next chapters, access his internal thoughts. From 1.1.1 to 1.2.5, we have been existing in Bishop Myriel’s point of view. The whole house goes to sleep in 1.2.5, and when Valjean awakens in 1.2.6, we have left Myriel and are now in Valjean’s point of view.

Somebody else pointed it out already, but I truly love that Jean Valjean’s father was called Jean and his mother was Jeanne. I hope his sister was also Jeanne and at least one of her children was Jean or Jeanne. No wonder there were all those “every Amis’ first name is Jean” memes back in the day. Hugo wasted all his creativity on last names and chapter titles.

So I looked up milkfever, and as far as I can tell, it’s mastitis, which is an infection of the breast tissue. Mastitis most often occurs in women who are breastfeeding. Which would mean that Valjean would have been extremely young when his mother died, possibly still an infant? So his sister raised him from what seems a very, very young age. It’s interesting, then, that he seems more sentimental about her children rather than her?

“His youth was spent in rough and poorly paid labor; he was never known to have a sweetheart; he had no time to be in love.” This line feels really important. It establishes how alone Valjean has been all his life, and that he’s never really had an ambition towards that kind of non-familial human connection. It sort of sets everything up for why he’s able to function so well on his own. At the same time, just in the next paragraph, we’re told that he lets his sister take the best of his meal for her children, and that he quietly paid for the milk that his sister’s children stole; this establishes a sort of quiet, almost instinctual kindness. He’s sullen, he grumbles, he barely speaks, but he cares enough to pay for the milk and not get the children in trouble with either Marie Claude or his sister.

This also establishes the difference between Valjean pre-prison and Valjean post-prison. Despite his reticence and grumpiness, pre-prison Valjean is kind and thoughtful and willing to sacrifice both badly needed money and food for the sake of the comfort of his sister’s children. Post-prison Valjean is equally quiet but has much rougher instincts: his reaction to Myriel’s kindness is a weird semi-threat, his instinct to steal the silver seems much different from his reasoning for stealing bread, he scares Petit Gervais away rather than giving him back the coin.

Hugo’s comparison between poachers/smugglers of nature vs the city is interesting. Men who are fierce to survive on their own in the forest or the sea are savage, but still human. The brutal inhumanity of city-based poverty destroys that. I think I see what Hugo is getting at here: Circumstances make the man. Men who survive in nature are impoverished due to their natural surroundings. You’re going to have to fight to survive if you’re all alone (or in a very small community) in the middle of nowhere in a forest/mountain or on the coast, because resources are scarce and nature is intense. But you retain your humanity because you are fighting against the ruthlessness of nature, not of other people (and perhaps because some of the time, you are working with a community to survive). On the other hand, men who have to survive in the city aren’t fighting nature. They’re fighting the total lack of sympathy from politicians, or employers, or anyone in a more privileged position, and the dog-eat-dog, every man for himself nature of surviving in such a place. They’re fighting against a lack of access to food/goods/money/etc not because those resources are naturally physically scarce, like in the forest, but because they’re socially scarce; in the city scarcity is man-made. It’s you and maybe you’re family against the world, and other people aren’t necessarily going to go out of their way to help you. The more you have to do hard labor to get almost no money and therefore almost no food or other essentials, the more your humanity is sucked away. Capitalism, woo! Again, Hugo being painfully relevant to modern day.

“In our society there are fearful times when the criminal law wrecks a man. How mournful the moment when society draws back and permits the irreparable loss of a sentient being.” Woof. I feel like I don’t even have anything to say about this line because it speaks for itself so goddamn loudly.

(It’s painfully strange to be reading this in the US in the 21st century and have so many modern day injustices come to mind.)

I don’t know enough about French history to understand why Hugo establishes Napoleon’s victory at Montenotte alongside Valjean’s attachment to the chain gang. I wish I did.

Jean Valjean is taken to Toulon and is “erased” at the same time as his sister and her children. In the same paragraph that Valjean’s past is erased and he is given the number 24,601, Hugo also tells us that, now that we are in Valjean’s point of view, his family have pretty much completely vanished as well, sucked into the blackness of poverty in the city. He completely forgets about them; aside from the retention of his plant-based knowledge for later in the book, it seems as though this is the moment where all of Valjean’s past is sucked away from him, and he pretty much never mentions anything about his pre-prison life again, except for the fact that he was a pruner at Faverolles.

Valjean attempts and fails to escape prison four times. I feel like this parallels with his major escapes later in the book, which are successful: his escape from the Orion, his escape into Petit Picpus, his escape from the clutches of Thenardier, and perhaps his escape either into the sewers or his “escape” from Javert when Javert lets him go.

And then a moment in which Hugo becomes self-referential. Claude Gueux is a short story Hugo wrote in 1834. (Also, I’ve just now read it, and Hugo references blowing the candle out with one’s nostril here, too. Only he calls it a boyhood trick.) It’s very obviously the scaffolding for Valjean later on, and a little for Javert. The very skeleton of a summary is this: it’s about a poor but noble-hearted man who is put in prison for stealing bread for his family; he is abused by a guard in a number of ways and kills that guard for his needless cruelty. At his trial he raises questions about what makes a man steal or kill, and how society is to blame.

“Valjean entered the galleys sobbing and trembling; he left hardened. He entered in despair; he left sullen.” Hugo reiterating what he said already with the line about a scar being left on Valjean’s heart. The only way for him to survive all those layers of pain and trauma is to let everything scar over and harden for protection.

There’s a lot in this chapter despite it being fairly short. Basically what the thesis of the chapter seems to be is “circumstances shape men in ways that force them take actions they are not necessarily naturally inclined towards, and abuse/neglect from the law and society only make it so much worse”.

[brachylagus-fandom]

12 Days of WIPmas - Day 11

Not in Our Stars (but in Ourselves), a 39 Clues/Hunger Games fusion

basically Catching Fire with the addition of Cahills. First chapter under the cut.

District Eight

The Reading of the Card happens on a Tuesday. Amy spends the morning clearing out Grace's attic trying not to think about it; since Katniss and Peeta were crowned, she and Woof and Cecilia have taken long walks through noisy parts of town (always with a reason - to pick up fat quarters or yarn or food or Cecilia's kids from school or Dan, not infrequently, from Peacekeeper custody) and quietly speculated at length about what the twist could be. (Woof had suggested forbidding volunteering in order to rig the reapings as much as possible - the Starling brothers, both severely injured in Games-losing ways, are eighteen, and Katniss has a thirteen-year-old sister, and fourteen, which Dan turned five months ago, has never been a good age for Cahills. Cecilia, scoffing at the Capitol endangering their beloved Career districts, thinks they'll change the age range. Amy suspects they'll do reapings in proportion to how many rebels each district had - get Dan and Prim and Ned and Ted and whoever else a rebel loves who’s of reaping age in one fell swoop.) She's sick of dreading it; she'd rather sort through the rest of Grace's library and relish six months outside of the Capitol since apparently they think she should use the time post-drawing to get extra sponsor pledges. 

Eight's victors decide to watch the Reading apart. (They used to do this at Grace's house, Amy knows from Woof's half-finished tatting projects bur- hidden in the couch cushions next to a forgotten earring of Cecilia's and notes in Hope's handwriting. She likes to picture them like that, crowded around the screen together, safe and healthy and alive.) When the sun starts to set, Amy goes back to her house, sets out dinner for Saladin, makes herself a cup of tea, and waits for Dan to come home. All of the factories were on half-shifts today because of the mandatory television (and because they're trying to crack down on the weavers by cutting their hours as deeply as possible), so he technically should have been home by four at the latest, but Amy would be entirely unsurprised if he's out painting mockingjays on burned warehouses or bleaching them onto Capitol fashion set to be shipped. (Wouldn't be surprised if the Peacekeepers shot him for it, either; Snow would think that a fitting punishment for her six months of freedom and what her district's just done.)

Five minutes before the broadcast is set to begin, long after sunset, Dan comes in, barely stopping to stomp the snow off his boots. There are fresh bruises on his knuckles. Amy hopes he isn't getting into fistfights with Peacekeepers.

"Where were you?" Amy asks. "There weren't any afterschool shifts today." Dan shrugs.

"Studying with Atticus and Lowell," he says. "They're stressed about the big text coming up, not sure they'll make seventy-fives." The weavers are getting antsy, he means. It's not surprising - things have been heating up ever since the last Games but Amy still tries not to think too hard about it. The last time the weavers got antsy - not counting last month, which ended with three bombed factories and fourteen executions and countless whippings, because last month was miniscule as far as riots in Eight go - was nine years ago, right after the "house fire" that killed her parents, and it ended with three executions for treason and four months of missed tesserae and twelve tributes, too young and totally doomed, who worked in the mills. (Thirteen, if you count Amy herself, but she'd worked inventory - bobbins in, bolts out - not on the floor. She hadn't been a mill girl, not really. Not in the way Hope had been, and especially not in the way Grace had been.)

"Well, just be careful where you… study," Amy says. "The weather's getting rough out there." Don't get caught running messages, she means. I can't lose you, too. Not for something that's partially my fault. Dan grunts an acknowledgement.

"What's on tonight?" he asks.

"Supposed to be the Reading of the Card," she says. "Cecilia and Woof say it's past time, actually." On their screen, the seal of Panem is replaced by Katniss modeling wedding dresses, which Dan scowls at.

Two years ago, he would've mocked the dresses - loudly, to Atticus' and Lowell's and Calico's laughing agreement - and mocked Amy's feeble comments in their defense. Two years ago, they spoke more than a handful of words to each other on any given day, even if most of those words were arguments. A year and a half ago, Amy went to the Capitol as a little girl with a jade necklace - a legacy tribute, sure, but still a child entirely naive to how the Games were really played - and she came home with Ian's blood caking the dirt under her nails and his words rattling around in her skull. (Silly girl, he'd called her, thinking you'll ever esc- and then she stabbed him and pushed him down to the mutts below, and he'd buried her alive but he hadn't deserved that, and she still sometimes wonders if he didn't really mean to win at all, if he was warning her of what was to come.) She came home, smiling and with clean hands (literally, not metaphorically) and deeply claustrophobic, to a brother who was quiet and furious and blank-faced. Sometimes, she thinks she lost him that year; if she didn't, she'll lose him (metaphorically, and maybe literally) when they go to the Capitol together, him as tribute and her as his mentor.

Caesar reminds Capitol citizens to vote for their favorite wedding dress - "something red to match Peeta," Dan mutters under his breath because Calico had been his friend before she had been Amy's first lost tribute - and then the screen transitions to the Viewing Room at Snow's mansion. The opening notes of the anthem play again. A small boy walks in with an ornate box filled with envelopes, each labeled with a games year. One marked 75 is drawn, and the slip within is pulled out.

"On the 75th anniversary," President Snow reads slowly, "as a reminder to the rebels that even the strongest among them cannot overcome the power of the Capitol, the male and female tributes will be reaped from their existing pool of victors."

That's… unexpected. Unprecedented. Terrifying. (Silly girl, Ian said, thinking you could ever escape, and Amy had killed him and come out with blood and dirt under her nails but she never really left and has spent the past two years bargaining for Dan's life with her body as currency with people who fundamentally do not care. She didn't escape. He did.) Subconsciously, Amy can feel the walls of the den closing in, trapping her, cutting off her air supply as Evan just sobs and sobs and sobs somewhere behind her, and then he goes quiet and a cannon goes off and she won't know it's not his until that night's deaths go up and she can't waste time trying to get to him when she has to dig herself out… Dan, swearing, storms out of the house, towards town (towards trouble), and Amy is back in the present, with a yellow and red quilt Cecilia made around her shoulders and nothing under her nails. The television has shifted to Caesar Flickerman and Claudius Templesmith guessing which victors will go in again; given that only five districts have at least two male and two female victors, it's not hard.

She has to go in again. (She never left.) Amy has so much less left to lose than Cecilia, and she's in better shape, more likely to win. (And, when she inevitably falls on a One tribute's spear, Cecilia has decades of mentoring experience; she's more likely to get their tributes - get Dan - out come next year.) They can get everything else they need out of Grace's house before the Reaping, stash it in a third-party location, and have Dan memorize it. They should do it anyways, just in case the Peacekeepers revoke access.

The day of the Reaping, Amy puts on her Reaping dress from two years ago and Grace's favorite jade necklace - her token, then and now - and shoes she can run in. She buries District Eight dirt as deep under her perfectly painted nails as she can get it. Dan, who's wrangled himself into a pure black suit of his own accord, doesn't mention the oddity if he notices it at all. He's been saying less and being out more than ever since the card was read; Amy doesn't ask where he's been or what he's been doing anymore. (She knows. She put him up to at least twenty percent of it.) Dissuading him is a lost cause, and the bugs in the house really shouldn't catch it if he chooses to tell her.

Dan stays by her side once she enters the pen and holds her hand like he's one of Cecilia's kids; Amy clutches his back. Antonius, after digging around for a moment, calls Cecilia's name, and she walks forwards, her kids still stubbornly holding onto her dress; the camera on the roof of the Peacekeeper's barracks catches every tear rolling down her face in HD, to be transmitted live back to the Capitol for its citizens to coo at. At the base of the Justice Building's stairs, Cecilia's husband takes the two younger children in his arms, leaving Cecilia to try to persuade only the eldest to follow him back with a few soft whispers before Peacekeepers force them apart.

Amy doesn't have to do anything. If she chickens out now, no one will know, and Eight might have a snowball's chance in hell of winning.

But - silly girl, thinking you could ever escape this. Amy came out of the arena, but she never left, never got all the blood and dirt out from under her nails, and now it's calling her back. Quickly, sharply enough that the cameras don't see, Amy takes her hand out of Dan's grip and steps forwards.

"I volunteer!" Antonius gapes at her. Cecilia sobs in relief. "I, Amy Cahill, volunteer as tribute." Antonius nods, gulps, announces her again. He's afraid for once. He should be; the crowd in the square is a powder keg of weavers who have mourned two Cahill girls already and rioters from six months ago who didn't get caught, and Amy's throwing out sparks.

It feels good to be the fire and not the cloth, for once.

Before visitation hour starts, the square erupts, and Eight's victors are hustled onto the train and out of the district as the square burns behind them. Amy, all the Eight she can have around her, only hopes Cecilia's husband and the kids made it out in time. She knows Dan probably didn't. (She knows Dan probably had a part in starting it.)

***

District Six

When the card is read, District Six's Victor's Village is eerily silent. It always is; its designers soundproofed every inch of it and placed it so far from the Hub that you can't even hear the trains. (Nellie misses the noise; she lived right under Track Five growing up, so the only time before her Games that there wasn't a train thudding overhead was the night before every Reaping.) As the closing notes of the anthem play and commentators come on, Nellie looks at the glass of vodka in her hand and debates flinging it at the screen to make Claudius Templesmith's face shatter.

She decides against it. Barely.

She needs to talk to Erasmus. The games this year were always going to be a mess, and they planned to disrupt them as much as possible, but this twist changes things. Disrupting a Victor's games will be easy. You have the lovers from District Twelve and either the mother or the legacy from District Eight, plus a variety of everyone's favorites from elsewhere. They can make this unpopular with ease. The only real problem will be getting them all out, since virtually everyone will either be in the games or mentoring them.

The morning of the reaping, Nellie doesn't dress up. She spikes her (recently redyed) hair up more than usual, but she wears the same grunge she always does; it's her style, and it got her through her first reaping just fine. When her name is called, she is thoroughly unsurprised that Rosie doesn't volunteer; she's pretty sure Rosie didn't even notice. (Ford certainly doesn't when his name is called. Nellie dreads what their pre-Games detox will look like.)

They have a brief visitation, Nellie's parents hug her and take most of her piercing jewelry (at least a quarter of which will be missing if she comes home), Erasmus glares down the peacekeepers to hug her tightly and whisper that there's a plan to get her out, yadda yadda, she's been through this before and it was just as forgettable the first time. The train speeds out of Six quickly, its wheels thudding along the track. Nellie can tell by the sound they're on a hyperspeed, duoblock wheels with front right starting to get fatigued. The sound lulls her to sleep.

***

District Five

Irina knows she's going back in; District Five's only two living victors are Edison, winner of the Forty-Ninth Hunger Games, and her, winner of the Twenty-Fifth. Most of her competitors had been picked because no one wanted them around, because they were a drain on resources, because they were hated; Irina had been all of those things, but she had also been chosen because people thought she stood the faintest, slimmest chance of winning.

She doesn't now. She's kept in shape since her win - she has too much time on her hands, so she might as well spend it doing endless pole vaults and gymnastics routines - but she knows the age breakdown of the victors, and she is one of the oldest left. She'll be speared through by some well-trained twentysomething from a Career district, and that will be that. This time, she has just as much of a chance as most of her tributes do (as Nikolai did), and she doesn't waste time trying to deny it.

She comes up when her name is called (after Flavinius spends a good minute and a half rooting around inside the ball for her slip, which is at least amusing even if it means nothing) and looks directly at the camera they plant dead center at the back of the square. She does not smile, or shiver, or cry, or react at all. She just stares into its dark lens until the cameraman turns away and whispers "as it began, and so it ends" under her breath. Edison staggers up next to her. She's not surprised she can smell the alcohol on his breath from two feet away; he's always been a less-than-functional alcoholic, even before he went into an arena swarming with insects and came out screaming.

They do not do visitation; there is no one to visit them. Edison has never had anyone, and Irina's husband is gone, and Nikolai… Nikolai is gone, too. (Irina just needs to block out why.)

***

District Three

Sinead can't return to the arena. Her brothers need her Victor's stipend; since the accident, Ned can only spend a few days a week in the workshop before the noise and the smell of burnt solder set off his migraines, and no one will hire Ted at all, not even for assembly work. If they were on their own, they couldn't survive, and all three of them know it.

So, on Reaping Day, Sinead stands in the pen with shaking and sweaty hands skating off her vinyl skirt; her stylist says it's in this year, and she needs to earn as many sponsors as possible however she can whether she's in or out of the arena. It's funny; the year of the Sixty-Ninth Hunger Games, she hadn't been nervous at all. Not with the crush of bodies in front of her to pad the probabilities and her brothers, leaning over their side of the cordon, beside her and so many Personal Efficiency credits on her side to balance out the tesserae they and everyone else they knew took out. Now, there are only two slips in a much smaller bowl - their tesserae haven't carried over, it seems - and a sickly sense of dread in her stomach.

Sinead doesn't cry when Wiress' name is called, but it's a close thing. It's not that she doesn't like Wiress - the woman got her out of the arena basically sane, and they work well together in the games and on technological projects - but she just can't afford to go back in again and lose - her brothers can't afford to lose her - she's going to lose Wiress, and it's going to hurt so, so much -

Then Alistair's name is read, and it's like a punch to the gut. Logically, Sinead knows the two events are independent - both of them had a one-in-two chance of being called - but it still feels like they should've gone in together if they went in at all. Alistair was there when her parents died and they had been too young to take out tesserae or get work; Alistair had been there to put her back together after she was crowned; Alistair was there when the battery factory exploded and through the months of painful recovery it had entailed for all of them; Alistair isn't going to be there for anything else, because Alistair's not getting out of this.

Not unless she does something about it.

***

District Two

Hamilton knows he isn't going back in. He knows the other victors have his back. He's barely out, not even cleared yet to mentor; his burn scars are still soft and fresh from a fourth round of half-successful remake. He's still woken up most nights by dreams of gasoline and fire and blood and the sensation of brain dripping on his fingers; the night before Peeta proposed, he nearly strangled Reagan when she tried to wake him up from a nightmare.

Reagan, who fights Madison almost daily over who'll get to volunteer the year they turn eighteen. Dad, trying not to look bitter at the honor he was denied, appeases them by saying one of them can try for a spot at seventeen like Enobaria; this only mutates the argument, which turns into a fistfight at the dinner table that Hamilton is left to break up as his parents smile. (He loves his family, he really does, but if Brutus' couch wasn't covered in wood shavings, he'd be staying there in a heartbeat.)

So, when Hamilton Holt is called forwards, he isn't worried about killing people again. (He knew what he was doing, knew what would happen when he set that trap, but that didn't mean he was prepared to watch a thirteen-year-old burn alive until Satin could shoot her.)  He knows the others will volunteer in his place; that's simply how it's done in Two. The female victors had a frenzy when Boudicca was called, and Enobaria won, no surprise about that. Until the crowd is eerily silent, and Brutus - his mentor - is stone-faced and shameful, and his scars itch in the summer heat and there's a sea of victors in front of him but none of them move a muscle and Hamilton realizes there's been a conversation he was left out of.

Goddammit.

His family raves during visitation about the honor he's been given. His father, the front-runner for the Forty-First Games before he was kicked out of the Program for the Promotion of Athleticism (allegations of unauthorized steroids, which Dad admits to, and rumors of grandad committing treason, which he claims were entirely fake, that followed Hamilton in ugly whispers from teachers and jealous peers alike) is eager to have a son who will win the games twice (any other option is unthinkable), and his sisters are eager to watch, but Reagan is shaky and pale. Hamilton thinks she's finally figured out what will happen if he doesn't win. Especially after Cato's epic non-win last year, which was broadcast live to District Two's schools.

Brutus, his mentor a second time around, is a stone wall on the train ride up. Hamilton doesn't do anything to assuage his guilt; it's his fault they're both in this mess again. He absentmindedly scratches at his scars; they haven't itched this much since the second round of remake.

Hamilton Holt is from the safest district in Panem, has already won the games once with tricks and fire and pure, brutal violence, and he's been reaped for the first time in his life.

Goddammit.

***

District One 

Jonah knew from the second the card was read that he was going back. He's young enough to still have a chance to bring his district glory; he's new enough that the sponsors haven't really fallen in love with him yet and won't care if he dies. (Jonah's fan's are a bit young for the big bucks, anyways - the markets pull in more money than a hundred concerts ever will - and he knew that when he made his talent music that he aggressively targeted to the tween market, had made that choice deliberately just as he had made his kills as personal and bloody and nonsensual as possible, and he doesn't really regret keeping as much of himself his even if it works less every passing year and even if this is what it led to.) The next morning, he gets a training plan from Victor's Affairs, supplements to help him bulk up muscle he's since lost to suit fashion whims and review on weapons he hasn't held in the six and a half years since his win. 

His family doesn't visit him after he volunteers. He doesn't expect them to; he hasn't seen Broderick since before he started training full-time, Laila is keeping Phoenix as far from the Career program and her sister as possible (which, frankly, good for her), and Cora… he's always known his mother's love is fleeting. The last time he talked to her was when he got pulled out, needing immediate surgery to stabilize his leg and half-delirious from pain, and she called him a disgrace - for getting injured, for not playing it sexy, for mercy killing Fourth Place instead of dragging it out - and she's never walked back comments like that. The person who does visit him is Natalie Kabra, sister of the Seventy-Third's male tribute, who placed second after being mauled by mutts. She's seventeen still, a year shy of the arena, but already gunning for the top spot if the trainers' reports are anything to go by. (Also halfway to completely batshit crazy if the psychologists' reports are anything to go by, but that's not exactly a disqualifier in the Hunger Games.)

"Avenge him," Natalie says. "Kill her." Jonah nods; he knows Amy Cahill's odds of leaving the arena alive, and they aren't high. He won't even have to kill her himself.