#fives it's uncharitable to compare the two

[mirrorofliterature]

if I make a post criticising the jedi, the institution, please do not bring up: 'ah, yes, anakin, the only jedi that exists apparently, and certainly the only jedi that could possibly fuck up'

It's tiresome. anakin has no institutional power in the jedi, really. a recently promoted knight.

if I'm critiquing the jedi council, can y'all just focus on the council and not anakin?

sincerely,

stop making my posts about systemic failure of jedi about the individual failures of anakin skywalker.... it's frankly quite annoying.

[horsetailcurlers2]

hi hello! sorry this is extremely random but you literally have the best analysis! a friend and i were talking about derek shepherd and the way his trauma affected him throughout his life. something along the lines of how his trauma compares to amelia. he tries to save everyone (falling in love with broken women) and how amelia destroys herself. and i was wondering if you had any thoughts about that? :)

hi! and omg thank you that’s very nice considering i feel like most of my analyses are just me word vomiting incoherently in an empty room and scratching at the walls lmao.

okay i will try to do my best here but i don’t know how much sense this will make or if i have anything new or interesting to say. i don’t really consider myself a derek expert (NOT that i consider myself an addison expert or anything but i do spend considerably more time thinking about her than i do about him). but YES you’re so right

something that i think is interesting is that we get a lot more direct focus on amelia’s trauma than we do derek’s. maybe that’s just the byproduct of her struggle with addiction or maybe it’s because private practice was often a lot more character focused than grey’s. i also think, at the risk of sounding uncharitable towards meredith (whom i adore with all my heart) that a lot of times on the show, his issues take a backseat to hers- although that may also just be a deliberate choice on his part or because its her fucking show lol. but  i find it interesting that he is vulnerable about her but rarely ever vulnerable with her.

i find the shepherd family dynamic endlessly fascinating and i especially think a lot about the idea of derek and amelia being the two out of the flock that were so directly impacted by their father's death. the math on grey’s is sloppy at best but it’s stated a few times that amelia was five years old. i think derek may have said he was eleven but that gets contradicted so i always just placed him between eleven and thirteen.

before i get into derek specifically i want to talk about amelia bc i love your point about the comparison/contrast of them in the wake of that shared trauma. i think that honestly the driving factor for her addiction wasn’t necessary the shooting itself, but the aftermath. amelia shepherd really pokes at my Little Sister Syndrome and i think her conversation with carolyn after the fake husband dinner was especially telling. amelia frequently describes her mom as “the best/great” (addison describes carolyn as a great mom too iirc) but after christopher’s death, carolyn was not as attentive to amelia as she was to her other children. that combined with amelia being the youngest with such a large age gap makes me think she had a pretty isolated childhood. there was a sort of disconnect from her siblings who were much older, her mother was changed by grief, and her father was gone. for a huge chunk of her adolescence, most of amelia’s family was already moved out of the house. not that i don't think the shooting itself or the trauma of losing her father had a big impact on her but i think a lot of her issues stem from feeling abandoned by the rest of her family. i think her addiction resurfaces when she feels most alone/abandoned. i think that a part of her is trying to avoid feeling the depth of her loneliness and a part of her is trying to be loud and take up space a) so that the people in her life will notice her b) like she couldn’t that day in the store with derek’s hand over her mouth. 

derek on the other hand, was old enough to be cognizant and understanding of what was happening that day in the store. he 100% felt a responsibility to protect his little sister and i also think he felt extremely powerless that he couldn’t save his father. obviously derek has a bit of a god complex but he also does have a savior complex. 

he protected amelia by keeping her quiet. i think that’s actually a big part of it (for both of them). also idk how to articulate this well and i’m no psychologist but derek only likes his women broken to a certain extent. i think he likes to be needed but he doesn't want them to be needy. he doesn't like when it’s not something he can fix with some immediacy (the powerlessness again) and his discomfort with being unable to fix it makes him lash out and withdraw. he liked saving meredith, until her trauma deeply affected how she behaved in the relationship. he liked (and this part is 80% assumption and conjecture from my addek brain) being able to soothe the wounds from addison’s childhood (her loneliness and feelings of inadequacy) until her “neediness” started to feel cloying and almost accusatory. 

so imo derek likes to save people, until they are too difficult to save. it's established that he is VERY black and white, which is why he thrives in brain surgery which has finite rules and steps he can follow in order to save people’s lives and bring relief to their families. he's good at surgery. its where he turns when he's feeling lost in his personal life. the guy clearly has some control issues. conversely, when things are going poorly at work (i.e jen harmon), he doubts EVERYTHING about himself and his choices bc the one thing he can always control is destabilized. 

i think that derek gets angry when he feels guilty which ties back to him lashing out and withdrawing when he can't fix something/someone. I think this is a huge component of his tension with amelia. he is extremely judgmental of her struggles with addiction, and he (like their other siblings) has trouble separating Adult Amelia from Teen Amelia. maybe a part of him has always felt like her addiction was his fault. like, if he had shielded her better, she would have less pain (which isn't true). so while on the surface, it seems like maybe he is just harsh on her because he is tired of her shit and still angry about the chaos she caused before she went to rehab the first time, a lot of it i think is actually resentment/anger because he feels guilty (and again, anger/moodiness is how derek reacts to guilt).

its an oversimplification, but i think what a lot of it boils down to is little preteen derek with his arms wrapped around his baby sister, holding his breath and needing to use both his hands to keep her still and quiet, and it has to do with her watching her father’s blood on the floor and being unable to scream. of course there's also the aftermath (amelia’s loneliness and how much grief she had to fit in such a small body, derek’s guilt, anger, and the horrible feeling that he's somehow now “the man of the house”)

idk this isn't well organized and certainly not as articulate as it could’ve been but god i do love thinking about the derek and amelia of it all. tysm for the ask. srry for the long-winded answer :)

[baggebythesea]

One central aspect of Glimmer's story that I really enjoy is her lust for power but also moral courage to avoid paying too high a price for it, even when she really wants to

Her wish to be seen as more than the 'weak' princess forces her to push herself as hard as she can and is the leading source of conflict with her mother. But instead of pretending she's something she's not (like an uncharitable reading of Sea Hawk), she uses every tool in the box to work together with the people around her, and thereby manages to build a princess alliance that didn't fall apart like the one her mother built.

Her initial relationship to Adora is marred by envy, because she too wanted the power of She-Ra and the respect it gave Adora from her mother and the other princesses. But instead of letting it fester, she works super hard on becoming best friends with Adora, helping and supporting her and thereby gaining access to that power the "right" way. Her envy is still there (she COULD have suggested their littel trio to be named the She-Ra Gang rather than the Glimmer Group) but she keeps it in check. Compare and contrast Catra, who took five seasons to put her envy of Adora behind her.

Her relationship to the magic of her two mother figures, like OP notes, is tainted by the fact that her immortal mother stands in the way, and instead she seeks the legacy of her father. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's part of her guilt in season 4. In a sense, Glimmer getting the power she saught was a direct consequence of taking Shadow Weaver's hand and bring her with her to invade the Fright Zone. Glimmer's last action together with her mother was to chose Shadow Weaver over her, and even if one may argue about the logistics and morality, I don't think the result is lost on Glimmer. But even so, she did her best to honour her mother's legacy and made sure never to let Shadow Weaver in all the way. Glimmer's guilt and refusal to use the moonstone before the coronation can be read a misplaced attempt at atonement for disobeying her mother in a critical moment. Compare and contrast Shadow Weaver, who never in her life commited an atrocity without telling herself it was totally justified. Even in her darkest moment, when Glimmer forbid Bow and Adora to go after Entrapta, she did her best to take care of Brightmoon like her mother had (and ironically repeated the error Glimmer always thought she did). Which leads us to...

Light Hope. Despite the warnings of her friends Glimmer went to the being that horded Etheria's magic like a dragon. When the price of the power seemed to be to empower a former enemy she never hesitated, and when it became clear to her that she had been deceived she immediately tried to corse correct. Compare and contrast Entrapta who never once seemed to ponder if destroying the whispering woods in her quest for knowledge was a bad thing.

And in the last temptation of Glimmer, when Horde Prime offered her space jello and the position as a good little trophy in his museum, she busted his fucking orb, got herself a cat BFF that saved her and hesitated exactly zero nanoseconds when Adora later suggested to go and save Catra. When Prime chipped her father to keep the taunting and temptation going she barely listened before beating the snot out of him too. Compare and (not really) contrast Hordak, who also got to see Prime for the piece of shit he was and reacted accordingly.

In conclusion: Glimmer is best girl, and her central story arc is DELICIOUS.

Thinking about Glimmer again.

Specifically lately thinking about the delicious tragedy that is how much she loves and revels the full power of the Moonstone and how, since Angella was immortal, she never would have moved beyond needing to recharge her entire existence unless Angella lost her connection to it.

All the joy and desire for power Glimmer has regarding her abilities with full connection to the Moonstone are tainted by this reality but now that she has it... would she give it up? I think she would, but it would plant dark seed of resentment. Especially as Adora grows in power. Glimmer can't stand to feel powerless and also she takes great desires in being powerful.

I think that's one reason she goes so hard on the magic Shadow Weaver teachers her. Only that magic is untainted as it's not being contingent on the loss of her mother. It's something I don't think Bow or Adora could totally understand.

It's just so good and so sad and I love Glimmer so much.

[cdyssey]

Trust Me, Pt. 2/2

Summary: Melissa had to put someone down as her emergency contact.

A/N: Part two, @straperine​, my friend!!! 8K+ words of the most unhinged angst imaginable, but then I wrote a little fluff—as a treat. 

CW: Car Accidents, Medical Procedures, Hospitalization, Alcohol

Part 1 | AO3 Link

In the hospital waiting room, Barbara paces the harshly-lit tiles back-and forth and then back again, likely driving the other two bleary-eyed occupants of the space insane. 

She is beyond caring about other people at this point, though, as selfish as it is, as uncharitable, and as unkind.

Melissa Ann Schemmenti might as well be the only person left in the world.

The wonderful surgeon, a maternal woman who insisted upon being called Njoki instead of Dr. Anyango, had already come out around an hour ago, sat next to Barbara in one of those dreadful hard-backed chairs, and explained it all very carefully to her. When the truck had hit Melissa’s comparatively tiny Civic, her seatbelt had thankfully done its duty and kept her in its seat when she careened into a shallow ditch… however, the external pressure exerted by the safeguard alone probably would have been enough to bruise a kidney. It was not an uncommon injury in a car wreck—a trade off even for not flying through the windshield. But then, on top of that, Melissa’s airbag didn’t deploy, and it appeared that she slammed forward into her steering wheel, which did quick work of lacerating what had likely already been a tender kidney.

Her only remaining one.

This was news to Barbara, who had assumed that she knew most everything there was to know about Melissa: her favorite color (lime green), the names of her fists (John and McClane), the significance behind the saints nigh perpetually suspended around her neck (a gift from her late nana, divine and holy protection). She even knew things that her friend hadn’t explicitly told her, such as the fact that she always had to face the door, hypervigilant against potential threats.

But she hadn’t known this.

“What do you mean she only has one kidney?” She had all but yelped, gathering the collar of her shirt in her clenched fist, rumpling it even further than it had been already. She’d barely given a thought to what clothes she had thrown on, half-pulling on garments at random. She wasn’t wearing a blessed stitch of makeup.

Njoki seemed surprised at Barbara’s surprise, raising a grayed brow, but she didn’t remark upon it.

“Her other kidney must have been surgically removed because there’s some old scar tissue there,” she said in a didactic voice, not dissimilar to the one that Barbara used when she was introducing shapes to her five-year olds for the first time. “But I didn’t see the operation on her medical records, so it may have been done a long time ago.”

Barbara hadn’t known what to do with this overwhelming information except to be distantly hurt that she had never been told about it. Granted, she supposed that there weren’t too many occasions when Melissa could have brought up the detail that she was missing a kidney in casual conversation… but just maybe, it could have been folded into the same discussion that they should have had about her apparently being Melissa’s emergency contact.

Because that was news to her too.

Not as surprising, she grudgingly reasoned.

Melissa probably had to put someone down after the divorce, and she didn’t trust any of her family as far as she could throw them.

But still.

Barbara would have liked to have known.

She would have liked to cherish the knowledge that Melissa trusted her so deeply… even though the very fact that it had remained a secret almost ran counterintuitive to that epiphany. 

Melissa had spent the entirety of their friendship taking care of her in so many ways, from making her feel at home in Philly at the very start to doing her damnedest to ensure that her house didn’t become an empty haunt in all the lonely months after the divorce.

But, in twenty-something years, she rarely—if ever—let Barbara extend those same sorts of extraordinary measures to her.

Not even when she had been married to Joseph, who was an overgrown manchild at best and a drunk buffoon at worst.

Not even when she had finally divorced his stupid ass and seemingly forgotten how to smile for years upon aching years, the gesture never entirely reaching her dark eyes. 

Not even when her nana passed away a few years after that, and she’d ended up falling out with her younger sister because of it too.

So much pain, year-in and year-out, and Barbara had tried to be present for her—bringing casseroles over to her house, embracing her in the teacher’s lounge, taking her out for lunches, telling corny jokes that never exactly succeeded in making her laugh, threading their hands together in unnoticed places, sometimes taking far too long to let go—but it never felt like enough. These gestures were all nice and good, and Melissa was audibly appreciative of each and every one of them, but Barbara, ever a model Christian, wanted to thoroughly save her friend.

Melissa once said she’d kill for Barbara—Barbara was family—but the inverse was precisely true for her.

She’d do anything to drag her friend back from the consumptive darkness, even if it killed her.

“I’m sorry… this is just a lot to process,” she had admitted to Njoki, by then delicately massaging her pounding temples with her fingertips. ��Melissa can be”—(so damn stubborn, headstrong, prideful, cagey, self-deprecating, and maybe even self-loathing, quite possibly unconvinced that she deserves to be loved)—“protective about the particulars of her life sometimes.”

“Understandable,” Njoki smiled graciously and let the sticky moment pass.

“But her other kidney...” The only one she had. God, it sickened Barbara. How could she not have known? “Were you able to fix it?”

She dreaded the answer, already fearing the worst outcome, unable to prevent herself from catastrophizing when every nerve in her body was alive with adrenaline and panic and hurt.

She would be brave enough for Melissa not to look away from it—the answer, the future, whatever else this hellish event had in store.

She owed Melissa her bravery at the very least.

“Mhm… I was able to fix it with an emergency partial nephrectomy,” Njoki returned patiently, “which simply means that I removed the damaged tissue from the kidney and did other repairs to successfully restore it to full functionality…”

The surgeon bit her dark lower lip then, hesitating slightly for the first time since the conversation had begun, and the gesture wasn’t lost on Barbara.

“There’s a but in there, though,” she intuited, her mouth abominably dry. She stared at palms, which were slightly red from the way she had been worrying them together for three hours.

Because Melissa had been in surgery for that long of a time—if not longer given the fact that an hour had passed since the accident and when Dr. McGill actually called.

Three godforsaken hours.

And Barbara had endured every second like her own personal hell. They drove through her hands—those seconds, those minutes, those hours upon unfathomable hours. They wounded her tender skin—scourged it even—but she could not stop herself from participating in her own bitter annihilation. 

She could not stop herself from fearing a world where Melissa Schemmenti could suddenly stop existing.

“Yes,” Njoki agreed softly, lightly curling her hand around Barbara’s wrist. Her fingers were cool, and that felt good to her feverish skin, soothing even. “She only has one kidney, so recovery is going to be on the longer side. We’re giving her a hemofiltration treatment while she’s in the ICU to ease the stress on the organ as it starts to heal. But I’m also not necessarily happy with her oxygen output yet, so I’m going to wait to take her off the ventilator for another couple of hours until she’s stabilized.”

“She’s on a vent?” Barbara had inhaled sharply, incapable from keeping the terror and unholy fear from climbing up the rungs of her throat. What she knew of medical terminology wasn’t much. What she knew of ventilators was absolutely terrifying. “She can’t breathe on her own?”

Njoki’s grip on her wrist tightened.

Reassuring but firm.

And kind.

So kind.

“It’s less that she can’t, Mrs. Howard, and more that the ventilator is giving her some help at the moment, so her body doesn’t have to work so hard to do so for her,” she clarified. “We’ll have her off of it in no time—don’t you worry, hon.”

Barbara winced at the use of her surname—the very one she had consciously decided not to change—still attached to the history behind it, wanting to continue to share a name with her daughters, and not wanting to endure the legal hassle of reverting to her maiden name besides… but, at the same time, Howard was inherently a reminder of Gerald. And there was something about the invocation of her ex-husband when she was in the waiting room of a hospital nearly about to lose her mind over her dearest not-just-friend that knifed her between the ribs. 

They’d been divorced for nearly an entire year, and she still felt the need to apologize to him.

For what exactly?

She could not say—in the very same way that she’d been unable to tell him the real reason why she couldn’t leave Philadelphia.

There had only been one reason, really.

One name.

One inexcusable sin.

“I’m going to allow her another hour to rest,” Njoki continued, giving her one last squeeze before finally standing up from the rickety chair, “and then I’ll send someone to come and get you. Does that sound alright?”

“Yes, of course,” she had replied somewhat untruthfully. Every atom in her itched to be wherever Melissa was now, to lay eyes on her for herself, to embrace her, to empirically confirm that she was still breathing, but she forced the facade of Barbara Howard to arise and perform her due diligence.

She smiled at the doctor with all her pearly white teeth.

But when she was finally gone, when it was simply Barbara and the two faceless individuals in the waiting room who were studiously looking away—rightfully lost in their own torments and fears—the kindergarten teacher bowed her head and cried.

She cried because she had apparently almost lost Melissa Schemmenti, and there wouldn’t have been a damn thing she could have done about it. And she cried precisely because she didn’t lose her best friend. She was still on this Earth—alive, tangible so miraculously here—and the guttural relief cascaded through her broken body like a deluge, like a Biblical, almighty flood. She cried because she was so utterly exhausted. She had spent the last three hours in a state of hypervigilance, every microscopic detail that she perceived razor sharp and stinging in the clarity of trauma. She cried because everything hurt—it all did—down to the way that when she glanced at her phone—and it was Melissa’s twinkling eyes that greeted her!—she had to hold back a sob.

She cried because had this been the end—had Melissa gone and left her, had she died—then there would have forever remained an unspoken thing, a wordless specter that perpetually haunted the few inches that unfailingly remained between them.

In Melissa’s music-filled kitchen when they accidentally brushed hips, standing side-by-side in front of the stove.

On Barbara’s soft couch when their shoulders just touched as they coincidentally laughed at all the same parts of a stupid movie.

In the teacher’s lounge at the round table that they both loved, their ankles occasionally glancing beneath their chairs.

Barbara cried about all of these things, having never verbally articulated the importance of even just one of them, a hand carefully splayed over her mouth to keep the carnage from coming out.

It was a quiet affair, of course, because she was conscious of the others—(she was always conscious of the others and their perpetual surveillance)—but the tears leaked from the corners of her eyes and down the weathered planes of her face anyway, collecting calmly on the vertex of her chin.

She allowed herself those five minutes of nearly unadulterated grief.

She indulged the child inside of her who had no recourse except to fall apart, who could only physically manifest these big emotions in the total reckoning of her own body.

And then, just as quickly, with expert precision, she capably mothered herself.

She wiped her streaming eyes on the sleeve of her soft shirt, the mask settling back into its proper place again, and she became Barbara Howard once more, unable to sit with herself and all of her unwanted baggage for very long.

Quite literally.

Which is why she’s been pacing for almost the entire hour, only taking a few sitting breaks before inevitably getting up again, continuing to pace, and impatiently waiting for the moment when the double doors open and someone tells her that she can see Melissa.

When that finally happens—sometime around three—when a nurse appears in front of her and tells her that her wife is starting to wake up, she never fully registers that there is something inherently wrong with such a sentence in the first place.

She just nods—speechless, so grateful—and follows eagerly, every step forward illuminated by the harsh fluorescence above.

—

The ICU is a terrifying place, dimly lit, shadowy, claustrophobic, and frankly alive with ghastly noise. Curtained beds line each side of the unit like stalls from which the intense whirring of machines rises upwards into the air and crashes indelicately upon her ears, but even that electric undercurrent isn’t enough to disguise the moans that frequently surface through the hum like a keen sort of lowing. 

Her stomach clenches, the column of her throat, as she catches a glimpse of a patient on a ventilator—not Melissa, thank God—but she knows that her friend must look similar, spidered with so many crawling appendages.

The nurse, a young lady named Cecily, silently gestures for Barbara to follow her down the corridor of beds on the right.

Before they reach the very last unit there, which is also initially eclipsed by a floor length curtain, Cecily gently whispers prepare yourself as though this is something achievable when one’s best friend—(and partner, confidant, companion, family, sole reason for staying in Philadelphia, guilty pleasure, greatest what if)—is behind that curtain, vulnerable and so broken, picked over and picked apart. But she only nods, distantly aware that it’s just something that the nurse has to say to be polite.

And so, Barbara Howard takes a deep breath and rounds the corner.

And she nearly falls to pieces where she stands.

Because there is Melissa Ann Schemmenti—a woman who always insists on looking so damn alive —thoroughly diminished in a hospital bed, washed out in a paisley-studded hospital gown. She is crisscrossed and scissored and swallowed up by so many colorful wires and tubes. Lines ribbon her arms, snaking around them and plunging inwards, connected to at least four different IVs that are swinging gallows-like from a singular pole. A row of stitches, neatly taped, rakes her colorless cheek, and the bottom of an empty catheter bag just pokes out beneath the blankets on the left hand side of the bed.

All of this Barbara Howard might have been able to live with, rationalize, and capably endure as part of the minutiae of what it means to be in an intensive care unit, were it not for the big and ugly tube erupting from the side of Melissa’s mouth, leading to a dreadfully bulky machine.

The ventilator.

Every rise and fall of the second-grade teacher’s chest is too perfect, too controlled, too precise.

Mechanical.

“Melissa.” Her name, the lilting three syllables of it, comes out shattered on her tongue. Barbara is desperate, unhinged at all of her carefully articulated seams. She’s scrambling to her side, unkeeled, unraveled, and so utterly unmoored. “Oh, sweetheart."

She stops just short of reaching out and touching her, though, suddenly afraid to do so—unable to stomach the thought of hurting her even one iota more—but then Njoki, who has just arrived, moves to the opposite side of the bed and gently shakes her head, her hands primly tucked into the pockets of her lab coat.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Howard,” she says. (It takes everything in her not to visibly recoil at the innocuous usage of her full name again.) “You can go ahead. See? She’s looking at you…”

And so she is.

Melissa’s olive eyes are half-lidded with exhaustion and likely a slew of painkillers too, purple half-moons edging them like elongated shadows, but even still, she’s clearly staring at Barbara, something of distress in those dark depths, something of unmistakable fear.

The younger teacher has always hated doctors—distrusts them, suspects that some (if not most) of them are quacks, won’t even go to her yearly check-ups unless Barbara nags at her to do so. Remembering all of this with a pang, she reaches out and runs her fingers through the familiar mane of red hair splayed all around Melissa's face in dull and lifeless tangles, tucking a stray strand behind her ear... behind the ventilation tubing...

“I’m here, sweetheart,” she murmurs as a single tear lances down the side of her face, falling somewhere onto the whiteness of Melissa’s sheets. With her free hand, she grabs the other woman’s closest hand—so careful not to disturb the IV port—and squeezes lightly.

“I’m here. I’m here.”

Melissa, with what little strength she seems to possess, squeezes back. There is dried blood still crusted around her painted nails, and the sight disturbs Barbara. They’d gone to get mani-pedis together just last week, and Barbara had never laughed as hard as she did when the technician had scrubbed Melissa’s feet with a pumice stone, and she’d erupted into unreserved giggles, surprisingly ticklish.

Endearingly so.

“Ms. Schemmenti and I—” Njoki starts, but Barbara quickly interrupts.

“—Melissa,” she says gently, glancing back at her friend, who hasn’t pried her glazed eyes away from her yet. “She prefers to be called Melissa… and it’s perfectly fine if you call me Barbara...”

Mrs. Howard—though she has long served Barbara well—does not have a place in this hospital, not here, not in this fragile moment, not by Melissa Schemmenti's sickbed.

Njoki nods once, her eyes warm and commiserating.

“Melissa and I, then, have come up with a system for communication while she’s still intubated,” the doctor continues with a slight smile. “I don’t want her moving her head too much, so we’ll go by blinks in response to questions until we can get her off the vent. One blink for yes and two blinks for no—right, Melissa?"

For the first time, Melissa’s gaze darts over to Njoki, and she blinks once and rather slowly to indicate that she’s understood.

Easy enough. 

Maybe, when all of this is behind them, years and years and innumerable years down the road, they will both be able to laugh about how this is the least Melissa has ever talked in all her sixty-years.

(Maybe, though, that wound will always be too tender to ever jokingly prod, and Barbara will treat any reminder of it like a cardinal offense. This is the day, the hour, the night, when she almost lost her. That will never not hollow her out to her bones.)

“Are you hurting, sweetheart?” Barbara asks, slowly lowering herself into the chair next to Melissa’s bed. It’s as uncomfortable as the ones in the waiting room, so she leans forward a little and presses her elbows into the mattress of the hospital bed for support, still holding on to her friend’s hand, though, refusing to let go.

Not now.

Never again.

Melissa blinks once and then twice, but the agonized way that her brow is furrowed over her eyes easily tips Barbara off to an alternative and very distinct possibility.

“Are you lying to me, Melissa Ann Schemmenti?” She asks in her most serious teacher voice, the one she only uses when she catches her kindergarteners trying to stay awake during naptime. And when she receives a thorough eye roll and then an accompanying blink in response, she can’t help but hoarsely chuckle in such a way that it's clear that she’s rather close to crying.

“As inappropriate as ever, I see.”

Another blink, and the corner of Melissa's bloodless mouth nearly twitches, but there is a tube in the way.

There is a ventilator.

The smile slips away from Barbara’s own lips at the unpleasant reminder, and before she can stop it, another tear falls from her eye. She hastily swipes at it—doesn’t think it’s her right to be so damn emotional when she’s not the one lying in the hospital bed with one barely working kidney and a machine dispassionately breathing for her.

“I apologize,” she says thickly, and she leans down to impulsively press a kiss against the other woman’s bruised knuckles. “Silly me. I shouldn’t be so upset in front of you…”

Melissa blinks once.

And then twice.

And then three times, staring at her expectantly, but Barbara glances up at Njoki instead, her dark brow pinching somewhere in the middle.

“Three blinks?” She muses aloud. “What would that be…?”

Njoki seems confused herself, pulling a hand through her long braids as she thinks on it.

“Mmmm, could be analogous for maybe?” The surgeon suggests, at which point Melissa squeezes her hand again, this time a little more insistently than before.

Barbara looks back down again to see that she’s blinking thrice once more, the expression in her eyes impatient, frustrated at not being understood. She frowns sympathetically; it has to be an utterly alienating experience to be entombed in one's own body.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she murmurs, now rubbing soothing circles into the other woman’s clammy hand with her thumb. “I’m not sure what you mean. You’ll have to tell me later...”

She receives a look that quite plainly says, What aren’t you getting?  

But nonetheless, slumping her shoulders resignedly, Melissa blinks once anyway, which she assumes is most closely translatable to an affectionate, Fine, dummy.

“So how long will she have to be on the vent again?” Barbara asks, now addressing the question to Njoki, who is adjusting a dial on the main IV pump. Whatever she does seems to produce an immediate and tangible effect on Melissa because she moans with audible relief.

“Just increased the dosage of morphine you’re receiving,” the doctor explains, briefly placing her hand on Melissa’s other arm. “Should help with any pain you’re feeling, hon… as for the ventilator”—she looks at Barbara again—“the team who does early morning rounds can reassess in a few hours while I’m in another surgery. If they’re satisfied that her vitals are stable, I’ll give them the go ahead to extubate her.”

Melissa tightly closes her bruised eyes at this, her nails suddenly digging into Barbara’s palm, sharp and terrified.

“I know,” Barbara interprets readily. “You don’t like that answer…”

It scares you to be so thoroughly dependent upon another.

Upon an unthinking, brutalist machine.

You’ve never known of a fight that you cannot handle with nothing but your own two fists.

You always think you have to survive the worst alone, Melissa.

Why is that?

Who taught you such a terrible way of existing in this world?

Barbara knows that even if Melissa wasn’t on a ventilator, she wouldn’t have been able to answer either of these questions aloud. They’re far too vulnerable, demanding the second grade teacher’s total honesty, and Barbara knows that it would be hypocritical to ask that of her when she can’t even fully offer it herself.

“But I’m not leaving you, you hear?” She goes on, her voice suddenly constricted, a hundred emotions thick. “I promise.”

Even though the effort looks a little painful, Melissa opens her eyes again to deliver one blink.

Two.

And then three… that same elusive response, and Barbara frowns, feeling guilty and lost. She knows Melissa so intimately, and yet, whatever she is attempting to convey with these microgestures is as baffling to her as some arcane language.

“Mhm,” she placates lamely. “Yes, of course. I see...”

But she still doesn’t get it, and Melissa isn’t stupid. 

She blinks twice in blatant admonition, and Barbara can almost hear what she would have said.

No, goddammit, she would have laughed. You definitely don't.

—

The critical care team extubates Melissa around six that morning after a weaning test is successful; her oxygen saturation has risen, and she’s been heavily struggling against the vent for a while, trying to breathe on her own. Barbara holds her hand through the entire process, whispering soothing words into her ear as she tries not to cry at the sight of Melissa coughing and coughing, her throat inflamed from the intrusive tubing. The resident in charge immediately replaces the life support apparatus with an oxygenated mask, and it’s a sign of the younger woman’s utter exhaustion that she doesn’t buck against yet another restrictive measure.

She just stares at Barbara from the depths of glassy eyes for what feels like an eternity before finally closing them, less falling asleep than succumbing to it. The kindergarten teacher kisses the side of her hand again and continues to temple it with her own, rocking back-and-forth in her deeply uncomfortable chair. She prays to God for at least another half-hour after that, asking Him for His mercy and His healing, for His continued hand of protection on Melissa; she pleads and pleads and so desperately pleads, hoping that the voice in her head scrapes against the infinite (and sometimes depressingly remote) heavens. 

When she has done all the prostrating herself before her Lord that her overtaxed mind can handle, she simply sits still and vainly fights against the fatigue that is threatening to overwhelm her own body, focusing on the rhythmic beeping of the intravenous fusion pump that is decorated with a nauseating number of IV bags—all playing a part to sustain her best friend’s life.

Beep.

Surely it’ll be okay if she closes her eyes for just a minute… she won’t fall asleep… she just needs a moment to collect herself, to recenter her shaken core…

Beep.

Nothing bad will happen if she allows herself a brief respite; thinking otherwise is just a byproduct of the remaining adrenaline that is slowly working its way out of her system.

Melissa is stable.

Melissa is (likely) going to make a full recovery.

Melissa is the strongest person she knows.

Beep.

Despite her best efforts, though, Barbara feels herself starting to drift off, and she is unable to drag herself back from the depths, her consciousness floating out to that vast and welcoming sea of darkness. The last productive thought she feels her brain entertaining has to do with her friend’s three blinks, which no one had been able to satisfactorily decipher. She doesn’t think it’s Morse code or some other professional equivalent, nor does she think it’s maybe like Njoki had suggested. Melissa has always hated the tepidness of that word, preferring a straightforward yes or no…

Blink.

Blink.

Blink.

I and love and you.

The epiphany—agonizingly simple though it is—suddenly breaks over Barbara's head like a cresting wave, nearly pulling her back to the waking world with a fierce and overwhelming  joy. She smiles in her twilight state, eyes still closed…  

“I love you too,” she murmurs sleepily, only dimly aware that Melissa can’t currently hear her.

Perhaps they’re constantly saying those three words to each other, her and Melissa...

... just always doing it when the other isn’t able to fully understand.

—

She wakes up to the sensation of someone gently pulling a thumb across her jaw—over and over again, tracing the outline of that sharp bone with a practiced touch. The action disorients her—reminds her so powerfully of her late mother who had once soothed her when she was sick in the exact same way, but then the clinical smell of the hospital hits her: sharp, astringent, acidic.

And it all comes rushing back to her in jagged fragments.

Oh, God.

Melissa.

The wreck.

Those untenable hours in the waiting room.

The ICU.

She bolts upright, limbs half-flailing, and is suddenly confronted with a sight that reconfigures her insides: Melissa, looking like death warmed over, but even still and all the same, smiling that damned crooked smile—the one that Barbara loves so well. While she was sleeping, they apparently replaced the oxygenated mask with cannulas that have been threaded into her nostrils and around her ears. But she’s still covered with as many lines and tubes as ever, and the presence of them unnerves her.

Barbara blinks a couple of times as her eyes adjust to the dim lighting.

“Melissa,” she simply says, relishing every phoneme of that holy name.

She’s so powerfully relieved that she will have every opportunity to continue saying it.

Melissa, Melissa, Melissa.

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” the younger woman rasps, her voice hoarse from the ventilator, barely audible, but it’s still the sweetest sound Barbara has ever heard. She will never forget the sight of her on that machine for as long as she lives; it will stain her vision like an anemic afterimage every time she so much as closes her eyes at night; she will nightmare the staccato beats of Melissa’s heart being measured out by a rhythmic monitor. 

And she will thank God every day that He spared her.

That He let her have this one good thing.

This miracle.

Melissa, Melissa, Melissa.

“Hello yourself,” Barbara chokes out, sudden emotion throttling the stem of her throat. “You gave me quite a scare there, you know.”

“Gotta liven things up a little every now and then,” Melissa tries to chuckle—as is one of her favorite defenses against any sort of uncomfortable sentiment—but the familiar gesture immediately costs her. She begins to cough, her pale face suddenly splotched with small patches of red, and the beeping on the heart monitor starts to pick up. Barbara, her own heart plummeting into her stomach, reacts swiftly, splaying a sturdy hand on the younger woman’s chest.

“Breathe,” she instructs in an almost calm voice, but the word breaks at the end, her facade slipping, her poise. She cannot stomach seeing Melissa Schemmenti so helpless; it is an untenable contradiction, an oxymoron that she cannot capably resolve. “Mhm… that’s it, sweetheart. Inhale. Exhale. In and out.”

And beneath the weight of her palm, she feels Melissa’s breathing begin to slowly even out, the rise and fall of her chest regulating itself again. Relief cascades through her, comorbid though it is with the heartache, and the interplay of these two polarized emotions settles inside her like a stomachache. When the beeping on the cardiac monitor finally returns to normal, she briefly dips her head against the railing on Melissa’s bed, grounding herself against its coolness and steadiness, closing her eyes against the rising nausea.

“Sorry,” Melissa apologizes, her voice indistinct. The exertion of the coughing spell has thoroughly depleted her; there is nothing left of rosiness in her cheeks; gone is that inappropriate twinkle in her eyes.

All that is left is apology and pain.

Barbara doesn’t know why the younger woman has always felt the need to apologize for something she didn’t do. She can conjecture, of course—can guess that it’s a side-effect of having been told that it was her fault all of her life. Joseph was especially bad in this regard, foisting the most egregious of his indiscretions onto his ex-wife’s overburdened shoulders.  

He has supposedly matured since then—has assumed total responsibility for what he so recklessly broke in the first place—and Melissa, being a good Christian, has generously forgiven him. She even calls him just to chat from time to time...

But Barbara hasn’t.

Forgiven Joseph, that is.

God forgive her for it.

“Nothing to apologize about,” she forces herself to lift her head from the railing and smile a wane smile; it feels stiff on her lips, tense and unnatural; it stretches her mask of a face into a new and unsustainable configuration. “You’ve had a long night.”

“So have you,” comes an immediate rebuttal, so tender and concerned. Indeed, the intensity of the other’s penetrating gaze makes Barbara suddenly realizes that her hand is still on Melissa’s chest, and blushing slightly, she withdraws it—idly smoothing her blankets instead.

Of course, the second-grade teacher quickly follows this charged moment with yet another quip: “You look like shit, Barb.”

“Me?” She snorts incredulously despite herself, despite knowing what Melissa is trying to do. “You’re the one who’s lying in a hospital bed looking like, like...“ But she stops short, faltering, stumbling on her next words.

The expression she had nearly been about to use was like you’re knocking on death’s door, but she finds, at the threshold of this teasing irreverence, she cannot follow through. She cannot be like Melissa and turn the severity of what happened tonight into just another throwaway joke.

“Like what?” Melissa prods quietly, sensitive to the change in the conversation.

Or, maybe more accurately still, sensitive to any changes in Barbara herself.

“Like… you nearly died,” she shudders, her voice folding in on itself, seismically collapsing. And there are unbidden tears in her eyes yet again.

There is the raw and visceral grief of having almost lost Melissa Schemmenti.

She withdraws both of her hands, using one to grip the fabric next to her stomach, using the other to swipe her forearm across her eyes, as though that will help, as though that will do anything but prolong the inevitable.

Which, granted, might be what the both of them do all of the time in their separate and intertwined personal lives.

Prolong the inevitable.

Familial heartbreaks.

Broken marriages.

This unspoken thing between them.

“You nearly died, Melissa,” she goes on, still shielding her leaking eyes away from the other woman, “and I don’t know what I would have done in light of that fact.”

The proclamation lands heavily in front of them both.

It is an ugly, pitiful thing.

And it whimpers.

It wails.

“It… would have been... hard,” Melissa swallows, her voice uncertain, as though she's just now realizing how close she had been to the end herself. Between being on the operating table, waking up on a ventilator, and trying to recover from the ordeal of both of these traumas, there probably hasn't been space enough for her to fully process the night's events—excluding the times she’s been consciously trying to repress them all with a laugh, of course. In the back of her mind, Barbara wonders if there’s some implicit faux pas she’s making by discussing the hypothetical of Melissa's death even when she's right in front of her, clearly and miraculously and so thankfully alive.

“Yes,” she replies anyway because they’ve gone all of their damn lives without ever once saying exactly what they mean.

And she can’t take it anymore—Melissa almost died and all of her nerves are so brutally exposed.

Melissa almost died, and things still haven't changed between them; there is still something dividing them, unbearable inches.

“But y’would have gone on, Barb," she valiantly replies. "Life would have gone on, even if—“

“No,” Barbara cuts across her ferociously, finally lowering her arm to see that Melissa is staring at her from wide and watery eyes too, her face still leached of all its exquisite color. She looks less like a person than she does a corpse, less like a corpse than she does a ghost: insubstantial and wispy, one exorcism away from total dissolution. “Don’t even suggest that, Melissa. I would have never been able to move on from you. I would have been so... so lost.”

And there would have been no coming back from that.

She knows herself entirely too well.

She would have wasted away in the absence of Melissa Schemmenti. She would have let it all, the sixty-seven years that she has spent meticulously constructing the mythology of Barbara Howard—mother, wife, woman of God, devoted teacher—crumble to dust and ashes, returned to mire and clay.

“And what does that matter, huh?” Melissa croaks, and the stubborn woman tries to prop herself up on her arm, but she’s stopped short by all the wires and tubes, and perhaps (hopefully), the withering glare that Barbara levels at her. “I’m still here, aren’t I? And according to the doc, I'm not leavin' anytime soon. You don’t have to imagine a world where I’m not in it.”

The other teacher attempts a smile that almost instantly falls flat on her chapped lips, but she extends her nearest hand all the same, palm facing upwards—an open invitation of platonic communion, yet another reification of their well-established status quo of just being friends—but Barbara wants more than that.

She wants more than the stolen glances and the almost touches and the secret words that languish on the tips of their guarded tongues.

She's nearly seventy-years old and she has only recently wondered what it means to be selfish in a glorious, unabashed, and unrepentant kind of way; she wants a whole  lifetime.

Barbara slowly stands up then, ignoring the dull ache in her arthritic knees, and simply stares at Melissa, the light wash from a nearby machine staining her face a sad and desolate blue—the same color as a mottled bruise.

"Barb, what are you—" Green eyes widen, the pupils in them entirely blown.

And as the tears that have been threatening to obscure her vision finally spill over her long and dark lashes, she leans down, with exquisite tenderness, and kisses Melissa Schemmenti's forehead. Eternity stretches between them, infinity wrapped in the moment that her lips meet the other's feverish skin, and she is the sole witness to the exact moment when Melissa's eyes glaze over too.

"I don't want to imagine a home without you in it anymore," Barbara whispers, drawing back. "I realized as much tonight."

Perhaps even well before she received that damned call.

Perhaps sometime or another over these last twenty-something years.

She just could not say the words aloud; they were impossible to think, much less articulate.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry"—and she bows her head, ashamed, verklempt, overwhelmed, and undone—"for having not said it sooner..."

She's been a coward, hiding behind the veneer of her wedding ring up until very recently, ultimately hurting herself and Gerald both.

(She's been a good, Christian woman.)

Melissa reaches upwards then, disturbing the nest of varicolored wires that spiral around her milk-white arm, and palms Barbara's cheek, her thumb gingerly resting against the side of her jaw.

"Always slow on the uptake," she chuckles as tears trickle down her scraped and battered face like a soft, April rain. Barbara tries to wipe some of them away, but they continue to fall anyway, as though the spillage is endless, a long drought finally ended.

Rejuvenation can only follow.

Spring.

"Forgive me, sweetheart," Barbara implores again, sniffing noisily, as Melissa lightly cradles her face.

"You keep acting like that's something only you've gotta apologize for."

"Isn't it?" She doesn't dare to be hopeful—doesn't dare to believe that Melissa feels the precise same way that she does about all of the missed opportunities and untaken roads and lost years—but even still, the relief prematurely leaks into her voice anyway.

"Nah," Melissa grins, the crooked gesture somehow both beautiful and tortured all at once, "we're both complicit here."

"Oh."

And then, whether Melissa is drawing her downwards, or Barbara is taking initiative and leaning in, regardless, they're suddenly brushing lips like everything about this moment is fragile and delicate, like the time they have been afforded is precious, like they are making up for all the times they have never kissed before, like they plan on kissing every day from now on—as long as they both shall live. It is slow and lovely, pained and more than a little sad; they're both hyperaware of Melissa's current physical limitations, careful not to exceed them. The rhythmic whirring of machinery, the hiss of the oxygen filtering into Melissa's nose, the lines that entangle their hands like so many dozens of snares, serve as perpetual reminders of where they are, and what it almost cost them to arrive to this bliss in the first place.

Barbara tastes the salt of their intermingled tears and suddenly dreams about how one day, when the younger woman has sufficiently recovered, she would like to take Melissa with her to the sea, where they can wade into the warm waters, chest deep beneath the moon, and bask in its silvery glow. She will drag her fingers through that damp, red hair and tell her that she is so lovely.

She is beloved.

But at least for now, they're confined to this oppressive hospital and to the fact that Melissa could have very well died last night; indeed, the weight of that particular knowledge presses upon them both like a shared and bloodied wound.

Oh, how they anoint each other's lips with their own, though, in jubilant defiance of this unspeakable grief, and in doing so, begin to heal.

—

Later that same day, when Njoki and the rest of Melissa’s care team are satisfied that she’s fairly stable and that her kidney function has mostly returned to normal, they move her from the ICU into a regular room on the second floor, where she'll stay for a couple of days for close monitoring. And upon Barbara’s polite, if a little embarrassed, request, kind orderlies obligingly shove two hospital beds together with the rail lowered between them.

And for the first time in both of their lives, Barbara and Melissa lie together in the same (kinda-sorta) bed.

But it will not be the last time—they're both damn sure of that.

And once Melissa is finally out of the hospital, the next time will be under far better circumstances.

For naturally, Barbara Howard plans on taking her home.

Until that eagerly anticipated moment, though, she just holds her, laying an arm across that soft, warm belly, careful not to disturb any of the many lines that are still attached to her companion, conscientious of every wire and every trickling tube.

And for her part, Melissa is astonishingly good at finally letting herself be held, perhaps too tired to fight the sensation, or perhaps realizing that it isn’t such a bad thing after all to be cared for so intimately by another. At one point, when Barbara is idly skimming her fingernails up and down the length of her arm, Melissa even admits that this is nice.

And so it is.

And so it shall always be.

The setting sun leans against the square window with a relieved sigh, amber and honeyed gold.

They talk a little about everything and nothing as they patiently wait for seven o’clock when they can finally watch Jeopardy! together on the boxy TV mounted in the corner of the room. Melissa recounts what she remembers of the accident; she’d thankfully reacted quickly enough to avoid swerving into a tree, but the alternative had been careening into the ditch—that was when she’d slammed into the steering wheel as the car violently tilted downwards.

“Damn piece of shit,” she pouts mutinously. “I outta sue Honda’s ass for that airbag not deploying.”

“Amen,” Barbara vehemently agrees, her chin nestled against the younger woman’s shoulder. “They owe you big time."

When Barbara tentatively asks how she’d lost her first kidney—(after spending at least ten minutes ranting and raving about having never been told that crucial fact in the first place)—Melissa only chuckles, which makes Barbara immediately suspect that this is yet another thoroughly traumatic event in Melissa Schemmenti’s sordid life that is about to be tragically underplayed.

Much to her chagrin, she is absolutely correct.

“Lost it in a game of cards.”

“A game of what?!” Barbara nearly cries, briefly forgetting the intimate geometry of their bodies.

“Dammit, Barb. My eardrum!”

“Sorry"—she lowers her voice—"but, girlfriend, what?"

“Listen,” Melissa shrugs casually as Barbara massages the skin beneath the other's ear in silent apology, “it was no big deal. Needed some money to pay off some student loans, and I was, uh, young and dumb, and that was a very high paying game. Fuckin’ Tony Artino, though, a stronzo if I've ever seen one, cheated when he was dealin’ the cards.

If Barbara could do so without disturbing the other woman, she'd be emphatically shaking her head in disapproval right about now.

Mm.

“Every time I hear a new detail of your younger years, I’m very much alarmed,” she says, thinking about how this is somehow even worse than the story of a twelve-year old Melissa having had to take all five of her younger siblings out to the woods one night because her paranoid father had thought the mob had come to call.

It had not, in fact, been the mob.

It turned out to be a very lost pizza delivery guy.

“Yeah, well, that’s why I don’t say most of this stuff aloud,” Melissa teases, glancing over her gowned shoulder at Barbara. “Don’t wanna upset your delicate constitution, hon.”

“Well, quit that,” Barbara immediately retorts, as studiously solemn as Melissa is facetious. “I don’t want to find out any more dark secrets from some doctor in a waiting room at three in the blessed morning, Melissa. I want to just know your truths—all of them.”

“Even the ones that involve me gettin’ into illicit organ gambling poker games?” Melissa arches a not entirely serious brow, though her tone has slightly shifted, raising itself into the form of an implicit, tentative question.

Do you really want all of me?

Even the ugly parts?

Even the parts that most people run away from?

And Barbara’s definite, resounding answer is,“Yes, even those. I want you in your entirety, Melissa Schemmenti.”

Ugly parts and all—anything and everything that makes you human.

That makes you my Melissa.

My lovely Mel.

"That makes you a masochist, I think," comes yet another quick witticism—(she should really start calling them Schemmenti-isms at this point)—but she can tell that Melissa is genuinely moved by the sentiment, the strange gravity in her voice betraying her, the tightness with which she squeezes Barbara's hand.

"No," Barbara murmurs, so softly, against the shell of Melissa's delicately formed ear. "I think that just means I plan on taking my role as your emergency contact very seriously. You've made it my business—nay!—my moral duty to worry about you... to care for you with everything in me, Melissa. Let me do that then. I want to do that."

She gently cards her fingers through that rich and vibrant hair as Melissa seems to formulate her response to this against the background noise of the steadily beeping heart monitor and the pneumatic hissing of the oxygen that is still being supplied to her. Barbara is supremely comfortable with the silence—quite patient with it now that she figures that she and Melissa have all the time in the world to finally get things right.

"Trust doesn't come easily to me," she finally says, and there's a hint of warning in her voice, as though she's alerting Barbara to this long-ingrained trait of hers for the first time, as though nearly three decades of friendships hasn't made her well-aware of the fact that the younger woman approaches the world like everyone she meets is doing a good job of hiding their knives.

Barbara gets it.

Sometimes, she absolutely feels the same.

"Me neither," she admits quietly, still playing with Melissa's hair, now twining a curl around one of her fingers, now just as idly letting it go. "I've always been terrified that my honesty to others would be used against me... or else, my candor would eventually backfire in some other karmic hand of fate."

"Yeah." It's just a monosyllabic reply, but even still, Barbara hears the weight of it.

Melissa knows precisely what she's talking about.

The lived experience of being vulnerable before another and agonizingly paying for it.

"But we'll just have to learn how to fully trust each other together," she insists, trying on the role of the idealist for once. She wonders after all these years of resisting the  very idea, if Janine hasn't been rubbing off on her anyway. "We already have an excellent foundation already; now we're just building up the walls, brick-by-carefully-placed-brick."

"Hah. You always know how to make it sound so damn achievable," Melissa chuckles tiredly, even as she leans further into Barbara's embrace, apparently growing comfortable within it.

Secure.

"Perhaps it is this time," she smiles softly against the crown of that scarlet head. "When the two of us put our mind to something, there is little that can be done to stop us, you know."

"Oh, I know," Melissa only says—still skeptical, perhaps—but nonetheless gentle and entirely fond. 

Jeopardy! comes and Jeopardy! goes, and between them joking about how Ken Jennings reminds them a little of Jacob and competing over who gets the most correct answers, Barbara has probably never had so much fun in a hospital in her life. Melissa wins—just barely—but that’s because Barbara is rubbish at anything to do with pop culture categories.

(Who in God's almighty name is Christine Baranski, for instance, and what exactly does she have to do with ABBA?)

When the show is over, though, both of them start to feel the weight of their exhaustions dragging at their aching bones—Melissa especially. After the night nurse comes in to administer some more pain medicine to her, she settles in Barbara’s arms, her breathing becoming heavier, her eyes starting to droop to a close despite her best efforts to stay up and also watch Wheel. When a long time passes without the younger woman saying something, Barbara assumes that she's asleep and decides to settle down herself, flicking the TV off, and tracing vague patterns into the back of Melissa's thin gown.

Even though she won't want to, she'll likely go home for a little while tomorrow... shower... make a soup for herself and Melissa... pack a proper night bag... and then come back to stay again. She'll also need to spend at least a few hours on the phone to placate each of her daughters, as well as so many other people besides. When she'd called Taylor earlier to tell her about why she had to cancel dinner plans, her eldest had immediately freaked out over the prospect of her Aunt Mel being hurt. And then Taylor had told Gina, and Gina had told her grandmother on her father's side, and Gerald's mother Hannah—Barbara's kind but notoriously interfering former mother-in-law—had seen fit to put it in on Facebook that Melissa needed prayers, tagging Barbara in the post, and now everyone at Abbott knows that Melissa is down and out for the count too. Janine has texted her at least five times that she's seen since she last picked up her phone.

So, yes, she'll have a busy day tomorrow trying to make sure no one barges in on an unsuspecting Melissa.

Or, well, the both of them together.

They'll tell their friends and family in their own time assuredly.

Soon even.

But she has a strong feeling that both of them would like to remain in their infinitesimal pocket of forever—just the two of them—for a little while longer.

It's nice here—safe.

Melissa has always felt like home.

As she turns these plans over in her tired mind, s he's incredibly surprised when not even ten minutes later, Melissa unexpectedly breaks the silence again.

“Barb?” She asks, her voice comically thick with drowsiness.

“Yes, honey?”

“Did ya ever flippin' figure out what three blinks meant?”

Barbara can't help but laugh, pleasantly caught off guard by the question; she had passively wondered if Mel had been too zoned out and drugged up to remember those failed exchanges in the ICU but apparently not.

“It took me awhile," she confesses.

Hours. 

Months. 

Years upon lonely years. 

Decades even. 

Almost all the time that the two women have known each other and pretended that friendship was the only mutual language that they spoke. 

“But I made it there in the end,” she finishes, pressing a light kiss against the side of the other woman’s head.

Three blinks.

Three words.

"I love you," she utters it so easily, like she's been saying it for quite sometime now.

I love you and I love you and I love you.

Maybe, if she's lucky, she'll echo this refrain throughout eternity.

[ramblingkat]

I’m not sure exactly where this came from. And it’s four, almost five in the morning. Have random eldritch blurbs. 

Fandom: Bleach

Characters: Isshin, Kisuke, Ichigo

Notes: Eldritch things are about. Headcanons as well. Here be monsters. 

He wouldn’t stop crying. 

At this point, Isshin was getting desperate. He could see that Masaki was as well. Both of them were going around with dark shadows under their eyes, and Isshin was feeling sluggish from how little sleep he was getting. Every time one or the other of them started to get to sleep, the crying would start again. 

Ichigo wailed, reedy voice raspy for all near constant crying he did. Even when the baby fell into some fitful sleep, he whimpered and fussed still. If Isshin thought he and Masaki looked horrible, it was nothing compared to their baby. 

He was so -thin-. They had taken him to their pediatrician. They had taken him to the specialist the pediatrician had recommended. They had even taken him to Ryuken, who was still working on finishing his training as a doctor. None of them could offer any reason on why Ichigo would not stop crying. Why he would eat greedy and almost as constantly as they could feed him, and still continued to lose weight. 

There was no fat baby cheeks for him. No pudgy little arms and chubby belly. Ichigo was thin, and Isshin could swear he was getting thinner in front of their eyes. 

He was desperate. 

So, after telling Masaki his plan, Isshin went across town and let himself into a candy shop. 

Inside, Tessai was cleaning, though his head came up as the sound of the wail that came from Ichigo. Before Isshin could say anything, there was the soft sound of the door in the back of the public area opening and a head of mussed pale hair sticking out. 

“What,” Kisuke said after a moment, blinking sleepily, “is that?”

He seemed to have just woken up, and Isshin had a moment of jealousy that the man could get to sleep. But he shook it off. He wasn’t sure if he trusted Urahara, there was always too much in that man’s head for him to fully trust anyone. Plus, having heard the official story that was told in the Seireitei over why the twelfth’s former captain was no longer a captain, Isshin had a hard time shaking off his paranoia. Even with everything the man had done for him since he’d come to the living world. 

That was not important now. 

“Ichigo,” he said, short and to the point. “He cries constantly. He barely sleeps. He’s always hungry.” 

Kisuke looked at him, a faintly dubious look on his face. “Don’t...all babies do that?” he asked slowly. Likely, Isshin thought  uncharitably, this was the closest he’d been allowed to a baby. Most people knew not to let assassins and madmen pretending to be scientists near children. 

“He doesn’t gain weight,” Isshin continued. “It’s not a physical thing. Masaki and Ryuken both say he’s having odd bursts of reiatsu. Masaki says she feels cold when she feeds him.” 

Just as he expected, that piqued Kisuke’s interest. The other man came closer. He looked at the baby in Isshin’s arms, then held his own out. “Give him here.”

After a moment of hesitation, he did. 

For being so uncertain about how babies worked in general, it was obvious that Kisuke had not been looking at Ichigo so much as how Isshin was holding the infant. He settled Ichigo into his arms with surprising ease. It was actually something of a shock, though Isshin couldn’t put his finger on why. 

Kisuke held his hand over Ichigo a moment, eyes glittering strangely all at once. 

Isshin looked away. 

When the light reflected that way, it was just safer to not look directly at Kisuke. Every instinct in Isshin’s body and soul screamed to take Ichigo away from what held him, even as his brain tried to reject that anything was holding Ichigo. 

Kisuke might not have corrupted his fellow captains like it was claimed, but he had definitely done -something- that was wrong. 

Then Ichigo stopped crying. 

His neck popped, Isshin whipped his head up to look at his child. But Ichigo was still there, Kisuke’s hand on his body. Eyes caught between bluish and brown slowly blinked close, tiny fingers curled around Kisuke’s.

“Go away,” Kisuke said softly. “For at least an hour. I need to focus.”

Isshin bristled. He was not going to….

“If you want your son to live for much longer. Go. Away.” 

Kisuke’s tone echoed in Isshin’s skull, and he swayed. To the side, he saw Tessai murmuring, hand held up, a faint glow around his head. Trying to think past the buzzing in his ears, he swallowed hard. “What are you doing to do?” 

Even his own voice sounded far away and distant. 

“I’m going to help,” Kisuke said after a moment, sounding like himself again, cheerful and like a human. A muffled human, but human nonetheless. 

He turned and vanished back into the private rooms. Isshin went to follow, only for Tessai to grab his arm. 

“We should go,” he said quietly “It would not do for you to die while your son is saved.”

He wanted to stay. Wanted to shrug off Tessai’s hand and go after his son. Whatever Urahara was going to do, it wasn’t going to be good. He knew it. 

But…. Urahara had saved Masaki, all those years ago. He’d helped Isshin settle into this life he had now. He was a monster, but he had kept his word so far. 

Isshin allowed himself to be tugged along and wondered what his son would be when he saw Ichigo next. 

<center>***</center>

Humming to himself, Kisuke slipped back through the shop. He came to a section of the hall, smiled, and then stepped sideways. The world twisted, and he followed his new path. In his arms, Ichigo mumbled, still pulling power through the grip he had on Kisuke’s fingers. 

“Poor little thing,” Kisuke crooned at him, allowing the poor thing to eat. “They make you half a monster and leave it at that. You’d think they’d know better than that.” He smiled. “Quincies and hollows, so similar in their needs, if not volume.” 

He felt power being pulled from him, being soaked up by Ichigo as the baby fed in a way he so obviously needed desperately. What had they been thinking? Oh, he’d expected something to happen, but to let a baby starve like this. 

Hollows and Quincy fed off spiritual power, even if the Quincy denied it. They could pretend with all their twisted little souls that they were just regular humans with powers. If that was the case, he wouldn’t need Quincy -and- human power to make a vaccine for the visored. 

Poor little Ichigo fed off reishi around him when it was free, and off the reiryoku inside of people when he could touch them. But he couldn’t get enough. Not for the hollow that was in the heart of his soul. Even as a baby, he could feel that hunger.

What were Masaki and Ryuken doing? Isshin was blind as any regular person now, so Kisuke could understand him missing it. But those two were still talented in their own way. How could they miss the fact Ichigo -hungered-?

Not that it mattered. Kisuke had plans for this malleable little soul. 

He always wanted a child of his own. 

Some more walking took them to the place he kept his precious little toy, the beat of her breathing echoing in his heart, pulsing in time with his blood. Kisuke could hear her singing, wanting to stretch out and reach for things not even he could see. But she was too small, too weak. Even as he fed her, there was not enough power for what she wanted.

But the core of that broken star was his own soul, and Kisuke knew she’d get what she wanted someday. Right now, she was quiet other than her soft song, though he could feel her buzzing as he got closer. 

The closest thing he had to a child so far, something pure and distilled of himself and Benihime. A thing of destruction, creation, and everything between. 

Her singing grew louder as he settled near the ornate wooden box that held her. Keeping Ichigo tucked against his chest with one arm, he opened the box and curled his fingers around the humming darkness that was the Hogyoku. 

She seemed to shiver under his grasp, pulling a bit of power from him, just as Ichigo had been before Kisuke had pulled his hand free. The boy whimpered, but was otherwise quiet. Though he’d just fed quite heavily on Kisuke’s power. Poor thing probably needed to settle that first, but Kisuke knew he’d be starving again soon enough. 

That gave him time for this. 

A sigh, and he shut his eyes. 

“Come on, we need to help feed your brother,” he said cheerfully, reality going hazy around him for a moment. 

When he had made the Hogyoku, Kisuke had started with a simple thing. A mix of the four powers. It hadn’t been hard to get what he needed. Though he had chosen to use a piece of his own soul, using Benihime to weave shinigami will with Quincy light, Hollow hunger, and pure human strength. Weaving the strands over and together, breaking them apart at the most basic of layers until they stopped being separate. When they went from being four different types of power and flavors to a glorious, radiant whole. 

He still didn’t remember everything, but it had ripped something apart, and he had killed half the people who had been in the labs that night. If Central 46 had discovered that, he’d have been facing them long before Aizen had made his move. 

But Kisuke had figured out how to put himself together again, to separate his mind and body from what it -could- be. 

He simply wasn’t done being Kisuke  and Benihime yet. 

But the Hogyoku was still this pulse infant of possibilities. Everything and anything was a potential reality for her. Once she fed enough. Once her song stopped having a note of hunger. 

Convincing her to share her food with her new brother took some doing. Kisuke was sure he was going to sleep for a week and then go hunting to feed all of them.

Well, that was what a good parent did, he supposed. .

Shifting, he held the Hogyoku above Ichigo’s chest. “Come on now,” he said cheerfully, even as she pouted in his fingers. “Be good.” 

Still, she resisted until Benihime sent a pulse down Kisuke’s arm into beating black creation. When would she learn that Kisuke was the nice parent?

Then a shift in his fingers, and a thick, oozing drop of something formed, dripped and shifted downwards. As it went, the bit of darkness shifted through solid, liquid, what he thought might be plasma, and a few other states of matter Kisuke had never seen. 

How interesting. 

Then it landed on Ichigo, soaking into his skin almost instantly.

Kisuke waited. 

A sensation that felt like a grumble through his fingers, and he felt the power drift from the Hogyoku towards Ichigo. Who absorbed it.

Then reality warped again. It had done it once with his first child, and now, it did it with his second. 

Ichigo’s eyes opened, a brilliant, faceted golden rainbow of colors with no names, and a chill ran down Kisuke’s spine. Fear and interest all at once. 

The two looked at each other for a long moment, then Ichigo yawned, blinked his eyes a few times. Kisuke was almost disappointed when they returned to the color they had been when Isshin brought the boy. But he also felt a bit of pleasure at a job well done. Already, even in just this few seconds, Ichigo’s cheeks were starting to fill out. 

“Really,” he said, putting the Hogyoku away, back into her box. “If your parents wanted to create a monster, they shouldn’t have stopped half way. That’s simply bad science.”

He stood, and then headed back to the front. 

Children were an interesting idea, but feeding them was the most Kisuke wanted to do with them until they were able to talk. 

“Remember,” he said to the drowsy infant he carried. “This is our little secret.”

Ichigo yawned and went to sleep. 

[grifalinas]

Thinking about James and Qrow and past relationships and why it always feels like I'm writing James as having a very bare dating history even though that's not? true? And I realized it boils down to how they define their dating history compared to each other that makes Qrow seem really slutty in comparison to the very chaste James (as a very uncharitable read might suggest) when it's very inaccurate.

Basically, James defines himself as only having had a few relationships, while Qrow is pretty open about having slept and dated around a lot, and will talk about casual flings and relationships alongside the more serious ones- Glynda even mentions that, as long as she's known him, he's had a lot of relationships, some more serious than others.

And the reason for that discrepancy isn't that Qrow is going out and sleeping with anyone with a pulse while James is just saving himself for his relationships, it's that James doesn't count everything as a relationship. When James talks about relationships, he's talking about long-term commitments. People he dated with a view to potentially form a permanent attachment. Whereas Qrow lumps everything from James, his eventual permanent partner, and Roman, a guy he fucked occasionally when they were younger, all into the same category. One night stands, flings, friends with benefits, casual dating, anything where there was any kind of sexual or dating element "counts" as a past relationship.

On the flipside, James doesn't count anything up to the third date as a relationship. So he might go on a few dates with a guy, and then they decide, actually, we're not really working, and then go their separate ways and James wouldn't look at that as a past relationship. It was just someone he tested the waters with. They dated, but they weren't a couple.

And the reason for this is that while their romantic and sexual needs line up (something that I always try to do with my couples), their relationship with their sexuality and romantic needs is very different. James is a romantic, he goes into every dating situation with the view of looking for someone to commit to long-term, and his sexual needs are tied into that. He's not demisexual, sex without a romantic attachment is entirely possible for him, but he ties sex and love up in a way that casual sex just isn't fulfilling for him (and that's fine). On the other hand, Qrow separates his romantic and sexual needs into two different things, and separates those from his commitment needs, so sometimes he'll go out with a view of fulfilling one or the other or both without worrying about the longterm (also fine).

With the ends result being that when talking about past relationships, Qrow might be specific about dynamics, but he's going to lump one-night-stands and committed relationships in together. Whereas if James is talking about his past relationships, he's going to be thinking about the people that he decided to go out with long term- the dates that made it to being relationships. He also has a much lower 'body count' when it comes to casual sex, because he's less likely to pursue a sexual relationship with someone he's not interested in pursuing a romantic and committed relationship with.

(It also helps the seeming imbalance that James was married for twelve years and had about five years of forced celibacy after that while he healed, but I sometimes think it seems like Josef was James' first relationship and Qrow is only the second, which is untrue.)

So, in a hypothetical situation where they each went on a date every night for a month, Qrow would count everyone he went out with that month as a relationship, whereas James would only count any of them that made it past the third date, but they still have each a month's worth of dates under their belts either way.

[michelles-garden-of-evil]

Shadow Over Seventh Heaven Review, Part I: Last Night I Dreamt I Went to Maljardin Again

Once, April Tennant had been the greatest screen star of all. Even now that this stunning creature was gone, the victim of a hideous accident, her name still cast a magic glow. And nowhere was her haunting spell more alive than within her great walled estate of San Rafael.

It was here that April had lived in her storybook marriage with famed actor Richard Morgan. It was here that her memory was worshipped still. And it was here that lovely young Jenny Summers came as Richard Morgan's new bride--to discover the terror behind the tinsel in this place transformed from a paradise of the living to a hell of the undead.... (inside front cover)

Welcome, fellow Strangers and all others who happen upon this post. This week, I have decided to begin a new series exploring the Gothic novels written by co-creator and first headwriter of Strange Paradise, Ian Martin, under the pen name Joen Arliss. Mostly, the purpose of this series will be to compare the plot and characters of Strange Paradise and those of his novels and what that may indicate about his original intentions for the overarching story of the soap opera.

I got the idea to start this series while writing my review of Episode 26, after the contents of an article referenced in one of the scenes reminded me of the events in this book. On his now-defunct website Maljardin.com, Curt Ladnier covered some of the similarities between “Here Goes the Bride,” the CBS Radio Mystery Theater drama from which this book was adapted, and Strange Paradise, but I wanted to dive deeper and do one of my characteristic overanalyses. So fly with me to the grand southwestern estate of San Rafael and together let’s explore Shadow Over Seventh Heaven--and let me warn you, there will be spoilers for the entire Maljardin arc of SP.

As noted above, Shadow Over Seventh Heaven is an adaptation of a radio drama that Martin wrote for CBS Radio Mystery Theater. CBSRMT is, perhaps unquestionably, Ian Martin’s most famous work. Created by Himan Brown in 1974 and running for 1,399 nightly episodes, Martin wrote a total of 243 (including many adaptations of literary classics) and acted in 255, typically in supporting roles. He continued writing and acting on the series all the way until his death in 1981 at the age of 69. Given my tendency to procrastinate, which sometimes makes it difficult to write just one episode review a week even when I’m not busy, I envy him for being such a prolific writer. I suspect that all the soap scripts he wrote got him into the habit, and he just couldn’t break it.

Even more extraordinary is that he wrote and published five novels during the same period that he worked on CBSRMT. His first was Nightmare’s Nest (1979), an adaptation of the CBSRMT play “The Deathly White Man” (and not the other drama, also by him, of the same name), which is his answer to Jane Eyre and which also has some interesting connections with SP which I plan to explore in another review series. Next came this novel, and then Beloved Victim (1981), adapted from “A Lady Never Loses Her Head,” which I don’t recall having anything noteworthy in common with SP, but I may need to re-read it to make sure. He also wrote two mystery novels, The Shark Bait Affair and The Ladykiller Affair, for the Zebra Mystery Puzzler series, but those are both very rare now and I haven’t yet read either, so I can’t say anything about them. The book Mystery Women: An Encyclopedia of Leading Women Characters in Mystery Fiction does, however, provide some information on their protagonist, Kate Graham, along with short plot summaries. As someone with two trunk novels from the last decade and about fifty pages of a third--which I mostly stopped working on after I started this blog--I also envy him for this. How on Earth did he find the time?

But I digress. Like that of “Here Goes the Bride,” the plot of Shadow Over Seventh Heaven draws heavy inspiration from Daphne du Maurier’s famous Gothic romance Rebecca, but with some major differences in plot and characterization. The novel fleshes out the radio drama some more, adding additional details and plot twists that aren’t present in the original play, which arguably make it more interesting. One gets the impression that he had a lot of story in mind while he penned the original drama, but knew he could only squeeze so much into a 45-minute radio play and so had to leave many of the most interesting details out.

But that’s enough background information. Let’s begin our analysis and see what Ian Martin’s later work can tell us about his original intentions for Strange Paradise.

Introduction

The face is lovely, matchless....

Opening like some gigantic and exotic flower as the camera zooms in...

It fills the screen, flawless, enticing....

The lower lip glistens, pulled away from those perfect teeth, trembling ever so slightly, promising undreamed-of delights for the man brave enough to taste its forbidden fruit....

The skin glows with an inner light....

The eyes beyond the thick fringe of dark eyelashes shimmer with the deep violet of a tropical night....

The pitiless exposé of the camera is defeated, no matter how close it probes in close-up....

This is beauty without blemish....

This is everyman's dream woman--sex symbol of the nation, and most of the world....

This is April Tennant!

Strange to think of her dead, for on the screen she is captured forever in all her vibrancy and stunning beauty....

Impossible to think of her lying, mangled and bleeding on the rocks, while the hungry sea licks out as if to possess her.

Incredible to think of her cold and in the grave. Which she has been for twelve months--or this story never would have begun (p. 5).

The first page of the novel introduces us to April Tennant, this novel’s Rebecca and also its Erica Desmond. Like Rebecca, she is the first wife of the protagonist’s love interest, whose tragic death will cast a shadow over her former estate. Like Erica, she was a famous actress--probably more so than Erica ever was--but the cause of her death is not the same as the alleged cause of Erica’s. In Episode 5 of Strange Paradise, Erica’s grieving husband Jean Paul claims that she died of eclampsia while pregnant with their son, although evidence uncovered by other characters in later episodes leads them to contest that claim. Instead, April’s death resembles that of Huaco, the wife of Jean Paul’s ancestor Jacques Eloi des Mondes who died when she fell from a cliff on Maljardin, Jacques’ island estate.

In this introduction, we also see what will become a theme of the novel: gaze. Not just the male gaze--the obvious POV of the introduction--but, more generally, the viewing of April Tennant almost exclusively through the eyes of other characters, both male and female. We never learn much about her inner life, even as we learn those of Jenny (our protagonist), Richard, and others. April is largely a mystery, a larger-than-life figure of ideal beauty who, in the eyes of the public, is more a legend than she is flesh and blood. It’s the same mystique that surrounds celebrities in real life that often makes other people forget that they, too, are human--if, indeed, that’s what April was. Or is there more to it? I guess we’ll have to find it.

Chapter 1

The first chapter begins with a detailed description of San Rafael--and by detailed, I mean that Ian Martin spends one and a half pages describing its wall, followed by two on the mansion itself. I won’t type out too many passages from this book for copyright reasons--for, unlike Strange Paradise, this book is still under copyright--but I will include some highlights. The wall surrounding the castle “was thick enough at the bottom to withstand any tremor of the California earth...topped by a corona of jagged broken glass and it ran for a mile and three-quarters in a great semicircle away from the rocky Pacific coast and back to it again” (p. 6). On its gate,

The ironwork swept and swirled in great balanced curlicues, and the frame was heavy and studded. The studs held great sheets of blackened steel, heavy enough to withstand a battering ram, blocking any vision of the grounds the wall concealed. And the vertical members of the scrollwork reared high above the frame of the door and the top of the wall in a bristling array of spikes, sharp as swords, arched forward to further discourage any hardy trespasser who might try to climb their height (pp. 6-7).

In case you haven’t already figured it out, Martin loved his purple prose. If you don’t like Byzantine descriptions of architecture, ironwork, clothing, or anything else, you probably shouldn’t read this book or any of Martin’s other novels. (Nightmare’s Nest is far purpler, however, than this one. There’s an entire chapter in there devoted to describing the protagonist’s lush Edwardian finery.) Fortunately for me, I love this kind of thing and will gladly devour description after description of gates covered in iron curlicues. My literary tastes tend toward “more is more” and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

We learn that San Rafael is a reconstruction of an old Spanish mission, commissioned by April and built in part by Richard himself, “who personally took charge of putting in all the glass that fronted on the sea.” The gardens that surround it give it “a riot of color--bougainvillea, hibiscus, passionflowers, trumpet vines--all enhanced and set off against the majesty of rows of carefully spaced Italian cedar, or Lombardy poplar” (pp. 7-8).

Despite all this radiant beauty--and as one might expect for reconstructed ruins from the era of Spanish colonialism--the estate is believed to be cursed, at least by “the superstitious peons who built the walls” (p. 9).  (That’s what the book uncharitably describes the Mexican builders--some parts of this book haven’t aged well, as you will see.) Two men died while rebuilding it, followed by April herself around a decade later.

Surprisingly, we learn at the end of this chapter that Richard Morgan’s background differs from that of Jean Paul Desmond. An actor himself, he “was king of the theater, and of East Coast entertainment. Their marriage was a royal one, and it vaulted both of them to new and undreamed-of heights of popularity” (pp. 9-10). It was this popularity that drove them to wall themselves in at San Rafael and use the police and guard dogs to keep rabid fans and paparazzi away--which, ultimately, didn’t work and only led to “a new wave of interest and snooping” (p. 10).

Chapter 2

Here we meet Richard’s sister Lisa, who is...well...quite an interesting character. She’s a beautiful woman with short hair, a deep voice, and--most importantly--an unusual, creepy level of attachment to her brother.

Cersei Lannister Lisa Morgan.

Lisa has just received a phone call from the Philippines where her brother is. The call has left her “literally stunned” (p. 11), which means that the modern slang meaning of “literally” dates back 30+ years longer than I thought. Surprisingly, she isn’t drinking wine to calm her nerves like Cersei above, but that’s her loss.

As she gazes at the ocean to the west, her housekeeper, Conchita Aguilar,  enters. Chita (as she is usually called) has not just worked as April’s housekeeper for most of her life, but also "she and her husband, Juan, had quite literally brought up April” (p. 13); as a result, she is fiercely loyal to the family of her deceased mistress. Here is a portrait of her:

Looking at the tiny woman with her bright button eyes, the black Indian hair swept stiffly away from her face, parted in the middle and tidily put away in a tight bun low on the back of her neck, Lisa was surprised at the sudden urge to go and take this familiar person in her arms--or better still have Chita take her in hers.[...]Chita might be tiny, but she was all steel and whipcord (p. 13).

Sound familiar?

Yes, Chita bears a resemblance to our beloved Raxl. They even have a similar background, for Raxl, too, comes from a people indigenous to Mexico, according to Episode 23.  Like Raxl, Chita is very old and has a mysterious magnetism that draws some people to her (which, in Raxl’s case, includes me). There are some minor differences--Chita doesn’t worship the Great Serpent, she uses gratuitous Spanish instead of gratuitous French, she has a living husband and grandson--but they are, in most ways, the same character. It’s clear that Ian Martin didn’t want to part with Raxl, and I don’t blame him one bit.

Also, for whatever reason, he was oddly insistent on both of them having a specific hairstyle. If you read the original script for the show’s pilot, you will see that he was almost as specific about Raxl’s hairstyle, mentioning “her hair tightly drawn over her ears to a small bun,” but less detailed about those of the other characters. Just an odd detail that probably bears little significance, but that I noticed.

Lisa tells Chita that Richard is on his way home with a new wife, a young, very wealthy orphan named Jenny Summers whom he met in the Philippines. This angers the ancient housekeeper, who argues that Jenny can never come to San Rafael

Because there is no place for her here--en la casa de La Señora! Everything here is hers--she still lives here, and will always live here. Her perfume is in every room, her pictures are everywhere, every ornament and ashtray and book I keep just the way she last touched it. There is no room for any other wife here! Oh, she will feel it, she will know it, because La Señora would never permit another woman to take her place (p. 16)!

Lisa insists that, despite the risk that Jenny won’t want to live on the estate and despite her equal displeasure about the situation, Chita keep an open mind regarding her and try not to be such a Mrs. Danvers about the situation. (OK, so she doesn’t actually say the last part; that’s just my paraphrase.) She also tries to pressure Chita into helping her take down the mementos of April at Richard’s orders, which she objects to, both for sentimental reasons and because they don’t have time to have the enormous fresco of April that adorns the former chapel. (Symbolism!)

“It was a breathless and yet terrible beauty. For any woman who stood next to it had to be eclipsed” (p. 20).

Yes, you read that right: they rededicated the mission’s former chapel to the silver screen sex goddess April Tennant. After their wedding, Richard had a giant fresco of her painted there in place of its former altar. This is a clear indication that one or more of the people in this household worship April, whether literally or figuratively. More than that, the portrait glows like that of THE DEVIL JACQUES ELOI DES MONDES, and seems, like Jacques’ portrait, to be alive, the living essence of a dead person. “Most haunting of all was the feeling that this was the woman--that she could not have died, that any moment she would step off the wall, and her silver laughter would fill the house again (p. 20).”

I’m sorry, Jacques. ;)

Coming up next: Jenny arrives at San Rafael and tries to adjust to living on an estate where almost everyone but Richard acts like they hate her.

{ Next: Part II -> }

[theincorrigiblemagpie]

Kasautii Zindagii Kay (2018) E01- Yo Momma So Bengali

25-9-2018

Long time no liveblog-first-few-episodes-of-a-new-show-before-giving-up-in-disgust, no?

It’s a big one this time, folks. I am here to watch the first episode of the KZK reboot with you all!

For those who have not spent a dissipated life watching Hindi TV and/or lack context: KZK was one of Balaji's 3 original 'K-soaps', that aired between 2001 and 2008 on Star Plus. It was the story of star-crossed lovers Prerna and Anurag (who was very unnecessarily Bengali). They had 30 million impediments to their relationship and literally never got together. No jokes. Spoiler alert but they tragically died at the end of those 8 years. One main impediment was the other dude in Prerna's life, Mr Bajaj (first name: Rishabh but always 'Mr Bajaj' to the world), whom she was married to for the most part. Another major impediment was the vampiest vamp that ever vamped-- Komolika. Between the 3 main protagonists, other partners of the 2 men, and from sundry side characters, we had eleventy five children who complicated matters further through several classic 'time leaps.' The only ones I cared about were Prem and Mukti but they also had a tragic end.

The first rule of fight club, even before you begin watching this reboot, is: NEVER ship anybody. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Anyhoo, it’s time to begin.

Lots of establishing shots of Howrah Bridge, Hooghly river, Victoria Memorial and sundry Kolkata monuments so that everyone knows we’re in Kolkata.

Extreme family-function-after-a-long-time feelz as we're introduced to a dizzying cast of people (the Basu and Sharma clans) who are all...praying. Separately in their own homes, I mean. The Sharmas are a modest 'middle-class' family while the Basus are mansion-owning-wealthy. I sat and screencapped all of them for you.

Meet the Sharma parents and siblings.

Now, meet the Basu parents and siblings.

And finally, Anurag and Prerna.

Please note how the Basus get a little Durga next to their names and the Sharmas get a little Ganesh. This attention to detail is what I expect from the production house that will at some point vanish several characters with no explanation.

On a side note, I am generally pleased with Erica Fernandes as Prerna. And think Parth Samthaan as Anurag is fitting in that I always thought Cezanne Khan was also terribly lame and not hero material at all. 

It's been 23 minutes and we're still in the exposition stage. We have learned through tedious and boring conversations that Anurag is a little goody-two-shoes who is obsessively punctual and determined to carve a name for himself independent of his father's publishing empire.

He is also the college heartthrob (obv everyone goes to the same college) but he does not talk to any women (except Prerna) leading to speculation about whether he's gay. And he only talks to Prerna about the weather despite having known her for 10 years on account of their dads being friends/employer-employee/both.

Prerna shows dangerous Manic Pixie Dream Girl signs and her explanation for all nosey questions about why she doesn't try to hook Anurag is "I'm romantic and he's practical-- we're incompatible."

If I had a rupee for every romance I've read/watched where the heroine disses the hero for his lack of romantic spirit and then discovers that he is secretly not as unfeeling as she'd thought, I'd freelance without worry forever.

The writers couldn't wait for Durga Puja because it's already Durga Puja in this show's timeline. I must warn you, it's likely to be Durga Puja up until November, when it will suddenly be Diwali. 

Prerna's mom puts up a gift item stall at the big Basu puja pandal every year while her dad oversees a lot of the general admin. Mohini Basu, who is a Calcutta socialite, pretends not to recognise Prerna because she's too much of a peasant, apparently. I’m censoring several uncharitable and gross comments about the background socialites who cannot act to save their lives, and esp the girl who was supposedly Miss Calcutta the previous year.

My mom, watching over my shoulder, asked why random people were doing Durga's aarti (including Prerna and Anurag) instead of just the priests. If any of you also have this confusion, it's so that this can be a source of foreshadowing, premonition, drama and whatnot. In that vein, Anurag and Prerna accidentally ended up doing the aarti together for a bit, which only married couples do on TV.

Mohini is absolutely a let-them-eat-cake bitch but Moloy makes WhatsApp jokes about matrimony and his wife constantly so I'm feeling far more sympathetic toward her than I should.

I’m wondering how much longer they'll keep up the red and white sarees worn the SLB-Devdas way, the dhunuchi naach, and the Hindi-fied Bengali to establish Bengali-ness. Can't wait for them to forget and only revive on special occasions.

Prerna's feather-brained friend forces her to ask Anurag if he's into boys or girls which she haltingly does. Boring Anurag proves to have a strange sense of humour wherein he tells her he likes boys and pretends as though a friend is his boyfriend. LGBTQ ally Prerna says 'that's great, so glad it's legal now' and also apologizes for asking such a personal question. Ngl, Prerna has exhibited the MOST sense on this show so far (despite her occasional lapses into MPDG territory). I refer to a scene where several girls were peeking through the shutters into a locker room to ogle Anurag in a football jersey messily drinking Gatorade (yes, we had a brief Kukkad Kamaal Da moment). Prerna rolled her eyes, said "this is so embarrassing" and walked away.

Anyway, the final bit is where Prerna's brother Mahesh (who has been living under a rock all his life in Kolkata, I believe), asks the priest who the buff dude with curly hair being killed by Durga is. Priest immediately extemporizes a flowery essay on Mahishasur and Durga for our benefit. This is cut with scenes of the silhouette of a drunk man in shiny red shoes exiting a big car and smashing a bottle of whiskey and setting it on fire. He is presumably the Mahishasur to Prerna's Durga. We've also had plenty of anvil-sized hints comparing Prerna to Durga but they were tedious and I won't go into them. (But with those shoes, he could also be the Wicked Witch of the East. Idk.)

I'm hoping this one is Bajaj and he'll appear on the scene soon enough (and not be rapey, please god) so that this story can move faster.

Ok so that alcohol-fire was in an alley on the outside of this very pandal and the whole place is on fire now. In tonight's episode, Prerna and her friend will get caught in this fire and Anurag will play a Rohit Shetty hero.

I’m starting a red-dupatta count for all the separate moments a red dupatta flutters across the scene and over one or both leads, because that is an original Kasauti Thing.

In today’s episode, it happened 3 times.

[gnomeontherage]

The Journey

1.6k words/gen/T/spoilers up to ep 85 (On AO3)

Clean break. No long teary goodbyes, no hugs, no lingering looks or obvious ‘what-if’s. Well...very little about it had been clean. But it had been abrupt, and complete, and that was probably as close to clean as it could get. It was Shorthalt and Shorthalt against the world, now, and they did a pretty damn fine job if he said so himself. Plenty of awkward silences, and a few strident arguments, and a lot of banter that really said nothing; but they were together, and that meant something, didn’t it?

(There was a kind of beauty in simplicity, sometimes. Grog had taught him that.)

He hardly even missed them, at first. The few times he made the mansion it was echoingly, eerily empty with just two occupants, but really--they were a bunch of little shits, weren’t they? He didn’t miss Vex’s condescension, or Vax’s self-centeredness, or Percy’s snottiness, or Keyleth’s stammering, or Grog’s obtuseness. (he did miss everything about Pike, but then he had been missing everything about Pike for years. He was used to it.) He started to miss Grog first. Funny how he didn’t realize how much he leaned on that massive, solid straightforwardness until he no longer had his best mate by his side. Kaylie could drink and fight and bluster just as well as a Goliath, and that helped, but, well. They didn’t share much beside blood, did they? No history. No inside jokes.

(You have to start somewhere, he told himself bracingly, inspiringly. Everyone has to.)

It was slow going with Kaylie, made slower by the fact that she was just as good a liar as he ever was. It was a bit of a puppet show, most of the time: he moved Scanlan-Kingslayer-Father-Adventurer-Shorthalt around like a marionette, she did the same with Kaylie-Bard-Brawler-Daughter-No-Really-Just-Kaylie. He tried to be better, he truly did, but it was hard. And slow. Three steps forward, two steps back, and the mask would come up and she would be a cheerful foul-mouthed stranger/travelling companion again. It was enough to give him a painful twinge of sympathy for...well. He was old enough, and older by the day. He’d learned patience. 

(learned it dueling with Vex’s words and picking at Vax’s moods, waiting for Percy to get to the point and Keyleth to decide what she wanted to say, sitting on Grog’s wide shoulder as he plowed steadily through a forest, lying back-to-back with Pike on a cold windy mountainside and listening to her low murmured prayers)

A blustery grey spring evening found them in the middle of nowhere and sick and tired of sleeping on rocks: he made the mansion, placing the materials with care, because he wasn’t part of a group of filthy-rich heroes any more, was he? He and Kaylie did alright, but fifteen gold was nothing to sneer at. He winced a little as the material components were consumed by the spell, and maybe it was that distraction, or the tiredness of a week of sleeping rough, or the fact that Kaylie had been simply marvelous all day and he was full to bursting with pride and no one to share it with, but when they stepped in the doorway he blinked around the foyer in a daze because it wasn’t the modest-yet-gaudy version he’d made for he and Kaylie specifically, but the one he’d made a dozen times before. The OG. The Vox Mansion-a. Kaylie noticed--of course she did!--but didn’t comment beyond a roll of the eyes before heading straight for the dining room. Dinner was simple but filling, and not just chicken, because Kaylie didn’t get the joke. (well, why would she? it wasn’t really a joke, was it?) When they both started nodding off over their plates they surrendered their belongings to spectral servants before heading for the bedrooms. Or rather, Kaylie headed. Scanlan took three confident steps, then two unsure steps, then one slow aborted movement that he ended by crouching and pretending to refasten a strap on his boots. Before he could recover his equilibrium, a roll of parchment was stuck in his face.

“Go on, you maudlin bastard.”

He sank back on his heels and accepted the scroll, looking it over. “What’s this?”

“Go spy on your idiot friends, you idiot. You’re broodier than a hen.”

Scanlan opened his mouth to retort but didn’t like any of the ones that came to mind. He cleared his throat instead, and asked intelligently, “Huh?”

“It’s a scrying scroll,” she said with the kind patience of a woman talking to a very old and rather slow hound dog.”Go use it.” Then, patience expended, she turned him around and shoved him in the general direction of the exit. “Don’t come back in until you’re satisfied they haven’t gotten themselves fucking killed.”

He did as he was told. 

Just outside the door of the mansion he found a smooth patch of dirt and settled into it, crossing his legs and cracking his knuckles as he unrolled the scroll and started to read. It was child’s play, really...not at all like that Gate scroll nonsense. In just a moment the scroll snapped out of existence along with the last note, and he felt a dizzying rush of motion as his vision was swept up and out of his body. It moved much to fast for him to have any notion of where it eventually settled, but when it did he had to laugh, because Vox Machina was in a tavern. Of course. Had been for a while, clearly: there was a general mess, and few other patrons left awake in the room. Vax was actually seated on one snoring citizen--a skinny human in dented but very shiny armor--and playing with one of his daggers with a nimbleness that should have been a sign of sobriety but with Vax meant fuck-all. 

“They haven’t changed at all,” he commented to the air...but then that wasn’t a surprise, was it? It had been less than five months. He counted heads and felt a brief rush of panic at finding one missing, but Vax and Percy wouldn’t seem so at ease of something had happened to Vex. (would they?) They weren’t any thinner, or more worn; they seemed to be eating enough, they clearly could still hold their liquor, and he spotted a few new shinies among their equipment. Everyone seemed so normal, in fact, that he almost dropped the spell right then and there. But of course, he couldn’t not look at Pike closer and he willed his vision to focus more closely on her. She was seated on the table, surrounded by empty glasses and explaining something to Grog with the great relaxation of the profoundly drunk. No new dents on her armor or scars on her lovely face, but when she turned her head to ask something of Vax he caught his breath, for what he had thought was a new style of braid was instead a loose thatch of short white curls. “Pike! Your hair!” he said, and she didn’t hear him, of course. When had that happened? Had she just decided to try something new, or had it been burnt off like Keyleth’s?

Speaking of the druid, she at least looked the same. Her clothes were different, but then Kiki had always liked to change her outfit with the seasons. She was seated sideways on the bench, back-to-back with Percy, the two of them totally dissimilar and yet as alike as two peas in a pod. Percy also looked blessedly unchanged, maybe a little broader in the shoulders, and with his perpetual scruff grown out into an actual white beard. Nothing to compare to Grog’s beard, of course: that was the same as before, as was he, except for new scars and a few lines at the corners of his eyes that Scanlan had never noticed before. (how long do Goliaths live, anyway?) He resolved to stay just long enough to see Vex, and as if the thought called her she came into his field of view. The bear was in her necklace, or in her room, and the massive bow wasn’t on her back. She came up beside her brother and said something to him, laughing, that Scanlan didn’t catch over the sudden roaring in his ears.

Her...her arm. 

“Oh, Vex,” he said, heartbroken From the elbow down her right arm was entirely missing, the sleeve not just pinned back but hemmed, and the stump was a mess of white scar tissue. She pinched her brother’s side with her one remaining hand, and reached into the bag beside Vax, which was half-under the armored stranger’s legs. From within she withdrew a strange spidery clockwork contraption which she affixed to what was left of her right arm. As she locked it in place with practiced motions, it came alive with a crackle of green magical energy and she stretched it, flexing almost like a real hand. “You kids were supposed to take care of each other,” he said, and as if she heard him, those sharp observant eyes came up and looked seemingly right into his. He held his breath. Not seeing whatever had drawn her attention, her gaze fell away and he let out a long careful sigh. He’d almost forgotten that look, the clever sharp fond look she got about herself sometimes, which she wore now looking over the inebriated members of her family.

“Come on, darlings, time for sleeping. Two to a room, mattresses for everyone, and I’m actually confident that there will be no skittery nightly visitors.”

“What about Tary?” Pike asked brightly, and Vex gave Vax’s ‘chair’ an uncharitable look. 

“Oh dear. I suppose he’ll have to share with Trinket and Dottie.”

“Damn shame,” Percy said.

Vax stretched his arms above his head and smiled a very little crooked grin at his sister. “Well, we could al--” his voice cut off as she spell faded, and Scanlan reeled a little in place with disorientation. For a long, long minute he didn’t move a muscle. 

Then he got up, and carefully brushed dirt off his trousers, and went into back in the mansion.

[paylolorens-blog]

The Benefits Of Physical Activity

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