#& remember the same thing & start recounting using the exact same language

[cainsgibsongirl]

louis really is the unreliable narrator ever truly like he recalls his birthdate a year off, it was winter when his brother died but also it should've been near autumn and by the time his sister was getting married? he leaves out certain details deliberately, whether consciously— did you eat the baby?, or unconsciously— except you made sure lestat wouldn't really die didn't you? he recalls certain things a lot differently sometimes because he refuses to think about them plainly and sometimes because he really can't remember, he's guilty over how claudia came to be, well, claudia but throws almost all the fault on lestat by not acknowledging his better half in turning her, he corners a teenage journalist drugged out of his mind and fucking bitches all the way to hell about lestat only to wax poetics about the man again to the same guy decades later, and so he's a little brain fogged and a lot biased and you can't take any of what he says to scripture, only to find out that!!! his companion!!!! of 77 years!!!! was also!!!! not only Entirely Lying to him on accounts of Huge events of Much significance in his life but also has been abusing his ability to erase whole memories from his head to the point he can't remember fucking attempting suicide and alters memories so terribly too not just with physic powers but also through a lot of manipulation tactics (you Asked me to erase it!) so really the season finale leaves you wondering what better part of paris was all entirely wrong, what of armand and louis' relationship was just entirely fiction or just completely skewed? turned on his head? the man already lost so much to age and the odyssey of recollection now we learn his brain fog is also largely attributed to a whole other person fucking around with it, someone who we know used it A Lot by that point too and probably got careless after the fucking... seventieth decade doing this that louis suddenly noticed his photos being swapped out... armand has gotten so careless and used to power he said shit like well... maybe You put those photos there....well You asked me to erase it.... and louis fucking believed him too!! what of any of it is real, and he must be wondering too after all of it, he wanted this, to remember, he's been wracking his head for details about whether or not claudia was dreaming next to him that night a million years ago and her killer is right there at the table next to him. when he's crying recounting the death of his daughter to the guy who orchestrated it what has he ever really known at all.

[hollowghostsonfilm]

[Geto/Gojo Fic] Hollow: Children of the Future [3/7]

Summary:

Satoru Gojo wakes up in the body of his sixteen-year-old self, 6 months before the Star Plasma Vessel mission. He's certain its a domain. Or a curse. Or a hallucination born at the moment of his death. It can't be real. Geto is alive. Shoko is there. The dorm floorboards creak at the exact right place. He has to focus, has to work out how to break out of this domain. But hope has teeth, and Gojo has been bitten. Haunted by a future that only he remembers, Gojo has to walk the knife's edge between redemption and madness. Because if this is real, he can't let it go the same way again.

Master List for previous chapters.

Link to AO3 or read below:

Warnings:

NSFW / 18+

Notes:

Just a note. In this chapter, Satoru isn’t just playing coy for part of the conversation here. Whereas often in the Japanese language, 好き [suki] is used to denote love (and sometimes 大好き [daisuki]), Suguru is using the much more formal version: 愛してる [aishiteru] and its conjugations in this conversation. In their argument, Satoru used the much more common 好き [suki]. So, when it feels like Satoru is just being awkward, it’s because he’s being pinned down to admit to a kind of romantic confession that one would usually only use for something like a marriage proposal or a deathbed confession of love. This doesn’t really change the conversation that much, but it might add an extra layer of fun for those of you who want to imagine it.

“All right. Let’s talk.”

Satoru sits there, in silence, and Suguru realises he’s waiting to be asked questions. Too used to being interrogated on what he knows, not offering information freely. He guesses that with so much to cover, it might be hard to know where to start.

“Tell me about the other timeline. All of it this time. Not just what I saw before.”

And so Satoru does. His voice sounds distant, robotic, as he recounts the events. Suguru keeps his hand in his own, an anchor, as he watches Satoru drift through the memories of another time, another life, every blood-soaked memory and burning loss reflected in his eyes but never quite reaching his voice.

It’s not easy to listen to.

They had suffered. This life that Satoru had clawed back for them was far from perfect, but even Suguru could see that it was somewhat better than the first-time round. When Satoru starts talking about the fight with Sukuna, how he’d taken over Megumi’s body, used him, Suguru feels a little sick.

He can’t imagine a world where he didn’t know who Megumi was.

“I don’t really recollect how that fight ended. Which probably means that I didn’t make it,” Satoru says, expression carefully blank. “I’m pretty sure I died. Pretty sure it was my funeral pyre that we both saw.”

Suguru doesn’t know what to say. There’s nothing he can do to change the past, though even as he thinks it, he wonders if that’s really true anymore. Somehow, Satoru has done the impossible after all.

There’s one thing that’s notably missing from Satoru’s retelling though, something that sticks out to Suguru as he brings his other hand to lay atop his and Satoru’s joined ones between them.

“What about us? In that timeline?” he asks. “You implied when we were fighting that he had been your best friend but never… you know.”

Satoru’s expression changes, a bit of his colour coming back. “Are you jealous of your other self, Suguru?” The corner of his mouth is twitching.

“What? No!” Suguru instinctively denies it, before he catches himself and then lets a sheepish smile form. “Maybe a little?”

Satoru snorts, head bowing forward for a moment before he looks back up. “Maybe I loved him in that way. I don’t know. In a kind of… unrequited way. We never crossed the line beyond playfully flirting, and when he was gone… Betrayal and grief is one hell of a cocktail. It makes… it makes it hard to feel anything else.”

Suguru can understand that. “So, you weren’t lovers?”

Satoru shakes his head, and he’s wearing a soft smile, a patient one. “No. We weren’t lovers.”

Suguru shouldn’t feel happy about that, but he can’t help it. He squeezes Satoru’s hand. Satoru squeezes back.

There is one more thing that he has to know, one more thing that hangs between them still. That in the months following their fight had played over and over in his head, but he was too angry to process then.

“You said you loved me.”

Satoru’s eyes slide to the side, the tips of his ears turning a little pink. “Ah, did I?”

“You know you did,” Suguru won’t let him hide. Not this time. “Did you mean it? Do you still?”

Satoru pulls his hand away, and for a moment Suguru is confused, until he watches Satoru actually cover his face with both hands to hide behind.

“Are you really going to make me say it? Is that really necessary?” Satoru’s voice is small.

Suguru feels light, breathy. Satoru’s reaction alone is more than enough to tell him the answer, but his embarrassment is adorable. It’s too much to leave alone.

“It’s necessary. Do you love me, Satoru?” He leans forward a little, trying to see behind Satoru’s fingers to catch his expression. Satoru lets out a whine and then his hands fall from his face. His cheeks are bright pink, startlingly so against the white of his hair.

“I changed a whole timeline for you, what do you think?” Satoru squirms.

Suguru isn’t going to let him get away with it. “I don’t know. What am I supposed to think?”

He’s pinned then by Satoru’s gaze. There’s so much behind those eyes, the entire universe contained in them. Being looked at feels like being observed by the heavens. Satoru’s hands fall into his lap, his face still red, his jaw tight with embarrassment. Suguru watches him, the pull in his chest tightening into something almost unbearable. He lets it sit there between them. Let Satoru sweat. He deserves to a little.

“It’s funny,” he says, and Satoru’s eyes narrow. “You can threaten the elders. Break the laws of physics, apparently. Throw yourself against the literal King of Curses. But saying this has got you crumbling like a sandcastle.”

Satoru groans. “See! This is why I won’t say it! I knew you were going to be smug about it.”

Suguru chuckles. “I’m not being smug.” He is, though even if something in his chest also feels like it’s unknotting, coming undone. Something soft, something sacred, unsealing and unwrapping itself within him. “I just need to hear it. Properly. From you. Not because of something out of your control. Not because you’re desperate because you think everything’s going wrong. But just because you can.”

Satoru raises his head, and there’s a vulnerability in his eyes that Suguru doesn’t expect. Wherever the arrogance has gone, peeled away like lacquer, it has left behind it a Satoru that looks all at once younger, and braver.

“Be careful what you wish for. I don’t know how to say things like this without ruining them. I’ve spent so long being a weapon, turning guilt into strength, regret into action, that this is absolutely terrifying for me. This isn’t something I’m in control of.”

Suguru’s heart trips at the confession.

“Satoru,” he says gently, reaching for Satoru’s hand again to lace their fingers together. “You don’t need to be afraid of this. Of me.”

Satoru inhales, like he’s about to speak, but then stops. Suguru watches his mouth start to form the words, stop, then he tries again.

“I love you.”

The words are quiet, uneven, whispered.

Suguru closes his eyes as the words land. It’s more than a confession. It’s a surrender. A tiny white flag planted in the soil from another life. The first time Satoru has ever said those words to him, the first time he’s probably said them to anyone.

Suguru opens his eyes again and studies him, his flushed cheeks, his parted lips, the hope that has blossomed in his eyes, unguarded and real.

“You know I love you too, right?” He says it casually, as though it’s no big deal. As though he hasn’t agonised over this as much as Satoru has, in his own way. “Even after everything.”

Satoru exhales, a shiver running down his spine so subtle that Suguru almost doesn’t notice it. But he notices the way the hair stands up on the back of Satoru’s neck, just a little, and is proud that he’s somehow managed to cause a full body response with just his words.

The silence between them then isn’t stretched, or hollow, but full. The note at the end of a triumphant song rather than their usual echoing discord. Suguru leans forward, brushing their foreheads together.

It isn’t desperate this time when they kiss. Satoru leans in first, his fingers grazing against Suguru’s jaw like he’s tracing a memory. His eyes are open, checking even now that this is really happening to him. To them. That this is the present and not a dream.

Suguru tilts his head until their lips meet. Soft, deep. Unlike the first time Satoru kissed him, this doesn’t feel like a collision, it feels like a homecoming. Like he’s water, and he’s remembering the shape of the shore.

Suguru curls his hands into Satoru’s shirt. He won’t rush. He won’t push. He just holds onto him. Gives Satoru permission to just feel safe, secure, with him in that moment. Satoru’s tongue brushes against his bottom lip, a sweet request and Suguru parts his mouth for him.

When Satoru finally pulls away, gasping for breath, Suguru thinks he looks slightly dazed. They can’t continue this here. If anyone wakes up for the bathroom, then they’ll run straight into them, and then there’ll be questions and excitable teenagers, and it will definitely ruin a mood that Suguru would rather not have disturbed.

He grabs Satoru’s wrist and pulls him, out of the kitchen, into the same room that they had once shared. Satoru looks around at the room once the door is shut, turning slightly as he does.

“You, er, threw out my things?”

Suguru shakes his head. “No. Boxed them up and put them in the wardrobe.”

This isn’t what Suguru wants to talk about right now. He draws Satoru towards him by the waist, pulling their bodies together. Satoru’s catches his lower lip between his teeth as Suguru slides his thigh between his legs, leaning in.

“Don’t bite my lip like that unless you want me to do something about it,” Suguru keeps his voice low, smirking when it illicits a shiver down Satoru’s spine.

“And just what are you going to do about it, Suguru?” Satoru asks, his head tilted slightly down towards him, those stupidly long eyelashes fluttering.

Suguru presses his thigh up between Satoru’s legs and he hears Satoru’s breath catch in his throat, his pupils expanding with desire.

“You always beg with your eyes before your mouth catches up,” Suguru nips at said mouth as Satoru’s hips press harder against him, desperate for friction that doesn’t come. He squirms in Suguru’s hold.

Suguru takes pity, reaching up to slide Satoru’s jacket off his shoulders and letting it pool onto the floor. His shirt goes next, unbuttoned with a slowness that makes Satoru’s heart race under his fingers. That joins the jacket, and then Suguru has access to the pale skin beneath.

He runs his palms up Satoru’s ribs, dipping his head to kiss along his collarbone as he does so. Satoru’s hands curl into his hair in response. Suguru suspects that Satoru has somewhat of a thing for it. His hands always find it in moments like these, coiling it round his fingers, tugging on it, running through it.

He licks along Satoru’s collarbone until he gets to where Satoru’s neck meets his shoulder. There he pauses, before he lightly bites down. Satoru’s fingers tighten in his hair, encouraging him to bite down harder. Suguru does, biting and sucking until Satoru is shaking against him, head thrown back and lips parted.

Suguru pulls back to look at his handiwork, admiring the mark that he’s left there. Yes, there’s no doubt about it now. They might still not have settled on a label yet, but there’s no doubt that Satoru belongs to someone with that bruise on his neck.

“You’re trembling,” Suguru murmurs, pressing another kiss to the bruise, as Satoru flutters against him.

“I’m always like this when I get what I want.”

Suguru huffs, and there’s another shiver. “I’m going to make you beg for me, Satoru.”

That earns him a low moan for his efforts, and then Satoru is pushing him back up against the bed. Suguru lets his legs catch, lets himself be pushed down, lets Satoru straddle him. He waits to see what comes next, but Satoru seems to stall there, staring down at him as though he doesn’t know what he wants to do first.

Suguru helps supply him with an idea by starting to undo the obi holding his kimono together. Satoru gets with the programme quickly, fingers scrabbling to help, sliding the length of fabric apart, pulling on it until it comes away and joins his clothes on the floor.

Satoru sits back on his heels, peeling away the layers of the kimono until his fingers are brushing against Suguru’s skin. Suguru watches Satoru’s expression when he notices it, the way his eyes widen a little as the pads of his fingers trace over the design inked on Suguru’s chest.

It’s only a month old. Virtually just healed. Two storm clouds are inked beneath his collarbones, dipping down the middle of his chest where the kirin rears on its back legs. Its lion’s head is open in a snarl, its horse’s front hooves kicked up as it’s scaled body runs down his sternum. The tail sinuously curls around his navel and then runs like a trail down beneath the waistband of his underwear.

Satoru’s finger traces it down until his fingertip hits cloth. “This is new.”

“I felt it fit. A watchful guardian for the reign of a great visionary.”

Satoru leans forward, and his lips start to trail the path left by his fingers moments before. Suguru lets his head fall back as Satoru slides down him, off the edge of the bed, and between his legs.

“It suits you,” Satoru says, and then he’s mouthing Suguru’s half-hard cock through his underwear.

Suguru sucks in a breath as Satoru teases him through the cloth. The heat of his breath blows through the fabric, but the open-mouthed kisses he leaves soon makes it wet, sticking to Suguru’s growing hardness. One of Satoru’s hands massages his thigh, the other grips the base of his dick, squeezing.

It drives Suguru insane.

“You’re touching me like you’ve got all the time in the world. Like you know I’ll never ask you to stop,” Suguru says, reaching down a hand to touch Satoru’s cheek.

He looks up, blue eyes dark and mouth wet. “Then tell me what you want. Or I’ll take my time figuring it out for myself.”

“Say it.”

“That I love you?” Satoru’s brows draw together as he misunderstands.

Suguru wouldn’t mind hearing that again, but no. That’s not what he wants right now. “That I can have you. Now. All of you. Riding me until you’re ruined.”

Satoru pupils blow wide, and his mouth hangs open for a moment before he’s scrambling to stand up, hands going to his belt and zipper and hastily discarding his pants and underwear.

Gods he’s beautiful. The streetlights outside are the only thing that light his skin in the dark, catching on every hard angle and ridge across his toned body. Suguru lets his eyes wander over his form, over the deep V that runs over his hips and then, of course, that perfectly formed dick. Because Heaven forbid that Satoru Gojo would have any imperfections whatsoever.

Suguru kicks off his own underwear, sitting up as Satoru crawls onto his lap, thighs bracketing his own. The kiss he gives Suguru isn’t frantic, nor aggressive, but intensely, erotically present.

“You’re everything I want,” Satoru says against his lips, not able to pull away long enough to form a sentence. He grinds his hips forward, the tip of his cock rubbing against Suguru’s stomach. “Take me, Suguru. Please.”

Suguru snakes one arm around Satoru’s waist in response, reaching for his bedside drawer and pulling out a bottle of lubricant. Satoru continues to rut against him as he does, making soft, helpless mewls that almost break Suguru’s self-control.

Suguru quickly warms the lubricant up between his fingers before he reaches behind Satoru, running the pad of his finger against the other’s entrance. Satoru’s spine bows as he presses back against it, the column of his neck exposed as his head goes back.

Suguru pushes the tip of his finger inside, watching as Satoru’s expression melts into one of bliss. He knows that Satoru would never admit it to himself, that he likes being taken like this. It’s another thing that they haven’t discussed. Yet. But every time Suguru fingers him, fucks him, he changes in this moment. The arrogance and plays for power falling away, and leaving just a pliable, willing body for Suguru to bend to his own wants and needs.

One finger becomes two as Satoru’s body stretches for him, accepts him. Satoru’s mouth is running again, a constant stream of thoughts and feelings as Suguru’s fingers work him open.

"You're so smug when you're like this. Bet you think you’ve got me figured out. I’m still—fuck—I’m still stronger than you. Don’t stop. Please, don’t stop."

Finally, Suguru withdraws his fingers and Satoru slumps against him for a moment, panting hot against his shoulder. There’s a sheen of sweat to his skin, and Suguru kisses his neck as he guides Satoru’s hand to his cock.

“Guide me into you,” he instructs.

Satoru is following his instructions without engaging his brain. His hand squeezes Suguru’s dick, stroking it almost on reflex as he lifts himself up. He has to arch and twist to get the angle right, to settle Suguru at his entrance and then slowly, thighs trembling, lower himself down.

Slick, wet heat surrounds Suguru as Satoru takes him, inch by inch. Those beautiful eyes close, his brows draw together and those teeth have caught his lip again. Suguru watches as Satoru settles himself, as the last of whatever tension he was carrying bleeds out of him.

“Open your eyes for me. No hiding,” Suguru commands, hands running up Satoru’s thighs to settle on his hips.

Those eyes snap open immediately, meeting his own and they both groan as Satoru tightens around him.

“Do you feel what you do to me?” Satoru breathes, cock spasming unattended and helpless between them.

“Every twitch. Every breath. Every heartbeat,” Suguru replies. “Remember this, Satoru. Every inch of me, every sound I make.”

Satoru rolls his hips, before rising up slightly and then dropping back down. Pre-cum starts to leak from the tip of his cock, and Suguru reaches between them, circling the base with his thumb and forefinger and squeezing hard. Satoru’s fingernails dig into his shoulders, and his hips buck in protest.

“Just making sure this isn’t over before it’s begun,” Suguru smiles up at him, mock-sweetness. Satoru huffs at him, but his eyes have glazed over even more than they were before.

Then Satoru starts to ride him in earnest. If Suguru had thought he was undone before, Satoru is absolutely wrecked now. His chest heaves as he fights for breath, his stomach muscles rippling as he lifts himself over and over again just so he can sink himself back down onto Suguru’s length inside him.

Satoru never reaches down to touch himself, Suguru has learned. It’s like it doesn’t occur to him to do so. He always waits. Always waits for Suguru’s hand to close around him to bring him over the edge. Suguru releases the grip he has on him, dragging fingertips featherlight up and down his cock until Satoru is whimpering, mouth watering as his lips hollowly call for more.

Suguru flicks his thumb over the tip of Satoru’s cock, watching as Satoru’s expression crumples.

“Do it again. Do that again. Please,” Satoru babbles, hips stuttering as whatever pleasure coursed through him distracted him.

“You’re so beautiful like this. It’s fucking unfair,” Suguru replies, doing it again just to see Satoru’s body twitch and more clear fluid leak from the tip of his cock.

“It’s for you,” Satoru babbles. “You’re the only one who’s ever made me fall apart like this.”

Suguru groans, stomach tightening. He abandons Satoru’s cock to instead grip the other man’s hips and lift him up slightly, before shoving him back down. Satoru lets out a cry, leaning forward and wrapping his arms around Suguru’s neck as he’s ‘helped’ to go harder, faster, slammed down onto Suguru’s cock and split open.

“Say my name.”

“Suguru… God, Suguru-“

Suguru can tell when Satoru is close. Words become incoherent, and instead Satoru just resorts to noises. Moans and stuttered, half-formed sounds that end when Suguru’s dick brushes against his insides again.

“Where’s all the attitude now, Satoru? Be a good boy for me. Tell me what you’re thinking,” Suguru coaxes.

He knows they’re both close now, can feel it in the way that Satoru’s body is coiling on top of him. His own orgasm is being held back by sheer will, determined that he won’t finish inside Satoru until the other man has come first.

“For you,” Satoru babbles. “For you. Only you. I’m yours… I’m yours.”

“That’s right, Satoru. You’re mine,” Suguru confirms, voice hoarse.

Thick ropes of cum spurt across his chest in response, Satoru’s thighs gripping tightly around him as he pushes back desperately onto Suguru’s cock to ride through his orgasm. Suguru holds his hips, pounding up into him as he feels Suguru tighten and twitch around his cock.

Satoru finally comes down, panting and love drunk, and Suguru kisses him. It takes only a few more thrusts before he fills Satoru, buried deep inside him, lips calling out his name.

♾️

The room is warm. Too warm.

Suguru watches as Satoru lies face-down on the mattress, fingers curled in the sheets. There’s a flush still around his cheeks, and tiny bruises forming over his hips.

“You’re beautiful when you’re wrecked,” Suguru says, brushing a hand down Satoru’s spine.

Satoru smiles at him, and it’s not his usual arrogant grin. It’s small. Genuine.

“Do you think the kids will notice I came back in the middle of the night?” Satoru asks, tilting his head as though to listen for the telltale sounds of anyone else awake in the house.

“Only if you were loud enough for them to hear,” Suguru replies, resting his palm on the small of Satoru’s back.

“I thought you liked me being loud,” Satoru grins at him, though he does look a bit sheepish. “You don’t think… they heard, do you?”

Suguru shakes his head. “No. The room is pretty soundproofed.”

“How do you- Oh.” Satoru scowls at him.

Suguru lets him jump to that conclusion without correction, especially when he sees the possessive, half-feral arrogance pass over Satoru’s face like a shadow. There’s something wrong with him that he finds it insanely hot. “Don’t look at me like that. We never put a label on this. Or restrictions.”

“We’re exclusive,” Satoru announces, reaching for him possessively. “You’re my boyfriend and you are not to fuck other people.”

“I agree. Let’s call it that,” Suguru chuckles, pressing a kiss to Satoru’s forehead.

They fall asleep wrapped in each other, breath syncing to a slow rhythm. The window slowly softens into dawn, and with the rising light, it feels like the world exhales.

[jammingkambing]

Country of Nothings and the Privilege of Grief

This is the one where my tito dies. 

I remember many details about his death: like the color of his urn and how my tita placed his glasses beside a picture of him smiling. I remember some points less clearly. I know he died in the summer months of 2021, but I don’t know if he died in April or in May. And I forgot the exact words that my mom used when she told me that he had died— if she mentioned his COVID, or if I just made that connection myself.  What I remember best, though, is the grief.

Grief was quiet— which is not to say it was mild or gentle. It wasn’t. Grief was quiet, like how I’d lie down to sleep in a silent room only to remember that I couldn’t remember the last time that I talked to my tito. I’d be looking at my phone while I was waiting for class to start and my browser would be open to the very last philosopher that my tito recommended. I’d be sitting at my desk during an empty moment, and I’d realize that I had forgotten the sound of my tito’s laugh.

This feeling, more than anything, is what Alfonso Manalastas wants to memorialize in Country of Nothings. 

The poem itself is the record of a very specific period in Philippine history. The dramatic situation is set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and its mounting deaths— thus the running count of fifteen hundred and one, hundred and two— joined with the shutdown of the ABS-CBN corporation. Here, then, is a Filipino who is trying to find meaning in the mismanagement of a country. Here is a persona who is trying to make sense of senseless deaths, rationalizing an irrationality and realizing what a privilege it is to still be here, to breathe and enjoy this grief. In telling this, the poem juxtaposes the story of an individual sadness with the tragedy of an entire country: Headlines looking more and more like obituaries / Staggering from their appointed places on the paper. 

This piece revolves around historicity. Every death and every pitch-black TV is caused by a national event or an international pandemic, respectively, and so the poem repeats, You recount the dead until you fumble over the math… You recount the dead until you fumble over the myth because these are not new events. This is not the first time that our country has experienced the crippling of free speech or the spread of a deadly virus, and it will not be the last, if only because history bears repetition.

However, for all that the poem is grounded in its context, its language explores the timelessness of mourning. On the streets, / more nothing. And from nothingness, you muster / nothing. The sensation of emptiness is not exclusive to the year 2020. Ever since injustice and ever since war and ever since illness, people have suffered loss and recounted the dead, but Manalastas' greatest achievement here is writing grief in the vernacular of this time and in the voice of this people while still retaining the universal numbness of death. And when they try to devour us with a hunger / so infinite, we will wholly surrender to them nothing.

So the poem ends with a surrender— which is itself a kind of silence. I find this fitting, if only because silence is another response to grief. Sitting in the dark until the numbers blur and your TV becomes static. Lying on a bed and trying to reconstruct a voice using fragments of memories. 

I'll tell you now that, in my better moments, I believe in an afterlife. I'm a Christian, which means that most of the time I like the idea of heaven and I look forward to the day when I ascend and I can finally ask my tito, Why did you leave me? And he'd give me the answer that I'm waiting for.

In my worse moments, though, I imagine asking that same question and receiving no reply. Nothing but the hum of a broken TV, and my grief left unanswered— as if to say that there are far worse things than the quiet.

A/N: The full text of Alfonso Manalastas' Country of Nothings was published in 2021 in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal over here in this link. Also, this is just my English homework. Hi, Sir Andy!

[serialreblogger]

Hey! I'm thinking of reading Dracula, and knowing that's your eternal hyperfixation, I wanted to ask your thoughts, if you had any comments, suggestions, ect.

HEY WHY DIDN’T I SEE THIS SOONER I’M SO SORRY FRIEND

okay okay okay okay (...several people are typing...) SO

the first thing you should be aware of when reading Dracula is that it’s quite Victorian, so you might find it easier, especially on a first read, to get an annotated version (the Norton Critical Edition version is quite good) that puts footnotes in to explain all the outdated references to like, London penny-meat merchants and stuff. I would say it’s significantly easier to read than Lord of the Rings, but because it was written 200 years ago the difference in language means it’s not a simple read. (However, if you have absolutely any attraction to the Gothic aesthetic, Dracula is so very much worth the brainpower to slog through the rougher sentences. Like. “...the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky.” The whole book is like that. A bit stilted to contemporary readers, but also breathtakingly spot-on in its Spooky Factor.)

the second thing you should be aware of is that Dracula is extremely gay, but in a Tormented Victorian Closeted way. There’s a part where Jonathan climbs out a window that just. It’s uh. The descriptions are very,, metaphorical-sounding. Again, the whole book is like that, and sometimes it’s very fun and sometimes (lookin at Lucy’s whole thing) it’s significantly more unsettling if you pay attention to the weirdly sexy descriptions of how the protagonists interact with the vampires, but I think that’s part of what I find so fascinating about Dracula--it’s unsettling and strange and the pieces don’t fit together clearly, and I still don’t know quite what to make of it, but all the same the feeling of what Stoker’s saying comes through quite clearly. There’s a reason why so many Dracula adaptations have this narrative of a protagonist falling in forbidden love with the tormented Vampyre, yknow? There’s something so unmistakeably sympathetic about the character of Dracula, even when the narrative of the story goes out of its way to establish that he has no redeeming qualities or even proper personhood, that he’s just a monster. Because there’s something about the story (even without getting into the whole “Mina and Jon murked their boss” thing) that makes a reader wonder if that’s really the whole truth. If there isn’t something tragic about Dracula. If there isn’t something in him, if not of goodness, then at least of sorrow, instead of only fear.

Anyway I digress but I think we all knew that was gonna happen; point is: Jonathan and Dracula definitely had sex, Mina and Lucy were definitely in love, Seward’s got something weird goin on with the old professor (and also he’s just very weird, full stop. sir. sir please stop experimenting on your asylum inmates. sir i know this is victorian england but please Do Not), and Quincey, well, Quincey is an American cowboy with a bowie knife, and I think that’s all we really need to know.

ok and! the third thing you should be aware of is The Racism. Imperialist Britain, yo. Bram Stoker was Irish so like, it isn’t half as bad as some other authors of his time period (Rudyard Kipling anyone), but the racism is real and I don’t wanna gloss over that. The g**sy slur is used with abandon for a huge assortment of people groups, there’s a tacit as well as overt acceptance of the idea that West is superior to East, and because the educational system where I grew up is a joke and I can only learn things if I accidentally fall down the wikipedia hole of researching the insect genus hemiptera, i genuinely still don’t know how accurate the extensive history of Romania recounted in the first third of the book actually is. Oh also casual and blatant anti-blackness is verbalized by a character at least once. I’m pretty sure the racism has a metaphorical place in the framework of Dracula’s storytelling, but I couldn’t tell you what it is because I am not going to bother putting myself in the mindset of a racist white Victorian man. This is the mindset I am trying to unlearn. So: read with caution, critical thinking, and the double knowledge that even as the narrators are meant to be unreliable, so too is the author himself.

Finally, regarding interpretation: so personally I’m running with the opinion that Dracula is, at least partly, a metaphor for Stoker’s own queerness and internal conflict re: being queer, being closeted, and watching the torture his friend Wilde went through when the wealthy father of Wilde’s lover set out to ruin his life for daring to love his son. Whether this is true or not (I think it’s true, but hey, that’s analysis, baby), you can’t understand Dracula without knowing the social context for it (as with all literature--the author isn’t dead, not if you want to know what they were saying), and the social context for it is:

- Stoker was friends with Wilde, growing only closer after Wilde was outed

- Wilde was outed, as I said, because the father of his lover was wealthy and powerful and full of the most virulent kind of hatred. This is especially interesting because of how many rich, powerful parents just straight up die in Dracula and leave the main characters with no legal issues and a ridiculous amount of money, which is the diametrical opposite of what happened to Wilde

- Stoker idolized his mentor Henry Irving. Irving was a paradigm of unconventional relationships and self-built family, in a world where divorcees and children born out of wedlock were things to be whispered about in scandalized tones, not people to love and embrace. Irving was also famous for thriving off of manipulating those close to him and pitting friends against each other. Given the painstakingly vivid description Stoker provides for his titular vampire and how closely it matches Irving’s own appearance and demeanor, Irving was widely understood even at the time of writing to be the chief inspiration for the character of Dracula

- the book is dedicated to Stoker’s close friend, Hall Caine, a fellow writer whose stories centered around love triangles and accumulation of sins which threaten to ruin everything, only to be redeemed by the simple act of human goodness

- Stoker was Irish, but not Catholic (he was a Protestant of the Church of Ireland, a division of the Anglican Church). This may come as a surprise when you read the book and see All The Catholicism, Just Everywhere. Religion is actually a key theme in Dracula--most of the main characters start out your typical Good Victorian Anglican Skeptics, and need to learn through a trial-by-fire to trust in the rituals and relics of the Catholic Church to save them from Dracula’s evilness. Which is interesting. Because not only do these characters start off as dismissive towards these “superstitions” (in the same way they dismiss the “superstitions” of the peasant class on the outskirts of Dracula’s domain), but the narrative telling us “these superstitions are actually true!” cannot be trusted, when you know the author’s own beliefs.

(Bram Stoker is not saying what his characters are saying. This is the first and most important rule to remember, if you want to figure out Dracula.)

- The second-most famous character in the novel, after Dracula himself, is Van Helsing, whose first name is Abraham. Note that “Bram” is a declension of Abraham. What does this mean? I legitimately have no idea. But it’d be a weird coincidence, right? Like what even is the thought process there? “Oh, yeah, what should I name this character that comes in, makes overtly homoerotic statements willy nilly, and encourages everyone to throw rationality out the window and stake some vampires using the Eucharist? hmmmm how about ‘Me’”

ok wait FINAL final note: you legitimately do not have to care about any of this. I love Dracula because it has gay vibes and I love trying to figure it out, like an archaeologist sifting through sentence structure to find fragments that match the patterns I already know from historical research; but that’s not why you should love Dracula. The book itself is just straight up fun to read. Like I said, Stoker absolutely nails the exact vibe of spookiness that I love, the eerieness and elegance and vague but vivid fear of a full moon crossed by clouds at midnight. The characters are intriguing, especially Quincey gosh I love Quincey Morris but they’re very,, sweet? if i can say that about people i, personally, suspect of murder? They come together and protect each other against the terrible threat that is Dracula, and you don’t get that half as often as I’d like in horror media. I don’t even know if Dracula could qualify as “horror” proper, because it’s not about the squeamish creeping discomfort that “horror” is meant to evoke, it’s not the appeal of staring at a train wreck--it’s not horrifying. It’s eerie. It’s Gothic. It has spires and vampires and found family and cowboys, and to be honest, I don’t know what could be better than that.

[ieatmypizzawithaforkandknife]

MAG 019 - Confession (part 1)

Summary: Jonathan reads the first half of the statement of Father Edwin Burroughs, regarding “his claimed demonic possession.”

Our first two-parter! Not that I realized that when I listened to the episode the first time, despite it being right there in the title, because I have the observational skills of a blind muskrat...but I’m excited because I know there will be more multi-parters in the future. I like the episodic format right now, but I know that as Things Begin To Happen, I’ll appreciate the increased breadth and depth of longer stories.

89 Bullingdon Rd is the third street address featured in the series so far, the other two being 93 Lancaster Rd in episode 5 and 105 Hill Top Rd in episode 8. Unlike the first two, however, this one actually exists - kind of. According to google maps, the house numbers on Lancaster Rd in Walthamstow run from about 1 to 85, and the numbers on Hill Top Rd in Cowley run from about 1 to 75. But 89 is right in the middle of the range of house numbers on Bullingdon Rd in Cowley, and while google maps says there’s an 89A but not an 89...it’s close enough. On one hand it’s super cool that these locations are relatively real (the towns are real, the streets are real, it’s just the exact buildings that aren’t). On the other hand 89A is a little too close to 89, and I wish Jonny had picked a number completely outside the range of addresses like he did with the first two, just to avoid crazy fans descending on real people’s houses.

It is definitely worth noting the proximity of 89 Bullingdon Rd to 105 Hill Top Rd. They’re only about half a mile (or about a kilometer, since this is in the UK after all) away from each other as the crow flies. And for both of them, the location itself seems to be tied to the paranormal happenings of the episode(s) they’re featured in. In episode 8, Ivo Lensik feels that unnatural burning start when he’s alone inside 105 Hill Top Rd, which stops as soon as Father Burroughs arrives. In this episode, Father Burroughs feels that same unnatural burning start when he’s alone inside 105 Hill Top Rd, and it only stops when Ivo uproots the tree. And in this episode, Bethany claims her problems are being caused by the Bullingdon Rd house itself, though she doesn’t explain what made her think that. But it’s very concerning that she can’t seem to see the only creepy thing about the house that we’re aware of: the old Latin word written in faded blue paint on the exposed wall.

The word “mentis” is Latin alright, but Father Burroughs translates it as “mind” which...isn’t quite right. “Mentis” doesn’t strictly mean “mind”, it means “of the mind”. The endings of Latin nouns change based on how they’re used in a sentence, so if you’re talking about the word “mind” as the subject of a sentence (or as the word in general) it is “mens”. “Mentis” is specifically the possessive form of the word. I don’t know whether this was deliberate or accidental on Jonny’s part, since if you look it up the dictionary entry shows “mens, mentis”. (It’s standard practice to include both the “subject” form and the “possessive” form in the dictionary since they’re different.) It makes me wonder if this word was part of a phrase and if there were other words hidden under the wallpaper. (Also, small shout-out to anyone reading this who is also a Latin geek, and I hope I explained it well enough that the non-Latin-geeks also understand that explanation.)

On the subject of language, this isn’t the first time Latin has appeared in connection with the paranormal. Ex Altiora, the Leitner found in episode 4, was written entirely in Latin (including the title), and the Lord’s Prayer was written in Latin on that long strip of singed paper found in the second trash bag in episode 5. It’s interesting that the same constellation of details from the trash bag incident are also in this episode: Latin, Christianity, and burning.

Latin isn’t even the only dead language to make an appearance this episode. When describing his experiences performing exorcisms at the beginning of the episode, Father Burroughs recounts: “I was once cursed at in Sumerian by a young man who was illiterate.” In episode 12, the phrase muttered by the hospitalized man that seemed to summon the “lightless flame” contained the word “Asag”, which is the name of a Sumerian demon that could boil fish alive in their rivers. Father Burroughs doesn’t appear in episode 12, but if he had been at that hospital, I think he would have pegged that guy as possessed and wanted to have an exorcism performed. So is there a connection between Sumerian and possession and burning? And how do all the different dead languages that have appeared so far (Latin, Sumerian, and Sanskrit) fit together?

I am also very interested in that nurse, Anna/Annie/Anne Kasuma/Willett. (Seriously, how many names does one person need?) For my purposes, I’m going to call her “Annie” because she seems to go by that. In this episode’s statement (made in 2011), Father Burroughs gives her surname as Willett, and in Jonathan’s wrap-up at the end of episode 8 (which he recorded in late 2015 or early 2016), Jonathan gives her surname as Kasuma. As an older, fairly conservative Catholic (she was a member of the congregation at Father Burroughs’ church, fully believed in demonic possession, etc.), it is highly unlikely that she changed her name for any reason other than marriage or divorce. Ivo Lensik described her as “Malaysian”, and Kasuma is an Indonesian name, whereas Willett is found overwhelmingly in predominantly white countries (the U.S., England, Australia, and Canada are at the top of the list of countries where the name is found). So it would make the most sense to me if Kasuma were her maiden name and Willett a married name. BUT when Jonathan mentions her in the wrap-up to episode 8, he calls her “Mrs. Kasuma”. Since everything else fits with the idea that Kasuma is her maiden name and Willett her married name, I’m thinking Jonathan just messed up the honorific, since he also referred to “Miss Popham” at the end of episode 15 when “Popham” was very clearly Laura’s married name. (This overly detailed surname analysis brought to you in part by my ongoing obsession with genealogy. If anyone reading this has anything resembling a passing interest in the subject, feel free to hit me up about it. I will gush.) All of that nitty-gritty was not without purpose: I think she’s important somehow. I could be reading too much into things, but why would Jonny give her a name change if it weren’t somehow important? Even I realized the nurse from episode 8 and the nurse from episode 19 were the same person on my first listen-through, when I missed or forgot 90% of the details in any given episode, so I don’t think he was trying to trip us up. And she has a direct connection to 105 Hill Top Rd: she grew up on that street, and had a lot of information on the property’s history dating back to before she was born, possibly indicating her family lived on that street even longer. But we haven’t met anyone else with either surname, so for now that’s where it stands: possibly a lead, muddled with a probable mistake.

I was so glad when Father Burroughs made the differentiation in this episode between perception and will: “Bethany told me that her will was still her own, but she could no longer trust her senses, and had found herself doing much that she did not understand.” She tried to eat a small slab of slate, and she apparently couldn’t perceive the word “Mentis” that was literally written on a wall. This might be the first time that the author of the statement calls attention to the recurring theme I’ve been calling “altered reality”. This “altered reality” is a heavy presence in the second part of this two-parter, but I’ll wait to talk about that in that episode’s post. Coupled with this “altered reality” is the “eating of something you really shouldn’t be eating”. In this episode, it’s Bethany trying to eat a slab of slate before being abruptly pulled back to reality by Father Burroughs, only then realizing what it was. Hinted at in this episode, and shown in more detail in the next one (minor spoiler, I guess?), is Father Burroughs eating human flesh and only realizing what it was when the police arrived. The only other time I remember these two themes working in tandem is in episode 3 when Graham Folger ate a notebook. No one stopped him or made him realize what he was doing, so we don’t know for sure that his reality was altered, but it makes the most sense to me that he, like Bethany and Father Burroughs, truly didn’t realize what he was doing. I’m not convinced that the events of this episode (and the next one) are actually related to the notebook incident in episode 3, but it’s an interesting parallel.

On a completely unrelated note, I’d like to talk a bit about Father Burroughs’ “possession” itself. First off, I get that Bethany saying “I’m so sorry...it wants your faith” was supposed to be an ominous line, but why is that the only thing she said throughout the entire attempted exorcism at the hospital? She couldn’t even say, “Hey, man, this isn’t working”? All she could do was look at him with pity and say that? I’d be OK with those being her only words if whatever was “possessing” her also affected her speech the way it did to Father Burroughs later...but she specifically established that she was free to speak and act as she wished, it was only at certain times that her perception of reality was altered. So I’m a little annoyed at her for not giving Father Burroughs (or us) any kind of useful warning or helpful information during the failed exorcism.

I was really confused by the apparent theft of the sacramental wine, too. What was the significance of that? Was it just an example of something weird Father Burroughs noticed that keyed him in to the fact that All Was Not Well, or was there something more to it? (This is only a semi-rhetorical question - if the answer to this was said outright or implied in this episode and it isn’t a post-S1 spoiler, please do fill me in. I sometimes miss stuff that’s super obvious to other people.)

I also find it interesting that he can say “God” towards the end of this episode. He stumbled over it, but by contrast he was completely unable to say “Lord” and “Jesus” at the very beginning. Not sure if this is significant, since there’s no real difference between the words “Lord” and “God” in my estimation. Jesus is specifically Christian, and while “Lord” tends to be associated with Christianity, it’s not exclusive. “God” is the most general of the three terms, yes, but in context he is very obviously referring to the Christian “God”, so his difficulty with getting certain words out isn’t based solely on their contextual meaning. Jonny could have written it without him getting out the word “God” at the end and I think most people listening would have understood that’s the word he was going for. It’s either some kind of clue, or Jonny just got sick of stuttering.

Father Burroughs’ call for protection is the point at which he knows something is Very, Very Wrong, as he feels his lips move even though he himself isn’t moving them. But, as with so many of these stories, Things Were Bad Long Before You Realized It. Bethany told him “it wants your faith” years before the Hill Top Rd incident. He himself admits that his pride led to his downfall, since he initiated an exorcism/blessing on Hill Top Rd when he wasn’t supposed to be doing them at all. But it wasn’t just his pride - it was something taking advantage of his pride. I think that, as much as any person can be, Father Burroughs was a victim of whatever possessed him. He made mistakes in his life - his sins, if you’re looking at it religiously, as he did - but he never wanted to be evil or commit crimes like cannibalism. Like the characters in so many of these stories, I don’t think he deserved what he got, and I mostly just feel bad for him.

His call for protection, he says, was answered by something that was not God, and when Jonathan reads the words that Father Burroughs’ lips were forming (“I am not for you. I am marked.”) we once again hear that creepy static or interference. And I still can’t decide if this is supposed to be some kind of clue or if it’s just to make things creepier. It feels like a clue, but I can’t figure out what exactly it’s supposed to mean. Most of the times I’ve noted it appearing (probably not a complete list - I’m working on it) it appears during a specific quoted phrase or instance of someone speaking: “Can I have a cigarette?” in episode 1. “Isn’t it funny, Amy, how you can live so near and never notice. I’ll need to return the visit someday” from not-Graham in episode 3. “Some hungers are too strong to be denied” from Angela in episode 14. Laura’s sister Elena asking her “how lost I was, in a low, grating voice” in episode 15. If the examples were limited to things like this, then I’d say that it occurs whenever some as-yet-undetermined otherworldly monster is given a human voice to speak through. But it also occurs the first time Ex Altiora is said in episode 4 and the first time The Boneturner’s Tale is said in episode 17, as well as two different moments during the recounting of the story inside TBT. So how is it connected to the Leitners? It didn’t occur when Jonathan read the title Key of Solomon in episode 4, which is implied to be a Leitner. And there’ve been a few other occurrences where something obviously supernatural is happening but that doesn’t involve speech or quoted words at all: When Laura describes the light changing from appearing like an approaching candle to sunlight (which it still wasn’t...) in episode 15, and when Jonathan reads the description of the bleeding books in episode 17 (”red dripped and pulsed from the cart”).

I don’t know what to make of the creepy static yet. But my specific concern with the most recent instance, when Father Burroughs “said” “I am not for you. I am marked” is: Who are the “I” and the “you” referring to? Is the “I” supposed to be Father Burroughs, or the thing “possessing” him? And who on earth is the “you”?

This post is part of a series where I write my thoughts about each episode and obsessively connect dots in an effort to figure out The Big Mysteries of the series. All posts in this series are tagged “is this liveblogging?” Comments and messages are welcome but I have only listened to season 1, so I ask that you not spoil me for anything beyond episode 40. In the words of Jonny Sims…thanks for listening!

[savittski-writes]

Doppelgängers Part Seven

So this is part seven of my AU crossover fic between Beetlejuice the Musical and School of Rock the Musical. Anyway, usual disclaimer that this is my first time writing for these characters, so it might be a little out of character. The idea for the story is based off this post:

https://colanom.tumblr.com/post/613740109133742080/au-where-charles-and-rosalie-are-cousins-and-ros

Title: Doppelgängers

Part: 7/9

Word Count: 1,117

Summary: Rosalie Mullins and Charles Deetz are cousins who have always been very close, if not a little emotionally stilted. When Charles and Delia invite Rosalie and her plus one to their wedding, what shenanigans will ensue? And why does Rosalie’s new boyfriend bear a striking resemblance to a certain stripey demon?

In this part: Everything has been explained to Ros and Dewey. Ros must come to terms with what is going on while Dewey is just glad he’s not the biggest screw up in the room.

Part One

Part Six

Part Eight

Chapter Seven: Whaddya Say, Amigo?

Deetz Residence, Living Room

“Remind me again why I couldn’t at least tell my side of it?” Beetlejuice asked grumpily from where he sat on the couch, arms crossed over his chest like a petulant teenager. Charles, Delia, and the Maitlands all rolled their eyes, glaring towards where the demon rested. Rosalie and Dewey, who was now sat on the floor in front of her armchair, both looked rather pensive as they took in the story the group had just finished telling them.

“Probably because you get very distracted, Beej,” Lydia drawled from where she sat upside down on the couch next to Beetlejuice.

“That and you tend to retell your Katherine Hepburn story a lot,” Barbara spoke up, glancing sideways to Adam. Both shivered in disgust as they remembered all the awful times they had to hear him recount the story. 

“Yeah, whatever,” the demon muttered as he waved a hand at the ghosts. “How’re you doing over there carbon copy? Still with us?” Dewey blinked, looking up at the demon’s words and gave a slight shrug.

“Well… I guess I’m a little relieved,” Dewey admitted at last, fighting back the smirk that was threatening to form on his face.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Beetlejuice asked at the same time Rosalie questioned, “Dewey?”

“Relieved that… someone actually fucked up more than I did,” Dewey said with a small chuckle before tilting his head back to look at Rosalie. “Hear that, Ros? Someone topped what I did!”

“That doesn’t make it any better, Dewey,” Rosalie chided in a disapproving tone, rolling her eyes at her boyfriend.

“Ah, you love me. Besides, I only lied. At least I didn’t torture, extort, or attempt murder,” Dewey pointed out helpfully with a smile. Rosalie’s eyes narrowed at the man, almost forgetting the other people in the room. In truth, she was thankful for the banter between herself and her boyfriend. It was a welcome reprieve from the situation that would allow her a few extra moments to come to terms with everything going on right now.

“You kidnapped children under false pretenses!”

“I did no such thing,” Dewey argued back immediately, turning fully to face her now. “I mean, one, I had already come clean by that point. So there were no false pretenses to speak of. And two, they kidnapped me, if anything. They hijacked the bus and came to my apartment. I was totally prepared to spend a night wallowing in self pity and drinking alone.”

“That… is pathetic,” the demon doppelgänger commented from across the room. Dewey turned back to him with a glare, though it seemed the gothy teenager was on his side just this once.

“Not any more pathetic than moping on a roof with purple hair and singing about how you’re invisible,” Lydia pointed out, drawing the demon’s ire. Beetlejuice couldn’t stay mad at Lydia for long though, and he couldn’t really argue the point. “Touché.” 

“I’m not sure I even want to know what you’re talking about, Rosie,” Charles decided as he massaged his temples, looking about ready to pull his hair out.

“Is it hardwired into your DNA, and the DNA of pretty much anyone who looks like you to be… slightly unhinged?” Adam asked, mostly rhetorically from where he and Barbara stood by the stairs. He glanced between the two doppelgängers, shaking his head at their similar mannerisms, energy levels, and general chaoticness they exuded. The only thing Adam was thankful for was that Dewey obviously had a functioning moral compass and general understanding for boundaries.

“Definitely. You should see our actor. He’s just as chaotic as we are,” Beetlejuice added, nodding sagely.

“What?”

“What?”

“What?” Beetlejuice asked innocently, glancing between Dewey and Lydia, who had both spoken. “Nothing, nothing! Forget I said anything at all!” The room’s occupants stared blankly at the demon, looking slightly concerned. Even those who were used to his antics were rather confused and uncertain of exactly what to say. Deciding that the weirdness had reached a level she was not prepared to deal with, Rosalie cut the tension.

“So… back to the most important topic. You moved into a haunted house and your daughter summoned a demon who went haywire, you brought to life and killed, and now plays house with you?” Rosalie summarized, looking to her cousin. Charles could only nod silently, not really sure of what else he could say to alleviate the tension or to assuage his cousin’s fears or worries. 

“Yeah, and for some reason my dead dumbass looks exactly like your living dumbass,” Lydia added, gesturing between the demon and Rosalie’s boyfriend. Both men bristled slightly at her words and shot her almost identical annoyed looks. “Okay, that’s weird, and I’ve seen a lot of weird shit. Even your clones don’t look this exact, Beej.” 

“That’s actually a very valid point. Why do you guys look so much alike?” Barbara asked as she stepped further into the room, glancing back and forth between the two men. “It’s uncanny. I mean, you would look identical if you just-”

“-Did this?” Beetlejuice questioned with a grin as he snapped his fingers and disappeared behind a wall of green smoke. Once the smoke had cleared, he looked remarkably cleaner with similar messy dark hair and beard. The only obvious difference between the two at that moment were their outfits and postures.

“Holy shit!”

“Language, Lydia!” Adam chided tiredly, glancing between the now identical demon and man.

“Whaddya say, amigo?” Beetlejuice asked as he reappeared sitting next to Dewey, elbowing him in the side. “Up for raising a little Hell?” Dewey for his part, looked slightly torn between being responsible and giving into his immature urges to have a little fun and take advantage of the situation.

“Well… I never was great at following the rules. And a little fun never hurt anyone,” Dewey conceded with a small smile, earning groans from most of everyone in the room apart from the demon and the goth. He was pleased to note that Rosalie’s groan sounded more fondly exasperated than genuinely put out.

“Tomorrow will be a disaster,” Charles groaned as he dropped his head into his hands, leaning forward in the other arm chair he sat in. Delia tried to soothe her future husband once more, rubbing his shoulders.

“Everything happens for a reason, Charles, so try not to stress. As my guru Otho always says, every success-”

“Starts with sucks and ends with yes,” the Deetz family chorused in varying degrees of enthusiasm, much to the confusion of Dewey and Rosalie. This was going to be a long day, and probably an even longer weekend.

[raeynbowboi]

Dating Disney: The Black Cauldron

The Black Cauldron is a 1985 Grimdark fantasy movie based primarily on the first two novels of the Chronicles of Prydain series by Lloyd Alexander written between 1964-1968. A primary reference and inspiration behind the series being the Mabinogion, a collection of early Celtic myths written in Middle Welsh. The character names also follow a Welsh naming conventions as Fflewdder Fflam uses the “Double F” found in the Welsh language, as a single F by itself makes a [v] sound in the Welsh language. The name Taran is also Welsh, meaning Thunder. So the movie is very neatly rooted in Wales, or Welsh-speaking Albion.

The Mabinogion

The Mabinogion is comprised of 4 main branches recounting Welsh mythology, compiled in the late 12th-13th centuries based on older oral traditions likely dating back to some time between 1050-1225. However, there are many suggestions as to when the stories might date from. (To hear a story from the Mabinogion, check out Red’s summary of Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed.)

Now, you may be wondering “why is there only 1 book on all Welsh mythology?” and I’m glad you hypothetically asked because it’s time to blame the Christians. Seriously, because Celtic mythology is loaded with god-like figures, Christian interpreters when they came to Albion censored or outright destroyed stories that implied that there was more than their God. Figures such as the Irish Tuatha de Dannan, which were godlike ancestral figures, had to be recontexualized as Faeries, Spirits, or Angels in order to avoid censorship by the Christian monks who transcribed these myths. Brigid, a very important Irish goddess, was Christianized into the figure of Saint Bridgette. This was actually an attempt by Christian missionaries to ease the pagans into Christianity. Essentially the mindset of “yeah, you can worship your holy figures, but uh, cut it out with the holy divine aspect. We can’t have that. They’re clearly not as top tier as our God.” 

You may remember from my Sword in the Stone discussion that I mentioned that Rome occupied Albion before Christianity wormed its way in, and you may be wondering, were the Romans this bad? Haha, clearly you underestimate how awful medieval Christians were. No, the Romans just viewed foreign pantheons as extensions of their pantheon. You have a sun god? So do we. It must be the same god with a different name. This is what’s referred to as Interpretatio Romana. So the Celtic Sun God Belenus would be referred to by the Romans as Apollo Belenus. It’s the same god, but the Roman name always came first. Compared to what is known as Interpretatio Christiana, which boils down to ‘you’re worshiping Satan in the form of a false idol. Stop that.’ So, when I say that our lack of written accounts of Welsh mythology is entirely the fault of the Christians, I’m completely sincere in that statement because the Romans didn’t censor Celtic myths or history, only the Christians did.

The Black Cauldron and Mythological Parallels

Prydain

It might sound like a generic fantasy name, but the name Prydain actually comes from the Welsh name for Great Britain, Prydain Fawr. Unfortunately, the term Great Britain dates to 1707. However, Prydain is also the medieval name for the island, as the Welsh never referred to the Island as Albion.

Henwen

Literally meaning “Old White” in Welsh, Henwen is a sow under the care of Coll, a pigkeeper for Dallwyr Dallben. In the Chronicles of Prydain, Coll is a character, but in the Disney film, Taran seems to have absorbed Coll’s role as pigkeeper. However, the fact that he refers to himself as an assistant pigkeeper could still mean that he is ranked below an off-screen Coll. However, the Henwen of Welsh mythology could not predict the future. It was known that Henwen was to birth something terrible, and so she was chased off a cliff into the sea in Cornwall. She survived however and went on to give birth to many unusual things, including a cat, a wolf, an eagle, and a single grain each of wheat, rye, and barley. And three bees. I really wish I was making this up.

Gurgi

Gurgi’s name might take inspiration from Gwrgi Garwlwyd, whose name literally means man-dog rough-grey. He was a warrior in Welsh Arthurian Legend, and was possibly a werewolf. Gwrgi was a monster that killed a man every day, and two on Saturday so he would not kill on Sunday. The Gurgi in the books is far more monstrous looking with horns, but Gurgi in the Disney film retains the dog-like traits of Gwrgi.

The Black Cauldron

Known in Welsh mythology as Pair Dadeni or “the Cauldron of Rebirth”, it is referenced in the second branch of the Mabinogion. Like in the movie, the cauldron has the power to revive the dead, and is destroyed when a living person is thrown into it, in the mythological case, Efnisien pretends to be a corpse and is thrown into the cauldron for revival, causing the cauldron to be destroyed. There are other similar magical cauldrons in Welsh and Irish mythology, including the cauldrons of Arawn and Diwrnach, which would not boil the food of cowards, and Ceriddwen’s Cauldron of Inspiration, which caused those who drank from it to gain infinite wisdom. There is also The Cauldron of the Dagda in Irish mythology. One of the 4 Treasures of the Tuatha de Dannan, the Cauldron of the Dagda was stored in the mythical city of Muirius, and no man would ever leave the cauldron hungry, for it produced infinite food.

The Horned King

In the novels, the Horned King is a minor villain, subjugated to Arawn, God of Death. However, in Welsh mythology, Arawn is not a death god. Rather, Arawn is king of Annwn, the Welsh Otherworld. Aka, the Faerieworld. See, this is another example of Christians mucking up translations and trying to force other religions to reflect Christianity, so Annwn is often treated as the Underworld of Celtic mythology, but considering Pwyll wanders into Annwn completely by accident, I don’t think that’s how it was interpreted in traditional texts. The Horned King may also draw inspiration from the Horned God, Cernunnos. Little is known about Cernunnos due to being a very ancient god, but his role as a horned god of the wilderness has historians guessing that he’s one of the oldest gods or divine archetypes in human history, as ancient horned gods pop up with surprising regularity in older religions: namely Baphomet and Pan. Cernunnos is also sometimes but not always folded in with the figure of the All-Father as a sort of father to all creation in Gallo-Celtic paganism. Cernunnos is often regarded as a god of nature and the wilds, but is also a psychopomp god that guides the dead to the afterlife, and maybe is also a god of death and rebirth as a part of life. Again, this is kind of very uncertain because of just how ancient Cernunnos is, so don’t take this interpretation as law. But despite how uncertain we are about what all this figure represents, he’s a very interesting deity none-the-less, and very likely contributed to the Christian idea of the devil as a horned figure with goat legs. As a seemingly undead creature, the Horned King may draw parallels to a creature known as a Revenant. A creature found in Celtic folklore, a Revenant is a vengeful undead that seeks to torment all life until it has found the person who wronged it while it was alive and exacts its revenge. However, it should be noted that in the books, the Horned King is a living man wearing a horned skull mask, whereas the movie version is very clearly a corpse.

Taran’s Sword

In Welsh mythology, the sword Dyrnwyn belonged to the great king Rhydderch Hael, and when held by a worthy man would glow with fire. In the books, Taran’s sword is indeed referred to as Dyrnwyn. Similarly, alongside the Cauldron of the Dagda, another treasure of the Tuatha de Dannan is the Claiomh Solais or the Sword of Light, housed in the mythical city of Findias. This may also be the mythical origin of Excalibur, though scholars have not made a direct, perfect connection.

Conclusion

With so much of the story pulling from the single source of the Mabinogion, we can boil down the likely setting to around when the stories were written as our general setting. Luckily, we can roughly guestimate to about when the Mabinogion might originate from, and the general look of the movie seems to match with this time setting. So, we’re looking at about 1050-1225, around the time that the stories in the Mabinogion might have started to be told, thus inspiring the events in the film.

Setting: Prydain (Wales/Isle of Britain) Kingdom: Kingdom of Prydain Era: High Middle Ages (1000-1250) Year: 1050-1225 AD Language: Middle Welsh

[miracle-sham]

Vent Your Spleen Until You Keen.

| {Maribat 2k20 – Day 3: Out Sick} |

| [Ao3 Link] | | [Masterlist Link] |

| Triggers/Warnings: Major Character Injury, Major Illness, Pneumonia, Concussions, Blood and Injury, Drowning, Explicit Language/some swearing. |

| Bloodied Robins aren't built to swim with clipped wings. Good thing the bats, birds, and bug are there to patch him up before it's too late. |

| Word count: 1968. |

==–==

| A/N: So as I mentioned in the authors note of the previous Ficlet, I got mugged in the dark dank alleyway by the Maribat2k20 MariTim prompt calendar and stabbed by the knife of inspiration. Except this time it was the angsty knife of inspo. So enjoy a nice but of hurt with comfort. |

| If you want to be tagged in future oneshots/fics, or a specific Au, then send me a DM or an ask! |

| Also side note, Don't Like? Don't Read. Also please do not criticise any of my writing. This was written for fun and receiving criticism, even in a compliment/criticism sandwich, is the exact opposite of fun. |

==–==

 Crashing into the Miller Harbour waters after being thrown from the roof of a warehouse is not how Tim thought his evening would go. Then again, earlier, he hadn't realised this drug trade would be a trap, meaning now he just so happens to be the unlucky bat to get caught. Or in this case, dumped in the harbour. Which is great. Lovely. Abso-fucking-lutely spectacular.

 The crack of the armoured suit and gear slamming into the dubiously murky waves is accentuated by the thrumming pain from where his back and neck take the brunt of the impact. Tim arches in pain as the air is knocked out of him, leaving him gasping for breath. It's not helped by the chilly water breaching his suit and stinging his open wounds. I'm going to get so sick from this, urgh. He grumbles internally. Even if he wasn't lacking a spleen, the harbour's waters are polluted enough to make probably even Superman sick.

 Tim kicks upwards and is struck with the realisation of oh no, oh fuck. As the water weighs his suit down even more and he starts to sink. The cold saps his energy and makes him clumsy. Fingers slipping at the straps and zips and security measures on his suit. Grimacing, he struggles, strength waning too quickly. Sploosh-Thwip-thwip-thunk-clink, chunks of his armour detach and sink below, significantly slowing his descent but he's still sinking.

 He fumbles around his belt for his rebreather and manages to get it over his mouth just as his vision loses colour and goes fuzzy around the edges. Breathing heavily, he listens to the creepy sound of the rebreather working and flurry of air bubbles surrounding it.

 Shit, I'm running out of time. Tim curses in his head. He keeps kicking and the water is looking lighter, meaning he's close. So close. But not close enough.

There's a thunderous splash as Tim breaches the surface. He doesn't stop—can't stop, not if he wants to live. His swimming is the only thing keeping his blood pumping and head above water.

 His vision blurts violently and the darkness at the edges of his sight flares. Not enough time, not enough. The bank is closer though, I might make it?

 Tim blacks out.

 One second he was swimming for his life, now he's lying face down on the cement bank, gasping for breath like a dying fish. He pushes himself up, muscles protesting and shaking from cold and pain. There's a shallow pool of watery blood surrounding him—not good but could be worse. Just need to get back to my Nest and I'll be fine.

 Tim fiddles around his remaining armour and gear, tapping the self destruct buttons for the discarded gear, and grasping at the grapple hook in relief—it would be a pain getting back home without it. He limps forward and shoots the grapple, swinging himself home.

 He barely makes it through deactivating his security measures and stumbles through his window. Limping over to his sofa, Tim immediately collapses and passes out—still in gear.

==–==

 The next day, Marinette's halfway through patrol and already fairly banged up—with a particularly nasty headache among other things—when she spots that the window to Tim's Nest is open. She swings by to inspect and sees his handiwork on the deactivation of his security measures. She hums and glanced through the window to look inside, thinking, Probably nothing to worry abo—

 Tim's lying half on the sofa, covered in blood and muck. He's pale—paler than usual—and his hair is plastered to his forehead. Breathing laboured and nasally, and shaking like a leaf. He looks sick and injured and he's not even managed to switch into civvies before passing out—not good, really not good.

 Okay maybe definitely something to worry about. Marinette mentally amends, a spike of worry slamming itself into her chest. Especially since no one's talked to or heard from him since early patrol yesterday... She climbs through the open window, closing it behind her and then resecures the security measures.

 With a whispered “Tikki, spots off,” she drops her transformation and wobbly bolts to Tim's side. Checking his pulse and status. Too-quick heartbeat, infected lacerations to the arms, legs, and torso, bruised or maybe broken ribs—Marinette flinches and takes a second to calm herself down so she doesn't retch—bruising to the side of the head, and a ton of minor bumps, scratches, and grazes from the looks of things. She then checks his other symptoms: rapid and shallow breathing with occasional wheezing, high temperature, sweating and shivering—clammy.

 Marinette chews her lip, eyes watering. “Oh, Tim…” She shakes her head, heart-pounding, and whips out her phone, scrolling down to the contact with shaky hands. It rings twice then picks up. “Leslie?” She cuts in as soon as the call connects, shoving the phone between her ear and shoulder to free her hands. “I'm at Red Robin's place and he's hurt, really bad, I—” She breathes in before recounting all his injuries and symptoms. “He's unconscious, and I think he's either in septic shock or got pneumonia, maybe both…” As she's talking, Marinette grabs the nearest first aid kit she can find and goes about cleaning out and patching up the injuries she can with the equipment she has.

 “I'll be able to treat him at the cave. How quickly can you get there?” Leslie answers in a clipped but calm tone.

 “Uhh…” Marinette pauses both in speech and in movement, “We'll need someone to drive him there because I can't drive. I don't know who's close enough and can drive. I'll call B, O, or Agent A after this.” She continues to apply first aid.

 “I'll be at the cave in twenty-five minutes,” Leslie responds, cutting the call off not a second later.

 She grabs her phone from her precarious ear-to-shoulder position and scrolls to Agent A's number and it only takes him one ring to answer. “A.” Marinette pulls the same thing she did with Leslie's call, cutting in before the other can speak whilst putting it back between her ear and shoulder so she can continue applying minor treatment. She repeats the same thing she told Leslie. “I've also called Leslie, she's heading to the cave now, she said she'll be about twenty-five minutes.”

 She doesn't quite catch all of Alfred's response because Tim wakes with a groan and coughs, his pupils are blown and his gaze is worryingly blank—glazed over. Marinette thinks she hears something about the batmobile and three minutes but she's more worried that it looks like he's concussed as well. “Concussion. He's also got a concussion.” Marinette relays on autopilot, and maybe she hears Alfred inhale sharply but she can't tell. She's not sure when or if the call ends but she's too stressed to care.

 She's fumbling with the first aid and it takes every speck of focus she's got to make sure she isn't making him worse—next thing she knows Nightwing and Red Hood and jumping through the window (security deactivated and opened first, so no broken windows here).

 Red Hood pulls Marinette away from Tim, and Nightwing carefully scoops his little brother up. The world blurs around her and then her vision wavers, going completely colour blind as it goes fuzzy and dark at the edges, getting worse and worse. She thinks Red Hood's talking to her, he's gripping her arm rather tightly, almost painfully but it's giving her something to anchor on to… But it's not enough, her vision spins, going completely black, and distantly she hears panicked yelling and feels the world tipping to one side—

 ==–==

 The world slowly comes to and Marinette's feeling absolutely wretched. She's lying on a medical cot from what she can tell, but her mind's so fuzzy. She doesn't want to open her eyes. People are talking in hushed tones the distance. She thinks this isn't the first time she's woken up here since—

 She has vague memories of opening her eyes and people bustling in and out of view, asking questions and doing things. She doesn't remember much.

 Then she hears a voice closer to her, she can't remember whose voice it is but it's warm and rumbly but not too gruff—familiar. “Hey kid, you awake again?”

 Marinette groans in protest—she would rather not be awake right now.

 “Yeah, yeah, you're in pain, life sucks. I know.” The voice sounds amused.

 She huffs in indignation which only causes the voice to bark with laughter.

 The voice quietens down after a second. “You an' Timbo gave us quite the scare y'know. Don't think I've ever seen B that worried before, when we dragged the both of you to the Batmobile.”

 Marinette hums, unsure how else to respond.

 “You've got a concussion if you're wondering, you were lucky I was already holding you up when you fainted. Could've made your concussion worse if you had hit the ground instead.”

 She groans again, the mention of the concussion brings the full throbbing pain in the back of her skull back to her attention. She huffs again to express her displeasure at the voice reminding her.

 The voice snorts—probably at her pain like a sadist. “Timbo's fine, by the way, surgery went off without a hitch. Even woke up a few times, so if you're up and about the next time he wakes up you can help the others smother him with love and affection.”

 Marinette smiles lopsidedly. “Coo'.”

==–==

 Of course, the first thing she does once she's no longer bed-bound, and Tim's awake and somewhat healed, is take Jason's (it took her a while to recognise it was him who had been speaking to her) advice. In the form of her relentlessly hugging Tim like a clingy koala—much to his joy and begrudging dismay.

 “Mari… please.” Tim begs, staring at the ceiling as if it would somehow save him.

 If anything his words prompt her to hug him even tighter, “Nope! I will hug you for as long as I physically can.”

 In exasperation, he exclaims, “Mari, no!”

 “Mari, yes!” She shoots him a smug grin.

 “Mari please.” 

 “Tim, I will keep hugging you.” Marinette threatens

 “Mari, let go.” He says with no real intent behind his words.

 “No letting go! Only hugs or death!” She declares with an even smugger grin.

 He grins back then dramatically proclaims, “Guess I'll die then.”

 “No!” She half screeches, struggling to contain her giggles.

 “Oh no! I'm dying! Blargh!” He lays back down on the medical bed, pretending to die dramatically. “Marinette, as my dying words I must tell you that—that I—I—” He fake coughs and lets himself go limp.

 “Tim! Nooo! Clearly, the only way to save you from dying is to give you the magical fairytale kiss of life!” As soon as she says that, not giving him any time to react, she pecks him on the lips.

 “Wow, I'm alive again, what a miracle!”

==–==

 Around the corner, unbeknownst to the two, Jason eyes Dick with amusement. “You taking blackmail photos there, Dickiebird?”

 Dick makes an undignified squawking sound and nearly drops his phone. If not for his bat training, he definitely would have dropped it. Trying to pull off an air of nonchalance, he leans against. “Pfft! What are you talking about? Of course I'm not, I'm just collecting evidence that Timmy's okay. For uh Bruce and Alfred's sake. And the Teen Titans too, they've all been worried once they heard how bad he got.”

 Jason snorts. “"For evidence he's okay", sure you are.”

 Dick narrows his eyes. “If you tell anyone, I'll release all the cute photos I have of you when you were still wearing the Robin suit.”

 Jason gasps. “You wouldn't dare!”

 Dick grins. “Try me, Little Wing.”

 Raising his hands up, Jason backs away. “Fine! You win!”

==–==

| Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed this little oneshot! Comments, likes, and reblogs are much appreciated! |

@maribat-2k20

[androgynousblackbox]

A day on the life of your favourite radio host

You woke up before your alarm did it’s job and then turned it off when it did. After putting on your shoes for home, stand up to open up the window and breath the smell of the beatiful flowers around the house. What a lovely morning! The sun was clear, there wasn’t any bird chirping and you could feel optimistic about today. But then again, when weren’t you a ball of sunshine with that bright smile on your face?

You could have greeted your neighborhood good morning, of course, but there was no one left to greet. The houses both at the sides of your own and in the front were empty, waiting for new owners, but it was so hard on the current economy and so funny for you in particular. How many people have sold their own children for one of those houses? Killed for them? Lied, stole? Oh, who knows! But it was entertaining to think about it as you dressed up.

You wear a white shirt you ironed yourself last night after cleaning it up; the closed vest matching the tone of your pants and your shoes, so pleasantly shiny and clean as if they were new. A wonderful way to start any day as you hummed your way down to the kitchen, preparing some toast and tea. You made a recount of your nocturnal activities and mental notes to keep track off for later. Thank goodness you had such a excelent memory, because the things you needed to remember were not things meant for writing on any common language. After cleaning up everything, you stepped outside and looked at your house with a inevitable sigh of nostalgia. It looked almost exactly the same as when your dear beloved mother was there, even the boarded up window of the attic. To think your own mother didn’t believe you when you said you threw the neighbor’s kid from there. It had been a perfectly honest accident. You just opened up for that small little boy to reach the wooden plane that had landed on your roof and then watched with amusement as he tried to balance out over the inclined surfice, only to finally slip out and meet his bitter end against the ground. You would have never harm a child, that is for sure. A man such as yourself might not have a lot of rules to live by, but that was certainly one of them. But watch them do reckless things without moving a finger to prevent it… well, that was another story, isn’t it? He couldn’t control gravity. And who was he to intervene betwen a boy and his new toy? You walked all the way to the radio station you were working, greeting everyone you knew and even some that didn't; they stared at you with such pathetic little admiration that was hard to resist to aknowledge it. Sat down on your chair, rolled up your sleeve  and waited for the signal indicating you were ready to talk. “Good day, my lovely listeners! Isn’t a espectular day today? Our way of living maybe be crushing under our feet and the hope of ever returning to what is normal seems dimmer with every second we are breathing the poison that is our life, but don’t fret, your good friend radio host will always be here for you! Let’s take a look to the news of the day, shall we?” You grabbed on a newspaper an assistant had handed to you and unfolded it, taking care for not to do it over the microphone. “My, it seems like the rate of suicides is rising once again! It seems that everyone’s salary is not the only thing that is dropping, ha! Oh, and it seems so many kids are currently on the streets right now as their parents sold them for their own sake. Better take care of your garbage, listeners, or you might find one of them looking for their lunch as you are listening and then you will have to clean up that mess! Mmm, I guess you could throw away a couple of scraps for the little lads but, between you and me, my friend, do you really want to? But you all know how children are, and unfortunely  their attempts can’t be avoided until are not able to keep looking anymore. It’s a sad, sad situation, indeedy, but that is why we must appreciate still the few delights we have left on this corrupted world, my friend. Like music! Let us hear some more about that lady that has everyone perking up their ears.” You flicked some buttons and put one one of the newest records on the station as you received a few calls on the meantime. Most of the calls were about people talking about their own sad situation. I had to sell the precious chinese porcelain of my grandmother, I lost all my money thanks to some thief, the bread is so expensive that my family is eating paper and blah blah blah Almost the exact same speech from yesterday, too boring to lose too much time on them, and instead concetrated on the people requesting for a new song or talking about their new misfortunes that your dear listeners haven’t heard of yet. Someone had to actually eat their pet dog and that got their entire family a food poisoning! Ha! Hilarious!  You can make up this, folks! You continued the show until midday and you had to say goodbye for now to give place to the next host. You didn’t have to come back until a couple of hours so you had a chance to grab lunch on some of the few restaurants that remained open. There a lady asked you if you were who she thought you were and you said yes, inviting her to take a seat in front of you and engage on a conversation. There was no wedding ring or the usual bags under the eyes of a mother stressing about what to feed her children, so when the route went about talking for a date, you played along to please her by inviting her to come over your house so you could both have a home meal. She blushed and pretended like it was a hard choice. You played as well, convincing her that it would be fine, just a perfectly decent, not at all attention worthy dinner between a pair of new friends, nothing else to see. After a little of back and forth, she finally promised to be there and stood up to continue with her chores. You made another mental note and kept enjoying your food, that you were almost sure it was actually a cat caught on an alley, but at least tasted good. Back to work, you put music, told a few easy jokes that your mother was so fond of and had a little talk with a carpenter who had his entire business burning just last week, a fire in which all his family died during their sleep. It was highly amusing to ask him about if he still dreamt about their faces so peacefully in the night, as if they were sleeping, but knowing they were never going to wake up again and he was, quite frankly, at least somewhat responsable.

Of course with enough jokes that the carpenter just sniffed a little bit and was able to contain from crying until the microphone was off. Then the night came and you had to say goodbye until tomorrow. And they better wished them luck, dear listeners, because he was going to have a date tonight with some lovely lady! You returned back home with your usual high spirit, humming the most popular song today, and prepared everything for the big event. When your new friend appeared, the dinner was already done and ready to be served. Some delicious deer meat that he bought from some local hunters that before were just doing it for the hobby, but now they practically only survived on their meat, whenever they could find it. Unfortunately the population of aceptable prey had diminished so much since so many other people had similar ideas, so it was getting quite hard out there. Well, at least people were being more creative now! Didn’t you noticed some “feline grace” on your meal today? Ha! You were kidding of course. Not really. Anyway, as you both finished, you took her hand to accompany you into the basement, where you had your record player and they could listen to some nice music more comfortable. Why do you have a record player on the basement, she aks? Why, it was initially just not to bother your sweet mother since she prefered a silent environment to read her books, but even after her death, it became just a habit to keep it there. Yes, it is smells terrible, you know, you assured her as you secure the grip on her wrist and closetd the door with a key only you had. It was dark, you know, and you were aware the smell was so intense that was going to make your darling guest to puke on her beautiful dress. What is that smell? Oh, nothing extraodinary, just the stench of rotting corpses you had yet to get rid of. Oh, what a enjoyable moment of silence was that. Did she thought you were joking? Did she assume you meant anything else but exactly what you said? On the darker stairs you could see her face changing, the beautiful and slow metamorphosis from a pleasant but confused smile to an actual realization that you were not joking, not at all, and your smile wasn’t because you were laughing at her incredulity but rather, at her whole life. By the time she turned her head to the door, you had already pulled her down stair and kicked her knees out so she would stumble the rest of the way and crash her head against the concret cube you had precisely for those situation. Ah, it was almost magical when their fall was just right and their lives ended with a clear and satisfying crack. The truly fun part is when they didn’t die right away, just knocked out for the time being, with some unimportant brain damage nobody cared about; then you had the chance to help them stay alive a little longer… and they'd regret the fall didn’t kill them. You were so excited when you discovered she was still breathing despite the blood and the weird shape her head had adquired. So you hummed happily as you dragged to the center of your hard learned symbols and grabbed some of the ritual knifes all over the wall. When you were done with her, you cut out some of her bodyparts and put it on a bag, but it didn’t seem heavy enough and added some other parts of the other guests you had the past week. They weren’t actually rotting, of course. You kinda exagerated it just for the shits and giggles, but you had to start getting rid of them again. They were so much useful outside on the garden, feeding the flowers that you were proud to keep alive, colorful and beautiful against an ugly reality. As usual, once the bag was sufficiently heavy enough, all that was left was put in a suitcase and carried to your car; it was to be buried under the same tree where the powers you were so devoted to would have their feast. They were so glotonous those rascals, but it was a small price to pay for all the things you were promised long ago. Even if the time you were going to receive those rewards wasn't exactly clear, and even if it was a tiny bit frustrating, you didn't mind. The show must go on, as they say! The job was entertaining per se and you wouldn’t have minded to continue doing it for as long as necesary. Besides, it’s not like you could actually do anything even if you did had a problem. Which you don’t, for sure, so who cares? When you came back on the morning, you were surprised to see some people coming and going the house on your left, not just as sometimes curious youngsters would do, but carrying stuff from one place to another and not minding seeing enter your home, a bright disposition on your face despite still needing a shower. New neighbors, finally! How long was it since you took out the last one? Not that long, that you could remember. Oh, you so hope they were fun people.  Or miserable ones, which was almost the same thing as far you were concerned. The last thing you needed in your neighborhood was boredom.

[airingxofxgrievances]

Part 4: The Interloper

It was a few days after my son's birthday party when I got a message from my grandmother on Facebook. It was some generic form of, "Hey, can you call me when you get a chance?" I knew immediately what was up. She wanted to stick her nose in it. I called her right back to get it over with.

Here's a little background information on my grandmother. We don't really have a close relationship (shocking, I know). Honestly I hardly know anything about her, other than she used to work at a group home on a farm for troubled inner city youth, and she's probably a Democrat (which I guess because she said once she wanted to see Hillary win because she'd like to see a female president, and she posts pro-mask things online, but that's the extent of my information). Growing up we lived far away from any extended family. We were in Western NY, and they were in Putnam. We saw them maybe once or twice a year, which is just enough time to feel fairly uncomfortable about the whole thing. Sure, call me a shallow child, but it was a long drive, their house was small and cramped, it smelled weird and damp because it was in a pine forest, it was always dark and shady and fairly creepy, there was never anything to do, the food was weird, and my grandparents weren't the friendliest of people. Any kid would reasonably hate it. Sometimes my grandmother would "borrow" small animals from the farm and being them back to her house for the afternoon so we could play with them. That was cool. That is the only good thing I remember about those trips. We never really talked as I got older, either. Are you noticing a theme starting to emerge? My family is not good at communicating.

So now this woman who was practically a passing acquaintance was trying to jump into the middle of the collapse of a relationship. What followed was a fairly infuriating conversation, where I learned that my mother was running around playing drama queen, acting like both a victim and an aggrieved hero who was willing to go to extraordinary efforts to prove her devotion but was being continually rebuffed (leaving out, of course, the details of how incredibly stupid those efforts would have been, and how she could at any time just follow a simple and clear set of rules but was choosing not to, thus creating her own problem).

The exact details of the conversation have been lost to the ages, mostly because I was so pissed off I deleted them from my brain fairly immediately. The one part that does and will forever stick in my mind was my grandmother saying that my mother had spoiled me, and me replying that money is not the same thing as unconditional love, emotional support, and acceptance.

I'm posting a screenshot below of my recounting of the call to my sister, sent fairly quickly after the call had occurred. Yes, it contains some adult language, FYI.

After this phone call we once again returned to radio silence from all parties for about a month... until the last week of October, when my father sent my husband an email.

[xoruffitup]

Burn This 7/14: Final Show Recap

Burn This is over and I’m a mess of feels. This play has gifted me with four solid months of incredible performances, late NYC nights with friends both new and old I will treasure forever, and short but beautiful moments of dreams coming true at stage door. The final performance was overwhelming, hysterical, and oh so bittersweet. 

First – A conclusive update about the letter book! After Adam didn’t come out to stage door on Friday or Saturday (understandable tbh because both nights had giant, rowdy crowds), the crowd was absolutely MASSIVE on Sunday after the last matinee. People were pushing, crowding, yelling Adam’s name and it was absolute madness. When Adam got down to me, the crowd was literally pushing in from every angle and there were about ten people reaching their Playbills out to him around my head, but I just started talking. Given the manic atmosphere I only had time to get out something like: “I’ve seen the show several times and had incredible dialogues about it. This is a collection of messages from people about what the show meant to them.” Adam literally could not stop moving or else the crowd would have caged him in, but he looked back at me, still listening, and when one of the security guys took the book Adam looked straight at me to acknowledge and thank me! Both he and the security guard assured me it would get to him. I didn’t get to explain it fully but I think he understood what it was and the book will speak for itself!

This is the cover I made for the collection:

You can see me hand over the white laminated book right at the beginning of this video, and Adam look back to say thank you. 

My friend next to me also took this video where he looks back at me for half a second :’D And gives a tiny smile! (in the middle of that pandemonium, poor bb) 

Let me quickly say a big THANK YOU to everyone who contributed. <3 After that insane crowd at stage door, those wholesome, thoughtful messages about his work in this play would be the perfect remedy. Thank you so much to all of you for taking the time to write out appreciation for everything he gives us. :’)

NOW, the show!

Okay so firstly, the downside: I was NOT impressed by the audience. A lot of people seemed to have seen the show before (not that I’m judging, clearly) but were laughing CONSTANTLY at everything Adam did. To the point where you couldn’t even hear his lines half the time, and the audience failed to grow appropriately somber in the moments when he falls apart. Not a very courteous audience at all.

But the cast!!!! There were some poignant moments when it really seemed to be their real emotions coming through, bleeding into the way they played certain scenes. During the infamous, always-entertaining exchange in Act 2 while Adam’s sitting on the couch in the robe asking “Who’s the apple and who’s the orange? You never had an apple tart glazed with orange marmalade?” I SWEAR there was a second where that grin was all him, having an absolute ball of a time. When he said “who’s the orange?” he literally kicked his feet up like an overexcited little kid and it was THE. PUREST.

Okay so in the interest of remembering as much as I can, I’ll go in order from the beginning!

First, a bit of textual analysis. Every time I see the play, I’m struck by how incongruous the first twenty minutes seem in comparison to the rest. I know that’s on purpose, because Pale’s entrance is very much supposed to shake up and tear into Anna’s world with pure chaos – turning everything on its head. But knowing everything that’s going to come after, all the lofty discussion in that first scene about myths and epic love tropes all seems terribly self-aware. It’s more than foreshadowing. It literally seems to be a self-narrating framing device for everything that’s about to follow after:

“The wives of the sailors out at sea. The women waiting for years and the men never coming back. What sustains them through loss? Through pain? I think they felt things in a more profound way.”

Robbie is never coming back, and Anna is searching for something inside herself – some feeling – in order to push through this mess of grief and frustration that she can’t make sense of even to herself. She has a shell around herself at the beginning, and nothing to break through it or guide her way; no direction.

“The Flying Dutchman – Senta throwing herself into the sea to save the Dutchman from perdition.” (I mean come on – In this story Senta literally “has this boyfriend hanging around” getting in the way of the epic love and this couldn’t be more meta if it tried.)

Knowing what’s to come, it’s striking that Anna doesn’t seem to realize she is the real subject of conversation here, not Burton’s lofty novel ideas. Even a mere ten minutes after she recounted the funeral where she swore she was expected to “throw herself over the casket” – she doesn’t seem to relate herself to the story about Senta hurling herself into a watery grave because of the love and loss of a man.

In some performances, I think Anna is closed off because she’s purposely trying to avoid such a fate for herself. After losing Robbie, she doesn’t want to “sacrifice herself” through deep connection to another person ever again – Not even to Robbie’s memory as she refuses to give in and confront her grief. And hence her resistance to starting a real relationship with Pale. In other performances, it seems that she’s genuinely blind to the walls she has put up around both herself and her own emotions. You can see the walls in her physical body language – How she always seems to be sitting in defensive, closed-off positions when Burton tries to get near her. (Contrast that with how she literally wraps herself around Pale while he’s crying on that same couch later.)

Anyway, I just find it incredibly cool that what at first seems to be snobby, “arty” (to take Pale’s word) aimless talk at the beginning is actually all the characters indirectly reflecting on everything that’s about to happen to them – to Anna, particularly. This same exact self-examination resumes in the first lines of Act 2, when Anna finishes reading Burton’s draft script.

“It’s so sad.” “I thought they were having fun.” “But beneath it all, they’re so lonely.”

There it is – The deceptively simple three lines that sum up the entire play and spell out the tragic beauty of Pale and Anna’s relationship.

OKAY I’ll stop with the analysis now. On to the details everyone cares about!

So when Adam charged out, holy shit his voice sounded SHOT. It took a good few minutes for his yelling to warm up enough for his voice to stop sounding completely hoarse. It clearly cracked a few times and I just wanted to brew him some tea. (A pot, of course, because a cup wouldn’t even be economical…)

But by around the time he got to my favorite, side-splitting monologue about imagining you’re a tree and you get made into toilet paper or money to get passed around or parchment for a restaurant or music paper for the Boss to write on… but either way you end up drifting down to get stuck in some Saudi Arabian oil tank propellers. (Bending down and spinning his arms like propellers and cue me absolutely falling apart each and every time.) …. His voice finally sounded fine by then! :D

I’ve forgotten to write this in previous posts, but in plays I always LOVE moments when the actors come right to the front of the stage and just stand there for a long moment, wordless and motionless, just staring out into the theatre without really seeing anything, lost in the gravity of their own emotion. Keri has a moment like this before Pale’s entrance (I think when she says, “I thought everything important to the future of dance was going to happen in this room.”) Adam has his moment while Anna is talking about Robbie’s dancing, how good he was and how Pale would have liked it. Adam just stares out into infinity for a long moment, while it demands physical effort from him in order to take in what Anna’s saying. He doesn’t smile while he says, “You saw him and say he was good. I never saw him and I know he was shit.” His long moment of stillness here – finally facing the audience in close proximity and unnerving silence (a striking moment after he spent the last fifteen minutes raging around the stage and often having his back to the audience) is when you can see the very beginning of him unraveling. This is when he starts to plateau – tumbling from his coked-up high into a dark, helpless pit that cleaves him clean through.

After bitching about his pants getting ruined and putting his leg up on the sofa to show Anna, he did the most RIDICULOUS twirl this time! After slowly lifting his leg over the table, never breaking eye contact with her once, he then did this slow, melodramatic twirl - complete with extended ballet fingers and everything. It was nothing short of glorious.

After he kneeled down and screamed, he rose completely shattered. I don’t think I’ve ever heard his voice so devastated with sobs and tears – to the point where you could barely understand him. “No, I don’t do this. This ain’t me” sounded like he was begging desperately, but had no idea what for. There are a lot of stunning things Adam does in this play, but rising and sinking and rising again through these completely polar opposite, all-consuming emotional states within the span of twenty minutes has to be the most incredible. He truly embodies the transformations with his entire body – The way he paces around aggressively then helplessly, the way he spends long, silent minutes simply rubbing at the same place on his chest in pain, the way he doubles over as the brunt of his grief settles upon him like a crushing physical weight. The way he channels his very physicality to embody menacing one moment, then vulnerable and helpless the next. It’s just nothing short of breathtaking and awe-inspiring.

Okay okay, after he drops the hilarious bomb out of nowhere: “You know you got no tits at all.” And when the exchange ends with “It makes a man want to look, see how much there is” – Afterwards he just looks over at her with this hilarious, seedy smirk that was GOLD. Almost like “so is this hapless seduction working????”

Watching the couch kissing scene was, again, like being seduced yourself. He just stares at her for such a long moment before finally leaning in for it. She knows what he’s thinking – she knows what he’s going to do, and she’s completely mesmerized by the intensity of his single-minded focus; even as his hand reaches out for that gentle, tentative brush along her hair. Making sure she really wants this before he slides into it.

And then…. God, the way he delivered the lines that are some of my favorites: “Let’s start the engines real slow here. Go halfway to the city, stop for something to eat. You’ll find there’s times I’m a real good listener.”

jsdfjadlj his voice is so soft and deep, while he’s looking at her so intently, almost communicating the words with his gaze alone. He speaks so slowly and purposefully. The words themselves might be flippant in the double entendre, but there’s a sincerity behind them that wraps itself around your heart completely. You can see it wrap itself around Anna, as she falls into him completely. Every single person in the audience would probably do the exact same.

When he leaves the next morning, it never fails to make the audience crack up how he just waltzes out the door with no great to-do as he calls “Alright people, I’m outta here!”

CLASSIC.

Act 2:

After Burton flips him onto the floor and keeps yelling at him, the way Pale just rolls away onto his side and goes “Good night” all mischievous and cutesy asldfjsadlkfj. And then “Good night, Bruce!” after Burton finally leaves.

Other honorable mentions from this scene:

Pale, from offstage: What the fuck do you know?! Larry: Hmm… what do I know? That’s one of those questions you don’t know whether to answer with hubris or humility.

“Who’s Bruce Lee?!”

After Anna and Larry left the room, Pale’s fighting with his coat was extra aggressive this time. He was basically windmilling his arms as he repeatedly yanked at the back of the jacket until finally flipping it up and off and over his head.

Okay okay so I know I already talked at the beginning about the robe scene but I swear this one was EXTRA delightful. He was just grinning and cheesing all over the place at his own cleverness with the “hat trick” joke. Looking SO pleased with himself and just infuriatingly adorable for a giant brickhouse of a man in a stupid purple kimono I mean wtf!!!!

Oh and right before that! When he brought Anna the cup of tea after sabotaging her phone call with Burton and then hiding his face behind the robe sleeve all coyly, he was extra sweet about it this time :3 After handing her the mug he kissed her twice on the forehead, then just stared for a second at her grumpy face before kissing her on the nose too. (!) Then he proceeds to do the cute thing where he tucks her hair behind her ear while asking, “You want some eggs?”

Even when Anna shuts him down, the way he went over to sit on the couch, picked up his tea, then gave these awkward looks to both Anna and Larry like “welp, guess we’re all sitting together now” was sO funny. How the man can deliver such comedic effect without saying a word is beyond me.

Then, Anna starts to blow up at him. When she delivers the final, most devastating blows of “I have nothing for you. I don’t like you, and I’m frightened of you” – I’ve taken to watching Adam as the blows land. He stands there completely still and his face barely moves, and yet there’s this unmistakable, silent devastation about him. The man’s been called the “King of micro expressions” for a damn good reason. This time, after several long moments of tense, pregnant silence – He just did this minute shake of his head as he looked right at Anna. Even for all her anger, he still doesn’t really believe that she means what she’s saying. But that tiny shake of his head spoke volumes. It was almost disapproving, almost pitying, maybe a touch frustrated. While in previous performances he often seemed to be completely crushed – all spark drained from him; There was this bare, subtle moment of disbelief and lingering defiance. Disbelief that Anna was really deluding herself so thoroughly. He is so sure in this scene – while he’s telling her she’s not really afraid of him, she’s only afraid of caring and feeling something – that she feels the exact same way he does. He’s sure their connection is on equal terms; just like he’s sure it’s the only honest, true thing in either of their lives. And in this performance, rather than being crushed by Anna denying it all, he seemed more upset on her account – That she wasn’t letting her walls down to let the truth in, as he already has.

That^ is Adam Driver’s talent, ladies and gentleman. I literally just wrote a whole paragraph about one barely-perceptible nod. Damn. Okay. Give me a second here to pick up the pieces of my feels.

Okay, so I have detail-level and meta-level thoughts on the final scene from yesterday. Detail-level first: Last night was the only time I’ve ever heard Adam deliver the “That was me and you up there” line softly and earnestly, rather than pitching it into a teasing joke with “me and youuuuu up there.” Instead, he kept the tone of the scene gentle and almost timid. I adore in this scene the way he asks her about her dance piece. How at first, he’s not there for himself or even for the idea of them together. He tells her how much he enjoyed the piece, and when he says that he knew it was Robbie – that he could see Robbie in it – there is no greater or more moving praise Anna could receive. Nothing could mean more to her in this moment.

This scene is so quietly gorgeous, and it was simply spellbinding yesterday in how the tone remained so tender all the way through. Throughout the entire scene, the two of them mirrored each other with absolute perfection. A large part of that is because you can tell these are two actors who’ve been playing off each other for months and developed such keen awareness of each other’s physicality and tiniest displays of body language. Even in the way they stand at opposite sides of the stage at first – It’s like they’re tied together by invisible threads. They face each other directly – neither turned away or trying to hide – and when one moves, the other seems to respond exactly the same way. It continues once they sit down together to burn the note. From the way they sit beside each other to watch it burn, to the way they slowly turn towards each other and draw together, they move in perfect harmony and symmetry. They are tuned into each other simply effortlessly and it’s so satisfying and beautiful to watch.

At a higher scene level: It’s so lovely how different this scene feels in comparison to their explosive earlier scenes. (One with sexual energy and another with an angry fight.) There’s this feeling of undeniable rightness and ahhfinallyrelief when they’re back together for this final scene. And as they talk about Robbie through Anna’s dance piece, everything feels different. It feels peaceful for the first time, even a touch reverent as they speak with a shared understanding of each other’s loss that no one else in the whole world could take part in. While earlier in the play, discussion of their shared feelings of loss led to negative acts of self-destruction, aggressive frustration, or self-denial; this time there is finally the feeling that these two can come together and create something positive out of the loss they’ve shared. Thanks to what Pale unlocked in her, Anna’s feelings of loss that were once so unbearable she could not even face the honest thought of it, now became the fuel for an act of creation she’s been striving for her whole life. And the fact that Pale made time to come see it; the fact that he appears in her apartment and can voice so precisely her same sentiments that went into the piece – It means they’ve finally reached a place together where their connection becomes a source of creation and positive beginnings.

Adam does such beautiful acting in this scene. “I don’t know what to do with myself here. I’m 36. I’ve got a wife, two kids…” He paused here, and when he spoke again his voice quavered with feeling that simply overflowed, “I ain’t never felt anything like this.”

One of my favorite images from the whole play is when they both silently sit together on the couch, watching the note burn away in the ashtray together.

(For the first time, I thought back to Act 1 when Pale cryptically answers Anna’s question about what he does with “I’m a roving fireman. I put out fires. Sometimes… just let it burn.” In this case, perhaps this fiery thing between them would be safer if it were put out. But they watch the flames dance and dwindle together, and the warmth and light slowly growing between them is something neither of them have the will to put out.)

And then, that touching, movingly desperate final moment. After “I don’t want this” / “I don’t want it too” – when Anna sinks into his arms and he hurriedly gathers every bit of her in his lap and in his arms that he can fit. He clutches her like she’s part of his very being, rocks her, and reaches up to smooth her hair back so he can kiss her head. His voice breaks again when he confesses, “I didn’t expect nothing like this.” Another moment of desperately holding each other, until Pale half-sobs in helpless apology, “I’m gonna cry all over your hair.”

Every single time, the way Adam says it delivers a swift, sweet blow straight through the heart. Honestly, I would do anything to relive that wrenching heartache again. <33

It’s been an incredible run. I miss the show already, but I couldn’t be happier with the moving, magnificent nights I spent in the Hudson Theatre. Thank you to Adam and the whole cast for touching so many of us every night with this beautiful play. :’’) It has been such a thrilling, joyful ride!

-Until Adam’s next play!!! :)

[eleanor-writes-stuff]

a language that i never knew existed before - Day 23

Here’s a modern AU paranormal investigators piece for anyone who might’ve been (or still is) a The Black Tapes Podcast fan, because it'll always hold a special place in my heart.

Only two ficlets left! Coming up tomorrow: the last canon-verse ficlet for this collection. See you guys then!

25 Days of Reylo Also available on AO3

THE RADDUS PODCAST NETWORK IS PROUD TO PRESENT: A TALE ABOUT GHOSTS, LOSS, AND ALL THE OTHER THINGS THAT HAUNT US.

A long, long time ago, in a desert wasteland far away, a young orphan stumbled upon a set of case files chronicling the world’s most intriguing paranormal phenomena. Even more intriguing was the fact that they were all signed by one Sir Benjamin Kenobi, the celebrated historian who mysteriously disappeared from the public eye in his later years and was never heard from again.

Twelve years have passed, and that young orphan is now RPN’s very own Rey Durand. Join one of the nation’s most promising investigative journalists as she partners up with noted paranormal skeptic Dr. Kylo Ren to get to the bottom of THE KENOBI FILES.

S02E11: The Mother

A seemingly typical trip to Naboo takes an unexpected turn when Rey finds out that Dr. Ren is connected to the case in a very personal way.

Genre: non-fiction; paranormal; supernatural; true crime; history; romance

“Good morning, Dr. Grumpy!” Rey chirps as Kylo folds his tall frame into her tiny car with a grimace. He opens his mouth to let loose a teasing reply, then takes one look at the recorder on her dashboard and reconsiders his words.

“Are you ever going to stop calling me that?” Kylo asks with a sigh for the audience’s benefit as he leans over the console to press a silent kiss to her temple.

“Are you ever going to stop being grumpy?” Rey retorts with a smile that’s far too soft for her tone as she pulls away from the curb of Kylo’s apartment building. They drive in comfortable silence until Rey gets on the highway, at which point she informs him that today’s case file is in the backseat.

“Just fill me in on the basics,” Kylo instructs her without missing a beat, ignoring the file as usual. He hasn’t bothered with them since halfway through their first season, claiming that anything more than just the facts will prevent him from approaching their cases as objectively as possible.

“Well, as I told you yesterday, we’ve got a long drive ahead of us. Four hours, to be precise, because today’s case is all the way in Naboo. Have you ever been?” Rey asks, sparing Kylo a quick glance.

“Once or twice,” he shrugs as Rey motions for him to open the glove box and retrieve a few pages’ worth of printed tweets. The papers crinkle as Kylo smooths them out, muffling his groan of realization. “Rey…”

She flashes him a bright grin. “Oh come on, it’s tradition! Time for another round of how many tweets can we make Dr. Ren read before he loses it!” she announces to their listeners. “You ready?”

“I never am,” Kylo mutters, utterly resigned to his fate.

“That’s the spirit. Now go!”

Rey can feel his glare on her, but she keeps her eyes on the road and resolutely ignores him until he starts reading. “@MrsDrRen–” and here Kylo clears his throat uncomfortably, takes a moment before he gets back to it with a hint of wariness in his voice. “@MrsDrRen tweeted: Look, it’s not like I need a picture of Kylo Ren to know that he’s hot… AF?” he asks, turning to Rey questioningly.

“As fuck,” she clarifies, and has to bite back a laugh at the way Kylo ducks his head and rubs at the back of his neck even at the tamest of the bunch. She can’t wait to see him react to the others. “Go on, what else did MrsDrRen write?”

“It’s not like I need a picture of Kylo Ren to know that he’s hot AF,” he repeats, “but I’d appreciate one anyway @ReyDurand @CoruscantU. How can she even be sure?” Kylo asks with an adorable little furrow between his brows. “All she has to go by is my voice and your generic descriptions.”

“Oh, trust me,” Rey smirks, “the voice is enough. And my descriptions aren’t generic, thank you very much. It’s not my fault that you actually have hair straight out of a Pantene commercial. Next one,” she orders before they can get sidetracked.

“This is from @KenobiFiles… 5Evah?” He waits for a nod from Rey before going on. “@KenobiFiles5Evah tweeted: Honestly, if Rey wants Kylo to lose it, all she has to do is lean over and suck– Oh.”

She can’t help but burst into laughter then, sneaking a glance at her scandalized boyfriend. “How would that even… that is very reckless,” he finally says, scowling at the paper before he balls it up and tosses it into the backseat. “Is this from another one of those people who think that you and I…?” Kylo asks, and his voice carries the exact same hint of confusion and disapproval as always, as if things haven’t completely changed since they first discovered that they’d gained a few shippers along with their viewers. He really is a better actor than anyone gives him credit for, especially her production team.

“Yup!” she says brightly, pretending to be as unaffected by the idea as always. “Okay, last one. If you read this one in its entirety, you win.”

“And what do I get if I win?” As far as their audience can discern, it’s an entirely innocent-sounding question. But the pointed way Kylo slowly drags his eyes up her body makes her wish they didn’t have a four-hour drive followed by a night in a haunted house ahead of them. Maybe she should’ve stayed over last night after all.

Rey shrugs the moment off. “I’ll buy you one of those sugary Starbucks monstrosities you like so much.”

“That’s slander and you know it,” he huffs, but there’s no way their dedicated listeners won’t pick up on the fact that he didn’t reject the offer. Rey can already picture them cooing over the fact that serious, grumpy Kylo Ren has a sugar tooth.

“All right, last one,” Kylo announces with a sigh. “@Carla666 tweeted: Dr. Ren could shit all over my beliefs and insult me to my face and I’d still ask him to… to…”

“To?” Rey goads, knowing he won’t back down.

“To fist me,” he forces out in a strangled whisper, and Rey laughs until there are tears in her eyes and she has to pull over.

Kylo’s sleeping when they finally arrive in Lake Country, and Rey wishes she could wake him up without the recorder on; he’s always so dazed and sweet after a nap. But she likes to think their show is pretty damn authentic, and that means capturing genuine first reactions whenever she can.

“Dr. Ren,” she whispers, wrapping a hand around his arm. “Dr. Ren, we’re here.”

He’s always been a light sleeper; something to do with a childhood incident, which Rey understands all too well. “Hmm? Where… Oh, we’re…”

She’s in the midst of watching him with a soft smile on her face, a flood of affection washing over her at the way he rubs his eyes, when Kylo suddenly tenses.

“Rey,” he says evenly, turning to her with the kind of blank look he gives her interns when he’s this close to snapping at them. It’s a look she’s never been on the receiving end of, and it’s just as unsettling as the unlucky interns claimed. “Rey, why are we here?”

“Um, the case?” she reminds him with a frown. “I told you it’s in Naboo, remember?”

“You said it’s in Lake Country. This is not Lake Country.”

“Yes, it is,” Rey insists, pointing out the big, fancy sign they drove past just minutes ago, while he was still dozing. “Kylo, what’s wro–”

“I don’t know what the hell they’re calling this area these days, but that–” he points up at the house ahead of them, the one they’re supposed to spend the night in, “is Varykino Manor, and this whole area is Varykino.”

Rey twists around and reaches into the backseat for the file. “Yeah, the house is still called Varykino, but that’s the only original structure left. The rest of it was turned into a luxury development years ago, almost a decade now. Wait,” she comes to a realization as she hands him the file. “You know this place?”

Kylo is silent for a beat, a struggle playing out on his face while she watches.

Finally, he turns to her as he opens the file. “This is my grandmother’s house,” he whispers, and when he turns to the file he squeezes his eyes shut as if he’s in physical pain.

“And that,” he points at the grainy photo attached to the first page, the specter circled in red marker, “is my grandmother.”

Miraculously, Kylo doesn’t call the investigation off.

“I’m sick and tired of this bullshit,” he growls after recounting the numerous alleged sightings of his grandmother over the years, the hushed rumors and unkind whispers about his family. “I’m going to prove once and for all that my grandmother isn’t a ghost because ghosts aren’t real.”

And with that, he slams the car door behind him and hikes up to the house with both their bags.

Rey scrambles to get the recorder and lock the car, and catches up to him in front of the grand, imposing double doors. This place certainly has all the makings of a haunted house, but it’s so beautiful that she can’t bring herself to be scared of it – of any of it, really. The house isn’t abandoned or in disrepair, just rarely inhabited. Locals have reported seeing lights on when they know for a fact no one’s around, but unlike most of their cases, there are no horror stories here, nothing even remotely malicious. There’s just the lights, and then the rare sighting of a woman – Kylo’s grandmother – on the balcony, looking out at the lake as if she’s waiting for something. The handful of eye witnesses who claim to have seen her report that upon making eye contact, she simply gave them a sad smile as she faded away, leaving them shaken by melancholy more than fear.

“Keys?”

“Oh, right,” Rey mumbles as Kylo pulls her away from her wandering thoughts, and reaches into the pockets of her coat to dig around for the keys.

“I’m assuming you got this from my mother?” he asks, taking the jumble of keys from her and easily identifying the two needed for the front door. God, this really is his grandmother’s house. And– mother. She’s spoken to Kylo’s mother.

“Oh my god, everything makes so much sense now,” she realizes out loud. “I kept asking myself why the hell a senator would let us investigate her mother’s house for some random paranormal investigation podcast, but this isn’t just a random podcast, it’s her son’s podcast.”

Kylo turns back to frown at her. “No, it’s not. It’s your podcast. I’m just the party pooper, remember?”

Rey rolls her eyes and takes his hand as they walk past the threshold. “You’re not just the party pooper. You’re our overqualified, stubborn ghost-mythbuster.”

His lips quirk at that, and it almost feels like they’re just walking into one of their homes after a long day, especially when Kylo casually drops his bag to the ground and kicks off his shoes.

“You’re… comfortable here,” Rey says, taking in her surroundings. Pictures don’t do this place justice; Kylo has mentioned once or twice that his estranged family comes from money, but she’d never imagined something on this scale.

“Used to come here as a kid,” Kylo reveals with a shrug, and leads her into the living room. It’s funny, the fact that she’s learned more about his past in the last ten minutes than she has in the last ten months. “And I ain’t afraid of no ghosts,” he adds over his shoulder, and Rey laughs at the reference.

“Can’t be afraid of what you haven’t seen yet,” she retorts as they go around turning on lights and exploring the first floor.

“Can’t be afraid of what doesn’t exist,” he amends, a familiar back and forth between them at this point. Rey’s pretty sure Finn once showed her a fan-made compilation of all the times they’ve had this exchange.

“We’ll see,” Rey hums, and leaves it at that.

To his credit, Kylo doesn’t really rub it in her face when the night passes without incident.

“I’m just saying,” he shrugs as they pack up their belongings, having spent the night in the room he’d claimed as his back when he was a child, “if her spirit really is here, don’t you think she would’ve revealed herself to either me or my mother by now? Her family?”

“But you’re not the reason she’s here,” Rey reminds him, holding up the file. It contains more personal information than most of the others, but Rey has to believe that Sir Kenobi didn’t just pull a tragic love story out of thin air.

“If she’s waiting for him, she’s going to be stuck here for a very, very long time,” Kylo mutters darkly as he zips up his bag. “Ready to go?”

“I guess,” she sighs reluctantly, casting her eyes out the window one last time. The balcony is somewhere above them, but even a trip there last night hadn’t yielded anything. Time to call it, then. At least they’ll have plenty of material for the episode thanks to Kylo’s revelation. “My stuff’s already downstairs,” Rey adds for the audience’s sake as she slings her bag over one shoulder.

Kylo smirks at her. “Good. Let’s go, then.”

They make one last round of the house, checking that all the doors are shut and lights are off. A caretaker comes by once every two weeks, according to Leia, but other than that the house has been empty for years. It seems like such a waste, a sentiment she’d expressed to Kylo late last night, when they – she – finally gave up for the night.

You know, my grandparents were married here, he’d informed her. Maybe someday…

And they’d left it at that.

Now, she watches as Kylo locks up behind them and finds herself smiling at him.

“What?” he asks, giving her a smile of his own.

“Nothing,” Rey shrugs, already planning to leave this part on the cutting room floor. “Just thinking about someday.”

He takes her hand, brings it to his lips. “Sounds like a good idea,” Kylo murmurs, and Rey leans in for a quick kiss before they head back down to her car.

“So,” he asks as they get into the car, easily slipping back into his Dr. Ren persona. “Now will you admit that ghosts aren’t real?”

“I’ll admit that I haven’t captured evidence of one yet,” Rey sniffs, “but that doesn’t mean anything. The ancient Greeks couldn’t fully prove that the Earth is round, but that didn’t make them wrong.”

“That’s not… Rey, that’s not even the same–” He gives up with a sign, pinches the bridge of his nose in frustration. “One day, you’ll see.”

“One day you’ll see,” she parrots back at him with a grin as she begins to back out of the driveway. “Really, Kylo, if something can’t be proven either way then shouldn’t you keep an open mind about it? Isn’t that just good, impartial science? How can you be so sure–”

A sudden death grip around her wrist shuts her up, and Rey steps on the brake as she turns to Kylo. “What is it?” she asks, slightly worried at the look on his face but not enough to bite back a teasing comment. “You look like you’ve just seen a–”

“Rey,” he whispers without turning to look at her. He raises his free hand to point at something, and Rey notes with growing concern that he’s shaking. “Rey, look.”

She follows his hand, looks out over the lake and up, up, up at–

“Oh.”

There, on the balcony, is his grandmother.

And they watch on as a man who can only be her husband materializes behind her, pulls her into his arms and swings her around in unmistakable, infectious joy.

When she turns back to Kylo and Rey, the smile on her face is anything but sad.

Gods above and below, what have I done?

This is 2700 words. That's nearly three ficlets. THREE. Someone send help, because clearly I need an intervention or something.

I'm beginning to think I should've saved this idea for a proper one-shot or maybe even a three-parter, but oh well. Here it is. I hope you liked it. Thanks for reading as always, and please don't hesitate to like/reblog/comment!

[celestiallydamned]

INTRO

Hmm’s & Praises.

Love us - don’t hate us. Contacting me from the other side, that’s what the Guardian Angel said. Using my inner voice. Sentiment I felt completely. And exactly what I’d wanted to say. But they got in there before me. And I grew angrier, still.

They’re like komodo dragons; one whisper inflicted, strategically, and you’re done for. That’s how I sometimes envisage them. The Agents (similar to our detectives). These monstrous beings hovering around their huge, oval-shaped desk with monitors throughout the length of its circumference. Monitoring constantly. Me. You see, I can make them out some of the time. Even though there’s the inevitable time delay and the fact they’re faster in their movements compared to us. Doesn’t matter. At certain times, as we converse - well, they talk, I listen and occasionally get the chance to interject - I can make them out. Which surprises them. But I can’t prove it. They’re likely to agree with me about the fact that I think I see them to purposefully keep me amused. Especially when I tell them MyGuy’s just arrived back from their canteen with goody bags for y’all. Yes, they snack up there.

The Agents don’t reckon I can see them at all. And seem bemused every time I might ask them things like, who’s the new guy leaning into the left end of the oval desk. I haven’t noticed them before. Long legs and great ass. I used to make comments like that to keep them entertained. As they seemed to buy into it every time. But now things have changed. Gone are the days when the Agents would select my best one-liner of that day, collect them and have them ready to show several of the elected Gods another time so they, too, could laugh. At my expense. Behind my back no doubt. But still, laugh.

Are there so few Agents still connected with my case up there they’re now using wannabee actors. This ongoing situation always was farcical. But this morning they’re adlibbing like I’ve never heard. And the problem is, especially as I lack concentration first thing, I start to wander, hardly taking anything that‘s said to me with any seriousness. Not that I’ve missed much. They’re usually quite fastidious about needing to grab my attention. But when they do, it’s often a case of their not having anything of any importance to tell me. We need to talk to you, they’ll say with urgency. Sit down, we need to explain what’s going on. But their explanations this morning were so boring I actually started to envisage the Agents bins, by their desks, bugged. And told them so. Of course they didn’t take it seriously, until later when they belligerently added, ahem, you were right. Besides them and their usual quandaries, the problem for me is simple: as a medium I can both see and hear.

Neither Agents nor Guardian Angels, both departments working from the same Head Quarters, had even thought of checking the bins. Although, for some reason, I suspected Special Branch’s TopCat’s involvement the night before - maybe so he could prove just how lax the Agents really are. TopCat? All names of the Agents, etc., by the way, are made up by me purely as I can neither hear their language nor the proper pronunciation of their names. Excepting for some of the Angels, those of us that have crossed over already. But even with them they don’t use their actual names. For some reason, and no one has explained this, they’re given different names by the angelic beings to be able to exist up there. Really? Or is it a case of not wanting me to know exactly who they are. Let’s face it, I could get in touch with theirs down here.

07:20 Dream: Large bouquet of flowers - was making mine out of branches. Within a wild, OTT garden. Was it a jungle-type place? Very overgrown but tame at the same time. 

White kittens, playing in a very beautiful white flowering shrub. Some girl I didn’t know had just bought or acquired them.

Simon, an Angel from the Dream Factory’s already there, just arrived to chat with me about dreams created by them, transmitted to me and played out this morning (notes above). Are dreams supposed to be split into sections? According to Agent Tedi (short for tedium and from the Psychic department within HQ) they’re usually 2 - 3 segments within one section, but sometimes split. Of course, regardless of what I snarl at these animalistic Agents, off their tethers, about not being able to remember dreams if and when, always when, I hear them droning on, on and on in the background first thing on waking throughout my night and early morning as this makes it practically impossible for me to remember the content of any of the dreams received. Like well-groomed actors waiting for their auditions, Simon and Tedi are easy to put up with admittedly. At least it’s possible to deduce from them certain interpretational skills in association with trying to understand the visual content of dreams that appear as suddenly as that one person you never, ever want to bump into again.

Is the content of dreams really based on Birth Charts rather than timelines? Somehow, and I can’t argue the reasons here, this has always been a factor, never mentioned by them until today. Do they think we’re all astrological junkies?

I should really bother to make notes more often as my journalesque foray into recording this absolute debacle - as it unfolds - has virtually stopped. There’s never enough time, what with dealing with live footage from them. All too live, as it‘s not possible for mediums to hear the ‘other side‘ without listening devices and other equipment installed, by download, inside their heads. Ssshh. Just don’t tell mediums nor psychics as it might destroy their inbuilt notions in being able to communicate with the other side as an innate ability accrued presumably at birth and nurtured throughout their apparent especial lives.

Live footage and monotonous tapes of conversations enacted by Angels (who used to be actors here and now work there as Agents) are played out for my benefit, to keep me company throughout the day. And every day. From as soon as tired eyes blink Agents are there, waiting slathering at their desks. Some conversations are hardly discernible at times as the volume to the listening device installed deep within my left ear is kept off to prevent interference - from others. Yes, according to the Agents, even with the volume switched off I can still hear them through my inner voice. I call it miraculous.

‘We’ve walked straight into a trap‘. Barely audible is someone’s admittance off in their distance. My pen hastily jots notes, marks tearing across pages at times erratically. You see, the Agents encourage both. Not only my writing but my moods. To keep me subdued. Occupied. Frustration verging on repetitive anger orchestrated meticulously and easily due to medication applied by them. And those that play at being god.

Talking of which, the medical department there have been hiding cellars; heavy decorative rugs strategically placed over trapdoors - leading to their underworld no doubt. Five male doctors were involved with monitoring me last night. Who were they? The only names I’m fully aware of within their department are Ben, and, to a lesser extent, Neil. Although I doubt if either were included in last night’s nasty littl’ soiree. Which seemed to be going fine for the 5 monitoring docs, until this temporary Guardian Angel (GadFly or GA for short) of mine at the moment squeaked a splash or two of oil on cogs needing lubed. Are they, within the medical department, able to multitask; masturbate and monitor me, with cameras spying on everything I do, at the same time?

This relatively new GA was conferring last night with Agents TopGuy and MyGuy about this supposedly classified case. In other words, me. When pertinent information was shared with them, along with an explanation proffered by Agent BigGuy who specialises in electronics and communication. According to them, the signals of the medical department had been checked and configured to track specifically an outgoing signal emitted through the use of significant 3D software?of me. I call the fucking thing ‘the Beast’. It’s an exact replica of myself - on a scale of 1:10 I would’ve guessed, without blemishes and skin infections I’m crawling with. Let’s call the Beast heavily Photoshopped. In other words, digitally worked over so I look perfect, in every angle. And twenty years younger.

The immense power of the imagination of Angels, those humans that have managed to reach the other side. Or Tearaways as I sometimes refer to them as. Those who have crossed over, bringing all-important recent hardware coding with them. And building Beasts.

Last night, according to notes I bothered to make, the realisation this case of mine means nothing actually bothered me. And I’ve no idea why. I’m exhausted; waking up each night several times: right rib cage causing postural problems when trying to relax in bed - the after-effects of having been brutally attacked through their use of poison. But it’s the dreams. And other means of communication, usually downloaded and opening early morning, I never seem to be able to recount. Yet they’re leaving me with neither hope nor wanting to get this misery figured out. And that’s exactly what’s happening. There’s an apathy gradually erupting. With their system so corrupt, and regardless of how disparate these departments appear to be, they’re essentially and relentlessly one and the same. The only real noticeable differences are their distinct races. And character traits.

Somehow female GA’s got through to me last night, late. Had I slept already? That aside, why were they making comment. It’s usually only those that do I’ll pick up on as their tiresome voices come through to my inner voice. I could even see them standing at a pedestal of some sort. Seriously, like something out of a television show. And their comments, intended to provoke, came through loud and clear. About the fact that it serves him right. Meaning me. I’ve no idea what other thoughts may have been charging through my head at the time.

If only I could sleep. All night. Like regular folks do. But I seem to wake up after every sleep cycle, and those don’t seem to last any longer than 60 - 90 minutes or so. Invariably I’m woken up out of dreams or some sort of communication - from them. And that’s when I hear them. Unintentionally. But they can’t help themselves. These wretched GA’s. Eagerly awaiting for me to wake so they can verbally whack me with totally unnecessary commentary. They’re like vultures, circling. Ready to drop. To rob their victim of all that’s holding them together. Before I doze back off again into never-never-land. Only to wake up.

A lull exists. Only if I scribble haphazardly into my notebook. Or if I read a book, something I haven’t bothered with in years. Or editing old photographs taken occasionally on travels thrown together. This lull’s happening during writerly scrawls and morning coffee, desperately needed today. The medical department, after last nights discovery by the Agents of a hidden lab within the medical compound, sent a delegation to HQ (where the dreaded Agents and hellish GA’s lunch most of their days away) to apologise. Not to me. Obviously. Why would the entire medical department be aware of my eavesdropping abilities from here if and when confabs ensue about me.

Besides, how come I was able to view a Victorian pile, or a neo-Gothic architectural monstrosity, last night where the medical moderators were, playing at being doctors. I could see them panicking when they realised their precious monitor / computer system was going to be checked by Agents - as the doctors were monitoring me at the time. The imaging itself (think along the lines of a vivid daydream) was of one of them handing something through a trapdoor just behind and to their left.

And then, along with several Agents, I happened to notice a turret outside, a rather horrid attachment to the original building of the medical compound, containing a spiral staircase with access to other floors; at its peak a cupola. Turns out this small, decorative roof was adorned with an aerial suitable for outgoing signals allowing the 3D software of the Beast and those that operate it not just full control of the Beast itself but their signal emitted under the radar, under the noses of the Agents stationed there monitoring all other signals transmitted through aerials on the main roof of the medical building.

But then I got slightly confused when I spotted a dark green and flourishing grassed lawn within the walled confines of the grounds. Rectangular in shape, its very existence incongruous to there. Is it real? I asked one of the Agents. Watered? Then it dawned on me, ‘It’s a grass roof; similar stuff used down here within inner cities‘. The lawn itself edged in a glass-like casing, allowing slivers of weak daylight into a darkened space below. Apparently the medical department were growing specific botanical specimens in relation to procuring essential natural substances; all organically grown I should hope. All within a large artificially lit greenhouse below the lawn itself. These substances elicited, albeit illegally, to be used in medication created in-house for the doctors insistence on carrying out deadly experiments. On our lives down here. Not theirs - they’re brain-dead already.

[grantplant]

One-derful

Mira is one! I’ve been stewing over what I might say about this that isn’t patently obvious (it went too fast, it continues to go too fast, she is magnificent and I love her explosively) and largely failing to come up with anything adequate. I think part of my paralysis is due to reading back through my journals from the past year. As I feared, my nightly entries did little to capture her magic at every stage. My tendency was to recount what we—or she—did in a day: hilarious moments, accomplishments, napping/eating trends, challenges, firsts, and always the sentiments, “I am so tired,” and “I love her so much.” Contrary to my intentions, the vast majority of it is really boring, though these last twelve months have been anything but. And even as I tried to recount all the major moments and pay very close attention to the passage of time, that it wouldn’t bring me up short and remorseful, I still can’t pinpoint when her face lost its baby-roundness or she started having a noticeable will, or how it is that she went from helpless and unknowing to capable and clever.

To my dismay, I am finding that describing Mira and how I feel about her with words alone is like trying to explain how something tastes based on its color. Surely someone somewhere has been able to do this, to write of love and the beloved with shape and sound and texture and dimension enough that it and they are recreated or preserved on the page, but I seem unequal to the task.

My reflections on Year One (and my attempts to translate those reflections into words) have been further waylaid by the actual fact of celebrating this occasion. Pat took Friday off for her birthday, which was the best present she could have received. On Saturday we had the world’s lowest-key birthday party, with a smash-and-grab Pikachu cake that Mira preferred to daintily paw at until I cut her a slice. While neither day was in any way action-packed or particularly taxing (in fact, her naps were inordinately long, giving us ample down-time) we were all-the-way worn out by Sunday. So tired that I spent an hour wrapped in a towel because getting dressed seemed way hard. So tired that, once I did get dressed, I feel asleep fully clothed on top of the covers. I could barely conceive of baking cupcakes for Mira’s day care celebration. Trying to ice each zucchini muffin (gah, I know. I’ve become that mother) with recognizable cat faces at 10 o’clock at night felt like an insurmountable task. How many parents, I wondered, have cried over cupcake decorating for no good reason?

I’m attributing all of this—all of the “I can’t even…” from her birthday until now—to emotional exhaustion. A complete head-and-heart overwhelm. How are we already here? One year—one truly indescribable year—gone. Despite my vigilance, time got to me anyway.

Leading up to Mira’s birthday, I’ve been trying to fill out her baby book, not just with all of the milestones and observations logged in my journals, but those things I’ve been stashing away in her baby box: sonograms, her hospital bracelet, the footprint from her first day on the outside, photos from the baby shower. Yet another attempt on my part to catalogue every possible thing as insurance against forgetting. When Mira woke up from her afternoon nap on Friday, she was ready to play, while I was still trying to make my deadline and finish the baby book project. It wasn’t lost on me that I was distracted from recording details about my child by the actual child herself, clamoring for our attention.

This happened later that same day as I was decorating her birthday cake. Pat had run out for icing reinforcements. The kitchen counter was strewn with food coloring and various implements to make this lump of zucchini loaf (gaaaaaaah I know! Zucchini loaf?! Who am I?) look like Pikachu. While I was painstakingly using cream cheese to create a gleam in his circle-stamped chocolate eye, Mira didn’t give a hoot that his nose was off-center and his smile uneven. She just wanted some Mom.

I imagine photographers struggle with this tension regularly: to commemorate or participate. To record or engage. Obviously I feel strongly that the documentation is important, but what if it interferes with the actual interactions that warrant the documentation in the first place?

And what if the documentation little reflects the reality you’re trying to capture, as with my journals?

I have been in a year-long panic over how to remember her sounds and smells, the look on her face when she tries a new food or falls asleep, the feeling of her hair in my face or the way she walks behind her push-toy, all stiff-legged and herky jerky. The inimitable sounds she makes with her mouth as she baby babbles, imitating our speech and intonation in her own singular language. Thank god for videos. I’ve resisted the urge to just set up a camera that will record every moment of every day, that we truly have a way to travel through space and time at will, but that would be, well, excessive. What about saving a smell, though, or a touch? Upon which technology might I rely for that?

I understand (and appreciate!) the biological imperative of forgetting pain. We know we had pain, but our brains erase the exact sensations we felt. Otherwise who might ever run another marathon or pay their taxes or submit to annual dental cleanings or, well, have another child? And is the price of that necessary forgetting, then, an inability to summon the precise sensations of the sublime? I know, of course, it happened, and I associate it all with the most perfect contentment, but the particulars are maddeningly blurred at the edges, like a beautiful dream that slowly evaporates over the course of a day.

My mom says, and I believe, that this is why people go on to have multiple kids. Not (only) because the mother has forgotten the unbelievably excruciating pain of giving birth, or both parents recall that they were sleep deprived but can’t still feel the specific sensory agony. They do it again to experience once more the spectacular, the ecstasy, that can’t otherwise be summoned.

No amount of photos or videos or journaling, no words or metaphors or blog post, can really do Mira justice. Anything I do or make of her outside of real-time is a simulacrum: bits and pieces, parts of the whole, fragments and outlines. And even if anything could save it all—the full five-sense experience of her—what use would it be for anyone but me or Pat, or maybe the grandparents, who, because of nature and instinct and survival, love her beyond all measure and reason. Through the eyes of another, she is something altogether different from who and what we see.

It’s a losing battle, these efforts to outmaneuver time and the limits of recollection, but it’s the only means we have of remembering what we can, however blurry the edges, however imperfect the impression. Even knowing that there’s nothing to hold of these cherished intangibles, I keep grasping at the fleeting and gossamer.

[fapangel]

Surprised I havnt seen you say anything about the travel ban going through.

Well, to be honest, there’s not much to say aside from laughing at more left-wing REEEE. As I’ve said before, there’s no way in hell the circuit court rulings are going to survive SCOTUS review - not only is this under the constitutional authority of the President, but also a power explicitly granted him under existing Federal law, by section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act: 

"(f) Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate."

That’s pretty damn clear-cut. But for that exact reason it’s an alarming - nay, frightening - travesty that not one, but two Federal courts shit on the explicit, plain language of the law because of Trump’s “implications” during his election campaign. That’s something courts have never looked at, especially in light of the natural hyperbole that comes into play in election campaigns. Plus, it opens the door to a slippery slope of even more questionable challenges - where’s the limit on speech that can be construed to imply “intent?” Can they use statements from ten years ago? Twenty? Trump’s written lines in his many cameo appearances in TV shows over the years? Furthermore, even if they could  prove that Trump is an evil racist from Hell who wants to punish all the brown people, it is still his legal authority to make decisions on immigration. You can’t ban someone from driving because they publicly announced on Facebook that they think drunk driving shouldn’t be illegal and that they’re generally swell folks who manage to make it home safe. THOUGHT-CRIME IS NOT A FEATURE OF AMERICAN LAW. 

And yet, not one, but two United States Federal Circuit Courts embraced this openly demented reasoning, passing injunctions informed by partisan political leanings, rather than respect for the actual laws on which they are entrusted to rule. 

This state of affairs is simply insane, and points to a deep rot at the heart of the judiciary. The judiciary branch was the mechanism by which civil rights campaigners were winning stunning legal victories to advance their cause many years before Martin Luther King started his “street protests” and “civil disobedience” that the popular consciousness now associates most with the civil rights movement (largely because it’s by far the most celebrated.) Those civil rights champions used the mechanisms given to them by the Founders - the Courts - to bring the reality of America closer to the dream. They used the levers of our government exactly as they were designed to operate, and we are all the better for it. 

Now, however, we are watching partisans in the courts openly abusing their power and disgracing the dignity of their high posts to defy the will of the people, and a lawfully elected President. And he is, without a doubt, the lawfully elected President of the United States. 

We’ve been down this road before - I remember eight fucking years of liberals whining about “stolen elections,” which made their 2016 caterwauling about Trump “accepting the election results” funny even before their post-election hypocrisy - but at least back then there were actual court cases brought, even if the lower court decisions allowing the Florida recounts were spurious, convoluted bullshit (and properly called out as such by SCOTUS.) The Florida Supreme Court’s ruling on that is a real scream to read. Florida election code stipulates a seven-day deadline for submitting all ballots, including re-counted ones. Late ballots may be ignored by the Florida State Department, but a $200 personal fine levied on each election Board member is mandatory. The Florida Supreme Court acknowledged the State Department’s authority and discretion in this matter - and then ruled that the Floridian SecState (Katherine Harris) was wrong for exercising that exact discretion on the grounds that 1. Federal law required them to include overseas/absentee ballots, which could be counted up to ten days after the election, and 2. that the plaintiffs “hanging chad” argument was a credible allegation of an “error in vote tabulation.” Thus they granted more time (6 days) for the halted recount to finish. 

For those of you who don’t remember, the “hanging chad” argument was the brilliant notion that if a Floridian voter had punched out the little square hole for “Bush,” and the wee square bit of paper hadn’t fully and completely detached from the sheet, then that vote might possibly have been in error. Maybe the voter really meant to pop his stylus into the completely different hole to punch the completely different chad for Gore - if that damned chad isn’t completely detached, then there’s no way to know for sure, right? 

Which is how we got this shit:

The Palm Beach elections Board came up with a whole slew of terminology to quantify their painstaking recount process: 

SCOTUS wasn’t impressed with the Florida Supreme Court’s rather meandering, myriad justifications in Palm Beach County Canvassing Board v. Harris, because when Bush’s campaign appealed it to SCOTUS, they wrinkled their brows and remanded it to the Florida Supreme Court for “clarification.” But it was the hanging chad thing that really tore it for the Supreme Court. As Breyer and Souter said: 

“It is true that the Equal Protection Clause does not forbid the use of a variety of voting mechanisms within a jurisdiction, even though different mechanisms will have different levels of effectiveness in recording voters' intentions; local variety can be justified by concerns about cost, the potential value of innovation, and so on. But evidence in the record here suggests that a different order of disparity obtains under rules for determining a voter's intent that have been applied (and could continue to be applied) to identical types of ballots used in identical brands of machines and exhibiting identical physical characteristics (such as "hanging" or "dimpled" chads).”

This is the polite way of stating the obvious: a bunch of assholes squinting at paper cards through magnifying glasses as they try to plumb the Unfathomable Depths of the Hanging Chad, focusing their spiritual ki energy through their sharingan to reverse the polarity and beam it through the main deflector dish and thereby discern the voter’s mysterious intent, is fucking bullshit. And Breyer and Souter wrote the minority opinion - the 5-4 decision only split because the liberals on the court wanted to do a proper recount, with rules, and regulations, and no fucking magnifying-glass seances. Even had the SCOTUS decision gone the other way, they wouldn’t have allowed the election Board to “find” more Gore votes with their arcane scrutiny. 

Naturally, Democrats felt this was a travesty of justice, and that the election had been stolen... and this is what I used to think was bad and childish on their part. But at least then they had some excuse - there was a court case, the details were murky to anyone who didn’t take ten seconds to google it, and it was such a close election that a few thousand votes either way in Florida might have swung things. Even the Florida SCOTUS decision only endeavored to give the recount the same effective amount of time it would have had under the law, even if it was legislating from the bench and countermanding the lawful authority of the Secretary of State, (one elected by the very voters who’s wondrous will the Court claimed to be defending). 

Compare that to the current situation, where the election was won by significantly greater margins in multiple states, the left wing launched an open, unabashed campaign to undermine said laws (encouraging, pleading, and berating electors to violate their state laws by casting “faithless” votes while promising pro-bono legal defense and all the blowjobs Hollywood could offer (I presume this offer was still standing.) After eight months of sneering at Trump’s talk of “rigged elections” as doing damage to the sanctified and perfect structure of our Republic and our electoral system, they staged an active insurrection in complete violation of law to invalidate the results of a vote they had lost. 

So, I dunno. Even with 5-4 decisions not always reflecting steep partisan divides on the decision, this travel “ban” case is pretty goddamned clear-cut. There shouldn’t be a 5-4 decision on this - it should be 9-0. But with the way political divides have steepened and the national “discourse” deteriorated in this country since 2000, I’m not so sure anymore. Gorsuch will be seated on the Court by the time oral arguments start, so the conservatives will have their 5-4 majority, but if it comes down to a 5-4 vote on something this clear-cut... I’d be scared.

I’d be really scared. 

[luminisvii]

So it’s pretty late right now and I’m liberally using the Bold function, but let’s talk about bad fanfiction.

Usually the first thing that springs to mind when it comes to bad fanfiction is My Immortal. Anyone who’s talked to me for more than five minutes knows that My Immortal is undoubtedly one of my favorite pieces of literature. And that’s not a joke, I think it’s an absolute masterpiece of bad. The misspellings, the reworkings of the characters to be goth/scene in an incredibly middle school way, to Marty McFly’s cameo to the chapter written by a self proclaimed troll--It’s a perfect storm of bad literature that makes for a hilarious read. I won’t get into a huge tangent but what makes My Immortal so funny is it has a certain level of naturalness to its writing where you’re never quite sure how serious the author is. The true joke is the mystery. We’ll never know who wrote the infamous fic and how serious they were when they did.

However, My Immortal is kind of scratching the surface. See, that’s a fic that’s actually funny bad. Most bad fanfiction is bad bad. Today, I intend to discuss the lesser known fanfic that I rank as being one of the most difficult reading experiences I ever had, and I only successfully pulled through after many years thanks to the love and support of my friends and us reading it out loud at 4 AM.

That fanfic is known as My Inner Life. Don’t let the title fool you, it was written well before our favorite goff showcase and it’s honestly a whole lot worse. This Legend of Zelda fic, written by one Jen and based on her dreams, features a young lady named Jenna who is a simple merchant traveling in Hyrule when one Link catches her eye and it goes downhill from there. The short version is that there’s a lot of overly dramatic sex, tedious clothes descriptions that include too many triforces, poor treatment of horses, Jenna getting praised and lavished with attention for no reason, and no research put into the lore.  After a while it straight up forgets about being an Ocarina of Time fanfic and launches off into some nonsense about griffins and an evil lord I can’t actually remember the name of (It was very late and I was very tired so I called him Lord Asshole after a while, it has the same effect) and also that The Griffins, who live just beyond the Black Mountains, do not trust easily.

If you wish to read it, you should probably quit now, but if you are too weak (which is honestly understandable) here’s my recounting of the story.

Where to start is a little bit hard, but a good place is the insane 2,000 word author’s note at the beginning. Jen, seemingly unaware of how thin skinned she’s being, goes on about how anyone who leaves her a negative review is being is immature and thin-skinned. Here’s a delightful excerpt that shows the author’s view on all of this!

“Also as a side note, I NEVER physically hurt ANYONE with this story. I got one reviewer that said. “Oh God please stop writing, your hurting everyone.” Now I want to know where I physically touched that person. I want to know how I’m twisting anyone’s arms to read this. I have never done anything of the sort in any way, shape or form and I DO NOT appreciate being accused of that! If you’re emotionally hurt over this, its your fault not mine.”

She spends quite a bit of time talking about how reviewers need to be more mature as she dedicates that much time to complaining about negative reviews and methodically rebuking everything they say from her poor grammar to Jenna being a Mary Sue. Now, props to the author for straight up saying that Jenna is the obvious author avatar that she is--Jenna is simply the dream persona of Jen, which okay, fine, that is not that bad. It’s what happens with Jenna that really makes me want to drink.

The other majorly telling factor is the first line of the story itself.

“Dreams come in many forms. Some good, some bad, some very realistic, even ones that feels very real.”

You may have noticed a redundancy there. That is only the beginning. If you get tired of hearing about the same things repeatedly, you will be VERY tired very quickly in here. Jen likes to constantly explain things to the point where she has footnotes in the story, and just after citing a footnote she explains what was cited in text anyway so now you have a double explanation.

“A tale of love, passion, despair and hope. I enjoyed my inner life. I looked forward to going to sleep to it every night. And I look forward to ones that will come, because LOVE WILL NEVER DIE.”

I love quoting that. I’m also not sleeping so I guess I don’t know the meaning of true love.

Anything beyond this point is where I start to die because I actually grew up playing Ocarina of Time and I’m quite well versed in its lore, so if you are too this is going to be about as pleasant as root canal.

Since me recounting everything in detail means we’d be here into the next year, I’m going to try to boil this down to its essence. TL;DR: Jenna meets Link and they fuck. Badly. A month later and they’re getting married so they can fuck more. This whole time you have King Hyrule who is treating a random merchant off the street better than Zelda, the Sages are just inexplicably back despite now residing in the Sacred Realm. Zelda also inherently gives up the throne because she will not marry and thus is no longer in the line of succession but this random guy from Kokiri Forest who married a random merchant is! Ruto is turned into a jealous harpy and the other sages hardly appear at all.

After they get married they go to the part where I quit the first time I started reading this fic which was the Bonding Ceremony. If getting married to a guy you met a month ago wasn’t enough, going to a monastery and getting telepathically bonded by drinking his piss sure is. Okay, it’s not JUST the piss drinking, but that was enough to make poor 2014 me stop trying and go lie down. They also fuck in front of the monks because that’s a thing straight people do, I guess.

Somewhere in there Jenna gets pregnant and has a child. She names the child Link Jr. I don’t have anything to say about that, I think it’s comedy in itself. On top of that Epona also gets pregnant so they get new horses named Midnight Star and Star Dancer. That’s not an important detail at all, my friend simply hates those horse names and I’m bringing them up on the off chance that she reads this.

Oh yeah, Dark Link is an antagonist at one point and he inexplicably talks exactly like a stereotypical villain and ties Link and Jenna up in a room and leaves them there for no reason like a small time crook leaving Batman in a cage with all his gizmos nearby. And turns out Jenna has magical powers and is from some ancient race of super people or whatever. They have to explain this over and over again in the same few paragraphs and I want to die.

Beyond all the bad sex that has tiger metaphors (Somehow Jen knows how tigers fuck) there’s the Original Material which had me crying more than the tragedy that was the remain of OoT’s story. Once we get tired of Link and Jenna’s love story and Tiger Sex, there’s suddenly an invasion from Lord Ariakas who is threatening the Griffins who live beyond the Black Mountains, just a day’s ride from Hyrule. He’s just some evil guy who threatens the Griffins, who do not trust easily, and who live near The Black Mountains. If you think redundancy is painful then prepare for the worst redundancy you’ve seen yet. I went insane when we were reading this and tallied all the times The Black Mountains are mentioned and turns out it was a whole lot less than I thought, but almost all of them happened in a short amount of time so it felt like an eternity of explaining The Black Fucking Mountains. Turns out I’m a masochist of sorts because this STILL didn’t shake me off. In order to repel Lord Arakias’ forces, Link and Jenna need to talk to the Griffins who like to make a big deal about how they don’t trust anyone as they instantly trust Jenna and let her into their royal court to give her support and magical gifts. It’s kind of incredible how Jenna does nothing and is constantly rewarded for it.

Sadly this ends in a cliffhanger, like all good terrible fanfics. But that’s a semi-coherent retelling of the actual plot. It takes way too long to explain any of these plot points in story. Characters constantly repeat themselves, there’s a bunch of small plot points I left out because we’d REALLY be here all year if we talked about this, there’s the original material where I have to give credit that she went and did this BUT ALSO DID YOU HAVE TO EXPLAIN THIS MANY TIMES WHAT THE BLACK FUCKING MOUNTAINS ARE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

I’m not okay. Time for some deeper analysis of particularly notable parts.

The sex scenes are sadly some of the less entertaining sections. They’re pretty boring for the most part, but then you have shit like “I turned tigress” and my personal favorite, “when I took his nut sack and caressed it with my hand, it was his undoing.” That exact sentence shows up TWICE in the fic, same wording and everything. Remember this, ladies, next time you have sex with a man, caress his nut sack. It’ll be his undoing. It’s not just the silly wording, though, there’s some stupid stuff in there too about how having sex makes your children stronger and also exactly how much fluid Jenna is ejecting which is a little bit alarming to say the least. Otherwise they’re a bit bland and use the same flowery language that you’d expect from poorly written erotica. Also they fuck in front of a bunch of monks. It’s for the bonding.

If you’re into LoZ lore then you’re going to have a bad time, too. My favorite thing is showing people the segment where Jenna explains how the OoT timeskip works because it makes zero sense to everyone, OoT fan or not. Let’s take a quick history lesson for OoT if you’re not familiar with it. In Ocarina of Time, a major plot point and element of gameplay is that Link travels between past and future in a seven year gap. From Link’s point of view, the change is instantaneous, right down to the fact that his age changes from child to adult and vice versa. To everyone else, they’re living those seven years. Time continues without Link there to observe it, and in Link’s absence Hyrule collapses. Thus is the plot--trying to stop Ganondorf from destroying the future with a power that Link and Zelda accidentally gave him. The point is all Non-Link people experience time normally, and the world moves on.

Somehow Jenna missed something that I inherently understood when I was a wee child of 8, barely able to play Ocarina of Time due to poor reading comprehension and lack of Zelda Puzzle Solving Skills™.

“Gannondorf tricked the soon to be "Hero of Time" into unlocking the door to the Sacred Realm. I even noticed that Zelda was a little older then I. Last I saw her she was four years younger then me. It was told to me that when Gannondorf went into the Temple of Time and into the Scared Realm, time jumped ahead in Hyrule seven years. Yet only two years passed in my land. And in the rest of the world.

After the "Hero of Time" defeated the King of Evil, the hero was granted to either return to the past or to remain in the present time. Since he chose to remain in the present Zelda jumped ahead of me in age by four years.  It seems that everyone in Hyrule jumped in age from the rest of the world.”

I’m not sure I really understand still. I’ve read this so many times trying to comprehend and maybe I’m just stupid but this doesn’t scan. But when you time travel it should affect the whole world or else that’d be pretty fucked. Back To The Future would be pretty wack if only Hill Valley was sent back to the 50s but everywhere else was still 80s.

God, I spent too much time on this. It still hurts my brain.

I also just have to have a section where I metaphorically hand Zelda a box of chocolates and a check for 5,000 dollars for even being in this mess. The real MVP of the story is Zelda for tolerating all this bullshit. She has to watch her father treat Jenna better than her, she gives Jenna a bracelet from her mother who is dead for Jenna’s wedding, she has to passively accept that because she isn’t married she’s lost her claim to the throne and it’s being handed over to Link and Jenna because despite both of them being nobodies they’re more legitimate heirs to the throne than the king’s own daughter. She also has to be the one to help Jenna birth her baby and it’s maybe a little bit weird to have the princess of a nation be your personal midwife. Even if she is your so called best friend. Were I ever in the circumstances of giving birth, I wouldn’t make my friends help. Please get an actual nurse. Also for some reason Jenna won’t stop calling her baby a miracle and it’s done so frequently it’s a little off-putting. Even the chapter where the child is born is called “The Miracle” like idk I know life is mysterious and miraculous but I’m not sure giving birth, something a lot of cis woman can do, is a “miracle.” Me not sobbing while reading this is a miracle. Zelda, honey, you deserve so much better.

I’m running out of things that will actually last a paragraph or so tangent wise, so time to wrap things up with smaller notes:

-Jenna thinks that you boot horses in the knees to get them moving. You are probably not riding a horse right if you can kick it in the knees while sitting on its back. That’s not even getting into other horse related mishaps like the fact that kneecapping them isn’t a good idea either.

-Link Jr. is capable of math at like, four months or something. I wish I was that talented.

-Ruto is my wife and I will not stand for this slander against her. Yeah, call me a fish fucker if you want, Sidon is cute too don’t @ me

-Take a shot every time Jenna mentions triforces on her outfit (actually don’t)

-Jenna makes a big deal about how Link has to go off to war and how she’ll miss him and he’ll miss her and it’s all very emotional but he’s back literally the next chapter

-One of my favorite moments is Mido rightfully pointing out that Jenna isn’t a Kokiri and thus has no right to receive a fairy but everyone thinks he’s being super rude for actually having common sense. They barely gave LINK a fairy and he grew up there!

-I inflicted this on my friends and it went as well as you’d think it would. Quote supplied by Jen who is not THAT Jen but a far superior one

-Somewhere in the fic suddenly Link and Zelda’s eyes are capable of changing color based on mood, or maybe they could do this the whole time and my eyes were changing based on mood alright, they were glazing over and I missed it

-Jen always types “threw” instead of “through” and it’s just enough to throw me off every time. Also every time a character starts a new sentence she starts another set of quotations even if they were already talking and occasionally she misspells “huge” as “hugh” which leads to some hilarious circumstances

-THEY DRANK EACH OTHER’S PISS

-Apparently when you are telepathically bonded with your Husband/Wife you aren’t allowed to be in a room with someone of the opposite sex AT ALL. Personally I think that reeks of insecurity

-Also because a good pal loses her shit every time we mention it, Jen couldn’t come up with a marriage ceremony that wasn’t just a christian one for a universe where christianity doesn’t exist, but she sure likes to put world building into those DAMN GRIFFINS

All in All? My Inner Life is not for the weak willed. It is INCREDIBLY long and redundant and while it’s still pretty funny, it’s mostly plain terrible. I consider is a much better showcase of what bad fanfiction is actually like, and also since it’s of a more standard awful, it means people can’t badly parody it while missing the point as to why it’s funny. So at least there will only be one My Inner Life and no imitators.

Seriously, I hate My Immortal imitators. Write your own terrible fanfiction, damn you! If I had a shot for every time a fanfic was compared to My Immortal I would be dead six years ago. Getting compared to MI is not a good thing, but not for the reasons you’d think. At least My Inner Life only shares the basic premise of a self insert character and the rest is a ride of complete bullshit that’s par the course for terrible Mary Sue fiction. Everyone loves Jenna for no reason and those who voice the valid concerns against her are seen as unreasonable and stupid. Characters are bent backwards to serve the threadbare plot and apparently Jenna’s love life alone is enough to constitute half of the story before we just plain forget it’s a Legend of Zelda fanfic and it goes off into some generic high fantasy horse crap with dragons and Griffins and some evil guy like what even is his name and it all ends without any real closure.

However if you are strong enough or maybe just a masochist (me) I highly recommend this fic for just being a test of endurance and also for all the funny little moments sprinkled throughout. It’ll certainly be a waste of time and it’s a good thing to read with friends. While it’s an oldie, it’s a goodie, and no one comes out unscathed.

Also the author apparently is a good sport about it now, although who knows. It’s just a thing I heard. While I like making fun of Jen throughout reading the fic, she doesn’t seem awful. Just perhaps young and unaware.

Truly, the real treasure was the piss we drank along the way. I’m sorry I will never be over that