#‘be a famous author who lives in england with my rich husband’

[johndonneswife]

i can’t belieeeeve we have been talking about moving out of the usa for years and just had a serious conversation a few months ago where we said we weren’t going to try to move away until we were older and ~more established in life~ but now we’re like…actively trying to do it

[heyyyharry]

Last Chapter: For The Rest Of My Life

(from the My Girl Series: Stay Mine)

…in which they live happily ever after.

Word count: 5.9k

AU: actor!harry, older!harry, younger!y/n (4-year age gap).

Wattpad link (Thea as Y/N)

This is it, guys. This is the last chapter. Thank you for following my beloved characters on this long journey. I never would have written three books without your support! :)

Love, Allie.

P/S: The first preview of TCTM2 - The Winter and the Crown (and first chapter on Patreon) is this Friday! I’ll postpone the new series until after TCTM2 so it’ll be updated weekly instead of biweekly :)

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“And they lived happily ever after. The end.”

“No!”

Celine shot her head up. Y/N could see her friend’s shocked expression in the mirror. “Excuse you. That was a great speech!”

Y/N apologised to her makeup artist, spun her chair around and told her maid-of-honour, “I love you, babe, but your speech was an hour-long. While you were reading, Allison has managed to finish yours, Amala’s, Alice’s, and my makeup. So it needs to be shorter.”

Celine stared at her paper as she blew out her cheeks. “But this is the complete story of how you and Harry got together.”

“Well,” Alice, who sat in the corner, finally spoke. “You might want to skip the whole love triangle drama last year.” She paused, gazing upward. “And the year before that. My God, Y/N!” Alice whipped her head to Y/N, her mouth wide open. “You got three men chasing after you in two years, became a best-selling author, and now you’re getting married after having been engaged for only a month to your super hot, super rich, super famous boyfriend! Talk about being ambitious!”

“Three months, actually,” Amala interjected. She was sitting beside Y/N, looking at her phone. “When she broke the news, Cece and I thought they were rushing the wedding because she was pregnant. As it turned out, they were just too in love to wait.”

“What the fuck? Your life is perfect!” Alice exclaimed.

Y/N shook her head. “No, it’s not. When he proposed there wasn’t even a ring!” And turned to Allison. “Can’t you believe my ex-boyfriend forgot the ring when he proposed?”

“You need to stop calling your fiancé ‘ex-boyfriend’,” Celine said.

“I don’t care. I want three hot men to fight for me,” Alice said.

“Don’t envy me. I’ve only dated three men in my life,” Y/N said then turned back to the mirror, “and today is my wedding day, so can we not make this about them?”

“Of course, baby,” Celine chuckled as she rose from her seat and came to give Y/N a kiss on top of her head. “I’ll make my speech shorter, but we'll keep the part where you read the story about Harry in front of the whole class and you and I became friends.”

“Sure.”

“And also any other part that I was in.”

“Fine.” Y/N snorted, rolling her eyes.

Celine gave her shoulders a gentle squeeze then bent over to press her cheek against Y/N’s, their eyes locked in the mirror as they shared a smile. “Now, let’s get you into that dress, baby.”

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“Rings? Where’re the rings?! WHERE–Oh, they’re on the desk.”

“Niall!” Harry and Isaac shouted at the same time.

Niall stared at them. “What?!”

Harry gave his tie a hard tug. To Isaac, he said, “I’m seriously considering making you the best man.”

“Hey, that’s not fair!” Niall objected as he shoved the ring boxes into his pocket. “You,” he jabbed at Isaac with his finger, “are my understudy today. So don’t even think about trying to sabotage me to take my place.”

“The stage’s all yours.” Isaac spread his arms. “To be honest, it’d be really weird if her ex-boyfriend was the best man at her wedding.”

Harry cast him a pointed look. “Can you not make me want to uninvite you right here right now?”

“You can’t. I would be your sister’s plus one anyway.”

“Damn it,” Harry murmured, looking back at the full-length mirror.

This was nerve-racking and kind of strange. Never had he thought one day he’d be standing in his childhood bedroom with Niall and Isaac let alone getting ready for his own wedding here. When imagining his wedding, he’d thought of something in the range of Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra’s wedding and the royal wedding for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. And yet, here he was, in his hometown with a guest list of under fifty people. And he had never been happier in his entire life.

“Can you check if the rings are in the boxes?” he told Niall and sighed in relief when Niall confirmed that the rings were safe. “Can’t be too careful. The day I proposed to her, I left the ring in my hotel room in New York. It was really embarrassing.”

“Y/N doesn’t care about this stuff,” Isaac said.

“I know,” Harry replied, feeling a grin taking over his face.

Suddenly, Niall burst out a laugh. He looked up from his phone, grinning goofily. “Harold, Alice just texted me a photo of your girl, would you want to see it? It’s really funny.”

“Is she in the wedding dress?” Harry asked.

“Yeah.”

“Then no. It’d be bad luck.” Then he cast Niall a look over his shoulder. “Yes, I’m superstitious. Judge me.”

Isaac’s brows knitted as he considered Niall with a tentative look on his face. “What’s going on between you and Alice?”

Niall’s smile suddenly vanished, and Harry realised he couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen Niall so nervous. The lad was rubbing the nape of his neck as he cleared his throat and was unable to make eye contact with either of them. “We’re not...ready to make it public yet,” he finally admitted. Harry and Isaac looked at each other, smiling with their mouths wide open. “My fans will tear her down just as they did to my other relationships. And after what happened to you and Y/N, I think we’re gonna lay low for a while.”

“I’m glad Bambi and I went through hell to set an example for you,” Harry said amusedly.

Niall’s mouth curled. “I’ll make sure to thank you in my speech.”

“Hold on!” Isaac interjected. “I thought I’d get to have a speech.”

“I’m the best man, though,” Niall retorted.

“That’s the point. You’re already the best man.”

“Niall’s right.” Harry gave Isaac an apologetic look. “But hey, you dated my wife and you’re dating my sister. Our friendship is on thin ice, so don’t jinx it.”

Isaac rolled his eyes, and a smirk peaked at the corner of his lips.

Without warning, Niall wrapped an arm around each of them and aggressively tugged them into a hug. Both Isaac and Harry scolded him for having wrinkled their best suits, yet neither tried to break out of Niall’s tight embrace.

“I’m so glad we’re back together,” Niall said. “The three of us, without all the weird tension between you two.”

Isaac opened his mouth to say something but was forestalled by Niall’s ringtone.

“I’ll be right back,” Niall said as he released them and pulled out his phone. “Yeah, that’s the firework guy.”

Harry and Isaac yelled at the same time.

“The what guy?”

“What the fuck?!”

“Niall, this is supposed to be a secret wedding,” Harry said in frustration. “I don't want the whole town to know that we're getting married in our backyard!”

“You should have said that before I called my firework guy!” To the person on the phone, Niall said, “Cancel! Cancel! No, do not light it up!” Then he dashed out of the room, almost slamming into the door.

Once his heavy footsteps had faded down the stairs, Harry and Isaac exchanged looks and broke into laughter.

“You know what?” Harry said, catching his breath and wiping a single tear from the corner of his eyes. “Just in case he gets himself blown up before the ceremony, you probably should prepare the best man speech.”

“I’m on it.” Isaac grinned, and to Harry’s surprise, he pulled Harry into a hug. Not just their usual one-arm-and-a-pat-on-the-back kind of hug. A real one, with both arms and a firm grip that said everything Harry needed to know. “I’m really happy for you and proud of you, H.”

Harry found himself beaming as he hugged his best friend in return. “And I’m really happy to have you here.”

They embraced for a second or two before Isaac broke off and straightened Harry’s jacket. “I’ll see you downstairs,” he said. “Now I have to go save Niall from getting blown up in your backyard.”

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When Y/N was little, she had wanted her mum to be the one to walk her down the aisle. Between her parents, she had always loved her mum more, simply because her mum had been there for her for most of her childhood. Y/N’s mum had been her first best friend, her advisor, the person who had known all of her secrets. But if Y/N’s mum were still alive, she would be glad to let her husband walk Y/N down the aisle.

Y/N’s dad burst into tears when he stood by the front door and watched her descend the stairs. It was the first time he’d seen her in her wedding dress. She’d had it altered so it’d look more casual than what a wedding dress should look like. The long sleeves had been removed and the skirt shortened. It was quite plain, perfect for a backyard wedding, and yet her dad was looking at her like she was the Queen of England. Perhaps in his eyes, she was. And as he wiped away his tears with the sleeve of his jacket, she felt her tears start flowing too.  

Her dad rarely cried. At least not in front of her. She remembered how much she’d loathed him for not shedding a tear at her mother’s funeral. It wasn’t until years later that she’d found out that he had cried, just not in front of everyone. He’d slept with a photo of her mum every day for many months after the accident, and cried himself to sleep every night, for the woman who had fallen out of love with him.

Y/N supposed her dad used to think tears represented vulnerability and if she’d seen him at his most vulnerable, she wouldn’t have trusted him to be her protector. He’d tried to be strong in front of her. But Dad, this is you being strong for me, she thought when she wrapped her arms around his neck and held him tight. He could have left when he’d found out her mum hadn’t been faithful. He could have given up on Y/N when she’d tried to push him away. But he’d stayed. Because brave people never gave up on the ones they loved. And she believed he loved her most of all.

“I’m sorry. Don’t cry. You’ll ruin your makeup,” her dad said, holding her face. “You’ll get two black lines on your pretty face like in the movies.”

“My makeup is waterproof,” she told him, laughing and sniffling at the same time.

“Why don’t actresses in movies use that stuff?” he asked, looking genuinely confused.

“You’re such a dork.” Y/N snorted and wiped his cheeks with her thumbs.

Her dad’s forehead creased. As he took in the sight of her, his eyes lingered on her short white dress. Recognition suddenly dawned on his face. “Is this—”

“Yes. It was Mum’s,” she said, fanning out her skirt. “I made some alterations. Do you love it?”

Her dad brought a hand to his mouth and was speechless for a long moment. She wasn’t sure if he was looking for the right words to say, or he was too emotional to speak.

“You look just like her,” he whispered as he held her arms, leaned in and kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry she wasn’t here to walk you down the aisle.”

“Don’t be,” Y/N said, fixing her dad’s collar. “I’m already the happiest to have you give me away.”

“Give you away,” he echoed, and even though his expression remained unchanged, she could catch a sign of sadness and regret. Then, the corners of his mouth raised in an attempt to lift up the mood. “Are you sure you want to do this? It’s not too late to cancel the wedding.”

Eyes wide, Y/N chortled. “Dad!”

“I’m just saying.” Her dad gave a half-shrug. “I want you to know that your old man always supports your decisions, no questions asked.”

“Thank you,” she murmured and kissed him on the cheek. “But I’d still like to marry Harry.”

“Ahhh. You know you’re getting old when your child starts being kind to you.”

Y/N scrunched up her nose at the remark which stung her heart a little. Still, she decided to be light-hearted. “Funny. Harry told me it was me who was getting old when I started being kind to him and you.”

Her dad raised both eyebrows. “You know what? Forget what I said. Do not cancel the wedding. I love that kid.”

Y/N rolled her eyes and gave him a playful nudge.

Suddenly, Celine emerged from the kitchen holding a bouquet and shoved it into Y/N’s arms. “Your flowers, babe. Good luck!” It was hilarious how she looked even more nervous than Y/N was, and Celine had been a bride before.

She kissed Y/N on the cheek, patted Y/N’s dad on the shoulder and then left as fast as she’d arrived.

Y/N’s dad offered his arm to her as the corners of his eyes crinkled with joy. “Shall we?”

She nodded, chin held high, and settled her fingers into the crook of his arm.

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The last time Harry had been to a wedding in Holmes Chapel, he’d returned to London with a broken heart. It was the day he’d thought he’d lost his girl forever, that he’d been too late and missed the only chance to make it right. And now here he was, back at the same place, but this time, he was the groom and his childhood best friend was the bride.

He and Y/N had decided to get married right where the old tree used to be. The new one hadn’t grown big enough to cover them in its shade, but Harry liked the symbolism of it – there was never really an ending, just another beginning.

He stood at the end of the aisle as the guests settled down, waiting for the bride to make her big entrance. His palms were sweating so hard he could feel it soaking through his jacket which he’d been clutching the whole time. In his entire acting career, he had never felt self-conscious standing in front of a crowd, and yet, standing here in front of the people he knew and loved, he could barely move a muscle.

The music started, and Harry straightened like a soldier. He met his sister’s eyes in the front row, and she mouthed at him, ‘You look stupid.’ His mum, who was sitting beside Gemma, shot her a pointed look before mouthing at Harry, ‘You look handsome.’

He gave his family a tight smile as he laced his fingers together in front of his crotch, like a nice little boy waiting for the photographer to take the photo. He supposed he did look stupid. He felt stupid. However, the fear didn’t last for too long, because as soon as the gate to Y/N’s backyard opened and she appeared with Bradford, Harry felt as if there were fireworks exploding inside his chest. Time stopped. And the rest of the world disappeared.

She was wearing her mother’s dress. He knew that because she’d told him when he’d offered to find her a famous wedding dress designer. She must have made some alterations to it, and as excited as he’d been to see her wear it for the first time, it didn’t shock him as he’d thought it would.

When he looked at her, in that white chiffon dress with her hair in a high bun and that big smile on her face, he could see the little girl in a tutu, and he was the little boy who waited by the car with her parents after her first ballet class, because she’d insisted that he came with them to pick her up that day. Then Harry saw the little girl with daisies in her pigtails; she’d made him play house with her and they’d had a fake wedding. That little girl, now older, was a princess for a school play; she’d practised in front of him so many times that he remembered all the lines and mumbled along as he watched her from the third row with her parents. Then she was at a school dance; they hadn’t been talking but he’d watched her in silence just to make sure her date didn’t cross the line. Then there was the girl at the Oscars; messy hair, messy makeup, out of breath, still the most beautiful girl in the room. The girl in his bed, the first face he saw in the morning, no makeup on. The girl with tears running down her face as she said yes on that windy roof. The girl who was drunk in the streetlight, red-faced, smeared mascara as he told her he loved her for the first time. The girl at the entrance of his treehouse; older and taller every time she returned. The girl telling him she’d given up on him for good. The girl telling him she’d love him forever.

He loved every single one of those girls. Y/N was a million girls in one; all were his. And he loved every version of her there had ever been, and every version there would ever be.

His eyes prickled with tears as she reached for his hand, and the first thing she said to him as the music stopped was, “Are you crying?”

“No, there’s something in my eyes,” he said, smiling at her. “Are you?”

“Yes, I am.” She nodded, staring heavenward and blinking back the tears as she tried not to laugh and cry at the same time. Harry almost leaned in and kissed her right then but then he remembered he would have to wait for the priest to say, ‘You may kiss the bride’. He’d meant it when he’d said he was superstitious. He didn’t want to bring bad luck to their wedding. Niall was already an exception.

As the backyard fell to silence and the priest said something Harry did not hear, he couldn’t stop beaming down at his bride and mouthed “I love you” as if she hadn’t got tired of those words already. She mouthed them back, as if he hadn’t got tired of them. Well, at this point he didn’t think it was possible to ever get tired of hearing or saying them.

“Psst, Harry!” Niall’s voice pulled him back to reality. He blinked fast. Everyone was staring at him. “Your vows!” Niall said.

“Right, right. Just a sec.” Holding up a finger, Harry frantically searched in his jacket for the speech he’d prepared last week. His cheeks heated as he pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and flashed his teeth at Y/N, who was staring patiently at him.

He held up a fist at his mouth and cleared his throat. “Forgive me if my vows are generic and badly-written.”

Laughter crackled from the guests, and Harry decided to focus all of his attention on his Bambi. It’d feel less weird if he was saying this to her instead of trying to impress their families, although the way her father looked at him was really intimidating.

He blew out his cheeks, shook his head and began, “I...wanted...to write something cheesy...something like ‘I always knew we’d end up together’ or ‘I fell in love with you the moment I first laid eyes on you’. But that wasn’t how it happened. Because when we first met, you were only nine, and you cried a lot so I didn’t really like you.”

Someone, probably Y/N’s stepmum, awwwed out loud. Y/N tilted her head, scowling at him, and he shot her an apologetic grin before he continued.

“It wasn’t love at first sight, or second, or third. But I think that’s the best part of our relationship. There wasn’t an exact moment where we fell in love. Our love grew as we did. It was always within ourselves even though I realised it a bit late and I let you down. Despite all that we’ve been through, you’ve always been by my side, and you’re the only person who loves me unconditionally.” His eyes searched his mum and Gemma. “Alongside my mum and sister.”

The guests cracked up as Gemma, with her arms crossed, mouthed, ‘I don’t love you,’ at Harry. Ignoring her, Harry turned back to Y/N. “You make me a better person–” And wiped his eyes. “You can call me a crybaby later.”

“I will,” she said as her fingers found his.

He squeezed her hand. “I cannot promise that–that I’ll be perfect, because everyone who knows us knows that we are far from perfect. But I vow to always try to be the best version of myself and love you for as long as I live. I’ll be your best friend, always listen to you, take care of you, always make you proud, and whatever obstacles are thrown in your way, I’ll face them with you.”

This time when a sob broke from someone’s lips, it was Y/N’s old boss, Eddie.

Y/N placed a hand on her heart as her bottom lip quivered. Tears shone in her eyes but she wasn’t crying like a baby like him. She released a nervous laugh, glancing at their families and friends. “I’m embarrassed. My vows probably suck compared to yours.”

“No way,” he murmured, not sure if she heard him.

She sucked in a breath, held her smile, and began. “Harry, I’ve never told you this, but when I was nine, I told Celine that I wanted to marry you when I grew up. I asked her to keep a secret because my mum had said that if you told too many people about your dreams, they would never come true.

“At nine years old, my biggest dream, beside being a writer, was to marry the boy next door. And I can now tell everyone about that dream, because after today, we’re gonna go home together and the boy I’ve loved since I was nine years old, is gonna be my husband.” She took a step forward, pressing his hand to her heart. “I vow to be by your side through sickness and health, through your bests and your worsts. I vow to never lie to you, never give up on you. Thank you for making me a better person. I’ll love you for the rest of my life.”

“That was so much better than mine,” Harry whispered, smiling so big his cheeks began to ache.

They exchanged rings, and then Harry’s heart started thundering as the priest looked at him. “Harry, do you take Y/N–”

“I do,” he said without taking his eyes off Y/N, who was beaming like the sun. “Yes, a million times.”

“Y/N–”

“I do.”

Harry believed he’d heard the priest sigh, yet he hadn’t paid attention to know for sure. Then came the words he’d been waiting to hear. “I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

His arms could not catch her fast enough since hers had wrapped around his neck as she locked her lips to his. He pulled her against him, tipped her head back and kissed her like he had the first time at that same spot. This time, in the cheering of their family and friends.

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The wedding reception was also held in Harry’s backyard. By the time Niall and Celine had finished their long speeches, everyone had been starving. After the meal and a few drinks, Harry had forgotten what Niall had said about him in that speech, still, he was grateful for Niall. He hoped the firework guy was having a good time being their uninvited wedding guest.

Their first dance was to the song Hearts Don’t Break Around Here by Ed Sheeran. Harry had picked the song and Y/N had joked about him listening to sappy music, but she’d cried when he sang the words into her ear as they danced with her cheek pressed against his chest and his chin on top of her head.

That every night I'll kiss you you'll say in my ear

Oh we're in love aren't we?

Hands in your hair, fingers and thumbs baby

Maybe it was the adrenaline, maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was her, but he was so upset when the song ended and he had to let her go so she could dance with her dad. His disappointment didn’t last for long because his mum was also a fun dance partner. After two dances, Isaac and Harry’s two cousins stole him away to do some shots. As the drink burnt his throat, he heard someone speaking into the microphone. They didn’t have a band or a stage so Harry didn’t even know they had a microphone. From the looks on Isaac’s and his cousins’ faces, he knew they had no idea what was happening, either.

“Hi guys, I’m Niall.”

“Oh my God,” said Harry’s cousin as he clasped Harry’s shoulder. “What is he doing? Is he drunk?”

“I’ll get him.”

“Stay exactly where you are, blondie!” Niall stabbed a finger at Isaac and all eyes shot at the poor lad. Isaac raised his hands and stepped back. It was then that Harry realised the firework guy wasn’t the only uninvited guest. Niall had brought his whole band. “I’m not drunk,” Niall said, nodding at his guitarist. “I have a little present for my two best friends.”

Harry caught his wife’s eyes from a distance, and she mouthed at him, ‘Do you know about this?’

‘No,’ he mouthed back.

“I wrote a song, inspired by their relationship. If you haven’t read Y/N’s book, I’m an important part of their love story.”

Isaac arched an eyebrow as he took a sip from his glass of champagne. Harry saw Y/N smiling with her mouth open, clinging onto Celine’s arm. She hated surprises so Harry was very relieved that she didn’t seem angry at Niall.

“The song is called ‘Black and White’,” Niall said as he put on his guitar. “I just thought black and white would be like the black suit and white dress and it would become a bit of a wedding song. I was getting a bit nostalgic with it and the song is basically about first love, when you're a teenager and you're like, ‘That's it, me and you are getting married.’ It's got a very happy feel to it, like a stomping driving tune. I think it might be my favourite on my next album.”

“He’s really using my wedding to promote his album,” Harry said, sounding more surprised than he actually was.

“Classic Niall,” Isaac chuckled, shaking his head.

Niall signalled for his band, and someone dimmed the lights in the yard as the song began with a guitar intro.

That first night we were standing at your door

Fumbling for your keys, then I kissed you

Ask me if I want to come inside

'Cause we didn't want to end the night

Then you took my hand, and I followed you

Isaac and Gemma were the first couple to step forward, and the others soon followed, gathering in front of the ‘stage’ and rocking to Niall’s song. Harry met his wife halfway in the crowd, and before he could say a word, she took his hand and pulled him into her.

Yeah, I see us in black and white

Crystal clear on a starlit night

In all your gorgeous colours

I promise that I'll love you for the rest of my life

See you standing in your dress

Swear in front of all our friends

There'll never be another

I promise that I'll love you for the rest of my life

“He didn’t have secret cameras installed around here, did he?” Y/N shouted over the music as Harry spun her around and drew her back in.

“Why?” he asked, laughing.

She cupped his face, bringing their foreheads together. “To film a music video. Because I would shave his head. Or Alice’s head. Which one do you think would hurt him more?”

Harry’s jaw dropped as he hugged her waist. “Just as I thought I could not love you any more.”

I want the world to witness

When we finally say I do

It's the way you love

I gotta give it back to you

I can't promise picket fences

Or sunny afternoons

But, at night when I close my eyes

I see us in black and white

Crystal clear on a starlit night...

“Are you happy?” he asked, his eyes closed.

“Yes,” she said. “Never been happier. I love you.”

“I love you, too. So, so much,” he mumbled into her hair. Suddenly, they were swaying on their own, just them two, under a starry sky.

I see us in black and white

Crystal clear on a starlit night

In all your gorgeous colours

I promise that I'll love you for the rest of my life

See you standing in your dress

Swear in front of all our friends

There'll never be another

I promise that I'll love you for the rest of my life

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(Three years later)

“Daaaaaad!”

Y/N burst into her father’s reading room and found him sitting in his swivel chair with a book in his lap. Outside, the sun was setting. Dust was drifting and dancing in the soft warm light filtering through the stained window. Bradford closed his book as he spun around and narrowed his eyes at her. “What happened?”

“I think I lost her,” she said, still out of breath.

Her dad jumped to his feet. His expression went from confused to shocked to horrified in one second. “How did you lose a child?!”

“I don’t know. I was writing and then she–Hey, Marcy!”

Y/N’s stepmother, who was standing in the doorway between the bedroom and the reading room, cast her husband a tentative look before raising an eyebrow at her stepdaughter. “What are you doing here? Harry and Minnie were looking for you.”

“Oh!” Y/N started though she’d tried her best not to look so relieved. “S-She’s with Harry?”

“Yeah. I saw them down by the lake behind the school.”

“Great. See ya!”

The door swung shut, and Marcy looked to her husband. “She lost Minnie again, didn’t she?”

“Yup,” Bradford sighed. “I’m worried.”

“Don’t be,” Marcy smiled as she rubbed his arm. “I’m sure she’ll be a great mother.”

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Bambi dropped her bike as soon as she found Harry by the lake, tossing rocks into the water to impress the two-year-old sitting on the tire swing. He’d hung that swing for Minnie at the beginning of last summer and promised that when the tree in his backyard was big enough, he’d build a treehouse for her.

Dry leaves crunched beneath Y/N’s boots as she made her way toward them. When Harry saw her, his smile glowed as bright as the sun behind him.

“There she is,” he said and picked up Minnie. “Say hello to your irresponsible big sister.”

“Shut up,” Y/N snorted.

“Shut up!” Minnie told her, happily. Minnie was still learning to talk so she would repeat everything.

Harry, with a smug look on his face, tugged slightly at Minnie’s little pigtail. “You’re on my team, aren’t you, Min?”

“You’re setting a bad example for her,” Y/N said, smirking at the inseparable two.

“I didn’t lose her.”

“I was writing. I got distracted.”

“Excuses, excuses.” Harry clicked his tongue, shaking his head. To Minnie, he said, “Now, Minnie, would you be so kind as to tell your sister who’s my favourite girl?”

Y/N rolled her eyes, but then her half-sister surprised her by throwing her tiny arms in the air and said, “Bambi!”

Harry chuckled and kissed Minnie’s chubby cheek.

“Did you teach her that to impress me?” Y/N asked.

“Yeah.” As Harry leaned in to kiss Y/N on the mouth, Minnie covered her eyes with both hands and said, “Yuck!”

Y/N’s heart fluttered as she watched the two of them. She had waited for the special moment to break the news, but seeing her husband and Minnie together, she knew she must say it now.

“Don’t get too attached to this one,” she told him while stroking Minnie’s pink cheek. “Our baby might get jealous.”

Harry snorted. Y/N pressed her lips together.

His face dulled. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

Harry’s mouth opened so wide Minnie must have thought he was playing. She burst out laughing, hugging her stomach. Her bright high-pitched laughter made Y/N laugh, too. Then all three of them were just laughing together, not knowing why, and yet they couldn’t stop.

When they finally did (and were on the verge of tears), Harry rubbed a palm over his face, his forehead creased though his grin never faltered.

“Wow. I can’t believe it.” He turned to Minnie. “Min, I’m a dad now, and you’re an aunt. You’re only two years old and you’re an aunt! Such big responsibilities for both of us, don’t you think?”

Minnie didn’t understand what he was talking about, but she could see the elation on his face so she started clapping like a baby seal. Y/N snorted, shaking her head. “Now I have to share your love with another girl.”

“How do you know it’s a girl?”

“My maternal instinct said so.” She shrugged. “Or maybe I want it to be a girl so I can teach her the things my mum taught me.”

Harry broke into a smile as he brushed Y/N’s hair out of her face. “Girl or boy. You know you’ll always be my number one.”

She took his hand and kissed it. “And you are mine.”

This time, Harry had to cover Minnie’s eyes as he went in for an open-mouthed kiss. His lips were cold against hers yet her face burnt as they broke apart.

Suddenly, his phone rang.

“Oh shit.”

“Oh shit,” Minnie repeated happily.

Y/N smacked Harry on the arm and the kid once again shook with laughter. “Look what you did!”

“Sorry!” Harry pointed a finger at Minnie’s little nose and said in a baby voice, “Do not copy Harry. That’s a bad bad word.”

“Harry!” Minnie said and pressed her lips to his cheek. Y/N was so confused when Harry told her Jeff was calling then turned off his phone and shoved it back into his pocket.

“Work can wait,” he said before she could ask. “Now I belong to you and Minnie.” Then he touched Y/N’s belly. “And also little Harry or little Bambi.”

Smiling, she told him, “You’ve only known that you’re a dad for like two seconds and you’re already acting like one.”

“What can I say? I can take on any role.”

He put Minnie back on the swing and wrapped his arms around Y/N, drawing her close. She hugged his waist and buried her face into his chest, listening to the sound of his heart beating in sync with her own.

THE END.

[soldouthaz]

Do you have any recent fic recs? 🥺 I just finished reading Baby Blue and now I don’t know what to read next. (It was amazing by the way).

hii!!! I'm so happy you liked baby blue! thank you so much for reading and for reaching out! :))) 

I don’t have any specifics on what you like to read, so I'm just going to give you a bit of everything - I hope that’s alright! if you want more you always know where to find me ;) 

--

recently read fics (July 2020) - 

✰ sleeping on our problems (E, 67k, bL) by @risthebrave / falsegoodnight 

Louis sleeps with Harry and they have more than just catching feelings to worry about. 

✰ tell it like an old song (E, 26k, bL) by @outropeace

where Harry is a bit lost (just like his memories), his best friend is hiding something, the love of his life is gone and love... love is like flowers. 

✰ soaked in the blood of angels (E, 40k, bL) by @crazyupsetter / whoknows

The boy looks drugged, caught between a man who’s almost twice his size and a girl who looks like she wouldn’t even break a sweat snapping him in half despite her small stature, eyes closed and mouth open as he pants, arching up between them almost as if he’s trying to escape. 

Normally, Harry would ignore it and continue on his search for someone to drink from, someone who wouldn’t mind his sharp teeth and rough hands. He’s seen plenty of boys like this one, ones who picked the wrong playmates, and if he stopped to rescue every single one of them he would have died from thirst a long time ago. 

This one, though. There’s something about this one, the sheen of his bright blue eyes as he blinks slowly, looks around as though he doesn’t know where he is, the weakness of his hands as he tries to push the girl off of him and make his escape. 

✰ like the earth around the sun (E, 23k, bL) by astrangepurplefairy

the one where Harry bursts in on Louis in heat and things only get more complicated from there.

(*personal note* if anyone happens to know if this author has a Tumblr please let me know!)

✰ we both got nothing to hide (E, 43k, bL) by lovelarry10 / @chloehl10

Omega Louis has a secret nest. Alpha Harry keeps losing his clothes.

✰ move so pretty (you’re all I see) (E, 10k, bL) by @risthebrave / falsegoodnight

Harry’s pretty content with his life. He loves his job- a veterinarian at a local clinic who’s already built up a name for himself despite his young age. He loves his gorgeous flat with its wide, open space and minimalistic, yet still homey feel. He loves his family who he talks to and visits as much as possible, not bothered by the long hours of driving to Holmes Chapel from London he endures multiple times a month. He loves his friends and his coworkers and his neighbors- especially Allison, the little old lady next door who brings him and Louis cookies on holidays and who always comments on how “strong and handsome you are, Mr. Styles,” everytime he sees her.

And most importantly, he loves Louis, just- maybe in a slightly different way.

✰ maybe, baby (M, 16k, omega!L) by @thoughtsickles​

Louis runs away. Harry finds him.

✰ when tomorrow comes (E, 11k, bL) by @jacaranda-bloom

the one where Louis is an Omega who has been keeping himself pure for his Alpha, Harry is a traditional Alpha focusing on his studies while he waits to find his bondmate, and Niall is a sneaky bastard who keeps borrowing Louis’ clothes and never returning them.

✰ in a world alone (E, 50k, bL) by @risthebrave / falsegoodnight

Harry’s breath catches as the glow grows bigger and bigger until he’s squinting his eyes and blinking at the sudden intense brightness. He closes his eyes, rubbing at them helplessly. When his eyes open again- he gasps, grip loosening on his bow as he gawks at the sight before him.

Because the swan is gone.

And in its place is the prettiest omega Harry has ever seen.

-

A Swan Lake AU

re-reads - 

✰ like a siren in the night (E, 24k, bL) by @crazyupsetter / whoknows

“There is an infestation in my home,” Louis hisses, righting himself quickly and pushing his way past Harry, heading directly for the kitchen. He’s rather haphazardly dressed himself, a coat thrown on over a loose flannel shirt and black pants, slippers on his feet.

Harry resists the urge to sigh, closing the door and trailing behind him slowly. “What kind of infestation?”

For all he knows, Louis is going to claim that there’s a ghost infestation. Harry has no idea what the end game is here – all he knows is that Louis has found at least three complaints a week to bring up since he’s been living on Harry’s property, and he’s been living here for six months.

It’s way too many fucking complaints, is what Harry is saying. Especially when most of them are ridiculous to start with.

✰ ours are the moments I play in the dark (E, 20k, bL) by @holdingthornsandroses / edensrose

Jane Austen's Persuasion AU. Nine years ago Louis Tomlinson was persuaded to break off his engagement to Harry Styles, a poor sailor. Since then Louis has come to regret being so easily convinced to give up his one chance of happiness. Now Louis' family is in debt and his childhood home is being sold. In a complete reversal of fortune, Harry has returned to England a wealthy bachelor looking to settle down. Events conspire to bring them together once more though Louis is- must surely be- the last man on earth that Captain Styles would think of now. 

✰ pretty please (with sugar on top) (E, 113k, bH) by @angelichl

Harry is a sugar baby omega who cons rich alphas for a living. Louis is a rich alpha with too much self-control.

✰ dance like warriors on a battlefield (E, 20k, bL) by @crazyupsetter / whoknows

Down in the arena, the triumphant gladiator places his foot on the back of the loser, holding him there as he waits for instruction on his next move. Kill or let live. It’s barbaric, really, the bloodlust involved in this sport. Louis is pretty sure that if it wasn’t for his distaste for the killing there would be a lot more blood soaking that sand.

As it is, his father rarely gives the kill order anymore. He gives the order to let the loser live. Louis rolls his eyes, turning away. He doesn’t miss the way the gladiator’s eyes linger on him.

fics on my list to read soon - 

✰ until (E, 38k, bL) by @allwaswell16

Rural Eagle County, Colorado wasn’t the type of place to find a famous musician or actor. At least not until songwriter Louis Tomlinson showed up with pop star Niall Horan to visit his uncle’s horse ranch, and they just happened to find themselves next door to a reclusive former movie star.

(*personal note*- I'd put off reading this until I finished my own cowboy fic so that I wouldn’t subconsciously copy anything but I’m so so excited about this one!) 

✰ smells like omega spirit (NR, 11k, omega!Louis) by @lululawrence

Louis is an omega doing a test run on neutralizers for a class project. Every time he talks to Harry he smells completely different.

Harry is an alpha who can't figure out if he's going crazy or his sense of smell is broken, but all he wants to figure out what Louis' real scent is.

Somehow they figure it out.

✰ ever since I tried your way (E, 25k, bH) by anonymous

In 1949 Harry left his bride at the altar, running away from the only life he'd known. When a kindhearted farmer offers him a ride in his truck and a place to sleep the two find themselves inexplicably drawn together. Isolated on Louis' farm with nobody but a field of dairy cows to intrude, the men are finally able to explore the parts of themselves they've spent their lives hiding away.

✰ was in no hurry, had no worries (E, 21k, bL) by @larrywmi / defencelouis 

The year is 1999 and Harry can’t stop dedicating songs to Louis on the radio. Or the one where Harry hits Louis with his car.

✰ the murmur of yearning (E, 93k) by @mediawhorefics 

Four years ago, Harry Styles was forced into a marriage of convenience to enrich and ally both his and his promised's families. The sudden, and slightly suspicious, death of the Marquess of Haxshire, however, brings great disturbance to Crescentfield Hall and, as his late's husband's closest male relative, Harry unexpectedly finds himself the head of a family he never felt he belonged to. Between a meddling distant cousin hellbent on inserting himself in Harry’s life, his wicked and mistrustful mother-in-law and his late husband’s advisors refusing to help or take him seriously, Harry struggles in the fight to keep what he’s earned and make the Estate finally feel like home.

Luckily, he doesn’t stand completely alone and finds himself an unlikely ally in Mr Tomlinson, the elusive Land Stewart who has been taking care of the property in the shadows for years. Louis Tomlinson is caring, patient, and unlike everyone else, he doesn’t seem to think Harry committed a murder.

-- 

as always, please let me know if I tagged anything incorrectly etc. and I hope this helps you a bit!! I hope you’re well and happy reading! :) 

[thehappyscavenger]

Books Read December 2020

Angel by Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that Elizabeth Taylor)

I saw the movie version of this starring Romola Garai way back when it came out and always meant to read the novel. In fact I’m pretty sure that I’ve tried to read it on at least two other occasions and never got past the first page. I’m not sure why, it’s an utterly delightful, charming and sad read. Set in Edwardian England it focuses on Angel, a pig headed working class girl with crazy vivid fantasies who decides to become a famous romance author and achieves immediate success though never critical acclaim. Her life is pretty tragic, made all the more so because despite her arrogance there is a frailty pushing her ambition and pigheadness that only two people in her life ever understand. Taylor writes with such compassion for a kind of nasty character. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Will be reading more Taylor in the future. 

Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser

I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, especially biographies because while I never hate them they always just seem like really detailed Wikipedia articles. Fraser does a really admirable job of making Marie Antoinette into a tragic figure and delves into a lot of her later life which was incredibly tragic, humiliating and prolonged (for example it took years from her leaving Versailles to her husband being assassinated, to her being imprisoned and torn away from her living children. A very, compassionate look at a woman whose name has become a punchline for excess. Do recommend if you’re into that sort of thing. Also this was the biography that Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette was based on though she only covered about 250 pages of material when the book is nearly twice that. 

Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford

I didn’t really love The Pursuit of Love but I decided to pick up the side-quel because it was enjoyable enough and I was already in that world. LiaCC takes place at the same time as Pursuit and is narrated by the same narrator but aside from some cameos from LiaCC focuses almost entirely on a different cast of characters, Polly Montdore and her rich family. The sexual politics of this book are weird in a way I simply cannot describe and is eye-brow raising in 2020. I can’t imagine what people in the ‘40s thought.  A very weird little book but a decent (and short) read. There’s a third book to the series but my library doesn’t have it so I guess I’ll never end up reading it.

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

I only heard of Dundy because she was the sister of director Shirley Clarke (who I ADORE). TDA was hugely popular as a comedic novel when it was released and then fell into obscurity though over the past decade and a bit two separate smaller imprints have brought it back in print.

Loosely based on Dundy’s life it tells the story of a 21 year old American rich girl who heads to Paris in the ‘50s to have fun, wreck her life and act a bit. It’s a silly and sweet read and I enjoyed it a lot. 

Augustus by John Williams

This is the final “major” one of Williams’ books I had left to read. As usual I loved it. It’s an epistolary novel which takes a little getting used to as that’s far from my favourite stylistic medium but Williams is, as ever, a spectacular writer wrestling with legacy and what it means to have a successful life. Here he focuses on the life of Octavius Caesar, Julius Caesar’s grand-nephew and legal heir. Ceasar and Mark Antony get all the historical attention because they had messy ends and were terrible leaders in their own way so it’s interesting that Williams focuses on Augustus whose reign over Rome brought about years of peace and was followed by a slew of unsuccessful leaders. The book delves into his maneuverings to power, the personal cost of living a powerful and public life and his own ambivalence towards his so called greatness (as imagined by Williams). 

The Right Intention by Andrés Barba

This could have been called “Variations on obsession” and been a more apt title. This wasn’t a novel but a series of four novellas all with kind of unpleasant, controlling characters whose singular focus ends up hurting those around them. I liked it okay.

And that’s a wrap for 2020! This was one of the worst years for books for me in terms of quality and quantity. At least it ended on a high note! 

[dwellordream]

“Members of respectable Victorian society were also able to perceive women as married to one another, and they rarely confounded female marriages between white, middle-class women with the polygamous or incestuous arrangements they attributed to the peoples they sought to subjugate, using Christian ideals of marriage to justify the imperial mission. The life of Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876), documented in letters and memoirs, shows that even a woman who did have an illicit affair with her daughter-in-law differentiated between that illicit, quasi-incestuous affair and a more marital relationship, conducted in full view of her friends and the public, with a woman she called her wife. Charlotte Cushman was one of the most acclaimed and financially successful American actresses of the nineteenth century, best known for playing Romeo in the 1840s.

Born in the United States, she lived outside it for most of her life, first in England and then in Italy, but returned often to play sold-out national tours. As Lisa Merrill has shown in a brilliant biography, Cushman used the language of marriage to conceptualize many of her sexual relationships with women, which after her rise to stardom usually consisted of a primary relationship with a peer and a secondary, clandestine relationship with a much younger woman, often a fan. Cushman described her primary relationships as marriages that created a spousal bond and kinship network. In 1844, she noted in her diary, “Slept with Rose,” and the following day wrote “‘R.’ Saturday, July 6th ‘married.’”. As in heterosexual marriage, sex made marriage and marriage created kinship: Cushman called Rose’s father “Father,” as though he were her father-in-law, or as though in marrying Rose she had become her sister.

Cushman was involved in two long-term relationships with women: one with Matilda Hays, an author, translator, and feminist activist, and another with the sculptor Emma Stebbins, whom she met in 1857. Steb- bins is best known today for her sculpture Angel of the Waters, which stands in Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace and features prominently in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Until her death in 1876, Cushman cultivated a public persona as a respectable artist and lived openly with Emma Stebbins in an elegant apartment brimming with friends and pets. After Cushman’s death, Emma Stebbins wrote a biography of her former spouse that, with the reticence and impersonality typical of the lifewriting discussed in chapter 1, made only one direct statement about their relationship: “It was in the winter of 1856–57 that the compiler of these memoirs first made Miss Cushman’s acquaintance, and from that time the current of their two lives ran, with rare exceptions, side by side.” But Stebbins attested to her marital connection with Cushman through the very act of writing the biography as a memoir, in her pointed exclusion of Cushman’s other lovers from her account, in her detailed description of their shared apartment in Rome, and in a ten-page inventory of their pets, including dogs named Teddy and Bushie.

…Cushman herself described her relationship to Stebbins as a marriage when she warned her young lover Emma Crow that she was not a free woman; as she put it, “Do you not know that I am already married and wear the badge upon the third finger of my left hand?” (211). Cushman began a clandestine relationship with the much younger Crow in 1858, soon after she exchanged rings with Emma Stebbins and began living with her. Cushman met Crow while touring the United States; their affair lasted years, spanned continents, and is documented in Cushman’s many letters to Crow, which Crow preserved and bequeathed to the Library of Con- gress, despite her lover’s many anxious requests that she burn them. In that correspondence, Cushman frequently tried to naturalize her adulterous betrayal of Emma Stebbins by calling the younger Emma Crow her daughter, niece, and baby, as if to suggest that Crow was not Stebbins’s rival but simply an addition to the family. “Never did a mother love her child so dearly. Never did Auntie think so sweetly so yearningly of her Niece. Never did Ladie love her lover so intensely,” Cushman wrote.

Cushman took the incestuous fantasy of sex as kinship to its literal limits when she encouraged Crow to marry Cushman’s nephew and adopted son, Ned Cushman. Cushman’s plan was to have Crow live near her as her daughter-in-law, a situation to which Cushman’s wife, Emma Stebbins, could not object. Crow was so in love with Cushman that she agreed to the arrangement, and she and Cushman continued their affair well after Crow’s marriage to Ned made Charlotte Cushman young Emma’s mother-in-law and aunt to the children Emma had with Ned. After Crow married Ned Cushman, Charlotte continued to address Emma as her lover, but also as a “dear new daughter” who had, in taking the Cushman name, also become in some sense Cushman’s wife. Cushman called Emma’s marriage with Ned her own “ultimate entire union” with Emma, and her letters to a pregnant Emma convey a sense, as biographer Lisa Merrill puts it, “that she and her ‘little lover’ were having this baby together.” With a grandiosity that came easily to a rich and famous actress, Cushman arrogated to herself the roles of husband, wife, father, mother, aunt, and lover, saluting Emma as “Dearest and Sweetest daughter[,] niece, friend and lover” and referring to herself in other letters as “Big Mamma.”

Cushman’s matrilineal, incestuous, adulterous, polygamous, homosexual household seems to realize the conservative fantasy of the primitive family in which no distinctions are made, no restrictions imposed, and patriarchal monogamy does not contain the promiscuity that results when women reign unfettered. For that very reason, Cushman provides an excellent point of departure for interrogating the equation of homosexuality with primitive sexual anarchy. Her affair with Emma Crow does not in fact show that those who disregard the taboo on homosexuality will also flout the prohibitions on incest and polygamy. Instead it demonstrates that, like most Victorians, Cushman’s desires were shaped by taboos that incited the very desires they prohibited. Vows of monogamy, even when not legally binding, made adultery all the more alluring, and as Foucault shows in the first volume of the The History of Sexuality, nothing in the Victorian family was more normative than its obsession with incest.

In societies that make “the family . . . the most active site of sexuality . . . incest occupies a central place; it is constantly being solicited and refused; it is an object of obsession and attraction, a dreadful secret and an indispensable pivot. It is manifested as a thing that is strictly forbidden . . . but it is also a thing that is continuously demanded in order for the family to be a hotbed of constant sexual incitement.” The mother-daughter axis was as subject to eroticization as any other aspect of family life, and incest fantasies, veiled and overt, were a prominent feature of Victorian culture (see chapters 3 and 4). Cushman’s letters to Emma Crow blurred the lines between lover and family member in the same way as Dinah Mulock Craik’s 1850 novel Olive did when describing a wife’s love for her hus- band: “She loved him at once with the love of mother, sister, friend, and wife.” Pornographic novels obsessively depicted incest of every variety and in every possible gender configuration (see chapter 3), and Henry James easily translated his acquaintance with Charlotte Cushman’s history into the heterosexual plot of The Golden Bowl, in which a father marries his daughter’s husband’s lover, also named Charlotte.

The normative cast of even Cushman’s most hidden desires helps to explain why she was not branded as deviant in her lifetime and why the relationships with women that she did make public were accepted by those surrounding her. Cushman was a recognized and often admired type: a nineteenth-century woman whose financial independence made it relatively easy for her to form a couple with another woman. Cushman enjoyed playing male roles on stage, and like many middle-class and aristocratic women in female marriages, she adopted masculine dress and nicknames. But she lived openly with other women as a woman, and identified with both feminine and masculine roles. Cushman called Emma Stebbins her better half and described herself as married to her first lover, Rose, but she did not consistently or exclusively see herself as a husband.

The language of marriage described the quality of her commitment to a sexual partner rather than a gendered division of roles. In this respect female marriage appears, on the basis of current historical evidence, to have been a primarily middle- and upper-class phenomenon. Working- class women who earned their own money also formed couples with other women, but it was more common for one member of the couple to live as a man. Such alliances were therefore not perceived as female marriages. Although in some technical sense they could be called marriages between women, in the eyes of the law, the couple’s community, and even the couple themselves, they were marriages between a woman and a man. If caught or exposed as women, some female husbands were legally cen- sured and mocked in ballads and broadsides for seizing male privileges, but others were not. An 1869 article on “Modern Amazons,” for example, wrote approvingly of two women who assumed the roles of “man and wife” and “lived together in good repute with their neighbours for eighteen years.”

…The idea of female marriage was not simply a private metaphor used by women in same-sex relationships; it was also a term used by the legally married to describe relationships that were conducted openly and discussed neutrally in respectable society. Even among middle-class Victori- ans, marriages were not defined by law alone, and for couples with no legal status, social acceptance provided legitimation and established rules for beginning and ending relationships. Charlotte Cushman assumed that many in her circle were aware of sexual romance between women, since she warned Emma Crow in an 1860 letter that “there are people in this world who could understand our love for each other, therefore it is necessary that we should keep our expression of it to ourselves.”

The historical context leaves it surprisingly unclear whether Cushman demanded secrecy because Crow was a woman, or because Cushman was afraid of being exposed as adulterous. There are no similar records of Cushman attempting to conceal her relationships with Eliza Cook, Matilda Hays, or Emma Stebbins, which far from being open secrets were explicitly acknowledged by her social circle and in newspapers. Cushman and her lovers displayed their intimacy for all to see. In the 1840s Cook published a fervent poem, “To Charlotte Cushman,” which described the two women as “captive in Affection’s thrall,” and when Hays published her translation of George Sand’s La Petite Fadette in 1851, she dedicated it to Charlotte Cushman. On a tour of United States theaters in 1849, Cushman traveled with Hays, and a newspaper article praising Cushman as a “woman . . . worthy of homage and esteem” added, “Miss Cushman will be accompanied by her friend, novelist and translator, Matilda M. Hays.”

…To understand the social position of women in female marriages, it is helpful to distinguish between a subculture and a network. Charlotte Cushman did not belong to a subculture, a type of social group that tends to be organized around a limited number of shared traits and that coheres through its separation from the mainstream. She did, however, belong to a network, a form of social alliance whose strength derives from its relative openness and internal variety and from its links to other networks. Overlapping sets of acquaintances as well as shared identities define networks; the stronger the network, the greater the number and type of groups to which it is linked. Cushman’s network thus included women in or interested in relationships with other women and had many links to people who were not in same-sex couples.

Her circle overlapped considerably, for example, with the Browning circle, which consisted of highly respected artists who lived in Italy to get distance from their immediate families, access to a warmer climate, and exposure to Italy’s historic culture. Charlotte Cushman’s integration into multiple networks shows how easily same-sex relationships between women were assimilated to the model of marriage. Indeed, as Merrill notes, Cushman’s relationships with Matilda Hays and Emma Stebbins helped incorporate the actress into many networks by giving her an aura of propriety and respectability. Women in female marriages or interested in sexual liaisons with women banded together but also entered social circles organized around legally married couples. Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning spent time not only with Cushman and Hays but with several other women whose charged same-sex relationships included giddy flirtations, tempestuous infatuations, short-term love affairs, and long-term partnerships.

…In the 1860s and 1870s, a period when few knew of the sexological idea of inversion and many still associated sodomy with sexual acts absolutely opposed to nature and virtue, the female couple was accepted as a variation on legal marriage, not treated as a separate species. This suggests that Lillian Faderman and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg were absolutely right that Victorians considered love between women to be perfectly normal, whether that love involved intense, sensual friendships that existed alongside marriage to men (Smith-Rosenberg) or lifelong partnerships that replaced marriage to men (Faderman). It also shows how they were wrong. Smith-Rosenberg erred in defining intimacy between women as a supplement to male-female marriage, for women in female marriages did not supplement marriage, they appropriated it.

Faderman was wrong to argue that acceptance of female couples depended on the perceived asexuality of their relationships; the use of marriage as a term to describe female couples suggests that people believed sex was involved, for marriage, unlike friendship, was never an asexual term. For Victorians, marriage meant the union of sexual and spiritual impulses, the reconciliation of sexuality with propriety. Marriage was a socially acceptable exhibition of sexual intimacy because it was predicated on fidelity and thus advertised not only the sexuality of spouses but also their acceptance of restraints and limits. For this reason, female marriage was not associated with a savage state of sexual license but instead was readily integrated into even the most restrictive ideas of social order. As we will see, however, female marriage also differed from legal marriage between men and women in significant ways, and those differences made it a model for reformers seeking to modernize legal marriage.”

- Sharon Marcus, “The Genealogy of Marriage.” in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

[eeveedel]

Hi all, I haven’t recced some fics in awhile but...today is fic writers appreciation day! And there are so many fics that I love so very much and have brought so much happiness into my life. 

And it just so happens I have a personal document where i’ve kept track of fics I’ve read for the past 3-4 years, categorized by tropes. So I thought it would be fun to rec you my all-time favorite fic from each of my personal categories! There are so many good fics so I hope you enjoy. And if you want a full fic rec list for any of these categories, please tell me! 

And a big thank you again to all of the lovely authors out there, I hope you have a lovely day and now how valued your work is. 

A/B/O

Sisterwives by jaerie

This was it, the moment Louis had been waiting for his entire life. Giddy excitement bubbled up as he held hands and stared up at his soon-to-be alpha and husband and grinned. The ceremony was small and simple, but Louis didn’t mind. Fresh flowers pinned into his hair and a brand new outfit was all he needed to feel special in front of their few witnesses. It was just some members of his family and a few of the church elders in attendance as was customary for any marriage beyond the first wife within the faith.

First wives were the ones to have elaborate weddings with the whole community involved. An alpha’s first wedding was a celebration of an their coming of age, his first steps into fulfilling God’s prophecy. There were many glories for an omega that came with being a first wife but also many responsibilities. Louis had never aspired to be a first wife or even a second. He wasn’t experienced enough to be the leader of an alpha’s many wives and children and he didn’t think he’d be up to the task.

Louis was just fine in the position he was stepping into as the seventh.

Or Louis thinks he's getting everything he's ever dreamed of. Harry helps him find what makes him truly happy.

Action/Adventure 

The Dead of July by whimsicule

Harry is Captain America, and Louis’ been dead for 70 years.

Age Gap

White Pages, White Lace, Big Hands, Pretty Face by thechesirepussycat

“He touches his sides, his neck, his lips, all the places Harry has just been, all the places that still tingle from Harry’s touch. Such a strange feeling Louis has, so unreal and nerve-racking. He can’t begin to describe what Harry has done to him, what about Harry makes Louis want to call him… Daddy.“

Or, a gratuitous Sugar Daddy!Harry and Student!Louis AU.

Angst

Bot by tomlinsunshine (11k)

Zayn builds robots; Harry is a big fan of his latest model.

Break Up

got the sunshine on my shoulders by hattalove

five years ago, harry styles left his tiny home town to make it big as a recording artist. he didn't have much regard for what he left behind - a life, a family, and a husband, who woke up one morning to find him gone.

now, harry has everything he could possibly want: he's rich, famous, and adored by everyone he meets, including his boyfriend. but when said boyfriend proposes to him, he's forced to face the uncomfortable facts of his past - and louis, who's spent the last five years returning every set of divorce papers harry sent him.

(or, an au based on the movie sweet home alabama.)

Canon

nonstop earthquake dreams of you by lumineres

And there's heat behind it, blazing, plasmatic, like stars crashing together, like an explosion in space, like a supernova, like a black hole--everything else sucked out of existence. There's no bed and there's no pillow and they're not lying down, just floating somewhere, somehow, and there's no room and there's no X Factor house and there's no Niall snuffling or Liam's deep, even breathing and there's no wind or traffic outside and there's no hum of the heating unit and it's all just Louis. All encompassingly Louis.

or, harry falls hard and finds louis already at the bottom

Classics

Love Is A Rebellious Bird by 100percentsassy and gloria_andrews

AU in which the boys still make music. Louis is the concertmaster of the London Symphony Orchestra, Harry is the New! and Exciting! interim conductor/ex-cello prodigy who "has made Mozart cool again" according to Esquire Magazine (Louis hates him immediately, which is definitely why he internet stalked him in his dark bedroom late at night that one time), and Niall is the best. Zayn and Liam are around too.

College/Uni 

Could be Kissing My Fruit Punch Lips by thechesirepussycat

Harry happens upon a porn site that specializes in live videos and sort of falls in love with the cute boy he only knows as Kitty.

And then he gets the surprise of his life when he finds out Kitty attends his university...

Crime

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by haroldslouis 

1997 AU where Harry is a bank robber and Louis falls in love with him

Dom/Sub

No Control Club series by SadaVeniren

Harry, a popular BDSM blogger, writes a negative review about Louis’ club. Louis wants to have a chance to make it up to him.

Dunkirk/Alex

Poison & Wine by tilthesundies

Alex comes home from the war to find a stranger living in his flat.

Dystopian/Apocalypse

things have gotten closer to the sun by starseas

when a solar flare is announced to end the world in twelve days, harry reunites with the people that he used to know better than the back of his own hand.

Enemies to Lovers

you flower, you feast by stylinsoncity 

He's King of the Underworld, but don't assume Louis has it all. He could stand for some excitement in his monotonous, eternal life and maybe, even.....a soulmate.

(Despite not having a soul.)

And along came "Harry"

Established Relationship

I Only Ever Want You by itsmiz

Louis and Harry's relationship goes through a series of changes while Liam and Zayn discover new things about themselves, as well.

Or: Louis & Harry and Liam & Zayn begin to have sex in front of each other and a lot of kink-discovery results from that.

Fairy Tale

Red by frosteddream 

Shockwaves were sent through the village after the McPherson family was savagely killed. There were people who feared the beast that did it, and then there was Louis, or, as most people liked to call him, Red. (Little Red Riding Hood AU.)

Fake Dating 

And Then a Bit by infinitelymint

Harry and Louis fake a relationship for publicity. Eventually it becomes a lot less fake and a lot more real.

Famous (non-1D AU)

a million roses (bathed in rock n roll) by deLILah 

au. harry sings in smoky dive bars; louis misses his flight home. they go to coney island in the morning.

(aka - harry is lana del rey, and louis makes him a star.)

Fashion

Just my style by thoughtsickles

Harry is sick, and the only thing that might help him is the pheromones from his mate--problem is, he hasn't got a mate.

Louis' just been disowned, and taking part in a medical study where he has to cuddle with some strange alpha seems to be his only option for earning a bit of cash.

The hippies and Omega Rights campaigners are busy changing the world--but all Harry wants is a chance to live.

Fluff

Dreaming of You by velvetoscar

The Begrudging Starbucks AU.

The world is winter and steamed milk and creamy espresso shots. The world is a never ending queue. The world is a Starbucks logo and a pink-cheeked smile from Niall and a bored scowl from Zayn and the world is Louis watching his best mate, Liam, fall in love with their newest customer, Harry. Who may or may not be in love with Louis. The world is cruel.

Frat

Soft Feet, Fast Hands, Can’t Lose by dolce_piccante

American Uni AU. Harry Styles is a frat boy football star from the wealthy Styles Family athletic dynasty. A celebrity among football fans, he knows how to play, he knows how to party, and he knows how to fuck (all of which is well known among his legion of admirers).

Louis Tomlinson is a student and an athlete, but his similarities to Harry end there. Intelligent, focused, independent, and completely uninterested in Harry’s charms, Louis is an anomaly in a world ruled by football.

A bet about the pair, who might be more similar than they originally thought, brings them together. Shakespeare, ballet, Disney, football, library chats, running, accidental spooning, Daredevil and Domino’s Pizza all blend into one big friendship Frappucino, but who will win in the end?

Friends to Lovers

OmegaVision by jaerie 

Tomlin Networks Presents: OmegaVision starring Louis Tomlinson! The world's first 24/7 reality channel available in over 150 countries worldwide following the life of the first male omega born in over a century. Follow Louis through his daily routine, the ups and downs of growing up or just leave him on for comfort. There are many reasons to tune in but, no matter what yours may be, there's always a part of Louis that is just like you!

Or a Truman Show au that nobody asked for where Louis is Truman and Harry just wants to be his mate

Girl Direction

Never Enough by idekboo

Louis couldn't get enough of Harry and that gorgeous body of hers. She wasn't shy about letting her know.

High School

I found a love (darling just dive right in) by wonderlou

Louis, an omega with very little control. Harry, an alpha with a lot of emotion. Neither of them have any idea what do to with this little thing called love, but they'll be damned if they don't put up a good fight.

Historical

Coax the Cold by MediaWhore 

England, 1897.

English Professor Louis Tomlinson’s passion for the occult has been a source of mockery and derision for most of his life. When he hears whispers of a travelling freak show newly established in London claiming the existence of a monstrous sea hybrid, half-man, half-fish, Louis sees it as his ticket to credibility amongst his peers. The summer he spends undercover working on the show, however, gives him much more than that.

Miscellaneous/Unique

the impossible now by stylinsoncity

A wish on Christmas Eve sends Louis to an alternate dimension where Harry is a member of One Direction.

Mpreg

The Things I’d Do to Wake Up Next to You by dirtymattress (36k)

Harry wakes up to a pregnant Louis Tomlinson and a wedding band on his finger.

Mythology

Say Hallelujah, Say Goodnight by alivingfire

Louis is an angel who is just a little too bad to be good, Harry is a demon who is just a little too good to be bad, and they're both a little too in love to be impartial when angels and demons go to war.

PWP

mr. tomlinson by iwillpaintasongforlou

Louis is a billionaire CEO who makes grown men cry and rival companies crumble. He's also an omega. Harry is the quiet cupcake of a man he calls his alpha and the only one who gets to see Louis as anything less than fearsome.

Roommates

streetwise hercules by bottomlinsons

Uni AU, where Louis pretends to be Harry's boyfriend to scare away his one night stands.

Royalty

feel the chemicals burn in my bloodstream by togetherwecouldbealright 

Harry is a journalist with a lot of secrets and Louis is the future king of the United Kingdom; they live together for 60 days.

Spies

never gonna dance again by togetherwecouldbealright

Louis is a spy and Harry is a dancer. The only real thing they know is each other.

Soulmates

Nameless Night by green_feelings

For their 18th birthday, every person receives a letter that reads a simple date. That is the date you'll meet your soulmate.

Harry and Louis have different beliefs, live in different worlds and have different dreams, hopes and fears. Yet, they're not so different from each other when it comes to love. When their paths cross, there is no doubt they belong together. Except for that one, essential difference: they didn't receive the same date.

Or, a fic about differences that make no difference at all: Harry and Louis are soulmates. In every way possible. Featuring Niall as a role model, and Liam and Zayn as a different kind of role models.

Summer Romance

Rivers til I Reach You by embodied

AU. Louis studies astronomy; Harry studies Louis. They spend their summers on the water and it shouldn't be complicated (spoiler: it is).

Supernatural

Howls Like a Beast (You Flower, You Feast) by indiaalaphawhiskey (16k)

France, 1754. Château de Versailles.

“You don’t love me,” Louis had said, utterly blasé as he callously fractured the heart of a Harry that was just barely eighteen.

“I do,” Harry had insisted pleadingly, green eyes already watering.

Louis had rolled his eyes, exasperated and flippant in the way only beautiful, young boys could be when faced with the affections of a baby prince. He had run his finger down Harry’s cheek then, had forced him to look into his eyes as he delivered the final blow.

“You’ll change your mind once you’ve seen more of the world,” Louis had teased, pressing a brutally delicate kiss onto Harry’s lovely, pure cheek. “Once you’ve been properly defiled.” He had whispered filthily, delighted by the gasp he heard, the frantic pink blush that had rested high on Harry’s cheeks, the power he had felt at knowing he could make the Crown Prince squirm.

[writer-at-heart96]

When the stars align - Chapter 1

Sat next to Emilia and Kit, she'd never imagined she'd ever sit here. Even after four years of living this life, of being as famous as she'd become. Sure she'd attended the Academy awards for the first time last year. But even then she'd never have expected to be sat here the following year as one of the nominees.

Four and a half years around New years during her final year of her nursing student she'd finally published to of her then finished books. And they'd taken her on a whirlwind story so far. She'd published books, become a successful actress, philanthropist, spokeswoman, successful author and writer for movies.

One of the people who she wrote most often with was Kit, they were the current dream team. As once Dan and Dave had been for Game of Thrones had been. They'd shot themselves in the foot by the worst ever ending for the best TV series ever. George was a mentor of a sort to her and he'd been the one to put her in contact with the Game of Thrones cast and how Emilia came to be one of her best friends. Kit was like the bigger brother she'd never had and her partner when it came to writing.

"And now presenting the academy awards for best original screenplay, Morgan Freeman." the announcer called out as she turned to look at Kit with a nervous smile. The pressure was on for them both. Alexis had won countless awards by now for her writing ability, she had no doubt in her ability to write anymore.

But still, an academy award would be the top of everything as she turned back to the stage as they finished running through the nominees.

"and the Academy awards for Best Original Screenplay goes to..." Morgan paused as he opened the envelope as Kit took her hand in his. "The nation's Crussador, Kit Harrington and Alexis Mertens." he called out as she turned to Kit with a stunned expression to which he only let out a chuckle, before pulling her up. "come on sis," he whispered in her ear as he gave her a hug. Placing her hand in the crook of Kit's elbow they walked to the stage, careful that she didn't trip over her gown, that would just be her luck as she accepted the award.

"First of all, we want to thank the people who've been able to turn the script we wrote into such a brilliant movie. A script is only as good as how the actors portray it, so thanks for making the characters we made come to life. To the people who've supported us through the years." Kit started as she stood to his side as she gave him a small nod for him to continue. When they'd been nominated they'd laughed and joked about it.

Then last week they'd sat together, realising they might actually win this. Their movie had gotten award after award in lots of categories, and they'd figured what they'd say together.

"When we started writing this story, the only thing we said to each other was that we wanted something than what we were used to." Kit chuckled, looking back at Alexis as she let out a chuckle, whilst tilting her head in amusement. "I think we've made accomplished to do that." he chuckled as he turned back to the crowd, finishing up his speech before they were whisked away to the back to talk to the world's press.

"I still can't believe it," Alexis whispered as they made their way to their seats. "Start believing it." Kit teased her as he nudged her side and she rolled her eyes. She couldn't sit still for long as she and Emilia had to present an award as the Targaryen rulers. This summer the final instalment of Ages of Conquest was going to air and she couldn't be happier. Four years of hard work on a Prequel Game of Thrones movie. She was mostly finished, just a few more pick up's and than she could officially hang up her wig of Visenya Targaryen.

"Maybe we'll finally find you a guy." Emilia teased her s they waited to be called on stage. "I doubt that'll ever happen," she told her with a shake of her head. Even though she and Henry had broken up about eight months ago, she wasn't ready to go out there yet. They'd been co-stars on Age of Conquests, him playing her brother and her husband. They'd only lasted less than a year, it didn't seem he understood the work she put in. She had done so many movies already in such a short span of time, but she wanted to prove herself, not only as an actress but as a writer and more. She had two organisations, ECIAS was celebrating its third birthday soon and RISE was going to be turning two in April. Both were causes close to her chest for different reasons.

Though they were run by others and capable people for her, she still knew what happened there and was updated every fortnight. Then she had her publishers breathing down her back, which lessened in the last few months since she ripped them a new one. she'd published seven books in under five years and no small ones either. She'd told them that if they wanted books worthy of being sold they'd have to wait. They'd become very rich from her books, not that she wasn't rich either from them. She was headed to being a billionaire from all her work. But still, she put a lot of work in everything. For a movie she was shooting now she'd gotten her helicopter license which she just loved. For another one, Mission Impossible seven she'd gotten her biking license and so it went on. The next movie to shoot was a sequel to one she'd shot with Emilia and Emma: Eden's treasure two.

"You can't stay single forever." Emilia tried, now that she'd found happiness with Scott, after all the failed relationships she was putting pressure on her to get the same. She'd introduced Scott and Emilia about two years ago when she'd shot a movie with him called Toff guys. She'd just broken up when she'd dragged her to a cast dinner and they'd hit it right off. And now two years later they were happily together and living together in England.

"I know, I'm just not ready I think. I have such a hectic life Emilia, maybe I shouldn't be getting with anyone, it's what broke us up in the first place," she told her as Emilia nudged her shoulder. "You deserve it more than anyone," she told her as they were called on the stage.

***

"Oh please." Alexis snickered as she lifted the flute of champagne to her mouth. "What, come on admit it you find him hot as shit." Emilia tried as Alexis threw her head back in full blown laughter, getting the attention of few people close by at the afterparty. "Fine, I'll admit," Alexis smirked at her as Emilia grinned at her mischieviously. "Why don't you go up to the Avengers, I think they might be looking for a goddess of mischief." she teased her best friend and now it was her turn to start laughing.

"I always thought you found me hot." Emilia grinned as both of them laughed when Kit walked up to them with a frightened look. "What are the two of you to planning on doing?" he asked them with a fearful glint in his eyes. Whenever those two got together, which was a lot since they were best friends they always got up to something. The last time he was with them at an event they'd told the press to ask him if he'd ever kissed a guy. they always got up to mischief and the laughing and teasing looks in their eyes, well it had him a little wary.

"You're scared of us." Emilia pointed out with a small wave of her hand. "With good reason, I've known you for 15 years Emilia and Alexis for almost four and a half years and you've been best friends since then. You two are always up to something, it's like Sophie and Maisie." he compared the two pairs of best friends as both Emilia and Alexis raised their brows at him, before looking at one another conspiringly.

"That's my cue to get out of here before the two of you get up something with me at the end of it," he told them as he pointed his finger at the two of them as he wrapped his arms around his pregnant wife and walked off. "Chicken," Alexis called out after him as he flapped his arms like a chicken as she rolled her eyes. It was so much fun to rile him up and it was so easy to do. Certainly, when she and Emilia were together, they tended to get up to trouble. "Excuse me." Alexis apologised when she bumped into someone and she immediately felt a pair of arms steady her.

"No trouble at all, it's you." the voice said as she turned to look at Chris Evans with a cheeky grin on his face. "yes, it's me." she chuckled with a smile on her face. "congrats on the award tonight." he congratulated her as she gave him a soft smile. "thanks it was a team effort, Kit and I only made the script, the cast made it comes alive," she told him as he tilted her head at her with studious face.

"Still, you guys did a pretty good job with that script." he complimented her as she gave him a sheepish smile, her cheeks reddening. "Thank you," she whispered to him as he nodded his head. "Want to have another drink?" he asked as she took a subtle look of where Emilia and the rest of her friends were, they were all scattered and talking as she nodded her head.

"Sure." she smiled, nodding her head as the turned to walk towards the bar, him following her as she ordered a Bellini and he a beer.

"I really like your work, by the way, I think you're an incredible writer and author." he told her as they went to sit on one of the lounches outside beneath the Christmas lights. "thank you, I put a lot of work and effort into it, I'm glad you enjoy it as much as I had making it and writing it," she told him with a tiny smile as she adjusted the slit of her gown so she wasn't flashing anything as she pulled her other leg underneath her. With all the camera's gone and the attention, she could finally let her hair down. She loved what she did, don't get her wrong and her fame gave her all she had, her career opportunities, the voice in which she advocated a lot of things for.

But she wasn't an attention seeker, it was great when she needed it for work and things she supported. But outside of that, she was still the shy, geeky, sheepish, uncertain person, at the core she was still the very same person she'd always been. She wanted to remain grounded and not float, she'd seen how it shouldn't be and she never wanted to be one of those people to disrespect others cause she had a great job and lots of money. She remembered her roots and where she came from and it had basically been from nothing.

And right now though she was surrounded by all the celebrities, she'd gotten used to being surrounded by them. It had taken her quite a while and sometimes she was still star struck. But she could hide it better, but right now all she wanted to do was put her feet up, have a drink, celebrate tonight and relax.

"there you are cap." she heard a voice behind her say and she turned around to face most of the Avengers cast. "And it seems you got a lovely woman's attention." Robert teased them as she ducked her head sheepishly. "It's very lovely to meet you." they all greeted her as she replied in the same sentence. "congrats on tonight's award," they told her as she thanked them. "It was a team effort," she told them with certainty in her voice.

"You writing anything at the moment?" Scarlett asked her as she lifted her new drink to her lips. "I probably should get started on my books, but I can't seem to get myself to sit down to do the research. I think a small break from them is in order and besides that not really anything concrete yet. Kit and I are meeting up next week at home to see if we can come up with a new script." she explained to them as she thought of her house in the English countryside, she loved it there. It was so green and beautiful, she had a beautiful property. It was a private place and she loved spending time there by herself or having friends and family over.

"Already a new one." Mark chuckled as she shrugged her shoulders. "Of course, we don't go long without writing together. We understand each other when it comes to writing and we understand what we're working towards. I've worked together with Kit, writing together for four years now and if we don't write for two months it's a rarity." she explained to them as she rested her glass on her knee.

"You mostly write with Kit?" Luke asked her as she nodded her head. "When I'm not writing by myself, I write with Kit," she explained to them as she felt a hand on her shoulder and she looked up to see Emilie there. "Hey guys." she greeted everyone, before looking back down at her best friend. "I'm not feeling too well, I'm going to head back to the hotel," she told Alicia as she started to get up. "You want me to come along? what's wrong?" she asked her with a tilt of her head. "just my stomach and no stay here, do you have the keycard to our suite?" Emilia asked her friend as she watched her open her clutch to check it out. "Yes I've got it with me," she reassured her. "Great, I'll see you tomorrow morning," she told her as she said goodbye, promising to catch up with those she knew later on and then she was off. "You two really are best friends." Scarlett pointed out as Alicia nodded her head. "Yes, We're pretty close and I'm glad to have had her for so many things," Alicia admitted to herself and to the people around her.

She was incredibly lucky to have her best friend, she'd taught her a hell of a lot about acting and so much else. she was a true friend, something which was hard to come by and she looked forward to being her maid of honour at her wedding in May to Scott.

Sure she still had friends home in Belgium, close friends, but they could never understand the life she now lived.

"Would you like to write for the avengers?" one of the producers asked her as she turned to look at him with a thoughtful look on her face. "I don't know, maybe given a chance, but knowing me I won't be loyal to the comics at all, I've never even read them," she told them with a chuckle as they waved it off. "You have brilliant ideas of your own, I'm sure you could make it work." The guy told her as she tilted her head to the side. "I wouldn't be against it let's keep it at that," she told them as they all gave her curious looks, to have her write for them. One of the two biggest writers at the moment, her and Kit. Well, that would certainly be something to take a hold of with both hands.

"How long are you in LA for?" the producer asked her as she took a sip of her glass. "Four more days," she told them as they nodded their heads. "Maybe we could come to London?" he suggested as she shook her head. "I'm heading for Ireland and then I'll be in Dubrovnik for the pick up's for conquests," she explained to them with an apologetic tone and look on her face. "I could come by tomorrow or the few days I'm still here if you'd want that." she offered up to them as they nodded their heads as they exchanged numbers. they'd be calling her tomorrow morning with when the best time would be to meet up.

It wasn't much longer than the bosses ran off and the kids could play as she always called it. Everyone always behaved till the producers were gone and then things went loose.

Kit had come to say goodbye not much later, wanting to return to the hotel with Pregnant Rose. "We'll see each other soon sis," he told her as he kissed her cheek as she said goodbye to her two good friends. "So you might come aboard MCU?" Chris asked her after some thought he'd extended his contract to play Captain America a bit longer. And now that Alicia might be writing on it, well it was just another confirmation that he needed to do this. "Yes, don't know what though," she told him as she gave him a small smile, still sat on the place they'd sat on. His castmates and friends had dispersed now as well as they kept talking.

"I'm sure that whatever you do, it'll be amazing," he commented as she gave him a sheepish smile. "Thanks," she whispered as he nodded to her glass. "Another one?" he asked her as she shook her head. "No thank you, I better get back, if they're going to call me tomorrow morning," she told him, it was already four in the morning and she wanted to be clear-headed when they did call.

"oh, I'd love to have talked a bit more," he told her with an honest tone, he'd been fascinated by this young woman since she started making a name for herself. First with her books, then as an actress and screenwriter. She was a multiversed person and there wasn't a person who hadn't wanted to talk to her tonight, people had come over to her all night. Interrupting their quiet fascinating and amazing chat.

"You've got my number," she told him with a cheeky grin on her face. "Why don't we go out to dinner tomorrow? Emilia can come with, it'll be nice to catch up," he suggested as she thought about it for a moment and figured why not. "Sure, send me a text with the details," she told him as she got up and he helped her as she gave him a tiny smile. "I had a lot of fun talking tonight," she told him as he nodded his head at her.

***

Chris: 'Up yet?' came to his text as she stepped inside of her suite, Emilia was sat on the couch, looking at something on her computer.

"How was it?" Emilia asked, looking up from where she was reading a new script. "Great, I'll be writing the next Avengers movie," she told her, still in disbelief, those movies were huge, to be writing for them, it was a very daunting task. She hoped to be up to the task, all actors had extended their contracts and were looking forward to the next Avengers movie. She still had to think about what she would write about. LA wasn't a good writing environment, it didn't work for her so she'd have to get started on it once she reached Belfast. And then she hoped not to disappoint the people she'd met last night and the people having faith in her. So far she'd only written two movie scripts all by herself, this would be her third. talk about pressure and she wasn't sure if she'd be able to do live up to the name she'd made for herself. Her brain was already running full speed ahead and she was starting to think that this might not have been the smartest either. Thanos had been such a great villain, to outlive that one, well she wasn't sure if she'd be able to do it. They'd assured her that they could find out a new villain behind a lot of conspiracy, leading up to another end game in a way. But still, it didn't give her much comfort and she was starting to get worried.

'Yes, just came back from the meeting, get to write next Avengers movie.' she texted Chris back before she forgot, she knew how distracted she tended to come and replying to messages could sometimes last hours.

"You'll do fine, you can't write a bad story," Emilia told her as Alicia gave her a doubtful look, before putting her stuff down in her bedroom. "So you coming to dinner?" she asked her as she sat down next to her best friend. "Hell no, a hot guy like Chris Evans asks you out for dinner and I would have to tag along. No way no hell, this is your chance," she told her as Alicia let her head drop back on the backrest with a groan.

"Emilia, stop setting me up, the only thing I can seem to be good at is career making. I'm not meant for happiness in my private life," she told her with a shake of her head. It's what it felt like at least when it came to her career, well many things could be said about it, but not that she didn't have a brilliant career.

When it came to her personal life, not that she'd gone through a list of guys, only one. She was pretty old fashioned when it came to relationships and she hadn't wanted to focus on a relationship when it would end badly again. Henry and Jens before him, nothing would ever work out for her when it came to her love life.

"Yes you are Li if one deserves to be happy and in love, it's you," she told her as she turned to look out the window behind them. "Just go out and enjoy an evening with a handsome and hot guy." Emilia tried as Alicia turned to look at her best friend when her phone buzzed.

Chris: 'Great, can't wait to read with what you come up with. You up for Italian?' came the questions and half a minute later came. 'Is Emilia joining us?'

"See I was even an afterthought, he wants you to have dinner with, not me." Emilia pointed out and she couldn't really deny that as she turned back to her phone. "Sounds great and no, she won't be able to make it," Alicia replied as she went to get her computer to start some research.

'Great, I'll pick you up, at the Waldorf right?' came the question. "Yes," she replied. "I'll pick you up at seven." cames his reply as she checked the clock to see it was only two in the afternoon, so she could still work for four more hours.

"Li, shouldn't you be getting ready?" she heard Emilia's voice say all of a sudden to her left. "I still got time," she told her as she continued to type on her laptop. "Yea, it's 6:15, Chris will be here in 45 minutes," Emilia told her with an amused sing a song tone as Alicia looked at the time and realised she'd just worked for four hours without realising it. "Crap," she called out, saving the document, closing her laptop and running to the bathroom in her room. "You couldn't have said anything earlier?" she called out to her best friend still in their living room as Emilia sat on the couch shaking her head in amusement. Only Alicia could be so entranced and occupied in thought to forget the time.

She'd seen her do it countless times whenever they shared a room. Which they tended to do when they had to go somewhere together. Mostly it was a suite with two bedrooms, they were best friends, had seen each other naked and knew each other's secrets. At times they'd even shared a bed when a suite hadn't been available. She could literally say that she knew her best friend well and could predict most of the things she'd do, and since Alicia was pretty unpredictable, that was an achievement in itself.

"What am I even going to wear?" Alicia asked herself as she rushed to get ready, washing her hair, shaving her legs and armpits, washing her body in record time. Wrapped in a towel, she dried her hair with another towel and let it to air dry whilst she brushed her teeth and applied the tiniest bit of makeup. She wasn't one that liked wearing make up a lot, for an event like the Oscars last night, then she'd wear makeup. Now it was only a bit of eye shadow, eyeliner, mascara and lip gloss, nothing else. Pulling her hair back from her face she did a knot at the back of her head and went to find out what she was going to wear. She still had 15 minutes to go, thank god for that, she looked to her right when she heard Emilia laughing. "hurricane Alicia is in the house." she teased her, the nickname she'd earned herself.

Since Alicia her mind ran up to a thousand miles an hour at times, she was called that. In a span of five minutes she could come up with subjects that weren't even closely related that it didn't make sense, but somehow she managed to connect the dots. She was able to go from writing to acting to doing other stuff, that's why she'd been given the nickname hurricane. Not that she minded at all, but looking around her room, it had been a mess before, it was even worse now.

"You should help me instead of laughing at me," she told her with a nervous chuckle as Emilia took pity on her and walked over to a dress lying on the floor. "This one, you'll look beautiful in it." Emilia told her as she eyed the dress doubtfully. "a part of my stomach is going to be bare." she told her, she didn't want Chris to get the wrong impression. Yes, last night, their conversation had been refreshing and amazing, but she didn't want to read to much into it either. And that dress in her mind did exactly that.

"Put it on," Emilia told her as she pushed it into Alicia's hands and she pulled off her towel, found the right bra to put on, her knickers she'd already had on and put on the dress. "You look incredible." Emilia told her as she looked at her best friend and hoped that she could return the favour she'd done for her two and a half years ago. The reason why she was getting married in three months time to an amazing man. And Chris, she knew him from previous encounters, if someone would be able to keep Alicia's attention and mind at bay, it would be him. The more she thought about it, the better it actually sounded and seemed. "Now go down and have fun." she told her as she nudged her out of their room with five minutes to spare she arrived at the lobby.

'I'm outside.' came the text from Chris as she went to look for him. She found him standing beside a Lexus car. "Hey, you look beautiful," he told her as she went to kiss his cheek. "Thanks, you don't look so bad yourself." she smiled as he held her door open to get in the car. "didn't want to disappoint," he told her as she slid in the car and he closed the door.

He knew that this wasn't just dinner and wanted to make sure that it was okay with her before they left the curb. So when he got inside of his car, he turned to look at her. "I probably should have said this earlier, but I'd like this to be more of a date than dinner." he told her as he looked at her, she looked so beautiful, the bare amount of make up. "you okay with that?" he asked her as she looked at him with a small smile on her lips. "it is," she reassured him, resting her hand on his that rested on the console between them. "Great." he grinned at her as he turned in his seat and drove them towards the restaurant.

"Really?" she asked with a surprised tone to learn that he'd spend nearly four weeks in India with Buddhist monks. "Yea really." he chuckled as she tilted her head to the side with an interesting look. "Must have been eye-opening I imagine," she noted and it was the first time that he got that response when he told someone. "Oh definitely, our head monk, at the time I had such a noisy head." he told her as he looked up at her from across the table. "and I always wanted to talk and talk and he'd say shhh, every time. I learned how to just be with my thoughts and like you said it was eye opening and life changing for me." he told her, wanting to tell her. They'd been at the restaurant for two hours already and they didn't want the night to end as he got to know her and she got to know him.

Never in his entire life had he felt such an instant and right connection than with her. Sure there had been situations close to it, but none as with Alicia. When she looked at him, it felt like she was stripping him naked and not in the wrong sense. But that she stripped him naked in understanding him, in getting him what he was saying. And he had a feeling that it was the same for her by some of the looks that she gave him.

For Alicia, though she didn't want to believe it and fought it, that feeling in the pit of her stomach. It only grew throughout the night, not once had a person got her as Chris did. Sure Emilia was her best friend and understood her better than most people in her life. But with Chris, it felt different like he saw through her, something no other person had ever made her feel. It made her feel vulnerable and dare she say exposed. She loved the saying the stars were aligned when her career finally started to come through. She might have to say the same in years to come about this moment.

"I could probably use that," she admitted with a chuckle as Chris tilted his head with a smile on his lips. "The mind of a writer?" he asked her as she nodded her head. He couldn't understand what she did, he admired her, respected her for what she did. Loved her work, for every word she manages to put down and make stories come to life in the only way she could. But he couldn't imagine what it must be like in her head. "sometimes I feel like my mind is miles ahead of me and I'm left to catch up." she explained to him with a shrug of her shoulders and small shake of her head.

"you meditate?" he asked her as she shook her head at him. "I don't have much patience for that I think. I think my mind just doesn't know how to be quiet," she explained with a smile on her face. "I'd suggest going to India." he teased her as she nodded her head. "Buddism has always fascinated me, maybe that's the way my mind can finally slow down a bit. I've already learned to say no," she admitted as he tilted his head at her in question.

"When my books first came out, I was in my final year of nursing school, I had five more months to go and then I was finished. By the time I graduated they'd already taken over the world by storm. I was under such pressure to get it right, to produce the next big novel, the sequel everyone wanted to read. Reviews and opinions from all over the world came in. So I pushed myself, then I had the chance of living a childhood dream and do another form of story telling by acting. I kept saying yes cause the chances were so good and I wasn't sure if I'd ever get them again. My publisher was on the phone every day demanding to see more of me. a few months ago I finally caved a bit under all the pressure, only Emilia and a few other close friends know. And I knew that always saying yes was going to be undoing of my health. I already regret pushing the four books I've published since the first three came out. I should have taken my time with them as I did with the three first one's." she explained to him as he nodded his head for her to continue.

"I finally told my publisher that if she wanted to settle for bad stories she should continue pushing me. George had a chat with them and told them to back off that good stories could only be written when taken the time for them," she explained to him as he gave her a small smile.

"so you finally said no." he pointed out as she nodded her head. "I did, now I finally have some breathing space again. I'm letting Ganuura and the M'Ark for what they are at the moment, they need some time to breathe as I say, so I can mull them over in my mind. no more pressure from now on." she admitted as she looked up from where she was wiping away an invisible thread.

"I'm glad you did, I can't imagine having to be under that amount of pressure. Sure I have contracts and commitments, but my manager doesn't call me every day to get it done and ready," he told her as he slowly reached out to cover her hand with his. "Neither is mine now, I'm sure my manager now gets most of the calls and she's a very capable woman of telling them off if need be," she told him with a chuckle as he finally took her hand in his and they looked down at their heads as they felt the small shock go through them.

Their moment was broken however when the waiter arrived with their dessert. forest fruit cheese cake for Alicia and Chris moelleux. "So one with a sweet tooth?" she teased him with a cheeky grin in his direction as he let out a sheepish chuckle. "Yes, I have a sweet tooth, although yours doesn't look too bad either," he told her, looking at her plate as she motioned her hand towards it. "Want to try it?" she offered as he gave her a questioning look to which she nodded. Reaching over he took a spoon of what she was having and he had to agree, it did taste amazing. "want to switch?" he asked her with a cheeky grin as she let out a chuckle and tucked a strand of hair that had come lose behind her ear.

"I think that's our cue to leave," Alicia admitted, she'd been having such fun, talking and getting to know Chris, they'd lost sight of time. Everyone around them was already gone, they were the only two left at the restaurant. The lights in the kitchen had just gone out and yet neither of them had wanted to leave yet. "Too bad, I could have stayed a bit longer," he told her as he motioned for the waiter to bring the bill. "Me too," she admitted, which even surprised herself at this point.

"Let me," she told him as they discussed who was going to pay the bill. "Let me," he told her, covering her hand that rested above the bill. Looking in his eyes she finally nodded her head and pulled her hand away. When they got out of the restaurant, the night had cooled significantly and she cursed herself not to have brought a jacket as she shivered a little.

"Cold?" he asked her as he started to shrug off his blazer. "A little it's fine," she assured him when she felt him warm jacket being draped over her shoulders. "Thank you," she whispered, looking at him he nodded his head, fighting the urge to wrap his arm around her and pull her closer.

Opening her side again, she slid in his car. "You free tomorrow?" he asked her as he started the car. "I have a meeting and an audition in the morning, I should be free after noon," she explained to him as he nodded his head. "Want to do something together?" he asked her as she nodded her head. "I'd like that," she whispered, her head turned in his direction.

Though he'd have wanted to kiss her, he didn't want to do it yet, he wanted to wait till tomorrow. He wasn't sure what he was going to get up to, but he wanted to spend more time with her, wanted to see if what they had tonight could be continued tomorrow.

Walking her to her door of the suite she was staying in, she slid in the key card. "You want to come in?" she asked him, opening the door to see the living room in darkness, at least Emilia was asleep. "I shouldn't," he told her with a small shake of his head. "Okay," she whispered, not being able to hide the slightly disappointed tone in her voice.

He'd intended to just walk her to the door and nothing else, but hearing that tone and the look in her eyes. He walked up to her so they were just hidden from the cameras in the hallway and in the small entrance of her suite. Looking up at him, his head slightly bend she hesitated slightly to rest her hand on his chest as they leant closer to each other. Their breaths mingling with each other as the space between their lips got smaller and smaller. Their eyes connected, just before they closed and their lips connected, his stubble brushing against her skin as their lips met in a soft peck and another without breaking away. His hand coming to cup her cheek in his hand as he kissed her lips again.

Never had felt something as right as this to both of them. Just the slight brush of their lips, a small kiss. "I should go," he whispered, resting his head against hers, her head still cupped in his hand as she nodded her head slightly. "I'll see you tomorrow, I'll pick you up at 1," he told her as she nodded her head. He pecked her lips one final time and then he was out of the door, pulling himself away from a night he'd never thought to get to experience. Alicia let herself fall back against the wall beside the door, her hand on her chest. trying to calm her heart. "I saw that." said a voice that nearly made her jump through the roof.

Amelia’s outfits 

Amelia at the oscars 

Amelia dinner with Chris 

Alicia's Instagram. (I try my best to edit pictures, but logically I can't them all to precision so when a picture meets the requirements I'll use that instead of a pic with the real people. It's all about the idea behind it :-p) 

Amelia’s wikipedia Page 

[lostinfic]

The Raven and the Goldfinch | 2

Part 2 out of 3   |    Part 1   |    Ao3

Summary: In turn-of-the-century London, the famous illusionist, Peter Vincent, must use his skills to reclaim the love of his life, a woman he thought was lost to him. Now that he’s given a second chance, he won’t lose her again, not even when supernatural forces get in the way.

Rating: explicit (@ktrosesworld wanted smut, so it begins, but there’s still plot)

Word count: 2.6k (I decided to divide it into shorter parts)

Ship: Peter Vincent (Fright Night) x Jenny (Spirit Trap). (see part 1 for notes on this pairing)

≒

The Bristol Commercial Chronicle, 29 November 1895

ON VAMPIRES AND VAMPIRISM

Lately, the conversation of private parties has frequently turned on the subject of vampires; and the discussion has been prolonged and invigorated by the pieces brought out at the theatres across Europe. Even in Paris, the French literari, whom nothing escapes, desirous of displaying their learning, have brushed off the dust of repose and oblivion from more than one story applicable to the matter of vampires. In London, vampirism has almost superseded politics in the journals, clubs and salons of the genteel society. The success of Mr. Peter Vincent’s Frightful Entertainments is no stranger to this phenomenon; his Nosferatus have inflamed the collective unconscious. He deserves attention, no less from its temporary interest, than from its peculiar character, as part of the history of the human mind. It is connected with notions of the most extensive and powerful influence.

Last week, we reported on the presence of the Earl of Westmorland and his new bride, Countess Iphigenia (nee Goldfinch), at the premier of Mr. Vincent’s show at the Egyptian Hall. They had recently returned from the Austro-hungarian empire, where perhaps they were acquainted with such creatures of the night. Indeed, it is reserved for the ruder tribes of the north, and perhaps for those of the wilder parts of the East, to graft on the notion of re-appearance of the dead, that of malignity and delight in the suffering they had the power to inflict. It is a notion generally received among the Hungarians, that certain dead persons possess the power of returning by night to molest the living. We have it under good authority that a peculiar illness has struck the Westmorland household, and that the Earl has invited Mr. Vincent himself to his residence for a private performance.

≑

It was common for the rich and nobles of British society to own houses around the vast green expanse of St. James’s Park, and the Earl of Westmorland was no exception. Though he owned lands and a castle in the north of England, he needed a pied-à-terre in London, so, for the season, he and Jennie lived in a large Georgian townhouse not far from Buckingham palace. The grey, smoke-smeared stones of the house surrounded by skeletal trees was a dreary sight on this November afternoon.

At the gates, Peter and his manager, Ingwer, were instructed to enter through the staff door. Neither the Earl nor, more importantly, Jennie, greeted them.

As Peter followed the butler through the house, he deliberately slowed his walking pace and peered inside every room to catch a glimpse of her, but to no avail. As disappointed as he was, he understood she had to be careful in her own home. Since their secret meeting in the carriage, he’d thought of nothing but of her. It was maddening: they were in the same city but couldn’t see each other, and now in the same house yet she wasn’t in his arms.

Peter whistled in admiration when he entered the pompous great hall. A stage, built for his performance, occupied the back of the room under a large crystal chandelier. Peter snickered at the somewhat phallic shape of the chandelier.

“Do you think he’s compensating for something?” he asked Ingwer, elbowing him in the ribs.

Several portraits of the Earl himself adorned the walls in ostentatious gilded frames, along with ancestors and pastoral scenes in smaller frames.

Peter thought, if he owned this house and was married to Jennie, there would be nothing but portraits of her on the walls.

From every corner of the hall, marble statues of Roman gods watched as the servants arranged velvet-upholstered chairs in rows for spectators. Comparatively to the rest of the room, the stage was bare. Exposed. A challenge. One Peter was keen to take on to prove his higher intellect and skills to the husband of his beloved.

≑

From the minstrels’ gallery above the great hall, Jennie observed them enter. She hid behind the balustrade and peered between the marble pillars as he set up his equipment for the show. He kept glancing around, surely looking for her too. But for now, she had to stay away, there were too many people around, servants she didn’t know if she could trust, and the butler her husband had obviously instructed to keep an eye on Peter.

She bid her time by watching him work, he’d removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves to install a dark wood contraption at the center of the stage.

So entranced was she by Peter, she jumped when she heard a whistle, like the twittering song of a bird. She hurried off the minstrel’s gallery. The trill echoed in the corridor, but she couldn’t locate its origin.

Voices came from the foyer, then footsteps up the staircase, and she forgot about the bird.

“Iphigenia? Where are you?” Dorothy, her sister, called.

The twelve year-old girl was as dark as Jennie was blonde, skinny while Jennie was plump, and for a good reason: they weren’t from the same mother. Dorothy was the daughter of a prostitute their father saw regularly, she’d died in childbirth, and against all reason, he had kept the baby. However illegitimate, Jennie loved Dorothy like a real sister, and she was the main reason Jennie couldn’t run away with Peter. It would reflect poorly on her sister and ruin her chances at a happy future. The Earl, because he was well-acquainted with Jennie’s mother, was the only one who knew that she would have been too ill to bear another child. At first, his tolerance of Dorothy had made Jennie happy, now it made her wary.

Dorothy and their father, Baron Thomas Goldfinch, had come over for tea and would stay for Peter’s show. Thomas’ cheeks were rosy under his greying beard, healthier than ever now that his gambling debts had been cleared by the Earl.

Jennie’s relationship with her father was ambivalent at best. For all intents and purposes, he had abandoned his wife in Northumberland, and Jennie held him responsible for her mother’s declining health and death, but he had a good heart nonetheless, as demonstrated by his care for Dorothy. And even if his interest in Jennie had laid mostly in acquiring wealth, he had never forced her to marry against her will. In fact, before Richard, she had turned down a few proposals, hoping for Peter’s return. Them, at 25, she was almost an old maid when the Earl started courting her. He was a widower, in his late thirties, and they’d been acquainted for some years already as his lands flanked those of her father’s. If only she’d held off just a little longer.

The family sat in the conservatory on rattan chaises amongst potted palms. She didn’t have the green thumb of the Earl’s first wife and some plants wilted. The high windows offered a beautiful view of the lake in the park, but most importantly, Jennie could also see into the great hall.

Her father inquired after the peculiar illness reported in the society column of the newspapers.

“One of our maids is so weak and pale she cannot work. We had to call in a physician, but he couldn’t make a definite diagnosis, and another girl is now feeling fainter as well. It is concerning, but the papers have exaggerated the story as they are bound to do.”

Jennie served the tea, two sugars for Dorothy and a drop of milk for Thomas.

“Is that the new tea service you brought back from Vienna?” Dorothy asked.

Sinuous, organic lines reminiscent of flower stalks and insect wings decorated the porcelain set.

“They call this style Sezessionstil. Richard thinks it’s too modern, but he admits I’m the artist, and I love it.”

She told her father and sister about the honeymoon in Austria-Hungary where they had visited the Earl’s family. She spoke with more passion about the beautiful mountains and architecture than about her new husband. Thankfully, they’d changed subject when Richard joined them. He down sat next to Jennie. When he put his hand on her leg, she had to exert phenomenal self-control not to recoil. Aspects of his appearance that hadn’t bothered her before, such as his bushy sideburns and fat hands, now repelled her. Every minute spent with him felt like a betrayal to Peter, even more so now they stood under the same roof.

“I have to go,” she said suddenly as she sprang to her feet.

"Where? We are all here, my dear.”

“I, erm, I have to… give the staff instructions for the reception. A lady of the house’s work is never done.”

She walked to the door with measured steps, but hurried as soon as she was out of the conservatory.

This morning, she’d chosen a cornflower-blue dress, reminiscent of her childhood’s skies, and so as she walked, she unpinned her hair, letting it fall loose down her back as a young girl would wear it. She wished she could be that child again, free of responsibilities and concerns about her family, wrapped in that magical world that only she and Peter inhabited.

She didn’t see Peter in the great hall, and knew he’d retired to the makeshift greenroom she’d had set up in the adjacent boudoir. Though a feminine room by definition, Jennie rarely used it as it held many mementos of the Earl’s first wife.

Peter didn’t notice her entrance. She’d become quite adept at avoiding attention, walking on tip toes to prevent the clanking of heels, only the quiet ruffle of taffeta might give her away. He was in the middle of putting on his costume, braces dangling off his breeches. She spoke quietly so as not to startle him or be overheard, “I used to do that for you.” She pointed at the kohl on the vanity, similar to the one she once stole from her mother.

He beamed at her, then sat on the edge of the table so they would be eye-level. She stepped between his legs. He closed his eyes and let her gently glide the stick of kohl across his eyelids.

“You used to shake like a leaf before a show,” she said, though her own hand was unsteady right now.

“It was not the show that made me nervous, it was you being so close to me.”

He opened his eyes and his copper brown pupils were even more striking with the dark lines. Despite the faint wrinkles that now surrounded his eyes, she saw in them her best friend, the magical boy with whom she’d fallen in love so long ago. However, the feelings that gaze stirred in her now, were not as innocent as they used to be.

He put his hands on her sashed waist, drawing her closer.

“These last days have been a real torture,” she confessed, “knowing you were in London and I couldn’t see you.”

“For me too.”

She touched his chest where his white shirt gaped, but glanced nervously over her shoulder. With a hand on her cheek, he brought her eyes back to him.

“My Jennie.”

Her chest heaved with a sigh, and she pressed her lips to his.

The kiss they’d exchanged in the carriage had been short, but she’d thought about it so much a yearning had built inside of her, growing stronger every day.

The taste of his mouth, the scent of his skin, his fingers spanning her waist, it all made her head spin. She wished there had only ever been him in her arms.

She deepened the kiss, fisting his shirt and opening her mouth in invitation. His arms wrapped around her waist, holding her tight. His lips moved to her jaw and down her neck, and she canted her head to grant him access to her throat. His goatee scratched her skin. His mouth traveled lower down her neckline. His teeth pressed lightly in the swell of her breast. She gasped but it wasn’t unpleasant, on the contrary. She encouraged him to continue, running her fingers through his hair, grabbing handfuls. His tongue sneaked under the lacy edge of her waist shirt just as his hands searched for the fastenings.

Jennie was faster, opening his breeches and slipping her hand inside. He hissed when she palmed his warm flesh. His movements faltered.

Jennie caressed him tentatively. Full of hesitation, she searched his face for signs of pleasure. A string of curses gave her the confidence she sought.

“Watch your mouth in the presence of a lady,” she teased.

“Then give me something to do with my mouth.”

She let him open her waistshirt and corset cover, exposing more of her breasts which he prompts covered with hungry kisses.

“Have you ever thought about me touching you in such a way?” she whispered.

“Many, many times.”

She opened his breeches wider. She wanted to see his cock, see her hand wrapped around it, see it throb thanks to her touch. It wasn’t mere curiosity, but a primal sort of satisfaction she sought.

“Have you thought about me too?” he asked in return.

“Yes.”

“Let me see you.”

She stopped him going further. She wore too many complicated layers to undress and redress quickly if they were caught.

“If you won’t show me, then tell me.”

“I wished for your body. For your mouth.To soothe this burning in me no other man can.”

“I will soothe it, then revive it, again and again.” He spoke the words, hot against her neck.

He closed his hand over hers to make her pump harder. His knee pressed into the front of her skirts, she jerked her hips.

“I wished for your hands,” she said.

“What about my them?”

“The way they move during a magic trick. So agile. It inflames one’s imagination.”

He thrust into her fist, she used her second hand, twisting over the head of his cock.

“Fuck, Jennie…”

She covered his mouth with hers and swallowed his groan of release.

He’d barely caught his breath, that he was gathering up her skirts. She was too turned on to stop him. To hell with getting caught.

A flower vase fell and crashed to the floor. They jumped apart and stared at the pieces of porcelain scattered at least three feet away from them. How had it fallen?

“Did you hear that?” she asked. “The whistle.”

“No.”

Peter tucked his member back into his breeches, and Jennie cleaned her hands with a handkerchief.

Just then, someone knocked at the door. Jennie quickly hid behind a screen and Peter opened the door. It was the butler, bringing him refreshments. He noticed the broken vase, and Peter took the blame, then a maid was sent in to clean it up.

“I think that butler wanted more than offer me a glass of water, he’s been on my heels all day. He could’ve caught us in the act,” Peter declared after they’d gone.

Jennie nestled in his arms, and he rubbed her back to soothe her nerves.

“Maybe your husband’s suspicious because you wanted to invite me here.”

“It was his idea.”

“So, he’s not aware we know each other?”

“No. He would hate that… I’m still not certain why he did invite you.”

“You’re worried?”

“I cannot get the measure of him. I thought I knew him before the wedding, but since we came back from Austria…” She shook her head. “On the one hand, he liked my mother.”

“What?”

“You know… her gift.” Jennie rolled her eyes. “He wanted to communicate with his deceased father, and my mother, she just told him what he wanted to hear.”

“So, he’s gullible.”

“But also very proud.”

“He’s full of himself, he is. What are you getting at?”

“Just please, don’t do anything to ridicule him tonight. A wounded ego is a dangerous thing in such a man.”

Part 3

[mimicofmodes]

(Not fashion. I wrote this as an answer to a question elsewhere and nobody saw it.)

Mary Tudor was the first queen regent of England. Was this noted at the time? Was there any significant reaction, positive or negative, to having a solo female ruler?

The only previous time in English history that a woman attempted to rule in her own right as her father's natural heir was Empress Matilda (1102-1167), the daughter of Henry I and granddaughter of William the Conqueror; at this time, it hadn't even been fully established that princesses could pass inheritance rights on to their sons, so it's remarkable that Henry decided to make her his heir in the absence of other legitimate children of his own. The following summary of the situation may sound familiar to you if you read or watched The Pillars of the Earth. When Henry I died in 1135, his nephew, Stephen of Blois, was able to get crowned in London since Matilda, married to the count of Anjou, wasn't able to make the journey immediately - the idea of the heir immediately becoming ruler on their predecessor's death wasn't yet a tradition. In 1139, she did travel to England, though, and sought out the support of local barons to wage a military campaign against Stephen. She prevailed and ruled for a short time in 1141 but didn't make it to a coronation before being dethroned, and kept on being "Lady of the English" until her half-brother and chief supporter, Robert of Gloucester, died in 1147. She then left for France, giving up on her own personal claim to the English throne.

In the very small number of primary sources left about Matilda's short reign and longer campaign, there's a lot of discussion of her gender. Without any precedent for a woman ruling England (though Anglo-Saxon queens had been able to wield their own kind of power as kings' wives or mothers), she had to construct a version of female kingship that led to her taking on a lot of masculine features. Henry had had her take the same normally-masculine oaths her late brother had made as heir, and while her gaining this position required her to remarry far beneath herself in order to produce her own male heirs, instead of taking on that new title she was considered largely as her father's daughter and an empress (her first husband had been the Holy Roman Emperor) and held onto most of her dowry. Once she began her quest for the crown against Stephen, she threw off conventions of gendered behavior and acted quite openly in her own interest: she captured opponents and held them in chains, legally appealed Stephen's succession, and, well, acted as a king among her own vassals.

Although there hadn't been any explicit opposition to her claim just on the basis of her gender, opponents did use her status as e.g. the wife of the Count of Anjou as tools to delegitimize her standing. Once she had some power, though, her lack of feminine reticence and modesty became a problem even in the chronicles that otherwise supported her. It wasn't so much an issue that people said, "hey, women shouldn't rule," but that once a woman was actively exercising power on her own behalf without cloaking that in concern for her son(s) or a pretense of not wanting to do it. Most kings had queens to project softer, interceding, and more forgiving royal power by their sides, rounding off their corners while they were able to make the hard choices and do nasty, bloody things. Matilda simply didn't have the advantage of this kind of partnership, and couldn't be both the king and queen.

So, Mary. While in general Matilda is not considered a proper queen regnant because she was never crowned (let's note that nobody has this problem when it comes to Edward V, one of the princes in the Tower, just saying), there is no doubt that Mary I ruled officially. Matilda was her only pattern when it came to English queenship, and due to the above, she was more valuable as an example of what not to do - despite the centuries between them, it would still not have gone over well if Mary had flouted what was expected of a woman and simply behaved like her father as a monarch.

Mary's Catholicism was a much bigger issue than her gender as a fact on its own, in a kingdom that had recently switched to Protestantism as the state religion, with a government full of people who'd fully bought into it. Where her gender came into it was the concern about where her husband - someone she was regarded as needing in order to produce her own heirs to keep feuding cousins from starting another civil war - would stand in relationship to the throne. Married women were considered femes couverts in English law, subsumed into their husbands' legal identities, which implied that a queen's husband perhaps might automatically be in charge of the country. Edward VI's "Device for the Succession" (which outlined who would follow him to the throne, since he had no heirs) excluded both Mary and the Protestant Elizabeth out of concerns about their marrying foreign princes - as would be appropriate to their station, being born princesses, even if they'd been later declared bastards - and subjecting England to foreign rule, diverting the line instead to Jane Grey, already married to an Englishman, "and her heirs male". (Jane was, technically, of course, another precedent for Mary. She planned to make her husband a duke, rather than allowing him authority over herself.)

Once she'd declared herself the queen, Mary quickly attracted support from the local gentry and nobility despite her gender: she didn't have a husband ruling over her yet and was also no longer a ward of any man, and therefore feme sole, a totally independent woman. While Mary did have to start off with a bit of military violence, unlike Matilda she had no real challengers and was therefore able to drop the masculine-coded aggression in defending her right to rule, inhabiting the office of kingship as a "normal" woman without really upsetting the overall patriarchal power structure. (It was also enshrined in law by this point that daughters could inherit from their fathers and brothers, so it simply made logical sense to most people that she was now the monarch.) She went to her coronation in cloth of gold and with her hair down, as in the famous coronation portrait of Elizabeth I, the traditional way for a king's wife being crowned to appear, and later billed this ceremony as her marriage to the realm, a marriage in which she was obviously the bride. In general, she modeled herself on her pious mother, Catherine of Aragon, rather than her powerful and somewhat arbitrary father - typically, this is presented in pop culture as just a part of her fanaticism, rather than the use of a traditional aspect of queen-consortship. She was publicly rather submissive to her advisors and ambassadors, confirming her status as an unmarried woman above her status as monarch and allowing them to believe that she was naive and trusting, as they expected her to be due to her gender. Before she wed Philip II of Spain, she talked up her desire to remain chaste and made it clear that her main reason for marriage was the succession (the ensuring of which would make her pregnant and therefore extra-womanly); she allowed it to appear that she was totally uninvolved with the negotiation process for his hand, as though the men were deciding her fate. (Despite all of this, she made it clear in her marriage paperwork that she would continue to be the ultimate authority, reducing him to the traditional female role of intercessor and soft-power-holder, and that Philip's title of "king" was only a courtesy, and she also brought no dowry at all to the match - far from the expected behavior of a royal bride, in general!) Rather than bringing herself into the masculine role of king, basically, she brought the role of kingship to herself while staying firmly in the female sphere, and while her sister's reign was longer and more successful, it's clear that Elizabeth took a certain amount of direction from the way Mary handled her gender.

Both of the two "first" queens regnant of England had a great deal of trouble in ruling (and in later biographies) as a result of the way that others perceived their gender and their ability to conform to its conventions. Their problem was the social practices surrounding their gender, that is - not just their gender in and of itself. It's difficult to get into the historical mindset that saw women considered the property of their male relatives throughout their lives (unless they were lucky enough to become rich widows) and yet also considered women not biologically unfit to rule a country. In part, this difficulty is supported by hundreds of pop cultural depictions of historical men as total chauvinists who thought women were simply stupid across the board, which ignores the reality that elite women did a lot of work in estate management and diplomacy, and which they recognized as valuable. It's a contradiction. People have a lot of contradictions, even today - we don't run on pure logic, although many think they do and use that to prop up their own internal contradictions.

You might be interested in reading The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History, by Charles Beem (2006), which is 100% about this issue and was my major source for this answer. It's great! In general, I recommend all of Palgrave Macmillan’s Queenship and Power series.

[mermaidsirennikita]

May 2018 Book Roundup

I don’t know when I got so into thrillers--but here we are.  Of course, I’m not as into the types of thrillers that are about a cop pursuing a killer.  It’s more the insidious types of domestic thrillers that catch my attention, about idle suburbanites who secretly harbor paranoid minds and little hatreds.  That’s probably why I enjoyed “A Simple Favor” by Darcey Bell and Liv Constantine’s “The Last Mrs. Parrish”, however much they polarized readers.  They both feature horrible women, stupid men, unreliable narrators, and endings that don’t neatly tie up loose ends.  In other words, they’re perfect summer reads.

The Defiant by Lesley Livingston.  3/5.  The second in a series, The Defiant returns to the world of female gladiators and in particular Fallon.  Now triumphant and happy in a ludus run by her sister, Sorcha, Fallon expects to have it easier.  However, her life is upturned when the women of the ludus are accused of rebelling, and Sorcha goes missing.  I rated The Valiant, the first book in this series, four stars so I must have enjoyed it, but I also don’t really remember it, aside from the basic plot and being interested in Sorcha and Fallon’s relationship.  I would still say that the sister relationship is the core focus of the plot, which is different (and distracts from a fairly shallow romance between Fallon and Cai, a Roman soldier; there’s an opportunity for something cooler, but the author bypasses that completely).  But I think I’m over this series; this book drove home that it skews too young for me to enjoy it.  The gladiatrix thing is cool, but there’s so much in this book about how the ludus is home, and like... hasn’t everyone been enslaved by Romans to some degree?  Taken from their homelands?  Forced into a blood sport to be entertainment?  It’s fun, and I won’t say that it isn’t without merits, but this is too shallow for what it takes on.

Fatal Throne by Candace Fleming et. al.  4/5.  A collaborative novel from the perspectives of all six of Henry VIII’s queens--and Henry himself.  What impressed me about this book was how it wasn’t really straightforward.  It seems like it might be at first; Catherine of Aragon’s section kicks it off by detailing the beginning of Catherine’s life in England, up until her marriage is collapsing.  Now, don’t think that this makes it a bad story; I quite liked it.  Catherine of Aragon is, in this version, for once more than a stereotypical zealot queen, though the author does that thing where a character whose native tongue is Spanish constantly throws random Spanish words into English sentences, which doesn’t feel real.  But anyway; many of the other stories are less traditional.  All revolve around the queens’ downfalls or deaths; for example, Anne (or Anna, as she’s called here) of Cleves has a story that really centers around her dying days, and the ghosts of her past.  There’s a weird, haunting creepiness to everything.  Though there are some rather shallow moments--including one bit in the Anne Boleyn story that seemed... pretty off--and there isn’t any reinventing of the wheel, it’s a sad retelling of the wives’ story, where the central villain is undeniably Henry VIII.

Ash Princess by Laura Sebastian.  2/5.  Theodosia was a child when she was forced to witness the murder of her mother, the queen of Astrea.  Since then she’s been beaten and terrorized in the submission by the conquering Kaiser, forced to live as Lady Thora, the Ash Princess.  The combination of being forced to commit a terrible act and the reappearance of a childhood friend wakes Thora to the reality of her people’s suffering, and spurs her to action.  She’s given a task: seduce the crown prince, and kill him.  So yeah, pretty typical fantasy stuff, but that doesn’t mean it has to be bad.  What makes it bad is Theo’s flip-flopping as a character and a truly dismal love triangle.  Neither romance feels real, and Theo’s constantly between dithering and acting like... Stormborn-lite.  Oh, yes.  The GoT influence is strong in this one.  I just wish it had been more interesting.

Love and Ruin by Paula McLain.  3/5.  The turbulent romance between Ernest Hemingway and his third wife, writer Martha Gellhorn, is told from Gellhorn’s perspective.  I remember really liking McLain’s version of Hemingway’s first marriage, “The Paris Wife”, but that was so long ago that I can’t remember much of it.  And for that matter, that marriage--which occurred during Hemingway’s years as part of the Lost Generation in Paris--was a very different animal from what he shared with Gellhorn.  You get the expected beats--Gellhorn and Hemingway meeting, her being initially starstruck while harboring her own ambitions, their work during the Spanish Civil War, the affair that led to a marriage, and that marriage’s destruction because Hemingway was incapable of holding a decent relationship and Gellhorn’s fierce independence kept her from being the idealized wife he wanted--but while the writing is pretty... the expectedness keeps the book from being more than exactly what it is.  And though obviously Gellhorn was a good bit younger than Hemingway and obviously her love for him and hero worship of him allowed to overlook shit long enough to up and marry the guy...  I just don’t really buy that Martha Gellhorn would speak and act the way McLain seems to think she did.  She’s so over the top as a young woman in love.  The book is fine, it’s just uninspired.

Trespassing by Brandi Reeds. 4/5.  Veronica is at her wit’s end, caring for a toddler while her husband is often gone for work as a pilot, while at the same time pumping herself full of hormones for her fertility treatments in order to have a second child.  Still traumatized by the miscarriage she suffered recently, she is shocked when her husband, Micah, doesn’t come home--on the same day that their daughter claims that “Daddy went to God Land”.  Swept up in a mess of emotions and falling under suspicion from the police, Veronica flees with her daughter to the Florida Keys, where her husband had a house in her name.  But the island life presents even more questions.  Who are the children in the photos she finds, and why is Micah with them?  This is a solid, engaging thriller that somehow is at its most disturbing when you consider the fact that Veronica’s mind is rattled in part because of what she’s put her body through via fertility treatments.  Veronica is sympathetic, and rather than stupidly accepting things like thriller protagonists often do, she’s paranoid, protective, never quite trusting anyone.  Why should she?  While I won’t say that the reveal in the end is one of the best I’ve read, the story as a whole is very interesting, and I appreciated the fact that Reeds really delved into the mind of a woman with a bit of feminine body horror--like, in a sensitive way.  It’s different.  The book is as much about Veronica’s identity as anything else.

The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine.  4/5.  Amber envies the lives of glamorous trophy wives, none of them more than Daphne Parrish.  Daphne has it all: a handsome, doting, extraordinarily wealthy husband, two daughters, and all of the possessions she could desire.  So she begins her plan: befriend Daphne under the guise of a homely, Pollyanna type and steal her life.  But as Amber becomes closer to Daphne, she constantly has to look over her shoulder for ghosts from her past that could disrupt her plan.  Little does she know that the real danger could be closer than she thinks.  This book was kind of disturbing and definitely does not have the type of ending that will leave you.... feeling morally good.  But it’s juicy. It’s Big Little Lies kind of juicy, about vaguely psychotic women with rich and famous lives.  Frankly, I would have appreciated more development of the female characters aside from Amber and Daphne, but the two of them were great as is.  You spend about half the book in Amber’s mind, and she is HEINOUS.  But in an interesting, darkly funny way.  The book isn’t going to be for everyone, but I found it extremely entertaining.

Next Year in Havana by Chanel Cleeton.  2/5.  Marisol has never been to Cuba, the homeland her grandmother, Elisa, fled as a young woman.  She returns to scatter Elisa’s ashes after the death of Fidel Castro.  However, she didn’t expect to connect with Luis, a historian and dissenter in the current regime--nor did she expect to discover that her grandmother had an affair with a revolutionary.  This book has a lot to say about Cuban politics; and I value that.  But unfortunately, the political backdrop takes over the story, which is very paint by numbers.  Nothing surprising happens.  The characters are dry.  I wish I loved it, but I just didn’t.

From Twinkle, with Love by Sandhya Menon.  3/5.  Teenage Twinkle is an aspiring filmmaker, out of sorts as her relationship with her best friend Maddie--newly popular while Twinkle remains a bit of nerd--deteriorates.  She’s surprised when Sahil--the shy twin brother of her crush, Neil--asks her to collaborate on him on a gender-flipped version of Dracula, but it isn’t long before she’s starting to look at Sahil in a very different way.  At the same time, however, she’s corresponding via email with her secret admirer, N--who she very much suspects is Neil.  What is Twinkle to do?  I loved Menon’s debut, When Dimple Met Rishi, and I’m still very excited for the spinoff of that book.  It was a perfect little romcom.  This was not.  This book read much younger--and Twinkle and Sahil are a bit younger than Dimple and Rishi were.  But their voices were also VERY immature, and in general it just... missed the mark for me.  I think someone younger would love this book.  It did touch on several really great threads, especially with Twinkle’s family.  But I didn’t feel the same thing I felt with WDMR at all.

Furyborn by Claire Legrand.  4/5.  When her best friend Prince Audric finds his life endangered, Rielle saves him--exposing herself as capable of wielding all seven types of elemental magic.  There are two people foretold to have this gift; one will be a queen who brings light and salvation, while the other holds blood and destruction.  Put to the test in a series of trials, Rielle must prove exactly which one she is.  A thousand years later, bounty hunter Eliana is shocked to find her mother kidnapped, with the only person who can help find her being a rebel leader.  In joining up with him, Eliana defies the empire she’s worked for--and puts herself in terrible danger.  This book is an interesting one; the two narratives you’re following are focused heavily on their respective leads, and neither woman is traditionally “good”.  Eliana has the charm of being a tortured rogue, at least--Rielle is more complex, obsessed with adulation and self-centered to the point of callousness.  But I enjoyed both of them, with Eliana’s story picking up a few points over Rielle’s towards the end... which was a pleasant surprise, as at first I wasn’t sure if Eliana’s side of things would measure up to Rielle’s.  There is a lot amgoing on, so things can get a bit confusing--and this makes the middle drag a bit.  But the ending left me dying for more, with the only other complaint I can make being that Legrand could work on her sex scenes a tad.  But if you’re looking for a female-centered story with a few guys who are all about that undying devotion thing, plus a sexy villain and moral ambiguity, I recommend this one highly.

One Match Fire by Lissa Linden.  2/5.  Twelve years ago, Paul and Amy were camp counselors--and he broke her heart.  Now Amy is back to run the camp after Paul quits, though they don’t realize that they’ll be meeting up again until she’s at his door, physically different but emotionally still affected by what happened between them during their teen years.  Both frustrated and with few other options, they make a deal: until Paul leaves, they’ll have a purely sexual relationship.  But Paul wants to know what really has Amy rattled--and he doesn’t want to leave anymore.  I like romance, I like erotica--I wasn’t sure how to categorize this book, as most of it is graphic sex but I don’t know, the erotica bells weren’t quite ringing for me--but I still need stakes.  They don’t need to be fantasy stakes.  They don’t need to be thriller stakes.  It could be that the family business is about to go under; it could be that the leads are dueling lawyers.  STAKES.  This book has no stakes.  I thought that Paul did something super shitty when these (28 year old) people were kids, but like... it was a bit douchey, but tons of people were dicks to me in high school, I was a dick back, and I don’t remember much of it.  Certainly, I found Amy’s reaction a bit over the top.  At the same time, Paul was--very shortly into this sexual relationship--being like “give yourself to me emotionally Amy” and I was like lmao dude why y’all haven’t spoken there is no reason for you to be so invested in this woman.  He was so pushy, it really irked me.  The sex scenes were okay.  “Will these two people run a camp together” just wasn’t a big enough question to keep me interested.

A Simple Favor by Darcey Bell.  4/5.  Widowed, neurotic mommy blogger Stephanie has found the best friend of her dreams in Emily Nelson, a wealthy publicity exec with a handsome husband and beloved son Nicky, who happens to be the best friend of Stephanie’s son Miles.  So when Emily asks Stephanie for a “simple favor”--to watch Nicky for a few hours after school--Stephanie doesn’t hesitate to do so.  But when Emily doesn’t show to pick Nicky up--when she isn’t even home by the time her husband Sean returns from a business trip--Stephanie goes on red alert.  It isn’t long before the police find Emily’s body; and it also isn’t long before Stephanie begins taking her place.  As Stephanie begins receiving odd messages, the question is impossible to avoid: what really happened to Emily Nelson?  Alternating between Stephanie’s blog posts and the characters’ perspectives, “A Simple Favor” is one of those thrillers that is kind of balls to the wall insane.  You can expect to find that Emily wasn’t all that she appeared to be.  But Stephanie’s secrets are just as great, if not greater.  I’ve seen a common complaint regarding this book regarding the fact that none of the characters are good people.  For me, that just made it more delicious.  Emily is this enigmatic, alluring figure luring over the entire story, and you just can’t shake her appeal.

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

I snatched my children from Sun Myung Moon

▲ Nansook Hong, 32, has found refuge with her five children (as seen in the photos on the table) in this house in New England.

Translated from French to English

________________________________________

Paris Match 2579    29 October 1998 pages 108-110

Interviewed by Romain Clergeat       Photos by Yann Gamblin

She thought she had married the son of God on earth. Instead, Nansook Hong tied her destiny, at the age of 15, with Reverend Moon’s eldest son, a violent, drunken, and drug addicted youth with whom she had five children. Now divorced, the young Korean woman evokes her ordeal in a book recounting her story. “In the Shadow of the Moons” is published by Editions1. She wrote it “to assure my protection,” she admitted to Paris Match. Nansook Hong reveals the hidden face of the Moon empire: the brutality of her husband, Hyo Jin Moon, the hypocrisy of her parents in-law, but also the reverend’s scheming, the diversion of money, the blindness of the faithful ...  It is a story of a dive into a Unification Church hell on earth.

From 15 to 29 years of age, Nansook Hong dedicated her life to the famous Reverend and married one of his sons. Now she straightens the record. For the Unification Church it is a shattering book.

Paris Match. Your departure from the Moon sect three years ago provoked the Reverend’s wrath. Things seem to have gradually calmed down. Why have you put fuel on the fire with this book?

Nansook Hong. When I left, I immediately thought about telling my story. I felt a kind of moral obligation towards those who were still in the organization. I would be happy if my experience could “enlighten” even one person. I spent a part of my life, from 15 to 29, in the Unification Church. For my mental equilibrium, I absolutely needed to make sense of what I had lived through. I also wrote this book for battered women and those who live in fear. I want to let them know that one can always get out of even the worst situations.

P.M. Your parents are members of the sect. In a sense they “gave” you to Reverend Moon to marry to Hyo Jin, his son. Do you feel bitter towards them about that?

N.H. No, not for a second. They had dedicated their lives to the Unification Church. For them it was an honor that their child had been chosen by Reverend Moon.

P.M. During the years of your marriage, did you talk with your parents about what you discovered each day in the sect?

N.H. I never told them that my husband was beating me. It would have “devastated” them. To endure, I very early on considered my marriage as a mission that I had been given by God. I could not complain. On the other hand, when I began to understand that Reverend Moon was not adhering to the principles he preached, I talked to my parents about it. But we felt stuck. For a while, I naively thought that I could change all that from the inside. That, of course, was an illusion. So I concentrated on educating my children; I wanted to raise them in a good way.

P.M. When did your husband, Hyo Jin, start drinking and taking cocaine?

N.H. He was doing that from the start of our marriage, when he was 19 years old. He was doing it in rebellion against his father. He felt immeasurable resentment against him. He blamed his father for not raising him.

▲ The young Korean Nansook married Hyo Jin, Reverend Moon’s eldest son, in January 1982, at the age of 15. In the foreground, her divine in-laws.

P.M. Did you try to reason with him?

N.H. At the beginning, yes. But he quickly became addicted to coke. That said, the only times he spoke was when he took it ... but soon his words did not make sense. He had a very Asian concept of the role of women, and considered them to be subordinate, and certainly not meant to help him solve his problems. In the evenings when he was particularly angry, he said that it was all my fault ... Then he started to hit me, which seemed quite normal to him since his father boasted of doing the same thing with a female church member.

P.M. Do you think he would be capable of taking over the leadership from his father?

N.H. I heard it said that the Reverend Moon had designated his successor. It will be one of Hyo Jin’s brothers. When the Reverend disappears there will be a bloody battle.

P.M. Why did you wait fourteen years before leaving?

N.H. I have asked myself that for a long time. If I had been 20 years old at the time of my marriage, I do not think I would have stayed more than a year. I was 15 years old and I was very naive. As time passed things got more complicated, above all because of my children. Besides, I was very religious and Reverend Moon was the embodiment of the Chosen One. It took me a long time to break that image. It was a long and painful journey. When I decided to leave, at 29, it was, in a sense, totally unrealistic. I was the mother of five children, living in unbelievable luxury, and I was going to find myself living without any money and all alone. And a lot of people were going to hate me eternally.

▲ It was already hell. In 1993, two years before fleeing, Nansook with Hyo Jin and four of their five children. Photographed at a Moon property in Irvington.

P.M. How long passed from the moment you decided to leave the Church to the day you actually did?

N.H. In January 1995 I felt that I had to leave. The beating sessions became more and more frequent and I knew that it would worsen, and that he would attack my children. I did not want to wait until it reached that extreme situation. It would have ended up with him killing all of us. I remember one evening watching my husband get dressed to go to a strip-tease club or to the bars. I had like a revelation: God authorized me to leave. Since I had deep faith, I needed this spiritual permission. It was a kind of grace. It was the best day of my life. I felt liberated. All the same it took me eight months to realize what I had felt so intensely.

P.M. How did you escape?

N.H. First of all I secured custody of my children. Without money and caught off guard, I could not fight against the financial power of the Moons. I consulted lawyers. I rented a house and, bit by bit, I took my things to a storage place. Fortunately, my husband, under the influence of drugs and alcohol, did not notice anything. Within the Church, no one thought that I would leave such a luxurious life. This was my chance.

P.M. Isn’t it surprising, despite suspicions, that no one, starting with the Moons, reacted?

N.H. It did happen. When I went to New York to see the lawyers, several people recognized me and then made their reports. Following that there were times when I was told off, but I repeat, no one thought that I would really leave.

P.M. Have you received any threats?

N.H. Of course. But I had taken care to obtain legal measures that forbade my husband to approach us by less than 50 meters. That did not stop him from hiring people to track me down. In the end they did find me. Fortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Moon prevented their son from doing something stupid. That said, again these days, people come around to the house, call us on the phone and scare my children. I still fear them – and even more so my husband who is a dangerous man. I was scared, but the publication of this book and the publicity surrounding it will give me some protection. At least, I hope so.

P.M. Did the Moons try to buy you?

N.H. Of course. They tried everything from threats to propositions. Mrs. Moon sent me tapes in which she spoke about a reconciliation. She sent people to visit my parents, and my friends. They also wanted to buy my silence when they realized that I would not come back. I’m glad they did not offer me a huge amount of money when I was weaker; I would have probably accepted.

P.M. Do you remember the first incident that made you understand that Reverend Moon was surely not the Messiah he claimed to be?

N.H. I understood that something was wrong when I realized that he thought he was God. It was a shock to me. He took himself to be the master of the universe. And these days how can a person conquer the world if not with money? He spoke as much about money as he did about God. But I do not know to what extent he has not gone mad, he has not convinced himself that he is really the all powerful Messiah.

NANSOOK HONG “Sometimes the Moons gave $1 million in cash to my husband. It was for him to “recycle” in the Korean businesses of New York.”

P.M. How does the collection of money work in the Church?

N.H. At first, to become a member, it was very simple: you had to give all your money. Today, it’s more fuzzy. Moon still always wants more members and has to “content” himself with substantial donations but not total ones. The main source of income for the Church comes from Japan which is the most flourishing branch of the Church. At regular intervals emissaries bring suitcases full of cash. The Japanese members are probably the most fanatical. They work until they are exhausted to fulfill the goals of the Church. In addition to the restaurants, hotels, and newspapers that Moon controls, the Church hides behind organizations such as The Women’s Federation for World Peace. Under the pretext of humanitarian work, they go knocking on the doors of the rich and extort incredible sums from them.

P.M. How does money laundering work?

N.H. Oh, it is very simple! The Moons sometimes gave $1 million in cash to their children, to the sons, who immediately make a trip to the family owned Korean restaurants in New York. It is a very easy way to recycle the money.

P.M. You say in your book that the true power of the sect is in fact held by Moon’s wife.

N.H. Reverend Moon had several extramarital affairs that he called “providential encounters, trials that God put on his path”. He and his wife had some sort of tacit agreement, a little bit like Hillary and Bill Clinton. Given power and a fortune, she closed her eyes. She is the mother of his thirteen children; she knows all his secrets. In traditional Asian societies, even if the man commands, in the shadows the woman is pulling the strings. If you had a favor to ask Reverend Moon, the best way to get it was to address his wife. Unfortunately for me, she never supported me. My husband beat me, but according to her I was one to blame. If I had lived up to my task, I should have changed him, she said. But how could I have transformed a violent manic-depressive when they themselves, who called themselves superior, had failed in their education of their own son? In their defense, my husband scared them. He is the only one in the family who answered back to his father.

P.M. Does Reverend Moon have illegitimate children inside the sect?

N.H. In the inner circle, it is known! But people are bound by the money and the desire to preserve their comfort.

P.M. You say Reverend Moon is able to give speeches to the members for fifteen hours. Does he use drugs to achieve such performances?

N.H. No, absolutely not. But these speeches are translated from Korean into English, which reduces his effective speaking time to seven hours; which is not bad.

P.M. What exactly does he talk about?

N.H. It’s a pretty incoherent jumble about God, family, purity and other nonsense ...

P.M. What are you living off these days?

N.H. Through my lawyers, I receive a pension from the Moons for the education of my children. That is my only source of income. I work at an association for battered women.

P.M. After being betrayed, do you now find it hard to trust your fellow men?

N.H. Not really. I find it hard believe the talk of religious people. In any case, I do not want to be under the control of anyone. ♦

________________________________________

Video : Hyo Jin de la “famille parfaite” Moon

________________________________________

J’ai arraché mes enfants à Moon – Nansook Hong

« L’ombre de Moon » par Nansook Hong

Les Moon sont entrés dans Paris 1990

_________________________

Nansook Hong, transcripts of three interviews, including ‘60 Minutes’

Nansook Hong interviewed by Herbert Rosedale

Nansook Hong – The Dark Side of the Moons

Nansook Hong In The Shadow Of The Moons

Sun Myung Moon: The Emperor of the Universe

The Moons entered Paris in 1990; Hyo Jin fled in a black Mercedes when the police arrived!

_________________________

Nansook Hong entrevistada en español

‘A la Sombra de los Moon’ por Nansook Hong

_________________________

Nansook Hong – Ich schaue nicht zurück

_________________________

TV番組「60分」で洪蘭淑インタビュー

わが父文鮮明の正体 – 洪蘭淑

文鮮明「聖家族」の仮面を剥ぐ – 洪蘭淑

[roman-catholic-mass-readings]

17th Nov >> Mass Readings (Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Australia & Canada)

 for

Friday of the Thirty-Second Week in Ordinary Time 

 &

Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Religious 

  &

Saint Hilda of Whitby, Abbess (England)

 &

Saint Hugh of Lincoln, Bishop (England).

Friday of the Thirty-Second Week in Ordinary Time

(Liturgical Colour: White)

First Reading

Wisdom 13:1-9

Naturally stupid are all men who have not known God and who, from the good things that are seen, have not been able to discover Him-who-is, or, by studying the works, have failed to recognise the Artificer.Fire however, or wind, or the swift air,the sphere of the stars, impetuous water, heaven’s lamps,are what they have held to be the gods who govern the world.

If, charmed by their beauty, they have taken things for gods, let them know how much the Lord of these excels them, since the very Author of beauty has created them.And if they have been impressed by their power and energy, let them deduce from these how much mightier is he that has formed them, since through the grandeur and beauty of the creatures we may, by analogy, contemplate their Author.

Small blame, however, attaches to these men, for perhaps they only go astray in their search for God and their eagerness to find him; living among his works, they strive to comprehend them and fall victim to appearances, seeing so much beauty.Even so, they are not to be excused: if they are capable of acquiring enough knowledge to be able to investigate the world, how have they been so slow to find its Master?

The Word of the Lord

R/ Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm

Psalm 18(19):2-5

R/ The heavens proclaim the glory of God.

The heavens proclaim the glory of God, and the firmament shows forth the work of his hands.Day unto day takes up the story and night unto night makes known the message.

R/ The heavens proclaim the glory of God.

No speech, no word, no voice is heard yet their span extends through all the earth, their words to the utmost bounds of the world.

R/ The heavens proclaim the glory of God.

Gospel Acclamation

Hebrews 4:12

Alleluia, alleluia!

The word of God is something alive and active: it can judge secret emotions and thoughts.

Alleluia!

Or

Luke 21:28

Alleluia, alleluia!

Stand erect, hold your heads high, because your liberation is near at hand.

Alleluia!

Gospel

Luke 17:26-37

Jesus said to the disciples: ‘As it was in Noah’s day, so will it also be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating and drinking, marrying wives and husbands, right up to the day Noah went into the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. It will be the same as it was in Lot’s day: people were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but the day Lot left Sodom, God rained fire and brimstone from heaven and it destroyed them all. It will be the same when the day comes for the Son of Man to be revealed.

   ‘When that day comes, anyone on the housetop, with his possessions in the house, must not come down to collect them, nor must anyone in the fields turn back either. Remember Lot’s wife. Anyone who tries to preserve his life will lose it; and anyone who loses it will keep it safe. I tell you, on that night two will be in one bed: one will be taken, the other left; two women will be grinding corn together: one will be taken, the other left.’ The disciples interrupted. ‘Where, Lord?’ they asked. He said, ‘Where the body is, there too will the vultures gather.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ.

———————

Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Religious

(Liturgical Colour: White)

First Reading

1 John 3:14-18

We have passed out of death and into life, and of this we can be sure because we love our brothers.If you refuse to love, you must remain dead; to hate your brother is to be a murderer, and murderers, as you know, do not have eternal life in them.This has taught us love –that he gave up his life for us; and we, too, ought to give up our lives for our brothers.If a man who was rich enough in this world’s goods saw that one of his brothers was in need, but closed his heart to him, how could the love of God be living in him?My children, our love is not to be just words or mere talk, but something real and active.

The Word of the Lord

R/ Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm

Psalm 33(34):2-11

R/ I will bless the Lord at all times.

or

R/ Taste and see that the Lord is good.

I will bless the Lord at all times, his praise always on my lips; in the Lord my soul shall make its boast. The humble shall hear and be glad.

R/ I will bless the Lord at all times.

or

R/ Taste and see that the Lord is good.

Glorify the Lord with me. Together let us praise his name.I sought the Lord and he answered me; from all my terrors he set me free.

R/ I will bless the Lord at all times.

or

R/ Taste and see that the Lord is good.

Look towards him and be radiant; let your faces not be abashed.This poor man called, the Lord heard him and rescued him from all his distress.

R/ I will bless the Lord at all times.

or

R/ Taste and see that the Lord is good.

The angel of the Lord is encamped around those who revere him, to rescue them.Taste and see that the Lord is good. He is happy who seeks refuge in him.

R/ I will bless the Lord at all times.

or

R/ Taste and see that the Lord is good.

Revere the Lord, you his saints. They lack nothing, those who revere him.Strong lions suffer want and go hungry but those who seek the Lord lack no blessing.

R/ I will bless the Lord at all times.

or

R/ Taste and see that the Lord is good.

Gospel Acclamation

John 13:34

Alleluia, alleluia!

I give you a new commandment: love one another just as I have loved you, says the Lord.

Alleluia!

Gospel

Luke 6:27-38

Jesus said to his disciples: ‘I say this to you who are listening: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly. To the man who slaps you on one cheek, present the other cheek too; to the man who takes your cloak from you, do not refuse your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you, and do not ask for your property back from the man who robs you. Treat others as you would like them to treat you. If you love those who love you, what thanks can you expect? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what thanks can you expect? For even sinners do that much. And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what thanks can you expect? Even sinners lend to sinners to get back the same amount. Instead, love your enemies and do good, and lend without any hope of return. You will have a great reward, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.

   ‘Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate. Do not judge, and you will not be judged yourselves; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned yourselves; grant pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and there will be gifts for you: a full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, will be poured into your lap; because the amount you measure out is the amount you will be given back.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ.

———————-

Saint Hilda of Whitby, Abbess (England)

(Liturgical Colour: White)

First Reading

Genesis 12:1-4

The Lord said to Abram, ‘Leave your country, your family and your father’s house, for the land I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name so famous that it will be used as a blessing.

‘I will bless those who bless you:I will curse those who slight you. All the tribes of the earth shall bless themselves by you.’

So Abram went as the Lord told him.

The Word of the Lord

R/ Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm

Psalm 14(15):2-5

R/ The just will live in the presence of the Lord.

Lord, who shall dwell on your holy mountain?

He who walks without fault;

he who acts with justice

and speaks the truth from his heart;

he who does not slander with his tongue.

R/ The just will live in the presence of the Lord.

He who does no wrong to his brother,

who casts no slur on his neighbour,

who holds the godless in disdain,

but honours those who fear the Lord.

R/ The just will live in the presence of the Lord.

He who keeps his pledge, come what may;

who takes no interest on a loan

and accepts no bribes against the innocent.

Such a man will stand firm for ever.

R/ The just will live in the presence of the Lord.

Gospel Acclamation

Matthew 5:3

Alleluia, alleluia!

How happy are the poor in spirit:

theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Alleluia!

Gospel

Matthew 5:1-12a

How happy are the poor in spirit

Seeing the crowds, Jesus went up the hill. There he sat down and was joined by his disciples. Then he began to speak. This is what he taught them:

‘How happy are the poor in spirit; theirs is the kingdom of heaven.Happy the gentle: they shall have the earth for their heritage.Happy those who mourn:    they shall be comforted.Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right:    they shall be satisfied.Happy the merciful: they shall have mercy shown them.Happy the pure in heart: they shall see God.Happy the peacemakers:    they shall be called sons of God.Happy those who are persecuted in the cause of right: theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

‘Happy are you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ.

———————

Saint Hugh of Lincoln, Bishop (England)

(Liturgical Colour: White)

First Reading

Ezekiel 3:17-21

The word of the Lord was addressed to me as follows, ‘Son of man, I have appointed you as sentry to the House of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from me, warn them in my Name. If I say to a wicked man, “You are to die,” and you do not warn him; if you do not speak and warn him to renounce his evil ways and so live, then he shall die for his sin, but I will hold you responsible for his death. If, however, you do warn a wicked man and he does not renounce his wickedness and his evil ways, then he shall die for his sin, but you yourself will have saved your life. When the upright man renounces his integrity to do evil and I set a trap for him, he too shall die; since you failed to warn him, he shall die for his sin and the integrity he practised will no longer be remembered; but I will hold you responsible for his death. If, however, you warn the upright man not to sin and he abstains from sinning, he shall live, thanks to your warning, and you too will have saved your life.’

The Word of the Lord

R/ Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm

Psalm 116(117)

R/ Go out to the whole world and proclaim the Good News.

O praise the Lord, all you nations, acclaim him all you peoples!

R/ Go out to the whole world and proclaim the Good News.

Strong is his love for us; he is faithful for ever.

R/ Go out to the whole world and proclaim the Good News.

Gospel Acclamation

2 Corinthians 5:19

Alleluia, alleluia!

God in Christ was reconciling the world to himself, and he has entrusted to us the news that they are reconciled.

Alleluia!

Gospel

Matthew 9:35-37

The harvest is rich but the labourers are few

Jesus made a tour through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the Good News of the kingdom and curing all kinds of diseases and sickness. And when he saw the crowds he felt sorry for them because they were harassed and dejected, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is rich but the labourers are few, so ask the Lord of the harvest to send labourers to his harvest.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ.

[biofunmy]

This Chinese Woman Is Running To Save The Love Of Her Life

Twitter / @allisongrabbit

Zheng Churan began to run when she had run out of options to save her husband from the police.

Over the past month she has covered almost 90 miles, running in circles around the city where she lives in southern China. She tracks her progress via Weibo and Twitter every day and plans to keep running until she’s completed 6,200 miles (or 10,000 kilometers), which is the distance between where her husband was arrested in China and the Old Trafford stadium in England, where his favorite soccer team, Manchester United, plays.

Zheng’s husband, Wei Zhili, went missing from their home in Guangzhou more than two months ago, in late March. Zheng told BuzzFeed News his disappearance was a “blow to the heart and head.” But it did not come as a surprise — Wei is a journalist and labor activist, exactly the sort of person who gets in trouble with the police in China. Zheng herself had been picked up by the police on almost exactly the same date four years earlier.

Zheng was one of five women detained by police in 2015 for handing out stickers against the sexual harassment of women on subways and buses. The official charge was for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a crime punishable by three years in prison. As writer and journalist Leta Hong Fincher notes in her book Betraying Big Brother, the five women — Zheng, Wu Rongrong, Wei Tingting, Wang Man, and Li Maizi — were virtually unknown at the time of their arrest. But the timing of their detention — just before International Women’s Day and as Chinese President Xi Jinping was about to cohost a summit on women’s rights in New York — turned their arrest into an international scandal, making them famous as the “Feminist Five.” Zheng and the four other women were released the following month after 37 days in detention.

Four years later, when her husband disappeared, Zheng knew the authorities were behind it, but that did little to console her. She tried everything to get answers — she visited three public security bureaus and two local police stations; called 12389 (China’s police reporting line), 110 (a general line for police complaints and to report disappearances), and 12345 (a general public administration service line); and wrote a message on Weibo that was shared over 6,000 times.

Zheng, 30, finally heard from the police one week after her husband disappeared. They told her that he had been picked up for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” — just as she had been four years prior. He was being held, for the time being, in a detention center two hours away in the city of Shenzhen. Although the officer on the phone told Zheng that Wei was doing fine, he would not be allowed to see a lawyer or his wife. There was no telling when — or if — Zheng would ever see her partner again.

That was when she began to run. Over email, Zheng told BuzzFeed News that she was running to bring attention to Wei’s incarceration, but also because she had simply “run out of campaigns” and didn’t know what else to do. Zheng shares a daily update on her runs on Weibo and Twitter with the hashtag #RaceToFreeWeiZhili. Twitter is banned in China, and Zheng, like many other young Chinese people, uses a VPN to circumnavigate the ban.

“He is detained under scrutiny, which means we don’t know where he is,” she said. “His lawyer is also unable to meet him — no human rights activists under scrutiny have ever met their lawyers, according to my knowledge.”

Obtained by BuzzFeed News

Zheng Churan and Wei Zhili

Zheng’s political and personal lives were always closely intertwined but became more so when she met Wei at Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University in 2013.

“He would speak to me every day about the living conditions of workers, why sanitation and construction workers had to work so hard, but were still very poor. They are not lazy or stupid, it is that society has structural problems that allow the rich to become richer while the poor become poorer,” Zheng wrote about her husband after he was detained, in an essay in the Hong Kong Free Press — a free, nonprofit online newspaper founded by independent journalists in response to concerns over declining press freedom. “Zhili forced me to think about all these issues that I rarely considered. If he wasn’t my boyfriend, I probably would have kicked him in the face to make him stop talking. But he was so persistent! Eventually, I became a feminist who also focused on workers’ rights.”

Zheng believes Wei’s disappearance is part of a crackdown on labor activists and left-leaning students in China. Wei is the editor of a pro-labor website called New Generation that monitors and reports on migrant workers.

“I always felt that he might be arrested one day because he helps workers, which pisses off the government for disturbing stability,” she told BuzzFeed News via email. “As a feminist, I have experienced a lot of this when I was arrested in 2015, but as the relative of an activist, it feels quite different.”

In the months before he was arrested, Wei, who is 31, was helping workers suffering from an incurable lung disease — pneumoconiosis, the most common occupational health hazard in China — to file legal claims against their employers. The day Wei disappeared, two of his coworkers, Yang Zhengjun and Ke Chengbing, were also reported missing.

After Wei disappeared, Zheng literally grew sick with worry. As she comforted Wei’s parents and her own, her anxiety began to manifest in physical symptoms: She coughed up blood, lost her appetite, couldn’t keep food down, could not sleep, and stayed glued to her phone day and night, waiting to hear from Wei.

In the fog of her depression and helplessness, Zheng told BuzzFeed News, she imagined that Wei’s ideal partner would be someone strong and capable of withstanding what she was dealing with, “someone with an eight-pack, who could hold him up with a single hand.” She decided to start running — with the goal of completing 6,200 miles and sharing social media updates about it — as a way to bring awareness to Wei’s incarceration and to fight her way out of the sadness that threatened to engulf her.

Here is the Chinese and English version to explain why I am running 10000km to call for free WeiZhili http://bit.ly/2IArSH9

03:58 PM – 07 May 2019

A lifetime of feminist campaigns and encounters with the state, Zheng said, meant she had devoted herself to work, spending little time caring for her body.

“Although I’ve been doing a lot of things for him in the past month, I am mentally exhausted. I decided to train myself and run to strengthen my mental power and health, so I can take better care of our parents and greet a free Wei soon.”

Zheng wakes up at 9 every morning, stretches, runs, stretches some more, and does squats and high-intensity interval training.

“My beloved disappeared because he did something good. It breaks my heart,” she told BuzzFeed News. “I am now trying very hard to rebuild my courage and my trust in the world.”

When she first began to run, Zheng said she was surprised: “I felt better. Focusing on my own body actually feels good. But at the same time, when I run I recall the good days with Wei, so I cry and run at the same time.”

Twitter / @allisongrabbit

Zheng’s 37-day detention in cell number 1107 caused her years of PTSD.

In prison, her glasses were taken away so she could not recognize the faces of her interrogators. Other members of the Feminist Five — particularly those who identified as queer — were sexually harassed by guards and lawyers, and the police frequently used threats against family members to intimidate the women.

Describing her state of mind to Fincher, Zheng used the Chinese term pujie, which translates as “spread out on the street,” like roadkill. At the time, Zheng had no way of knowing what was happening to her family back in Guangzhou, but Wei and his network of supporters in the labor rights community were keeping the authorities at bay with a constant vigil around Zheng’s parents.

Zheng did not recover from the effects of incarceration for a long time after she was freed. Fincher described Zheng’s deep shock, how she would grow afraid whenever she heard a knock at the door, terrified of being arrested again, and remembering the hazy faces of her interrogators and her prison.

Even after her release, Chinese police would keep Zheng in a constant state of anxiety by randomly calling her up for a “chat” or inviting her for “tea.”

After months of therapy, Zheng married Wei in 2016, promising her parents that she would not work for women’s rights until the government dropped all charges against her. The Feminist Five were released when lawyers for the prosecution failed to present evidence and charges against them within the mandated period of 37 days, but they are still considered “suspects” by the police.

Zheng is no longer running alone. Thanks to her followers on Weibo and daily running updates on Twitter, she’s been joined by eight other people who heard about Wei and her through the internet. “Some of them are avid athletes, while some seldom do any sports, but they all support me and Wei with this,” Zheng told BuzzFeed News. “Some pay little attention to social activism or civil society, but after they heard about Wei and my story, they ran over 10 km with me and said that they hoped to share 100 km with me. It was deeply moving and filled me with power.”

#大兔跑一萬公里迎小危自由 打卡第31天。今晨跑步突然遇到大雨，還打雷，迎著雨跑感覺自己很強大。 #racetofreeweizhili day 31 check in. It rains when I went running this morning. Heard some thunder too. Running in the rain makes me feel strong.

06:42 PM – 30 May 2019

Among their followers and friends, Zheng and Wei have always been referred to as “knight errants.” Both of them, Zheng wrote in her essay about Wei, grew up in middle-class families in the 1990s with a culture of heroes and warriors, which taught them: “At the sight of injustice, draw a sword and render help. In other words, we had to help others who are treated unfairly, and speak up for them or else we wouldn’t be able to become our ideal selves.”

Zheng is still afraid, but these days, she said, she’s putting one foot in front of the other.

“I think no one can avoid the fear of leaving family behind, losing freedom, and being imprisoned,” she wrote in the essay. “We turned to words that we had always used to encourage one another: ‘My feet are trembling with fear, but how can I not do it?’” ●

Sahred From Source link World News

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[zukoscomet]

This Strange World

My first ever Newtina fic with some Jakweenie family interspersed! It’s probably one of my longest pieces, too, so enjoy. I also may be convinced to write follow-ups to this ;)

Newt and Tina Scamander had the ideal marriage to a stranger’s eye. They were both young, healthy, and shared the kind of love that some could only dream of. He was a famous author, she a high ranking Auror. They weren’t rich but they had enough. A nice apartment in London, space for their relatives to visit and for their weird and wonderful host of beasts. 

“Look at my sister, living the high life in the Old Smoke with her handsome husband.” Queenie would often say to her friends.

But, as the years rolled on, it became apparent they were missing a piece.

A family of their own.

Tina had known going into her marriage that she and Newt would probably never have children. Before she’d even laid eyes on her future husband, her mother had always said that Tina was the career-girl and Queenie the home-bird.

Newt hadn’t expected to ever marry in the first place.

And, even if they’d wanted to, Grindelwald was still out there.

The idea that he could one day come back for Newt petrified her. Newt was strong, stronger than the average wizard, but even he stood little chance against the Elder Wand. Tina had seen enough post-mortem reports on his victims to know Grindelwald wouldn’t hesitate to murder the magizoologist that put him in the custody of MACUSA. A quick death would be a stroke of luck, not a given. Newt, as per usual, was more concerned about what the wizard would do to Tina rather than himself. Tina couldn’t expect any mercy, and neither would any children, were they in the line of fire.

That promise alone was enough to keep Newt and Tina’s resolve but they had their moments. Episodes where they wavered and wished for something more. As the months turned into years, they became a more frequent occurrence for them both. They were the one thing they didn’t share with each other.

Tina got them when she saw Newt fawning over his beasts. His gentle hands and kind eyes. That natural paternal instinct that he tried so hard to suppress when he wasn’t with his creatures to save himself the heartache. 

It was easier for Tina in some ways. She had work to throw herself into when the going got tough. 

Newt did, too, but he was stuck in the house.

He pretended not to, but Newt noticed things. The quiet in the rooms that never seemed to go away completely. The empty spaces and the almost sterile cleanliness of their furniture. Tina’s odd longing gazes. The sad expression that his own mother wore whenever he saw her. 

It was hard, but they managed. They had each other and that could, and would, be enough for them.

That was until Jacob and Queenie’s baby arrived. 

Newt had been sitting at their kitchen table, perfecting the outlines on a sketch for the new edition of his book, when Tina had burst in through the front door, waving a letter in her hands. Newt had jumped a mile. 

“It’s a boy! Queenie had a boy,” Tina had said breathlessly.

Newt swallowed the lump in his throat and quirked his lips. “That’s wonderful news, dear. Are they okay?”

“They’re all great,” She pushed a photo towards Newt. “His name is Ralph.”

His eyes turned to the moving picture of what would be his nephew under his fingers. A tiny baby, lying on his back in a Moses basket, clutching onto Queenie’s outstretched fingers. Ralph Kowalski certainly had plenty of his mother in him, that was for sure. Lush golden curls and cream skin, with a sharp chin. It was Jacob’s dark irises that stared back at Newt, though. 

Newt struggled for something appeasing to say. “He looks just like your sister.”

The state that Tina was in, in that moment, reminded Newt of when she’d walked down the aisle close to three years ago with Queenie on her arm. Her smile made of blinding light, happy tears threatening to spill over.

They left for New York the next morning. 

For Tina, the trip seemed to last an eternity. She stood out on the deck of the steamer, leaning over the rails and scanning the horizon for sight of her homeland impatiently. She seemed to almost vibrate with anticipated excitement. 

For Newt, the journey went all too fast. With each mile they sailed away from England, a sickening sense of dread deepened in his stomach. He knew he was doing far too much inward-looking. This was about Queenie and Jacob, his family, not his own warped grieving for something he couldn’t have.

But Newt knew even then; this wasn’t going to do his marriage any good.

They stayed in New York for nearly three weeks. Newt had never seen Tina so happy. Queenie looked none the worse for wear after having a child. She’d bounced back into her lithe frame as easily as putting on an old coat. The same couldn’t be said for Jacob, who maintained a constant look of having run ten laps around Central Park. 

Tina fell in love with Ralph as quickly as a click of the fingers. He seemed to like her, too, as much as a newborn could show. He was quiet with her, sat on her lap and played with her necklace and her rings.

It was too much for Newt to bear at times. 

“Hey, man. You good?” Jacob asked him one night as he climbed up the escape. 

They’d been sat on the fire exit together, side by side. The sky was turning orange like a tiger lily, flecked with white as the stars began to appear. A cool breeze drifted along, ruffling Newt’s hair gently.

“I just-” Newt hesitated, looking out over the city skyline. “I needed some air.”

“I get it. It’s pretty stuffy in there, right?” Jacob chuckled, shrugging his work jacket off. “We need to get a bigger place.”

Newt wasn’t sure if Jacob was mocking him or just hadn’t sensed anything wrong.

Jacob took a deep breath in. “Look, Newt. Queenie asked me to talk to you.”

“You needn’t bother yourself, Jacob, I’m fine.” 

“It doesn’t take magic to know that something between you and Tina has been off lately. Hell, I’ll bother myself as much as I want, you’re my wife’s brother-in-law so you’re basically my brother-in-law, too.”

“Tina wants a child of her own.” Newt answered after a moment, staring at the traffic bustling about on the ground below.

“And you …” Jacob trailed off, trying to decide on the most tactful way to put it. “Can’t give her one?”

Newt flushed at the implication. “No- no, I can. As far as I’m aware, atleast.”

“Then what’s holding you back? I know things are looking a bit shaky over with the Jerrys- ”

“It’s Grindelwald.” 

“You’re afraid he’s going to come after you? Newt, it’s been like half a decade.” Jacob said in disbelief. “He hasn’t even been in Britain. Queenie says he’s frightened of some guy called Dumbledore.”

“He is, but how long will that hold? I can’t place the life of a child, my child, on the hope that Grindelwald has forgotten about me.”

The other man was silent for a minute. “Nothing I say is going to change your mind, is it?”

Despite himself, Newt smiled a little. “No, but you’re an honourable man for trying.”

Jacob grinned back at him. “Thanks, Newt.”

There were few circumstances under which Newt would ever consider moving to America, he loved Britain too much, but being out there with Jacob and Queenie, and now Ralph, made him waver. He liked this, this close-knit family that they’d built together, although there were many thousands of miles between them normally. 

“Right,” Newt started, beginning to push himself up onto his feet. “I’m going to go and see Tina.”

“Let’s give the ladies some space to talk, too, shall we?” Jacob put his hand on Newt’s shoulder firmly. “We’ll go somewhere and leave them be for a while.”

The magizoologist hesitated, before resigning himself to an excursion with Jacob. Tina saw her sister precious little. Perhaps some time alone with Queenie would do her good.

“Alright,” Newt sighed. “Where do you want to go?”

“Uh, surprise me, Mr Scamander.”

And with that, Newt apparated off of the fire exit with Jacob in tow, to wherever his mind took him. 

A floor below, Tina jumped at the sound, as did Ralph. It was only Queenie that didn’t seem surprised as she stood at the kitchen counter, stirring a hot drink for her and her sister.

“Tina, are you and Newt getting on okay?” 

Tina looked up from her book. A bolt of anger shot through her quickly, there and gone before she’d had time to comprehend. 

“You’re the Legilimens, you tell me.” she replied sharply, going back to her page to avoid her sister’s eyes.

“I don’t want to read your mind. I want you to be honest with me.” Queenie retorted stubbornly, straightening up as she perched on the armchair.

“What’s there to say? That Newt and I aren’t 100% happy that we can’t have children?”

“Because of Grindelwald?” 

“Germany, too.” Tina muttered.

The ushering in of extremist politics in Germany made her feel uneasy. Who knows what the rest of 1931 was going to hold. Men like Hitler getting to power often ended in war and Britain wasn’t ready for that. The Depression was hitting hard. The Muggle army was down on their numbers, as was the country’s productivity. The Ministry wasn’t in much better shape. They were already at war with Gellert Grindelwald. People were going missing, turning up dead later on. The Auror Department was shrinking by the day. The last thing they needed was hot war with Germany. 

“The thing is with war,” Queenie said gently, setting a cup of coffee in front of her sister. “Is that it can go on for a real long time. You and Newt might be too old to have babies by the time the world quietens down. That’s if it ever does.”

“You know, Teen, life doesn’t just stop in the bad times. Things go on.”

Tina watched her nephew play on the rug, completely untroubled by the environment he’d been born into. Little Ralph Kowalski. His parents weren’t that different from him in that sense. Jacob and Queenie knew the world and all her dangers full well, but it just didn’t seem to trouble them. Tina was glad for them, that they could be that way. She envied it, even, but it infuriated her, too.

Queenie knew that. 

“Maybe Newt will change his mind one day.” Queenie said carefully. 

“Everyone has a selfish streak. It’s bigger in some, smaller in others, but we all have it. The need to content ourselves, even if the cost is irrational,” Tina leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “Except Newt. Newt doesn’t have it.”

“He’s still human.” Her sister responded quietly, taking a delicate sip from her cup. 

When they finally left New York a few days later, Tina was devastated. 

Their house seemed quiet as a graveyard compared to the Kowalski residence. There was none of Queenie’s humming as she cooked or Ralph’s excited squealing, no fire crackling in the hearth, no radio playing in the background. The hollowness was suffocating. 

The silence made Newt want to scream.

Tina ran her hand over the flawless marble worktop, cool against her fingers, as Newt set down the last of their baggage.

“Newt.” His name came out of her mouth like a plea. Tina always thought she was coping until she wasn’t. Her sadness seemed to hit like a tsunami, filling her lungs and drowning her. 

“I’m going to the Amazon.” 

Tina took a sharp breath in, tears beginning to well up. “What?”

“I’ve finished every profile for the new edition of the book, except for the creatures that are native to the Amazon,”  Newt refused to meet her sad, brown eyes. She’d open him up in a second if he did. 

One blink and the tears started to fall. “Please, don’t.”

It took Newt a moment to summon the courage to answer, to be as cold as his need for isolation required him to be. “I’m leaving the day after tomorrow.”

Tina knew well enough that Newt’s overseas work trips lasted indefinitely. Sometimes he’d be gone a week, sometimes months on end. It was for that reason that, when Newt had booked his passage to Brazil, he’d left himself a day to spend with Tina. In retrospect, that hadn’t been such a great idea. They didn’t speak to each other. She slept firmly on her side of the bed. 

Tina didn’t linger. She wasn’t there when he opened his eyes on the morning of his departure. She wasn’t there waving from the docks when his ship pulled away. That truly broke his heart. She’d done that for him since ‘26.

The defining factor of Newt and Tina’s partnership was that they were always there for each other, no matter the circumstance. To have that severed felt to Newt like his marriage had never even existed.

He felt it when he penned letters to Tina from the Amazon, sometimes two or three times a day, and got nothing in return. Newt had gone on this trip to escape the silence, but he’d only created another sort from someone who did exist. Someone who was definitely the love of Newt’s life. 

That still did not make him brave enough to go home. 

Newt wasted weeks looking at beasts he’d studied a million times before. That normally never deterred him, but everything he seemed to do was hollow right about then. He observed, wrote, sketched, cataloged some of the world’s most incredible creatures without enjoying a thing. Not even his expulsion from Hogwarts, what Leta had done to him, all those years ago had made him feel this way.

It was only on his seventh week out in the Amazon did he experience something real, and it wasn’t pleasant.

It had been a normal day. He’d rolled out of his hammock at 5:30am, ate a lukewarm bowl of porridge at the rickety table in his tent while he flipped through some sketches from yesterday. An owl, a Eurasian eagle on that day, dropped the latest issue of the Daily Prophet in front of him. He took a passing glance at it. The headline read:

Eleven Ministry Aurors killed in Grindelwald Attack.

Newt had scrambled to open the paper, eyes tearing frantically through the report. It was headline news, but not much detail, as it was with most events that involved the Ministry. All that was certain was that a mission to apprehend Gellert Grindelwald had gone drastically wrong. Eleven out of the team of fifteen were dead. Condition of the survivors were unknown, as were names. 

Newt had never struck a camp so fast in all his life. 

He didn’t bother with a boat. It would take him too long. He did the reckless thing and apparated country to country. Brazil to Senegal to Spain to Calais and then right into his empty living room. 

It was exactly as he’d left it nearly two months ago. The grandfather clock was still ticking. Tina’s coat was still draped on the armchair, a cold cup of coffee on the table. Nothing out of the ordinary, except for a glittering on the mantelpiece that caught Newt’s eye.

Tina’s rings, on closer inspection. Her engagement and wedding bands piled neatly on top of one another.

Tina never took those rings off. 

The air was stolen from Newt’s lungs as he stared at his wife’s abandoned rings. His chest felt as those it were imploding, overcome by a crushing pain in his heart that made him seize. So this was grief. Full of unbearable hurt, inexplicable anger and far too much regret. 

Newt had always known that Tina had the power to kill him. Such was the consequence of true love. That was when Newt started to cry, for the first time in years. All his pent up emotions expressed in guttural sobs that tore from his body. Newt truly felt that he was dying in that moment and he would have gone with Death gladly over the pain, over living a long life without Tina. 

He barely heard her voice over his own racket.

“Newt?” 

There she was, in the kitchen doorway. His Tina, dropping a bucket to the floor when he turned to face her. 

Newt’s breath was heavy, tears still streaming down his face. His nails dug deep crescents into his palms. “Why aren’t you wearing your rings?” His voice was so high pitched, he was virtually screaming at her. 

Tina flinched back at the sound. “I- I was taking water to the Niffler. I didn’t want him to steal them.” she stammered.

And then, as if he’d been injected with a sedative, Newt’s rage was washed away. It left him with relief, that Tina was okay, that he was here with her. He saw her. Tina had never been so beautiful, dressed in her navy waistcoat with its silver chain and a white shirt underneath. Dark brown hair straightened, tucked behind her ear.

Nothing else needed to be said. He found Tina in his arms, where she belonged. Her head buried into his shoulder, hands clutching the fabric of his coat tightly. Newt murmured a series of sentences into her hair over and over again.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“I love you.”

Tina didn’t need to hear them right now. She had wondered if Newt would ever come home. To have him here with her was the only comfort she needed.

It was for that reason that it took her a few moments to notice the blood.

Newt had blood dripping from several areas of his body. He had apparated between continents without stopping, she realised. Newt had been splinched. A few times, actually. On his shoulder, his right forearm, lower left leg.

“Newt, what have you done?” Tina whispered, staring at the crimson stain growing on his shoulder as she pulled away slowly. 

He shook his head as if to say it didn’t matter. 

If Tina could have had her way, she would have dragged her husband to St. Mungo’s to be treated immediately, but it was out of the question. This many splinch wounds, that deep, on an experienced apparater like Newt would raise unwanted questions. She couldn’t use her wand either. Her job in the Ministry meant that her spell casting was checked at the beginning and end of the day. The strong, complex healing Newt needed would trigger alarm bells. Tina had to stitch and bandage him up herself. He didn’t make a sound of complaint but the scars left behind would be awful. Tina fought the desire to burst into tears every minute of the whole horrible affair.

Newt was battered, sore and as emotionally worn-out as he’d ever been. That didn’t stop him making love to Tina that night. He needed to feel her familiar form beneath him, her warm breath on his neck, her hands running up and down the bare skin of his back. 

He was a little less careful with her than usual. 

It took Tina a while to register that something was off. Having Newt back distracted her. It was as it had been in the early days of their marriage. Happiness on the border of delirium. Her job at the Auror Office was going well, they were closing in on Grindelwald more each day and she had her husband at home waiting for her. 

It was only when she entered the second week of vomiting up her breakfast that she had the thought. 

It was another week before Tina pushed a positive potion towards Newt. It wasn’t a surprise to him. He’d had his suspicions before it had even dawned on Tina.

“What now?” 

Tina was at war with herself. The moral part of herself was disgusted that she could be so foolish as to get pregnant in such troubling times. The other part, the more selfish part, was thrilled at the news that she was finally carrying her and Newt’s child. But the viability of this would depend on Newt. 

Newt was hard to read. His head was down as he stared at the iris purple liquid blankly, swirling it around in the bottle. “We get out of London. Go somewhere safer.” he said finally.

“We’re doing this?” Tina asked tentatively.

Newt set the potion back down on the table and lifted his head, eyes meeting hers directly. “We’re doing this.” he murmured back. 

“What are you thinking?”

“Life has to go on. This wasn’t preferable but it’s happened,” Newt exhaled, putting his hand on top of Tina’s. “I refuse to take it as anything less than good news.”

“You’re going to be a father, Newt.”

A small, shaky smile appeared on Newt’s face. 

Their move out of London was remarkably quick. It was easiest for Newt. He had his livelihood already packed. Literally. Tina had more to go through. At the announcement of her pregnancy, she’d been put on consultancy and paperwork only. Her boss was less than thrilled at losing one of his senior Aurors during such trying times but there wasn’t much to be done about it. 

Tina found them their new home. A large farmhouse in the Dorset countryside. It was out of the way but had Floo network connections so Tina could use it when she went back into active duty. There was plenty of land for Newt’s creatures if he ever wanted to dispense of the case. There was a beautiful master bedroom for them, a nursery for the baby and a few guest rooms for Jacob and Queenie to take up if they ever visited.

Those rooms came into use far sooner than Newt and Tina had expected.

Tina received her weekly letter from her sister, announcing that Ralph was going to get a little sibling in the late spring. The next time Tina heard from her sister was when she was standing on her doorstep in the rain, with her family and a few of their possessions.

The MACUSA had caught up with them. 

“We’ll be out of your hair as soon as we can find our own place.” Queenie said over breakfast one morning.

“I said don’t worry about it, Queenie. We’ve plenty of room to spare.” Tina replied dismissively as she poked at her bowl of porridge.

“Still, we wouldn’t want to be in your way once the baby’s here. That’s for you guys to enjoy on your own,” The blonde witch persisted, both at the conversation and trying to feed Ralph an apple slice. 

Jacob nodded his agreement. “How long do you have left, Tina?”

“Two months and three weeks.” 

The last few months had been a whirlwind to the Scamanders. Tina was now six months into her pregnancy but she was already tired of it. It had been nicer than Tina expected but the changes in her body still bothered her. She was slow and uncoordinated. Her back seemed to constantly protest at the extra weight she was carrying. She couldn’t eat what she wanted; some things would make her ill. Her abdomen had swollen prolifically, setting a defined curve in even the loosest of Tina’s clothes. Her belly fascinated Newt. In fact, everything about her seemed to fascinate Newt at the moment. She’d never admit it, but she was enjoying the attention that her husband was showering on her.

“It’ll go like that, I promise you.” Queenie snapped her fingers.

“Well,” Tina eased herself into a chair opposite Newt. “Not quick enough.” she muttered.

Newt smiled into his cereal. Considering his original misgivings, Newt was taking this all remarkably well. He was clearly getting excited. In the moments where he wasn’t fussing over her, he was fixing up the nursery or baby-proofing other areas of the house. The only thing they hadn’t prepared was a name. They were both of the opinion that they’d know when they met their baby.

The Kowalskis did eventually find their place in Britain. In Dorset, too, oddly enough. They bought a nice little three-bed in the biggest town. Jacob set up a new bakery and it was, naturally, a hit with the townsfolk within days.

It seemed to Tina that her two biggest wishes were being fulfilled. She and Newt were having a child that they wanted. Queenie was close to her again.

When the baby finally arrived, at 8:03am on the 9th of December 1931, it seemed that all their preparation wasn’t worth much at all. 

Tina hadn’t recognised her first contractions for what they were, assuming they were just hicks. It was, after all, a week before her due date. Over the course of a few hours, though, the pain become too strong and lasted for too long to write off as practise contractions. Newt kept extraordinarily calm in that first stage, even when her water broke. 

It was the parts after arriving at the hospital that Newt struggled to recall. He remembered practically carrying Tina to a bed. How tightly she had held onto his hand. The noise she had made, moaning and whimpering and ragged breathing. The screaming, towards the end. 

The sun was just beginning to rise when Tina finally managed to deliver their child into the world. For a moment, the baby hadn’t cried, leaving both Newt and Tina alone in a skin-crawling moment of silence. 

Their child, their son, started to wail soon after.

In the last three months of Tina’s pregnancy, they received two bouts of terrible news. In late September, Newt received a telegram from the Ministry to inform him that his elder brother, Theseus Scamander, had been killed in yet another futile attempt to apprehend Grindelwald.

In November, Tina got word that her old boss, Percival Graves, had also fallen victim to Gellert Grindelwald. Newt had asked her once, before they were married, if she’d ever had a romantic relationship with Graves. Tina said almost.

They named him Perseus. Perseus Newton Scamander, and he was the most beautiful thing that Newt had ever beheld. 

He mostly took after Tina. He had her dark hair. Glossy and thick, smooth as silk. His skin was her porcelain colour, once the ruddiness had faded, free of any freckles. He had Newt’s eyes though, a strange off-blue like sea water.

Newt couldn’t stop looking at him. He was sold the moment that Tina asked if he wanted to hold him.

Perseus seemed content with them both, snoozing in the crook of Newt’s elbow, swaddled in snow white blankets from his aunt Queenie. Newt had climbed onto the bed with Tina and she lay against him, head on his shoulder.

“What do we do now?” she whispered to him, stroking a finger across Perseus’ little hand. 

“The nurse says we can take him home.” Newt said softly in reply, but that seemed like the most terrifying thing to him. He was so in love with his son, but also terrified of him. Jacob said that was normal.

“That’s scary.” Tina echoed his thoughts. 

“I know, but we’ll take care of him.” 

Newt turned his eyes back to his baby son. He’d lost count how many times he’d done that already. 

“You’ll be just fine, won’t you, Perseus? It breaks my heart that the world isn’t as good as you deserve, but it isn’t all bad, I promise. The world is full of some amazing things and they’re all around you. I’ll teach you to see them. I swear that I will. You can do the things that they never did. That I never did. Or you can do none of it, if that’s what you want. I won’t ever mind, so long as you’re happy. That’s what matters, really. All I’m ever going to want is for you to be happy. Can you do that for me? We’ll see. 

But of all the things I’ve seen in this mad world, you are certainly the most fantastic.” 

[ucflibrary]

Women’s History Month began as a week-long celebration by in Sonoma, California in 1978 which was centered around International Women’s Day on March 8. A year later during a women’s history conference at Sarah Lawrence College, participants learned how successful the week was and decided to initiate similar in their own areas. President Carter issued the first proclamation for a national Women’s History Week in 1980. In 1987, Congress (after being petitioned by the National Women’s History Project) passed Pub. L. 100-9 designating March as Women’s History Month. U.S. Presidents have issued proclamations on Women’s History Month since 1988.

Here at the UCF Libraries, we have created a list of suggested (and favorite) books about women’s history in both fact and fiction. Please click on the read more link below to see the full list with descriptions and catalog links.

Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream by Tanya Lee Stone What does it take to be an astronaut? Excellence at flying, courage, intelligence, resistance to stress, top physical shape, any checklist would include these. But when America created NASA in 1958, there was another unspoken rule: you had to be a man. Here is the tale of thirteen women who proved that they were not only as tough as the toughest man but also brave enough to challenge the government. They were blocked by prejudice, jealousy, and the scrawled note of one of the most powerful men in Washington. But even though the Mercury 13 women did not make it into space, they did not lose, for their example empowered young women to take their place in the sky, piloting jets and commanding space capsules.  Suggested by Jamie LaMoreaux, Acquisitions & Collections

Enter Helen: the invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the rise of the modern single woman by Brooke Hauser Chronicles the rise of a cultural icon who redefined what it means to be an American woman. In 1965, Helen Gurley Brown, author of the groundbreaking bestseller Sex and the Single Girl, took over an ailing Cosmopolitan and soon revamped it into one of the most bankable--and revolutionary--brands on the planet. At a time when women's magazines taught housewives how to make the perfect casserole, Helen spoke directly to the single girl next door, cheekily advising her on how to pursue men, money, power, pleasure, and, most of all, personal happiness. Bringing New York City vibrantly to life during the sexual revolution and the women's movement, and featuring a rich cast of characters, including Hugh Hefner and Gloria Steinem, Enter Helen is the riveting story of a polarizing pioneer who bucked convention to define her own destiny, baiting a generation that both revered and rejected her. Suggested by Richard Harrison, Subject Librarian

Fight like a Girl: How to be a Fearless Feminist by Megan Seely Fight Like A Girl offers a fearless vision for the future of feminism. By boldly detailing what is at stake for women and girls today, Megan Seely outlines the necessary steps to achieve true political, social and economic equity for all. Reclaiming feminism for a new generation, Fight Like A Girl speaks to young women who embrace feminism in substance but not necessarily in name. Suggested by Mary Rubin, Special Collections & University Archives

Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation by Elissa Stein Flow spans its fascinating, occasionally wacky and sometimes downright scary story: from mikvahs (ritual cleansing baths) to menopause, hysteria to hysterectomies - not to mention the Pill, cramps, the history of underwear, and the movie about puberty they showed you in 5th grade. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus Girls to the Front is the epic, definitive history of Riot Grrrl—the radical feminist uprising that exploded into the public eye in the 1990s and included incendiary punk bands Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, and Huggy Bear. A dynamic chronicle not just a movement but an era, this is the story of a group of pissed—off girls with no patience for sexism and no intention of keeping quiet. Suggested by Carrie Moran, User Engagement Librarian

Juliette Gordon Low : the remarkable founder of the Girl Scouts by Stacy A. Cordery In celebration of the Girl Scouts' centennial, this biography is a salute to its maverick founder. Born at the start of the Civil War, Juliette Gordon Low grew up in Georgia, where she struggled to reconcile being a good Southern belle with her desire to run barefoot through the fields. Deafened by an accident, "Daisy" married a dashing British aristocrat and moved to England. But she was ultimately betrayed by her husband and dissatisfied by the aimlessness of privileged life. Her search for a greater purpose ended when she met Robert Baden-Powell, war hero, adventurer, and founder of the Boy Scouts. Captivated with his program, Daisy aimed to instill the same useful skills and moral values in young girls, with an emphasis on fun. She imported the Boy Scouts' sister organization, the Girl Guides, to Savannah in 1912. Rechristened the Girl Scouts, it grew rapidly because of her unquenchable determination and energetic, charismatic leadership. In this biography, the author paints a dynamic portrait of an intriguing woman and a true pioneer whose work touched the lives of millions of girls and women around the world. Suggested by Richard Harrison, Subject Librarian

Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen by Fay Weldon Alternating between passages from Jane Austen’s novels and accounts of her own career, Weldon reveals the connections between art and life, and charts Alice’s trajectory from unpublished writer to celebrated author, her success ultimately outstripping that of her famous “aunt.” Letters to Alice puts Austen’s works into a contemporary perspective as it explores the craft of writing fiction, the pitfalls of publishing too early, the conventions that stifle the creative impulse, and more. In paying tribute to Austen, Weldon opens an illuminating window onto reading, writing, and why literature matters. Suggested by Jamie LaMoreaux, Acquisitions & Collections

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott Lovely Meg, talented Jo, frail Beth, spoiled Amy: these are hard lessons of poverty and of growing up in New England during the Civil War. Through their dreams, plays, pranks, letters, illnesses, and courtships, women of all ages have become a part of this remarkable family and have felt the deep sadness when Meg leaves the circle of sisters to be married at the end of Part I. Part II, chronicles Meg's joys and mishaps as a young wife and mother, Jo's struggle to become a writer, Beth's tragedy, and Amy's artistic pursuits and unexpected romance. Based on Louise May Alcott's childhood, this lively portrait of nineteenth-century family life possesses a lasting vitality that has endeared it to generations of readers. Suggested by Cindy Dancel, Research & Information Services

Mercury 13: the true story of thirteen women and the dream of space flight by Martha Ackmann In 1961, just as NASA launched its first man into space, a group of women underwent secret testing in the hopes of becoming America's first female astronauts. They passed the same battery of tests at the legendary Lovelace Foundation as did the Mercury 7 astronauts, but they were summarily dismissed by the boys' club at NASA and on Capitol Hill. The USSR sent its first woman into space in 1963; the United States did not follow suit for another twenty years. In addition to talking extensively to these women, Ackmann interviewed Chuck Yeager, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, and others at NASA and in the White House with firsthand knowledge of the program, and includes here never-before-seen photographs of the Mercury 13 passing their Lovelace tests. Despite the crushing disappointment of watching their dreams being derailed, the Mercury 13 went on to extraordinary achievement in their lives: Jerrie Cobb dedicated her life to flying solo missions to the Amazon rain forest; Wally Funk went on to become one of the first female FAA investigators; Janey Hart had the political savvy to steer the women through congressional hearings and later helped found the National Organization for Women. Suggested by Jamie LaMoreaux, Acquisitions & Collections

My Life, My Love, My Legacy by Coretta Scott King The life story of Coretta Scott King--wife of Martin Luther King Jr., founder of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and singular twentieth-century American civil rights activist--as told fully for the first time, toward the end of her life, to one of her closest friends. Coretta's is a love story, a family saga, and the memoir of an independent-minded black woman in twentieth-century America, a brave leader who stood committed, proud, forgiving, nonviolent, and hopeful in the face of terrorism and violent hatred every single day of her life. Suggest by Missy Murphey, Subject Librarian

My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem Gloria Steinem had an itinerant childhood. Every fall, her father would pack the family into the car and they would drive across the country, in search of their next adventure. The seeds were planted: Steinem would spend much of her life on the road, as a journalist, organizer, activist, and speaker. In vivid stories that span an entire career, Steinem writes about her time on the campaign trail, from Bobby Kennedy to Hillary Clinton; her early exposure to social activism in India, and the decades spent organizing ground-up movements in America; the taxi drivers who were "vectors of modern myths" and the airline stewardesses who embraced the feminist revolution; and the infinite, surprising contrasts, the "surrealism in everyday life" that Steinem encountered as she traveled back and forth across the country. Suggested by Carrie Moran, User Engagement Librarian

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Lillian Faderman As Lillian Faderman writes, there are "no constants with regard to lesbianism," except that lesbians prefer women. In this groundbreaking book, she reclaims the history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, tracing the evolution of lesbian identity and subcultures from early networks to more recent diverse lifestyles. She draws from journals, unpublished manuscripts, songs, media accounts, novels, medical literature, pop culture artifacts, and oral histories by lesbians of all ages and backgrounds, uncovering a narrative of uncommon depth and originality. Suggested by Missy Murphey, Subject Librarian

Olivia by Dorothy Strachey Captures the awakening passions of an adolescent girl sent away for a year to a small finishing school outside Paris, where she develops an infatuation for her headmistress. Although not strictly autobiographical, Olivia draws on the author’s experiences at finishing schools run by the charismatic Mlle. Marie Souvestre, whose influence lived on through former students like Natalie Barney and Eleanor Roosevelt. Olivia was dedicated to the memory of Strachey’s friend Virginia Woolf and published to acclaim in 1949. In 1999, Olivia was included on the Publishing Triangle’s widely publicized list of the 100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels of the 20th Century. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

Olivia by Ian Falconer A new and unexpected heroine emerges with the irresistible Olivia. Olivia is a spunky little pig with an abundance of energy and enthusiasm. Her daily activities of singing the loudest of songs, creating art on walls, and building skyscrapers do not tire her in the least. Rather, when it is time for bed, she asks for a plethora of books to be read! Olivia's mom, on the other hand, is drained. Parents and kids alike will marvel at Olivia's abounding energy and her mom's abounding patience and love. Suggested by Susan MacDuffee, Acquisitions & Collections

Queen Victoria: A Personal History by Christopher Hibbert The unearthing of lively, telling anecdotes is the special province of Christopher Hibbert, who delights in forcing readers, in the most entertaining way, to reassess all their notions about some of the world's most intriguing historical figures. His biography of Victoria is no exception. We learn in these pages that not only was she the formidable, demanding, capricious Queen of popular imagination, but she was also often shy and vulnerable, prone to giggling fits and crying jags. Often puritanical and censorious when confronted with her mother's moral lapses, she herself could be passionately sensual, emotional, and deeply sentimental. Her 64-year reign saw thrones fall, empires crumble, new continents explored, and England's rise to global and industrial dominance. Hibbert's account of Victoria's life and times is just as sweeping as he reveals to us the real Victoria in all her complexity: failed mother and imperious monarch, irrepressible woman and icon of a repressive age. Suggested by Peggy Nuhn, Regional Librarian

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt In the 1940s and 50s, when the newly minted Jet Propulsion Laboratory needed quick-thinking mathematicians to calculate velocities and plot trajectories, they didn't turn to male graduates. Rather, they recruited an elite group of young women who, with only pencil, paper, and mathematical prowess, transformed rocket design, helped bring about the first American satellites, and made the exploration of the solar system possible.  Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Mitford If F. Scott Fitzgerald was the hero of the Jazz Age, Edna St. Vincent Millay, as audacious in her love affairs as she was in her art, was its heroine. She embodied, in her reckless fancy, the spirit of the New Woman, and gave America its voice. Nancy Milford was given exclusive access to Millay's papers, and what she found was an unimaginable treasure. Hundreds of letters flew back and forth between the three sisters and their mother - and Millay kept the most intimate diary, one whose ruthless honesty brings to mind the journals of Sylvia Plath. Suggested by Larry Cooperman, Research & Information Services

When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone Documents the ancient worship of the great creator Mother Goddess under a diversity of names and details the rewriting of myths, the recasting of rituals and religious doctrines, and the transformation of the Goddess into a wanton, depraved figure by invading patriarchal tribes. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

Women in early America: Struggle, survival and freedom in a New World by Dorothy Mays "Women in Early America: Struggle, Survival, and Freedom in a New World "provides insight into an era in American history when women had immense responsibilities and unusual freedoms. The coverage begins with the 1607 settlement at Jamestown and ends with the War of 1812. In addition to the role of Anglo-American women, the experiences of African, French, Dutch, and Native American women are discussed. The issues discussed include how women coped with rural isolation, why they were prone to superstitions, who was likely to give birth out of wedlock, and how they raised large families while coping with immense household responsibilities. Suggested by Peggy Nuhn, Regional Librarian

You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life by Eleanor Roosevelt Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the world’s best loved and most admired public figures, offers a wise and intimate guide on how to overcome fears, embrace challenges as opportunities, and cultivate civic pride:��You Learn by Living. A crucial precursor to better-living guides like Mark Nepo’s The Book of Awakening or Robert Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, as well as political memoirs such as John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, the First Lady’s illuminating manual of personal exploration resonates with the timeless power to change lives. Suggested by Carrie Moran, User Engagement Librarian

For information about the whole host of Women’s History Month events at UCF, please visit the UCF Office of Diversity and Inclusion Women’s History Month site.

[nightmareonfilmstreet]

Loved to Death: Top Five Gothic Romances for Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day may at first seem like the antithesis to any horror fan’s dream holiday. Regardless of relationship status, it seems hard for us fiends to enjoy a holiday so sweet and loving, without a trace of blood or bats in sight. But romance has in fact enjoyed a long love affair with horror. In fact, Gothic horror, one of the earliest and most influential genres of horror, is frequently centered around romance.

Gothic horror was originally a literary genre, but in the era of horror film, it has moved from the page to the screen. Gothic horror films frequently depict the darker side of romance, making them the perfect pick for a spooky Valentine’s Day. So if you want to add some terror to your love story this year, check out our top five Gothic romance picks.

  Crimson Peak (2015)

If you can only watch one Gothic romance, make it this. Guillermo Del Toro is a master of distilling every genre he takes on and creating films that are essentially the ultimate take on that genre. Nowhere does he do this better than Crimson Peak (2015). Del Toro’s take on Gothic horror is a masterpiece of atmosphere, construction, visuals, and theme. It flawlessly captures the essence of the entire Gothic romance genre in a single film.

Crimson Peak stars Mia Wasikowska as Edith Cushing, an American heiress and aspiring writer in late 19th century New York. As a child, Edith was visited by the ghost of her mother, who warned her to “beware of Crimson Peak.” Now a young woman, Edith is writing a novel, a ghost story on the surface, though she explains the ghost is really a metaphor for the past. Her dismissive male publisher wants her to include a love story. Early on, Del Toro establishes direct references to key themes of Gothic horror, while foreshadowing the story to come.

Edith is an intelligent, independent woman whose literary aspirations evoke the bold female authors who made Gothic romance the iconic genre we know today. I’m certain it’s no coincidence Wasikowska was cast in the role, after so perfectly embodying the most famous of Gothic heroines in Jane Eyre (2011). Edith meets Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), a British nobleman traveling with his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain). Thomas hopes that Edith’s father will invest in his clay mining enterprise. The investment doesn’t happen, but Edith falls in love with the mysterious nobleman, and after her father meets a violent death, she marries him and moves into his crumbling manor in England. Once there, she is thrown into a nightmare of ghosts, murder, and secrets.

Crimson Peak is a perfect deconstruction, and reconstruction, of Gothic horror. It takes key themes of the genre and examines them with depth and detail. The film brilliantly explores memory, family, the past, British aristocracy vs. American new money, the role of women, and the perils of new love and trust. With the relationships in Crimson Peak, Del Toro handles the tropes of Gothic love stories with incredible understanding and insight. There are really three love stories at play in the film, only one of which could be considered healthy. One of them is downright twisted, and all of them reference prominent tropes in the Gothic genre.

Crimson Peak is a visually rich, emotional, and frightening film. Del Toro can take on any genre of horror with brilliance, and his homage to Gothic romance is no exception.

  Jane Eyre (2011)

You can’t talk about Gothic romance without mentioning Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 masterpiece of romance, horror, mystery, and proto-feminism laid the groundwork for most modern iterations of the Gothic romance. While Bronte’s novel was not by any means the first of the genre, arguably every Gothic romance since owes a measure of debt to Jane Eyre. The novel is a masterpiece of swooning, slow burn romance, incredible characters, and horrific dark secrets. As is to be expected with any iconic novel, there are plenty of film adaptations to choose from. My pick for the best is the 2011 Jane Eyre directed by Cary Fukanaga. I’m a massive fan of the novel, and for me, Fukanaga’s adaptation hit all the right notes.

Jane Eyre follows the eponymous heroine (Mia Wasikowska) — an orphan who survives a hellish childhood. As a bright, independent young woman, she takes a position as a governess at the mysterious Thornfield Hall. There she begins to fall for the brooding Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender). But the dark secret of Thornfield threatens to destroy their passionate romance. The 2011 Jane Eyre is a faithful adaptation that manages not to feel rushed within its two hour runtime. Wasikowska and Fassbender give incredible performances, as does the supporting cast — including Judi Dench, Sally Hawkins, Imogen Poots, and Jamie Bell.

Jane Eyre is more heavy on the romance than the horror, but the novel and film do feature a distinctly spooky atmosphere and some supremely creepy scenes. And when this Jane Eyre goes Gothic, it does so very effectively. From Jane’s childhood ordeal in a room that she believes to be haunted, to the disembodied laughter and nighttime mysteries of Thornfield Hall, Fukanaga had me on the edge of my seat with careful lighting and sound design. And when this film is more romance than horror, it delivers perfectly handled characters and incredibly raw emotion. The only disappointment of this adaptation is that it cut the most terrifying sequence in the original novel. I love romance, but the more horror in the mix, the better. But since Jane Eyre succeeded so brilliantly in every other aspect, I’ll forgive this fault.

If you want to witness an effective and faithful adaptation of a monumental classic, Jane Eyre (2011) is a must see.

  I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

From the ultimate Gothic romance genre maker to an exceedingly creative retelling. My next pick is Val Lewton’s haunting re-imagining of Jane Eyre, I Walked With a Zombie (1943). This film marked Lewton’s second horror project after the hugely influential masterpiece, Cat People (1942). I Walked With a Zombie continued the producer’s partnership with director Jacques Tourneur. Lewton’s work with Tourneur would include his very best horror films, and I Walked With a Zombie is no exception. Like Cat People, Zombie was made on a shoestring budget, using a cheesy title provided by the studio via focus groups. But also like Cat People, Lewton would use these limitations to make a frightening, beautiful, and stunningly creative film.

I Walked With a Zombie follows Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), a Canadian nurse who travels to the Caribbean to care for the catatonic wife of Paul Holland, the owner of a sugar plantation. While there, Betsy falls in love with her employer, and begins to except there may be a supernatural source behind his wife’s illness.

I Walked With A Zombie predates the modern horror conception of a zombie, as originated in Night of the Living Dead (1968). Instead, the 1943 film concerns the original concept of a Zombie in Haitian folklore. The subject is handled with surprising care and accuracy for 1943. Lewton and his writers did extensive research on voodoo beliefs and practices for the film, and the depiction of rituals feels almost like a documentary. Furthermore, the film doesn’t shy away from the underlying influence of slavery on zombie practices and beliefs. The film uses the lingering trauma of slavery as a central theme, making for a film that while still flawed, feels overall very ahead of its time. After all, horror is the genre where some of the most socially conscious filmmaking can be found.

Like his first horror film with RKO, Lewton creates some seriously scary sequences using shadow, sound, and suggestion. Betsy’s moonlit journey through the cane fields is intensely creepy — it’s possibly my favorite scene in all of Lewton’s films. As a Gothic romance, I Walked With a Zombie stands out. It takes a familiar structure and story beats, and transports them. Far from the misty moors and crumbling castles of England, I Walked With a Zombie instead gives us the humid nights, shadowy cane fields, and moonlit rituals of the Caribbean. This creative switch results in a new take on a classic genre that is sure to stick with you.

  Rebecca (1940)

Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s novel is a classic work of gothic romance. Hitchcock is known as “the master of suspense” for a reason, and Rebecca proves exactly why. The film manages to take a story where the primary threat is merely memory and guilt, and transform it into a work of horror.

Rebecca follows an unnamed protagonist (Joan Fontaine) working as an assistant to a wealthy woman traveling in Monte Carlo. While there, she sees a man appearing to contemplate suicide on a cliff, and stops him. The man is the aristocratic Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier). The two fall in love and are married after only two weeks of knowing each other.

The new “Mrs. de Winter” moves into her husband’s estate, Manderlay. While settling in, the timid young bride feels overwhelmed by the lingering presence of Maxim’s dead first wife, Rebecca. Her monogram is everywhere, her bedroom remains preserved — everywhere she goes the new Mrs. de Winter is reminded that she can never live up to Rebecca. The unnerving presence of Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), the housekeeper who is obsessed with her late mistress, does little to ease the young bride’s fears. Rebecca, like the novel it is based on, draws heavy influence from Jane Eyre. Like the 1847 novel, Rebecca concerns a working class young woman who falls fast for a mysterious aristocrat — only to find the secrets of her new love’s past will continue to haunt him, and her.

Rebecca is a tour de force of atmosphere. Hitchcock makes Manderlay seem present and unnerving through his mastery of pacing, cinematography, and suspense. The performances in the film are steller. Joan Fontaine balances naivete, fear and strength as the unnamed protagonist. Olivier is the ideal of a haunted Gothic hero, and Judith Anderson embodies an iconic villain as the unhinged Mrs. Danvers.

Gothic stories are most often about the horror of the past. Ghosts and curses may serve as the surface scares, but they always represent the true terror of the past sins and traumas our characters are attempting to escape. Rebecca creates a gothic horror without the metaphor, and makes the ghost at its center literally a memory. But it proves that memory can have just as much power, perhaps even more so, than any specter haunting a castle’s halls.

  The Brides of Dracula (1960)

A hidden treasure of Hammer Horror, The Brides of Dracula makes up for what it lacks in Christopher Lee by being a wonderful and entertaining take on a Gothic romance by way of vampires. Brides of Dracula follows Marianne Danielle (Yvonne Monlaur), a young woman traveling through Transylvania to take a teaching position at a girl’s school. She is a woman in the mode of the classic heroine of Gothic horror; Young, intelligent, but without wealth or social status. She is perfectly poised for a Byronic hero to sweep her off her feet.

Before long, Marianne encounters just such a hero. Or so she thinks. Stranded by her carriage, Marianne accepts the hospitality of the Baroness Meinster (Martita Hunt), who tells Marianne of her insane son, who she must keep locked away for his own safety. Marianne is horrified, and when she encounters the young man, she is swept away by his fairy tale good looks and piteous state. She sees him as perfectly sane, imprisoned by a cruel mother to keep him from his inheritance. She believes she alone can save him, and frees him. But it soon becomes apparent that the young Baron Meinster is not the romantic hero he seemed to be. Before long, peasant girls are turning up dead, and Dr. Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) is on the case.

Brides of Dracula is a fantastic addition to a gothic romance marathon. It flips the tropes we know and takes them fully to the dark side. It forces us to question the themes of Gothic romance by showing how terribly wrong they could go. The Gothic love interest is always flawed, haunted, and dangerous. While the threat posed by any given Byronic hero can vary, they usually at least genuinely fall for the Gothic heroine. But Baron Meinster is all deceitful predator. He embodies the stereotype of the tortured, beautiful aristocrat who needs saving. And he does this intentionally to draw women into his trap. The ruse works, not only on our heroine, but on other women as well. All of them are blinded by the fantasy sold to them by the genre, which the film more than suggests its characters have read too much of.

Along with a great examination of the dark side of Gothic romance, The Brides of Dracula boasts the stunning cinematography, technicolor color palette, and incredible costumes fans of Hammer Horror have come to expect. And while the film lacks Christopher Lee as Dracula, Peter Cushing literally slays as Van Helsing. He adds the intriguing suggestion of a love triangle to the film. This is also Van Helsing in serious badass mode. During the climax of the film, the vampire hunter pulls one of the most hardcore moves in the character’s entire screen history.

If you want your Gothic romance less swooning, and with more vampires, The Brides of Dracula is the film for you!

    Diving into Gothic romance is a great way for to explore ideas of love and loss through the lens of horror. Gothic romance gets at the complexities of love, possibly better then any other genre. It features true love, but also unhealthy love, controlling love, imperfect love, lost love, and terrifying love. It seems fitting that one of the strongest of human emotions be paired with fear. If you want to forgo the candy hearts and dive straight into raw emotion, romance, and terror, let Gothic horror be your Valentine this year.

The post Loved to Death: Top Five Gothic Romances for Valentine’s Day appeared first on Nightmare on Film Street - Horror Movie Podcast, News and Reviews.

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