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southslates · 3 years

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you are lost without the waiting

for the @grishaversebigbang mini bang 2021!

lovely art was done for this piece by amethyst @amethystmoonart [here!] and door @doorhandle16 [here] ! these two were absolutely amazing to work with <3

Summary:

Inej made a deal with the devil. She had faith in him, for whatever reason. His eyes were black as dirt. They were cold. They were home.

In which Inej is Persephone, Kaz is Hades, and she chooses to stay.

ao3 link!

“Tell me you loved to destroy.

Tell me you need me. Please. You are the bones

of my spine. You are the ground beneath my feet.

You are made of deeper stuff than the earth

can give. Admit it: you are lost without the waiting.

― clementine von radics, letter from hades to persephone

Can you even imagine yourself in paradise?

Even the daughter of gods must know loneliness,

must sometimes want nothing more than to be

trapped in a hell of forevers. Thank me, you queen.

I’ve given you forever.”

Inej had been a wind spirit.

Technically, she still was. She didn’t feel like one anymore. She used to dance across rooftops and skies—her parents said she was a gravity-defier. That there was no place in the world—no land, nor ocean—that could bind her feet—or her—to anything.

They were wrong. She had been taken when flying through the skies, swept away into a deep sleep until she woke up in a bed at the Menagerie. There she met Tante Heleen, purveyor of lost spirits. Heleen had told Inej that she saved the girl from a fiery fate, and that now she owed her an indenture. An indenture Inej paid by tending the lands the goddess reigned over and touching the men who let Heleen carry out her whims.

Inej had been a wind spirit, but she did not think she was one anymore. She could not break free. If she left the grassy fields of Heleen’s island world she would be caught and subjugated to an even darker fate.

She stayed. She tended to the fields. She danced in front of gods with long teeth. She belonged to the Menagerie, the girls with lost spirits. She distanced the innocent who breezed through the flower fields from the one who balanced on rope. She felt like two people. She wanted to leave but had nowhere to go.

One day, airing out a field of daisies, she stopped. She could see a flash of color between the deathly white blooms, and held her breath as she reached out to thumb bright orange petals. It was a geranium. It had been her mother’s favorite flower.

In a moment of weakness and pain and longing, she reached for the stem and tugged it out of the earth. And then the ground opened, and Inej fell.

Inej felt as though she fell for days. She thought she would shatter into a thousand pieces when she finally hit the bottom of this well. She thought she would fall forever.

When she reached the bottom of the hole, it was an ocean. She found herself submerged in water and darkness, and pulled herself up until she felt dry air. The darkness stayed omnipresent. She couldn’t see anything. “Hello?” she called into a void.

For a minute, nothing happened. She could almost believe that she was nonexistent. And then something, a bullet, whizzed past her. She barely dodged it.

A light flicked on, and she saw a man in a bright orange waistcoat holding a . . . small cannon in her direction. She assumed it had dislodged the bullet that had almost torn her immortal life. The light disturbed Inej for a moment, but she found her balance quickly. She anticipated another attack, but the man just frowned in her direction. “Who are you?”

“Where am I?” Inej countered.

The man took in her silk dress and the painted spots on her face, and he seemed to come to his own conclusion. “Not anywhere you should be, goddess. Your kind are not welcome here.”

“Where is here?”

The man sighed. “My name is Jesper,” he said, then gestured to his side. “Welcome to the land of greed. I suppose I’ll have to take you to the boss.”

Jesper took Inej to a large black palace in the middle of . . . absolutely nothing. It wasn’t particularly enchanting, unlike the gilded arches of the Menagerie. The building seemed to speak to her, to warn her away from its obsidian glare. She wanted to turn back when Jesper gestured for her to enter, but she had nowhere else to go. Even if she could find her way to the surface, she would land in Hell that was simply more discreet.

And she was certain that she was in Hell. The land of greed, Jesper had said. The land of greed, of rocks and riches and death. What lay under the fanciful pretenses of the land Tante Heleen and men such as Pekka Rollins claimed to rule.

Inej didn’t know who ruled this land, but she was certain she was about to find out. She took one last look around the landscape, blank and dead and black, before stepping into the palace. The stone of the entrance cracked under her feet.

Jesper led her around dilapidated columns and stairs and walls, human architecture, until they reached a large room at the top of the palace. Even up here, Inej was distinctly aware of the stillness of the air. She felt as though a part of her was missing. She felt like a wind spirit again. When she looked down, she could almost see through herself. She required air to stay formed. This place was sucking out her lifeblood, and she could not find it in herself to care.

“Kaz!” he yelled. Inej startled at the sudden noise, but stayed deft on her feet as they approached a tall, lank, pale figure, sitting at a throne that almost seemed like a desk. There was a hat on the man’s head and a cane next to him. Inej frowned at it. She had met many gods and spirits, and none needed aids such as that. “We’ve got a four-hundred-sixty-three.”

The man looked up, and his searing brown eyes met hers. He didn’t break that contact as he stood up from his seat and gripped his cane. “I don’t know what your asinine numbers mean, Jesper. Speak proper. We have a guest.”

Jesper almost blushed at Inej’s side. She found herself entranced by this man she knew nothing about. “She fell from above.”

“Indeed,” Kaz said. He was unnaturally still. “So? Take her back up.”

“No!” Inej shouted. Jesper’s gaze fixed on her too, and he seemed a bit scared.

“No?” Kaz questioned. “Why would a wind spirit not want to go back to the lands above?”

“I’m indentured to Tante Heleen,” she murmured. “Please, I can help you.”

“Can you?” Kaz asked. She couldn’t let her eyes off him, either. His voice was a salty rasp, dead but safe. They stood in that silence for a moment, looking at each other, until Jesper cleared his throat.

“Kaz?”

“Put her in a guest bedroom,” he said easily. “Always fine to piss on darling Heleen.”

His name was Kaz Brekker, and he was greed’s guardian. Truly, he was the guardian of Hell, but few called him that. “Death does not bow to me,” he told her at breakfast the next day, a table length apart. He wore leather gloves and kept his cane close to him. It was topped by a crow’s head. Late at night, Inej had heard them flying around the palace. They were the only form of life she’d seen so far, though no wind followed. She was the faintest bit translucent. “Death bows to no man. But greed? It is my servant and my lever.”

Inej was a bit overwhelmed by it all. She was frightened of this new world, one of death and decay. She knew she did not belong. But she knew it was better than what awaited her above.

“How do you intend to help me, Inej Ghafa?”

“How do you know my name?”

“I make it my business to know all things,” Kaz said. “There is unrest in my fields, those of the deceased. You will learn why.”

“Why—”

“Yesterday,” he said, “you came with Jesper, bells on your ankles, bracelets on your wrists. I could hear my enforcer from a mile away, but not you.” He leaned close to her, several bodies apart. “Spy for me, won’t you?”

Inej made a deal with the devil. She had faith in him, for whatever reason. His eyes were black as dirt. They were cold. They were home.

Inej saw Jesper occasionally. He ensured that she had basic necessities, and he toured her around the land of greed. She saw rubies growing on trees, diamonds blooming from the ground. She met shades, those who had died centuries ago and entered the land crying for the saints she knew were above. The more days and weeks she spent here, the more see-through she became. She was almost afraid she would become one of them.

She made herself silent and danced through them. And when she knew what they spoke, she went back to the palace. She went to the river. She went to valleys and canyons, and she learned of the guardian of this Hell. She found peace in the darkness, in the stillness.

Kaz Brekker was a true demjin, she was told. She was told he started wars himself, when he grew tired. She heard he controlled all the riches and corruptness above her.

She believed it, too. She ate twice a day with him, and then he did whatever demons did as she wandered the terrain of his domain. They spoke only occasionally. He tended to stare into her soul, and those looks always said more than words. Inej was a wraith, a ghost, but Kaz made her feel solid and seen.

One day Kaz Brekker asked her if she would like him to take her to the shadow fold. “You’re curious,” he told her, as though he could see inside her and also right through her. She wondered if he could. “It’s intriguing.”

So they’d gone on a walk through something dark and damp, sapphire-studded weeds carpeting the ground under their feet. The air was moist and still. The fold was somehow darker than the rest of this world, and it frightened Inej. As they stood at its precipice, she grabbed Kaz Brekker’s gloved hand.

She had seen him shy away from Jesper’s touch, seen him stay feet away from her. But when she held his hand that day, he didn’t let go. The next day he was not at breakfast, but there was a bouquet of flowers in front of her, studded with orange opal. Inej had never mentioned to Kaz her favorite flower.

The walks became a daily occurrence, and she slowly started to wring fragments of humanity from this immortal. Kaz Brekker enjoyed drinking wine and his work, the guardian of the souls of the worst kind of men. He was sure of himself as a monster. He asked her twice as many questions as she asked him.

If she wrung humanity from a demon, he wrung personality from a shadow. He brought her up into what she once was—until she remembered the wind spirit again. Inej talked of flowers and her friend Nina and how she loved dancing across rooftops. She talked of her parents and her siblings and the freedom of the air. Kaz seemed to drink her in, with his menacing, freeing gaze. He knew her. He saw her.

Once, she asked him why he wore gloves, why he avoided the river at the entrance of his realm, and why he used a cane. He only explained the latter, only said there was strength in being broken.

They didn’t touch. Inej grew used to the feeling of leather around her palm. Kaz seemed aloof, but he grasped her translucent hand through his clothing as though he never wanted to let her go. And yet she never felt stuck, or alone, until—

Until one day she woke up to Jesper forcing her back into her rooms. He seemed frenzied, and Inej went back to bed only to crawl out through her window when she heard loud sounds in Kaz’s throne room. She sat at his window and heard a voice which seared her invisible soul. Pekka Rollins, indeed.

“You must return her. She is indentured—”

“And you would think that something I would consider? I am your safes and vaults personified. It’s meaningless.”

“The girl belongs to—”

“The girl belongs to no one,” Inej heard Kaz hiss. “Go tell your Tante Heleen that Inej Ghafa belongs to nobody.”

Inej slipped a little at that admission, right into Rollins’ eyesight. He looked at her slight, ghost-like body with his eyebrows afloat—as though he’d won something. “Come, little lynx,” he cooed at her. “You don’t have to stay in this land anymore, with this demon.”

“She doesn’t want to come with you,” said Kaz. Rollins laughed.

“Found a new master already, have you?”

“I belong to no one,” Inej repeated what Kaz had said.

“Little girl,” Rollins said. “You would stay here? In a land of no sky, of death and decay and greed? You are a free spirit. Come to the world above.” His eyes traced her figure. “You are nothing here.”

She knew he was referring to her barely corporeal form. His words still stung deeply.

“I am freer here than I could ever be,” Inej said. And yet she knew the hard skies of Kaz’s world were dulling her sensibilities. She didn’t want to leave; but she would have to soon, if she didn’t want to fade into the fold itself.

Pekka appeared as though he had more to say, but Kaz stood up in protest to his unsaid words, ghosts in the air, leaning on his cane, something truly—truly demonic in his eyes. “If you do not leave now, Pekka Rollins,” he said, “it is your mortal son who will suffer. Kaelish, isn’t he?”

The man left. His words stayed in the air. Inej was in a nightgown and Kaz was dressed like a monster, but she felt as though she had the power in the room. His gaze did not fall away from her. “He was right,” she said. She was fading.

“I know,” he said. He stared at her enough to know that she did not have much time left before she became invisible. “You would never be able to pay off your indenture.”

Inej knew this. She knew that he could give her all the riches of his realm, and she would never pay off her indenture. “I have no choice.”

He walked across the room and pressed a gloved hand to her cheek. “Greed is my servant,” he said. “And my lever.”

The walls started shaking, and Inej fell away from Kaz. She could feel leather on her face.

Then she saw darkness, and nothing more.

Inej woke up in a field of flowers. They were jeweled, and they were orange. They smelled like dirt and decay. She wanted to spend the rest of her life in that field. She lifted her hand and saw herself, all of herself.

When she stepped forward, she was back home. She heard the news soon afterward, that the entire Menagerie had fallen into Hell. That the guardian of greed had taken the woman who loved it above. That the girls forced to be animals were free.

Inej was home, and yet she was not home; how did she explain to her people of the air that she yearned for a place with croaking birds, cloaked in darkness? She did not—Kaz Brekker made it his business to know all things. It was six months later that she found a fresh geranium in a field of flowers outside of her cottage.

She fell again. This time she didn’t fall into water, but the open embrace of a demon without armor. She thought she would fall forever. She thought she could find peace.

#dee writes #gvbb21 #gvbbminibang21 #gang 2 #kanej #kaz brekker #inej ghafa #shadow and bone #six of crows #crooked kingdom #grishaverse #kanej fic #amethystmoonart #doorhandle16

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bloededhoine · 4 years

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world building cause twn doesn't part 4: elves!

everyone loves elves! they're a fantasy genre mainstay, archery is so sexy, and they have those E A R S. plus, they play a pretty important part in the witcher universe!

series masterpost

colour code cause i fucking love colour codes - already happened/introduced, probably s2, important background info, stuff that might be in the prequel, extras

background

i'd recommend going through the last parts, or at least the tl;dr's first

elves arrived on the continent about 2000 years before humans, and are divided into 5 distinct cultures of varying importance: aen undod, aen elle, aen seidhe, black seidhe, and aen woedde

elves only came to the continent in one group, but not all of that group stayed. the different branches based on where they settled make up the different cultures

the main two languages in the witcher are common speech and elder speech (aka hen llinge), the former used by most humans and the latter used by the elder races

aen undod

the aen undod are the oldest elven culture, having existed years before the conjunction of spheres

their home world faced some huge catastrophe, so the aen undod left in search of new worlds, leaving their descendants to become all the future elven cultures.

the aen undod spoke the oldest dialect of elder speech, laith aen undod, or one speech

aen elle

the aen elle use a language derived from hen llinge called ellylon, in which their name means "of the alders"

they don't actually live on the continent, having abandoned it years ago for their own world.

however, when the aen elle arrived in this new world, it was already populated by humans and unicorns. unfortunately, these elves are notoriously ruthless and both the native species were eradicated.

the capital of the aen elle world is tir ná lia, and is described as stunningly beautiful, featuring open air buildings made of marble, alabaster, and malachite. here it is in the third witcher video game, by djkovrik on nexus. their screenshots are amazing btw.

[ID: screenshot from wild hunt showing tir ná lia. the city is built on cliffs above a sea, there are waterfalls falling from the cliffs and bridges connecting them. there are mountains in the background and the buildings are fairly small and out of focus, they seem to be in the gothic revival style with ornate windows and steeped roofs. end ID]

the ruler of the aen elle was auberon muircetach, king of the alders and aen saevherne (aen saevherne is the honorary title of an elven mage who has extensive knowledge of magic, geneology, history, and many other subjects). auberon was also ciri's 5 times great grandfather. this gwent card pretty much sums up his vibe: scary yet sexy.

[ID: illustration of elven man with long white hair on a brown horse. he has defined cheekbones and facial features and is wearing a gold crown and blue robes with a red sash, gold belt, and leather boots. he is holding a white unicorn head in one hand. the unicorn's horn is cut off, and is bloody around its neck and where its horn was. end ID]

auberon's consort was another aen elle named shiadhal, with whom he had one daughter, lara dorren. lara is so so so important for the witcher, as she is the beginning of the elder blood, or hen ichaer.

hen ichaer is a gene that carries incredibly powerful magic, and those who have it are usually sources. i talk more abt this in part 3.

for better or for worse, lara dorren fell in love with a human sorcerer, cregennan of lod, and left tir ná lia for him. auberon took this as cregennan "stealing" his daughter and therefore the hen ichaer, and developed a pretty hefty vengeance and dedication to "take back" what was his (yikes).

this also set a precedent of people "claiming" the lives of carriers of the hen ichaer

auberon also formed an elven cavalry known as the red riders or wild hunt (dearg ruadhri in ellylon) and he appointed eredin bréacc glas as their commander. the initial purpose of the wild hunt was to travel to different worlds and capture slaves for tir ná lia, although they later became auberon's tool to find and exploit carriers of hen ichaer.

the wild hunt also uses specially trained mages known as navigators to open portals to other worlds, the most notable of these navigators is caranthir ar-feiniel, who doubled as one of eredin's most trusted men.

the aen elle also live a pretty long time, average is around 650 years, so the timelines are kinda hard to keep track of.

notable aen elle include: auberon muircetach, shiadhal, lara dorren, eredin breácc glas, crevan espane aep caomhan macha (aka avallac'h, also an aen saevherne and lara dorren's ex), caranthir ar-feiniel (also avallac'h's foster son), ge'els (the viceroy of tir ná lia), and imlerith (general of the wild hunt)

aen seidhe

put simply, the aen seidhe are the elves that did not leave when the aen elle did

the aen seidhe don't really have a society like the aen elle, they're pretty dispersed across the world. but, there are certain areas the aen seidhe have claimed as their own.

one of these little civilizations is dol blathanna, also known as the valley of flowers. unfortunately, it's not an independent state, as it was conquered by aedirn in the 1150s. however, then-king baldwin thyssen did allow the elves to retain a lot of their cultural identity and live in peace.

dol blathanna includes the village posada and the capital silver towers, which is where filavandrel aén findháil is from. he's that sexy man right there

[ID: photo of white elf man with blonde hair going to his shoulders. he is wearing tattered green robes and is looking slightly to the side with his lips pursed. end ID]

not that anyone cares, but here's him in the hexer. it's not important to the lore or twn it's just fuckin funny

[ID: old man with white frizzy wig. he is wearing a headband that appears to be rocks on a string. he has what looks like a potato sack tied around his shoulders over a green tunic. he is scowling. end ID]

outside of dol blathanna, there aren't really any places where elves can live with minimal human interaction, although the blue mountains are home to a few incredibly powerful elves

side note: dol blathanna is technically part of the blue mountains, but is in the far southern foothills so they're usually treated as separate entities.

the blue mountains are also a natural border dividing the northern kingdoms from the far east, and where filavandrel went to live after he got fed up with dol blathanna.

they're also the home of ida emean aep sivney, who's also an aen saevherne and future member of the lodge of sorceresses.

next season, we're going to meet the beautiful elven sorceress francesca findabair, also known as enid an gleanna (hen llinge for daisy of the valley)

here she is with fringilla vigo (nilfgaardian sorceress) in twn season 2. note that enid is preggers! that's very odd and i will go into detail on it later

[ID: photo of two women walking side by side. the one on the left is black and has black hair in braids going over one shoulder. she is wearing a silver dress with a similarly coloured floor length coat. the one on the right is biracial and has strawberry blonde hair in a braided updo. she is wearing a floor length blue gown with gold embroidery and a metallic brown cloak. she is pregnant. end ID]

enid is crazy interesting and important for the story of the witcher (and confirmed for season two!), so i won't go too in depth about her now

as i mentioned in part 2, nilfgaard tends to favour elves, leading to a lot of militaristic forces allied with nilfgaard. most notably, the scoia'tael, or squirrels. the scoia'tael are an incredibly ruthless and effective nonhuman guerilla force, generally divided into commandos, units that patrol a given area and eliminate the northern (or simply human) threat.

there are a lot of scoia'tael, so i'll just give you the commanders for now: angus bri cri, coinneach dá reo, iorveth, isengrim faoiltiarna, riordain, and toruviel.

you might remember toruviel as this sexy angry lady from twn, and she is possibly going to get a much bigger role later... pay attention to toruviel.

[ID: young elf woman with white skin and red hair tied over her shoulder. she has a bloody nose and is wearing a light green top with a dark brown leather studded belt. her belt is also around an olive green coat. she looks quite angry. end ID]

the scoia'tael were very well organized, but also quite dispersed, so when nilfgaard needed more specific tasks done, they would assemble specific military units (usually led by some of our favourite squirrels)

the vrihedd brigade was the most important of these units. they were especially notorious for their cruelty in the second northern war, so i'm sure we'll meet at least a few members next season.

their leader was colonel isengrim faoiltiarna (aka the iron wolf), and his officers coinneach, iorveth, riordain, and angus.

francesca findabair is not directly involved with either the scoia'tael or the vrihedd brigade, but she does work quite closely with them very often.

also important to note that not all scoia'tael are aen seidhe elves, most (including all higher ranking commanders and officers) are, but there are a number of nonhumans including dwarves and halflings.

unfortunately, the aen seidhe are slowly going extinct, both from years of genocide from humans and their slow reproductive cycles (elves live a Long time, but can only have children towards the beginning of their lives)

that's why it's so surprising to me that enid is preggers! we don't exactly know her age, but by my calculations she was over 150 in twn (pretty far past the age elves can have children).

because of this, elves are pretty divided between fighting against human rule and seeking coexistence. there are arguments for both camps, mainly that humans are colonizers and should not be trusted for the former, and that elves are dying out already and need to live with humans to survive for the latter.

the most prominent stand for the fight was in the 1060s when an aen seidhe named aelireen led an uprising against humans. most of the elders told her that it wouldn't end well, but she didn't listen and led hundreds of young elves into battle. it was an utter massacre, and basically all elves who could have children died.

yikes

unfortunately, the movement for coexistence was just as unsuccessful. it was led by our man cregennan of lod, lara dorren's husband. the poor simp just wanted to live in peace with his wife, but a lot of humans thought he was a traitor because he married an elf, and he and lara were murdered in 1137 in redania.

the last real push for independence was with the formation of the scoia'tael in the 1260s. I say 1260s because the very beginnings of the scoia'tael were right around 1262-1236 (the start of ciri's timeline) but they became majorly important around 1267. although, even the scoia'tael realized they needed humans to survive and began working with nilfgaard.

however, some scoia'tael are less keen on being nilfgaard's attack dogs, leading to further division amongst the aen seidhe.

black seidhe

remember the elves i talked about in part 2 as being the ancestors of the albans? this is them!

the black seidhe are native to the south, more particularly the valley around the alba river. they are practically extinct, but the nilfgaardians carry a lot of their cultural identity in the nilfgaardian language, a variation of hen llinge.

aen woedde

the wood elves, or aen woedde, is the elven culture we know the least about, they primarily live in the areas around nilfgaardian forests and speak hen llinge.

the only notable wood elf is aenyeweddien, or iskra, a member of the rats, a gang of semi violent youths in the northern realms. we'll learn more about the rats in future seasons.

tl;dr: elves, especially the aen seidhe and aen elle cultures, make up a large part of witcher lore. they are most notable for their long lifespans, magical and historical knowledge, and militaristic alliances with nilfgaard.

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bookishofalder · 4 years

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Just Breathe

Pairing: Adam Driver X Reader (GN!Reader)

A/N-In this fic, AD is single. Inspired by my own love for makeup and the alternate life I’d have enjoyed as a film makeup artist. I also think this ended up with the reader being gender neutral!

Warnings: Mutual pinning. Kissing. Caffeine addiction.

——————

You took a long, deep breath, focusing on clearing your mind and settling yourself into professional mode. This was a routine, which used to simply be automatic for you, until you started working this new movie trilogy and your world flipped.

Just breathe.

You had been ecstatic when you got the call-key makeup artist for the new Star Wars movies! It was an absolute dream come true, after years working hard as a makeup artist for smaller films and television shows, building your experience. Now you were the lead, which meant you were going to be working with main character actors, a chance to really prove yourself, under the direction of the production designer. You would get to design concepts for their appearances and execute the approved designs.

And not to mention, you were a huge Star Wars geek, having grown up watching the films with your dad, who was an original geek. You would watch them every year on his birthday together, a tradition that you carried out regardless of where in the world you were working from on set, you would stay up all night and video call him while watching, if you had to. You never missed a single year.

But now, it was years later and you were working on set of the final instalment, which was bittersweet in so many ways. You just needed to breath.

Because since day one of production on these movies, you’ve been in love with the lead actor, and it’s been chipping away at your soul. Because it’s one thing to imagine being with someone unattainable for fun, but when you spend a lot of time in that persons presence and over time realize how perfect they are to you, it can drive you up the wall.

Adam Driver was kind, funny and serious. He and you hit it off really well when you met, he was always keen to hear your thoughts on his characters appearance, and he’d even asked you recently to join him on the next press tour as his stylist and makeup artist. That in itself was an amazing opportunity, one that would continue to launch your career into orbit. You adored working with him, and spent a lot of your down time missing him, his corny jokes and soft looks and overall presence. Because that man took up a lot of space, which seemed to affect you in many ways, all good.

You felt like that character in Love Actually, played by Laura Linney, who was in love with Carl. Except, you were sure you hid it well, and you were always the most professional colleague. However, pining over a celebrity felt too ridiculous, too common, and you were hard on yourself constantly for it. You convinced yourself every morning that it was simply a crush, one that would fade if you kept yourself focused and reminded yourself daily of the type of person he could date, if he wanted to.

Yet, here you were, needing to breath, because he was on his way to the makeup trailer for end of day cleanup and you needed to get your head in the game, figuratively shoving your feelings down. Daisy had finished and left already, while your makeup assistant Bailey was hurrying about tidying the trailer, avoiding your station, and moving some of the equipment into the storage area. Soft classical music was playing on the Bluetooth speakers, and the smell of peppermint tea you had brewed was calming you somewhat.

Glancing in the mirror, you adjusted your hair, smoothed down your apron and internally chastised yourself for bothering to check. Setting down your tea, you looked over your set up, ensuring you had everything needed, though end of day was always the easier part on this set for you. You didn’t exactly envy the hard work that the SFX make up team had on both sides of the day, but you were always beyond impressed with their beautiful work.

The door to the trailer opened and immediately, you felt his presence. Adam stepped inside, wearing a hoodie and sweatpants, his hair and face still fully set to Kylo Ren’s appearance, which always made you smile, as the contrast was hilarious.

“Evening, y/n, Bailey.” He said, nodding to you both before sitting down heavily into his chair. He smiled at you warmly, looking tired. You quickly set a headband on his head, pushing all the hair from his face carefully.

“How are you, Adam?” You briefly met his soft eyes, which were fixed on your own. If you didn’t spend so much timing beating yourself up for liking him, you might have noticed his eyes often following you, or his soft smiles, or the way he sometimes stiffened when your hands ran through his hair or down his face as you worked on him.

But you never did seem to notice. “I’m good, tired today, this week’s caught up with me.” He rumbled. You hoped he couldn’t hear your heart rate pick up every time he spoke. Although, it had been like this for years and he hadn’t complained yet. Or he’d grown used to it. ‘Shut up, brain’, you thought.

“I’m not surprised, after the fiftieth take of this scene I got tired watching you!” It was true too, having to be on set at all times during filming meant a lot of time spent watching the actors at work, and since Adam insisted on doing his own stunts, a lot of the scenes he was in were physically gruelling. You didn’t know how he did it, and despite his words you knew if he was called back to set for any retakes, he’d spring from the chair full of energy and ready to work.

His dedication was an astounding trait that impressed you from the start, never wavering. His serious, hardworking personality only had you falling harder.

He chuckled at your words, his eyes closing automatically as you spritzed his face with a gentle solution you liked for removing the prosthetic scar. He kept them closed as you worked, peeling off the wound with delicate fingers. You didn’t know that he kept them closed because when you were really focused on something, you bit your lip in a way that made his blood warm, in a way that gave him trouble with tearing his gaze away.

“I saw Bailey sneak you a latte, though, which I’m pretty sure means I’ve won our bet.” Your hands stilled at his words, and he peaked up at you, a devilish grin quickly spreading across his face freckled, handsome face.

You faked offence, scoffing “I don’t know what you mean, it was decaf.” Adam gave a bark of a laugh at your lie, shaking his head.

“Just admit it, you’re a caffeine addict.” He’d been teasing you for years for constantly having caffeinated beverages within reach, and you’d recently, stupidly, agreed to a bet where you would stick to one a day for a month. If you won, he had to forever leave you alone about it, and if he won he could continue to tease you for infinity.

“I believe the terms of our bet allowed for one slip up, actually.” You pouted, jutting your chin out slightly. You continued working, getting his skin cleaned and recovered from the makeup, pretending to be unbothered by the fact that he had noticed Bailey sneak you the latte on set. And you tried not to overthink why he would have been looking at you in the first place.

Adam considered your words for a moment, “Yes,” he said slowly, “But today is only day two of this bet, and you’ve already slipped up.” You were smiling now, the joy evident in his tone was contagious. Still, you rolled your eyes.

“I’m only human, you know, but I am competitive.” You hoped you sounded convincing. You weren’t sure you cared about winning the bet, really.

He continued to grin at you, but made no response. You settled into a comfortable silence together as you made your way through the end of day skin care routine you developed for Adam during the first movie. You had one for each of the main actors, and they’d all impressed you with their dedication in following them. You weren’t good at giving yourself credit, though. Everyone knew a skin care routine curated by you was priceless.

“You need me to stick around, y/n?” Bailey asked, popping out from the back of the trailer where the storage area was. She gave you a pointed look, which you promptly ignored.

“No, go on ahead and start your weekend, Bailey, I’m almost done here, thank you.”

“Night, Bailey!” Adam waved. Bailey bid them both goodnight and left, leaving you alone with Adam. You cursed yourself, feeling foolish. You meant to be genuinely nice to Bailey, who worked hard and deserved the break, but usually you kept her around at times like this to ensure you weren’t left alone with the object of your daydreams. When no one else was around, you had no witnesses to any comments that Adam made that you might consider flirtatious. And while you assumed handsome celebrities like him would probably inherently flirt with others as second nature, you never understood why he would flirt with you. It confused you entirely.

You felt your nerves suddenly rear up, and your hands shook very slightly as you removed the calming sheet mask you had placed on Adam. His eyes followed your hands, but he said nothing. You’d been alone plenty of times before, but every time you would turn into a nervous, silly mess, overanalyzing every comment he made and every word you managed to sputter.

You didn’t know it, but Adam always wished for more time alone with you. He knew you well, and could recognize your nerves and always wondered why being alone with him made you nervous. He hoped it was because you liked him, but he was helpless at flirting, and didn’t know how let you know how he felt. He didn’t want to overstep, or make you uncomfortable. You were both technically working, and he felt you probably had much more appealing options for partners outside of work.

Tonight, though, for the first time, you were both exhausted, under caffeinated and, though neither of you would openly admit it, lonely. Years of longing the other, feeling hopeful, was going to catch up to you both tonight.

“Okay, head froward for me please,” He complied, and you expertly ran your hands into his hair, pulling smoothing serum through the thick locks with gentle care. As you focused, applying liberal amounts, you noticed Adam’s hands clench the chairs arms. “Is that okay?” You worried you’d hurt him.

He tilted his head back and met your eyes. He was so tall that even sitting in his makeup chair, his eyes were level with yours. It was nice not needing to adjust his seat, as you needed to do constantly for most of the actors, but it also meant a lot of time face to face, learning to read one another. Your hands were still in his hair. Somewhere in the back of your mind, a voice of reason was telling you to calmly remove your hands and step back. But the look he was giving you had you frozen to the spot. You’d never read that expression on his face before, his eyes were dark, serious.

His eyes searched yours for a moment longer, “Yeah, y/n.” His voice came out quiet, soft. You think maybe your heart would stop working, because he wasn’t looking away. You couldn’t understand his expression, he seemed to be searching for something in your own.

Finally, you managed to pull your gaze away. Quickly removing your hands, you stepped back, smoothing down your apron nervously, “I-I mean, you’re all set, Adam, unless you need anything else from me?” Why was your voice so quiet? And your face, it felt hot.

You needed to get out of this trailer, away from this man-he was having such a strong affect on you. You rationalized that it was simply because you were tired, you really had cut down significantly on caffeine and this was the result, your sleepiness was lowering your defences and he was noticing you were acting strange. That was all it was.

Adam stood, frowning slightly, but didn’t move away from you. Now, he was right in front of you and you had to tilt your head back just to see beyond his chest. You glanced up at him, and his eyes seemed to soften.

“You’ve really been cutting back on coffee, haven’t you?”

You nodded, “Told you, I’m competitive.” Your voice was breathy, like you’d been running. What the hell was wrong with you, you wondered.

Adam smiled, “I know, I love that about you.” You thought maybe you were now hearing things, and simply stared up at him in surprise, his words genuine, warm.

“Thank-um, thank you, Adam, that means a lot, coming from you.” Now, you were basically whispering. Yet your voice sounded much too loud.

He tilted his head, took a careful step closer, the gap between you nearly gone now. His overall hugeness as he stood over you made you feel safe, and a jolt ran through to your core. “I love a lot of things about you, y/n. Like, how you’re face gives what you’re thinking away, if the person knows you well enough, and you know that about yourself so you try to hide it. You look away, before someone reads you-but I’ve gotten pretty good at catching your expressions,” The low timbre of his voice was doing things to you, and you couldn’t look away from Adam now, “And right now, I think I do know what you’re thinking. Can I test my theory?”

He was asking permission, for what you didn’t know, but at this point you’d have given it no matter what. So you nodded, “S-sure.” You saw the look in his eyes shift, his gaze moving to your lips.

Despite noticing this, it still caught you entirely off guard when Adam leaned down, his hands moving to your face, gently, and caught your lips with his own. So off guard, that you immediately moaned in surprise. You felt Adam freeze, and wondered if you’d messed up, but before you could open your eyes to check, he pressed you against the wall behind you and resumed kissing you with renewed fervour. You felt yourself returning the kiss, mirroring his movements, entirely caught up in him. His tongue ran across your lips and you parted them, allowing him to taste you as he deepened the kiss.

And you tasted him, his breath minty and overwhelmingly him, you felt drunk, dizzy. You moaned again, and he pulled away, still holding your face, “Sweetheart, you have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that.” He breathed, his pupils blown, face flushed. His gaze was intensely affectionate.

You had to catch your breath, “I didn’t think...I’m just a makeup artist, Adam, I-“

But he cut you off, shaking his head, “Don’t do that, how do you not realize how amazing you are, y/n? You take my breath away every time I see you, and it’s not just because you’re beautiful,” He punctuated his words with a peppering of kiss along your cheeks, “It’s how funny you are, how hardworking, your talent and vision, the way you take care of me and the others, how kind and sweet and goofy you are-I’ve been in love with you for a long time, for a million different reasons.”

Tears threatened at his words, and you had to work to blink them back, “I think I’m dreaming.” You breathed, feeling silly, but he grinned, and shook his head. You returned the smile, gazing up at Adam in wonder, before reaching up with both hands to caress his face, the gesture so much more intimate than it had been when you worked on his skin. His eyes closed briefly, but opened again when you spoke, “I love you too, you know, always have.”

In an instant, his lips were on yours again, this time the intensity was burning, smouldering. Entirely too much and yet no where near enough. You pushed your hands into his hair and he groaned against you, his hands gripping your face and it felt like you couldn’t get close enough to him. He dropped one hand to your waist, pulling your body flush to his, then slid his other into your hair. You weren’t sure how long you stayed like this, fully ablaze in each others arms, but you never wanted it to stop.

When you did break apart, breathless and flushed, Adam was the first to speak, his deep voice sending shivers down your spine, “Would you like to come over to my hotel?”

You nodded, still standing close against him, “I’d really love that.” And you leaned up, on your tip toes, to plant a chaste kiss on his nose, unable to stop smiling.

Adam hugged you close again, planting a few affectionate kisses to your cheeks and hair, before stepping back, watching you as you gathered your things quickly. He took your bag from you as you pulled off your apron and threw on your coat, and you followed him out, feeling giddy.

“We might have to end our bet, by the way.” Adam held open the passenger door for you, when you reached his car, and watched your confusion at his words.

“Why’s that?”

He leaned down, his eyes dark in a way that had you mesmerized, “You’re going to need a lot of caffeine when I’m done with you, sweetheart.” He murmured softly, his voice laced with cheek, and yet you shivered.

You met his gaze, grinning, while internally you had to remind yourself to breath.

Just breath.

#adam driver x reader #adam driver #reader insert #oneshot #first post #romance #star wars #constructive critism welcome #new to the community

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aliveandfullofjoy · 3 years

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It’s the first day of 2021, which calls (yet again!) for my ten favorite new-to-me movies I watched in 2020!

The rules are the same as always: no movies from this past year (2020) or the year before (2019). Every other year is free game.

All ten of these movies are fascinating and beautiful and well worth your time, so consider this a strong endorsement for all of them. I’ve also included ways to watch all of the films (as of this writing, Jan. 1, 2021).

01. Two for the Road (dir. Stanley Donen, 1967; USA) Donen takes the ideas of romantic cinema and celebrates it while injecting a healthy dose of painful reality. He chooses two of the English language's most attractive movie stars, Albert Finney (in full himbo mode!) and Audrey Hepburn, and follows their ten-year marriage as seen on their various road trips across Europe. It's a memory piece more than anything else, but the arc of their relationship is clear and their palpable connection burns through the screen. These are two beautiful, intelligent adults who love each other deeply, who are still physically attracted to each other, who are able to hurl verbal jabs and insults at each other with the best of them. Finney is magnificent, but Hepburn sort of steals the show. In what is probably her finest onscreen performance, she gets to grow from a virginal bride to a fully fleshed out adult, living beautifully in different shades of sexy and goofy and bitter. They make a screen couple for the ages. The script is funny without losing its honesty, it's tragic without leaning too far into artifice, it's romantic without being treacly. It's a remarkable balancing act and makes for a masterpiece. (Two for the Road is available to rent online or viewed at this link.)

02. Stop Making Sense (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1984; USA) Stop Making Sense feels like a miracle. It hints at a narrative arc, but that part is unimportant. It’s a live performance recorded and packaged specifically for consumption as a film. In its brief runtime, it becomes a living, breathing, sweating testament to David Byrne’s skill as a performer, as a songwriter, as a storyteller, and to the remarkable talents of everyone in Talking Heads. It’s a breathtakingly joyous experience. I can’t remember the last time I watched a recording of a live performance that captured the same brand of energy, of buoyancy, that you feel as you’re leaving a great communal experience. This is a masterpiece that proclaims as loudly as possible that there is no joy greater than making art with people you love. (Stop Making Sense is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.)

03. Scattered Clouds (dir. Mikio Naruse, 1967; Japan) Filled to the brim with unspoken turmoil and emotional devastation, Naruse's final film chronicles the rough terrain of a relationship between a widow and the man responsible for her husband's death. Spanning years and exploring just how deeply these wounds can go, much of the Scattered Cloud’s success rests on the performances from Yuzo Kayama and Yoko Tsukasa. Kayama is a handsome, likable screen presence who beautifully lives in his own cloud of grief. Tsukasa gets a bit more to chew on, as this really is her story: her arc and her inability to move forward, despite the best intentions, is one of the film's most lasting ideas. Brutally sad but incredibly beautiful. The work of a master filmmaker. (Scattered Clouds is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.)

04. L’Atalante (dir. Jean Vigo, 1934; France) My only regret with L’Atalante is that I didn’t see it sooner. The final (and only feature-length) film from Jean Vigo before his untimely death at 29, this film is a technical marvel and a humanist miracle. Featuring spirited performances from Dita Parlo, Jean Dasté, and the great character actor Michel Simon, and intoxicating dreamlike imagery, as well as a relentlessly romantic score from Maurice Jaubert, this film looks and feels like no other film from its era. (L’Atalante is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.)

05. Daisies (dir. Věra Chytilová, 1966; Czechoslovakia) Věra Chytilová's iconic masterpiece of anarchic cinema more than lives up to its reputation. Operating on its own chaotic wavelength, Daisies follows the exploits of Marie I (Jitka Cerhová) and Marie II (Ivana Karbanová) who seek to spoil themselves after realizing how spoiled the world is. They begin to live extravagantly and rip off older men and cause general mischief. Over less than 80 minutes, Daisies upends a whole slew of cultural norms. Beautiful, ambiguous, funny, cynical, and truly visionary. (Daisies is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and HBO Max.)

06. The Hero (dir. Satyajit Ray, 1966; India) The Hero sort of feels like Satyajit Ray's answer to 8½ in its meditation of fame and regret. Uttam Kumar is fantastic as Arindam Mukherjee, a superstar actor who works through his career and his loss of values in an interview with a reporter played by Sharmila Tagore, who is also fantastic. Under Ray's sleek direction, gracefully opening up the world of the train, and with his intelligent and human script, the cast uniformly sinks their teeth into this film. Kumar is the MVP out of necessity -- without him, the whole film would fall apart -- but the whole ensemble is remarkable, peppering the background of the train scenes and in Arindam's flashbacks. This also has one of the all-time great nightmare sequences. Easily one of the master director’s best films. (The Hero is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.)

07. Malcolm X (dir. Spike Lee, 1992; USA) Malcolm X is a truly massive film housing an even bigger performance from the great Denzel Washington. Tracing Malcolm X’s life and career while juggling numerous tones and visual styles and spanning across decades and continents, this is surely Spike Lee’s most ambitious film up to this point in his career. Washington is onscreen for virtually all of its long runtime, from the early exuberant days before his imprisonment all the way up to that fateful day in the Audubon Ballroom, and he is, of course, tremendous. All that classic Denzel charisma and magnetism is on full display, whether in his impassioned speeches or in his more intimate scenes. Lee’s direction is top notch, making this full story about a life with an incalculably profound impact feel richly and deeply intimate. This is one of the essential American epics. (Malcolm X is available to rent online.)

08. Beau Travail (dir. Claire Denis, 1999; France) Beau Travail’s place in the modern canon of world cinema is assured, and Denis is rightfully seen as a master, but it really can’t be overstated just how much of a gem this film is. Pepper with sparse dialogue (though always packed with meaning), the film lives in one of two modes: muscular, suntanned men doing slow, precise choreographed exercises in the heat of the day and those same muscular men dancing and gyrating with attractive young women in some ethereal nightclub. Between these poles lies Denis’ almost cosmic meditation on masculine ego, homoerotic obsession, and regret. A fascinating, enigmatic, devastating beauty. (Beau Travail is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.)

09. Only Angels Have Wings (dir. Howard Hawks, 1939; USA) Only Angels Have Wings might be Howard Hawks' crowning directorial achievement. The aerial work, the rainy nights, the beautiful atmosphere of the bars, the palpable camaraderie of the characters, the tragic loss of life and yet the persistence to move forward. Cary Grant leads a terrific cast, including a quietly moving Richard Barthelmess and a rarely-more-likable Thomas Mitchell, and his chemistry with both Jean Arthur (the most charming) and Rita Hayworth is a joy to watch. This film seems to dabble in multiple genres at once, subverting the cliches of the Hollywood formula while still embracing the melodrama and the artifice within. In that way, the film feels very strange, but if the viewer lets themselves be carried along with Hawks' unique rhythm, the reward is one of the most fascinating and exciting films in Hollywood's fabled 1939 output. (Only Angels Have Wings is available to rent online or viewed at this link.)

10. Closely Watched Trains (dir. Jiří Menzel, 1966; Czechoslovakia) Between the precise composition of the shots and the young narrator-protagonist, Closely Watched Trains feels like a spiritual predecessor to Wes Anderson's work. This comparison extends to the thematic content of the film as well, as the story of a young man coming-of-age against the backdrop of the Nazi regime is definitely cut from the same cloth as The Grand Budapest Hotel. Lucky for me, I love Anderson's work, and Grand Budapest is my favorite of his, so Menzel's stylistic flourishes immediately endeared me to the film.Menzel maintains a skillful tonal balancing act throughout Closely Watched Trains. Even under the wry, almost self-deprecating humor, the film never loses track of preciousness of life and the horrific tragedy of war. Beautiful cinematography, strong performances across the board, a memorable score, and a clever script make this a gem of the Czech New Wave and a moving, delightful, and accessible coming-of-age tale. (Closely Watched Trains is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.)

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951), The Band’s Visit (Eran Kolirin, 2007), But I’m a Cheerleader (Jamie Babbit, 1999), Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962), A Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, 1929), Crossing Delancey (Joan Micklin Silver, 1988), Divorce Italian Style (Pietro Germi, 1961); Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994), Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947), The Freshman (Fred C. Newmeyer & Sam Taylor, 1925), The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953), Kuroneko (Kaneto Shindo, 1968), Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, 1965), Le Notti Bianche (Luchino Visconti, 1957), Like Father, Like Son (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2013), Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983), Love & Basketball (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2000), Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981), Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair, 2001), One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (Agnès Varda, 1977), Pennies from Heaven (Herbert Ross, 1981), Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953), Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998), Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954), Sleepless in Seattle (Nora Ephron, 1993), Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (William Greaves, 1968), Tea and Sympathy (Vincente Minnelli, 1956), They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Sydney Pollack, 1969), Tomboy (Céline Sciamma, 2011), Wendy & Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008), Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, 1920), Whisper of the Heart (Yoshifumi Kondo, 1995), and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988).

And some miscellaneous viewing stats:

First movie watched in 2020: A Fantastic Woman (Sebastián Lelio, 2017)

Final movie watched in 2020: Holiday (George Cukor, 1938)

Worst movie watched: The Notebook (Nick Cassavetes, 2004)

Oldest movie watched: Ten films by the Lumière Brothers (Louis Lumière, 1895)

Longest movie watched: Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954; 207 minutes)

Month with most amount of movies watched: December (58 movies, including shorts)

Month with least amount of movies watched: February (11 movies) (pre-COVID, naturally)

First movie from 2020 seen: Birds of Prey (Cathy Yan, 2020)

Total movies watched: 455

#sometimes elliott watches movies #year in review #two for the road #stop making sense #scattered clouds #l'atalante #daisies #the hero #malcolm x #beau travail #only angels have wings #closely watched trains

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yellowocaballero · 3 years

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⭐

But nobody could know what an Avatar of Knowledge and Observation could know. Nobody knew the truth, except for him: that in this beautiful world where humanity knew the shape of each other’s souls, nobody could understand each other at all.

Nobody in this world could understand how he felt. He was alone even among the other monsters. Nobody was willing to see reality for what it was except him; nobody had heard Strix drip poison into his ear but him. Everybody else lived inside these delusional little bubbles, where their daemons weren’t replaced by evil puppets of Dust and nobody they cared about would ever disappear. That life was forever and would never cease.

Hope, Etc. again! I really enjoyed writing this intervention scene, because while it was technically ABOUT Jon, it really revealed something about everyone involved. And it hit you on the head with a hammer about the themes.

Everything in our lives is filtered through our own experiences. And the unique (and complicated, and confusing) thing about this team is that they all have four different ideas of what’s going on. Nobody in the scene actually really understands the situation, and they’re all bumping up against each other and fighting because they’re all working on a faulty premise.

Basira is focused entirely on solving this issue, and she isn’t addressing what is causing this issue at all. Melanie’s approach cannot work because she is dealing with the intense shame and guilt and fear and confusion over recovering from the Slaughter. She’s assuming Jon’s experience is her own, and she’s kind of projecting - “Well yes you’re a terrible and awful person and you’re just taking your self-hatred out on your daemon, but you have to make a choice!”. Daisy believes and understands Jon, and more importantly wants to understand, but when she tries to stand up for him he sees that Daisy still does not understand Jon’s grief about the genuine death he has experienced.

So it’s silly, because this story is so predominantly about how daemons allow a deep and unhindered connection between two people, and how intimacy in terrible situations is possible - but Jon also sees here that actually maybe it can never happen, because everybody is an individual person and conflict will always arise. And maybe that vulnerability will make the inevitable betrayal even worse. And so Jon’s isolation continues, because he is perceiving a world that nobody else can - but maybe you can say the same about everyone.

But it comes down to that metaphor for grief, right? Because Jon really does understand on a fundamental level what nobody else in this room can: that people can die any day, at any time, and you are never safe from death. You can’t really...live your life constantly painfully aware of how we can all die at any second. You just kind of have to forget about it and go eat a bagel. Jon’s lost an insane amount of people, and he just can’t forget about it - there is no solid foundation for him, just a house built on sand. He lives this story in a separate world from everyone else, existing in a separate space, because sometimes when you’re an Avatar of a Fear of Knowledge that means that you can’t stop knowing the things we have to forget about in order to stay sane!

So, having realized all of this - that there is nobody else who can understand him without filtering him through the lens of themselves, that there is nobody who has felt this unique flavor of loss and grief that he is, and that there is nobody who can comfort him when he feels the weight of this....Jon starts just crying about how he wants her back. Because he really, really just wants her back. And there’s nobody else who can make him feel better anymore.

(There’s also the choice thing but I think that’s a different essay.)

#last 4 2nite because it's midnight and im not sure tipsy essays are my best work #but I kind of emotionally connected the feeling to....when you're in like A LOT OF PAIN #like so much pain you're screaming #my cramps get bad #or when you're really really really sick #and you just kind of want your mom?#yeah #my writing

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notbecauseofvictories · 5 years

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I’m going absolutely apeshit at the thought of the UK under undead Jonah Magnus’ rule while being prowled by a host of vast, Lovecraftian embodiments of primal human fears.

Mostly I’m fascinated by the idea that the world ends, but it doesn’t....end. You still have to go to work, water your plants, call your mother. Only now, when you’re topping off your oyster card, the PA announces that The Dark is currently occupying Zone 3, and fares for unaffiliated acolytes traveling to Zone 3 will be increased to reflect the liabilities of travel. That’s the kind of shit I live for.

Other things:

the entire population of the UK divvies themselves up according to Entity. I mean, you can stay neutral and unaffiliated, but unless you pick a protector you’re basically just leaving yourself open to all varieties of human fear.

..........this means that the entirety of Great Britain is now 14 cults on 1 1/2 islands. (please imagine this. it’s amazing.)

Jonah is definitely In Charge---I bet he’s still going by ‘elias bouchard’ only everyone ends up calling him ‘Magnus’ after the Institute (and the new seat of power for this fucked up hellscape he owns.) However, while the other avatars are generally content to let him run what passes for “government” in these days and times and the Entities don’t care either way---it’s understood that most of his job is liaising with the other avatars to preserve this fragile, chaotic equilibrium.

Due to the general chaos and the confusing internal politics of it all, it takes the humans a while to realize what’s happening: reports of ugly, preventable deaths increase dramatically before anyone figures out that John Amherst is de facto chair of the NHS; ditto Tom Han and the Food Standards Agency.

Annabelle Cane for PM!!!

I’m just saying, Jonah Magnus hands out key governmental and administrative positions to avatars in order to keep everyone’s god fed and the world spinning around him specifically.

The first time someone greets Jon as “The Archive” he absolutely loses his shit and tries to Know how she knows. He mostly just gives her a headache.

(The fact that it’s Daisy, slavering and grinning, flushed with bloodlust even just sitting beside Jon at a bus shelter, makes it so much worse.)

There’s a giant eyeball in the sky and after the very necessary period of general, widespread terror, the Eye In The Sky is a meme. So many memes.

Basira is still looking for Daisy (she made a promise, she would never break it) but somehow also accidentally stumbles into being one of the more notable human freedom fighters in the UK. Please picture her, all no-nonsense Eye-affiliated-but-grudgingly leading a band of ragtag revolutionaries to hunt down avatars and break their authority while rescuing civilians. To her everlasting chagrin, she becomes known by the code name ‘Detective’ and can’t stop thinking about Elias saying it first.

Basira and Daisy also have several extremely fraught, villain/hero-style encounters and sometimes, Basira will find avatars and acolytes she & her people were trying to take down already dead, laid out for her like an offering. She’s not sure how to take that.

JonahElias is the only person having a good time.

JonahElias is having a marvelous time.

JonahElias is living his best life sorting through people’s embarrassing tracking cookies and eating popcorn under the giant eye that is technically his god.

So many people die/are lost/vanish/are eaten/absorbed/corrupted/swallowed/skinned/changed beyond recognition, humanity stops holding funerals. Well, unless you’re with the Buried. Its acolytes insist upon it.

One time coming back from the shop, Martin met The Lonely in an alley. He absolutely refuses to talk about it, no matter how Jon asks.

Jon has a standing Wednesday morning meeting with JonahElias. He knows, because the little calendar invites ping his mobile fifteen minutes beforehand, no matter how many times he changes his number, his address, his SIM card. (Once, he deliberately didn’t replace his mobile at all. A gilded invitation showed up on the kitchen table.) The first time he actually shows up, neither of them are the slightest bit surprised. “Okay,” Jon says grimly. “Let’s get started.”

#thank you for this personal gift jonny jingleheimer simms I will treasure it #the magnus archives #the 21st century radio play

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zazujoy · 4 years

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I’m sure this has been done but here’s everything I, a person who has listened to exactly zero seconds of The Magnus Archives, know about this podcast

Characters

Jon: He’s the main character, the archivist, and he’s got some spooky eye powers. I don’t know if he got them on purpose. He’s kind of a dick but in a way that makes the fandom love him.

Martin: Jon’s boyfriend, eventually. Unfortunately I don’t know much about him outside of that, but he’s both a. A monsterfucker and b. Pro killing all the monsters, so we’ll see how that works out for him

J. Leitner: fuck this guy. I don’t know anything about him but fuck him.

Daisy: is a werewolf maybe? She’s evil but she might also be friends with Jon, I’m not sure

Sasha: I don’t know much about her but she seems chill. She might be dead by now; there’s a not!Sasha which means she got pulled into one of the Spooky Things, so f in the chat for that

Tim: idk he exists

Georgie: might be a secretary or something? That might be a different character. There’s someone named Gertrude who I also know nothing about so it could be her.

Elias: is he married to Tim? Is there a different character named Tom that he’s married to? I think this guy got married and divorced and then remarried his ex-husband but I don’t remember his husband’s name. Also I think he’s insanely old. Maybe.

Basira: ???? [see also: Tim]

Spooky stuff

There’s spooky stuff. I don’t exactly get how it works but you can become an avatar of a Spooky Thing, although that seems like not the greatest life decision.

Trying to think of Spooky Things from TMA off the top of my head, I listed The Lonely, The Slaughter, The Flesh, The Eye, and Clowns(???) and then I just googled a list so I’m just gonna guess what the items on this list mean.

The Buried: There’s worms somewhere in this podcast and worms like to get buried in the ground so I’m saying The Buried is the Worm Spooky. I hate it.

The Corruption: yeah I have no idea. The word “corruption” brings to mind either religion or politics so maybe it somehow has to do with one or both of those things.

The Dark: darkness is spooky I guess.

The Desolation: yeah so “desolation” definitely sounds bad and scary but I have no idea what it means in the context of this podcast, because everything is bad and scary here except for occasional moments of tenderness. So this is a Mystery Spooky Thing as far as I’m concerned.

The End: I know there’s something in season 5 that hits uncomfortably close to Real Life Pandemic stuff that’s happening, so I’m gonna say The End is that. Probably it’s the end of the world or humanity or something.

The Eye: Jon’s an avatar of this one; I think it just lets you Know Stuff that you otherwise wouldn’t; also maybe you get literal extra eyes? Or can see through other people’s eyes? I’m just making things up but those might be true. I know “invasion of privacy” is a Spooky Theme in at least some of the episodes and The Eye seems like a likely cause of that.

The Flesh: gross meat stuff. 0/10, do not like. I think the Leitner dude that everyone hates is involved with this one

The Hunt: I guess it makes you want to go kill people?? Also maybe you’re a werewolf. I think Daisy is an avatar of this one.

The Lonely: pretty much what it sounds like: makes you really lonely and isolated. Martin got caught up in it for a bit in a recent episode but then he remembered he loves Jon so it’s fine for now.

The Spiral: sounds like some weird hypnosis shit

The Stranger: this is the one that got Sasha, I’m pretty sure. Replaces you with a spooky version of yourself or something. IDK what happens to the original person, maybe they die (rip). I think this is the one that led me to include “Clowns???” on my original list, though maybe that was The Spiral.

The Vast: emptiness as a concept is inherently spooky so maybe that’s what this is. Makes me think of a very large empty field and I hate that shit, so.

The Web: based just on the name, sounds like something that’d give you a supernatural mental connection to the other avatars of this thing.

Plot

I really really have no idea. You could string together literally any set of events and say it happened in The Magnus Archives and I’d believe you. But here’s my best attempt at piecing the events together:

Jon is doing archivist stuff; people come and give him statements about scary stuff that happened.

There’s a guy who got a cursed coffin that said not to touch it or open it so he didn’t. Legend.

Martin is new at the Institute, I think, and Jon doesn’t like him, but eventually they fall in love (slow burn, babey! But like really slow; I think they got together for real in s3 or 4)

Jon removes a rib or two, maybe to get his Eye Powers. One of the ribs is just sitting in his desk drawer. It’s fine.

At some point I think there’s a transition between “Jon listens to people talk about spooky experiences” to “Jon fights worms and other weird creepy things” and I don’t know when or how that happens.

Daisy tries to kill someone I think.

Some worms are fought.

Sasha becomes not!Sasha. I feel like this went unnoticed for a little while and then eventually caused fairly sizable problems.

(I wasn’t joking when I said I don’t know the plot of this podcast at all)

I think Jon and Martin are currently trapped in some tunnels fighting monsters. Martin wants to kill all the monsters. Jon is one of those monsters, technically, and probably he has some Issues and insecurities related to not being fully human (he needs therapy. They all need therapy). Martin had An Experience with The Lonely; it was a whole emotional rollercoaster but he’s in love and he won’t forget that.

The creators have said it’ll end in tragedy and I think this is the last season, but everything is sort of okay for now? It’s not great but Jon and Martin are still alive and together for the time being.

Other stuff

The Magnus Archives is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill Ltd. and licensed under a creative commons attribution non-commercial sharealike 4.0 international license.

“Statement begins”

“Fabric rustles” (NO kissing noises)

The creator’s name is Jonathan Sims and he just named the main character after himself for fun

Apparently “Jonathan” is supposed to be shortened to “John” but that’s bullshit

#the magnus archives #tma #tma spoilers #tagging that just in case but I can't imagine I got anything correct enough to spoil it #Joy to the World

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mst3kproject · 4 years

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She Freak

Oh, boy, this is going to be a fucking delight. If the 1932 movie Freaks were Invasion of the Saucer Men, She Freak would be Attack of the The Eye Creatures. Freaks is a very troubling movie, but it does go to great effort to present the denizens of the sideshow as human beings who can be loving, greedy, heartbroken, or naïve as much as anyone else, and who find family in each other when the rest of the world rejects them – and must be very careful who they let into that club. The horror of the story is derived as much from their predicament as from the fate of Cleopatra. She Freak is… not like that.

A woman named Jade Cochrane works at a little diner somewhere in the south, quietly (and sometimes not-so-quietly) enduring sexual harassment from both the customers and her married boss. Wanting more out of life, she quits her job and goes looking for work at a passing carnival, which she figures will at least allow her to travel. From there she sets her sights on marrying Steve St. John, the owner of the freak show and the richest man connected with this community. Unfortunately for everybody around her, even this very moderate form of power corrupts Jade to the core, and after too much of her mistreatment, the sideshow stars take a horrible revenge!

The opening sequence is a bunch of carnival footage in which everybody looks bored, worryingly reminiscent of both Carnival Magic and MUZ. Even worse, quite a bit of it is shot by somebody sitting on a moving ferris wheel or other midway ride. I’ve never been able to enjoy midway rides because I get motion sickness (I can’t see J. J. Abrams movies in theatres for the same reason), so this was not a fun experience for me, even on my tiny laptop screen. It goes on way too long, and most of it doesn’t even have any credits over it. Crow would have fled to go throw up in a corner.

The moment I knew She Freak belonged on MST3K, however, is this shot:

What the hell does that sign say? YHJCY A+ FTJB? What does it mean? Is it an acronym? A secret code? An in-joke? A message to or from aliens? That would have fascinated Mike and the ‘bots. They’d have built a whole host sketch around that sign.

She Freak is tooth-rattlingly bad in many different ways. I don’t know what any of the people in it think they’re doing but it sure isn’t acting. It’s relentlessly padded, full of pointless footage of putting the midway up, taking the midway down, putting the midway back up again, and carnival-goers wandering around looking dazed. At one point we have to watch a stripper do her act, to a chorus of background hooting and applause that sure isn’t coming from the bored-to-shit audience we see. Most of the film feels like nothing is happening, and then what ought to have been the entire plot is crammed into the last fifteen minutes.

The one place where there is a glimmer of competence is in a couple of quite nice directing choices. There’s a scene where Jade leaves her new husband with his buddies and sneaks off to bang the guy who runs the ferris wheel, Blackie (don’t worry, he’s white. She Freak has a little person called ‘Shorty’, but to my relief it wasn’t tasteless enough to cast a character named ‘Blackie’ as an African American) that makes a very good use of shadows to tell us what’s going on in two places at once. Pity the film stock is so crappy it almost ruins it. I also liked how Jade’s scenes with Blackie have proper dialogue, while Steve woos her in a series of montages. Jade wants to spend time with Blackie, while her marriage to Steve is something she goes through the motions of and gets out of the way.

She Freak really has no right to tout itself as a remake of Freaks, for the simple reason that it isn’t even about the sideshow. The older movie had characters like Hans the dwarf and Daisy and Violet the conjoined twins, who were people with relationships and roles in the plot. In She Freak we never even see the sideshow that so upsets Jade in an early scene. There’s Shorty, the little guy in a cowboy hat who works for the carnival, but when we see him he’s acting like he’s Steve’s friend and assistant rather than one of the exhibits. An armless woman and a few people in funny makeup appear at the climax, but we’ve never seen them before and we have no idea who they are. Where the hell is the ‘Alligator Girl’ the banners promised?

It’s probably all for the best. If there had been any ‘unusual people’ with major roles in the movie it would doubtless have treated them in a disgusting and exploitative manner. But what’s on screen shouldn’t even pretend to be a remake of Freaks.

As the owner of the sideshow, Steve insists that he cares about his employees and considers them ‘human beings, just like you and me’. He tells Jade that many of them came from abusive homes, and that in his show they’re able to earn a living and be around others who won’t judge them. This is a reasonably noble sentiment, but what we are subsequently shown is somewhat at odds with it. Steve says his employees are also his friends, but he hangs out and plays cards with the other carnies, not with them. When Shorty tells him that Jade is cheating on him, Steve slaps him like he would a misbehaving child. This is not how people treat friends and equals.

You may have guessed where this is heading: in one of my favourite running complaints, yep, we have nobody to root for in this movie. We’re probably supposed to like Steve, but he’s bland and his actions don’t agree with his words insisting he’s a nice, compassionate guy. The character from whose point of view we see the events is of course Jade, but Jade is the villain of the movie and we’re watching it to see her hubris destroy her. That means the protagonists ought to be the sideshow people themselves, but since we never actually meet them, their revenge is meaningless. In this context they are not human beings, they are not characters, they are merely what Jade has been calling them all along: monsters.

(Shorty, by the way, is played by Felix Silla, who is the closest thing this movie has to a star. He was Cousin Itt on the Addams Family TV show.)

She Freak presents us with several reasons why we ought to dislike Jade. She’s introduced working at the greasy little diner, where she turns down a date first with a customer and then with her boss. The customer accepts this gracefully but the boss does not. The scene tries to show us Jade as an uppity bitch who thinks she’s too good for other people, but her boss is such a slimy toad that we have to take her side. She tells us how her mother married too young and lost any chance at her own dreams, and while Claire Brennan is a terrible actress, the story is one that inspires sympathy. When Jade seizes on the carnival as her chance for escape she becomes downright pathetic. I mean, how awful is your life if a travelling midway and sideshow seems like a step up in the world?

Of course, as the movie continues we find that Jade really is just a snotty bitch whose idea of ‘getting more out of life’ is having a rich husband to carry her bags when she goes shopping. She sees others only as what they can provide to her – Steve for money, Blackie for sex. This attitude blinds her to others’ true intentions. She is entirely oblivious to the fact that Blackie is an abusive bastard or that Steve honestly loves her. The lesson of the movie seems to be ‘beware of women who want more out of life.’ She should have known her place!

This is a pretty nasty attitude towards women but there are other female characters who are treated a bit better. Pat the stripper tried marriage and domesticity and didn’t like it. She seems to enjoy working at the carnival and is gregarious and kind-hearted. We’re invited to leer at her performance but she’s presented as much less trashy than Jade, who considers herself above such things. Pat continues to try to be a friend to Jade for as long as she can, and keeps giving her second chances long after it should be obvious that Jade isn’t interested in reciprocating her kindness. There’s also Olga the fortune-teller, who needed to support herself after her husband died. The three of them even manage to have conversations that pass the Bechdel test. In a movie called She-Freak that’s almost impressive.

The ending of She Freak is the only place where it really even seems inspired by Freaks. The sideshow employees take their revenge on Jade, and we see her on display in the sideshow, licking a snake and wearing some unconvincing Harvey Dent makeup. This is supposed to feel like justice, in that she has become what she most hated, but it’s been so watered down by the movie’s refusal to humanize the sideshow, or even to show us Jade interacting with them at all, that it has no power to horrify. It’s a big letdown after the opening scene that promised us a horrible freak that was once a human being. Why does her burned side have an elf ear?

Invasion of the Saucer Men was not a good movie, at all, but it still deserved better than Attack of the The Eye Creatures. It’s up for debate whether Freaks was technically ‘good’ but it was an ambitious film with much to say about how human beings treat one another and about the eugenics movement of the 1930s. In fact, the US National Film Registry considers Freaks one of the most significant films ever made, and it currently boasts a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. The fact that writer David Friedman claimed She Freak was a remake of Freaks just proves that, like the audiences who booed that film in 1932, he never bothered to understand it.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #she freak #tw: abelism #all carnival no magic #60s

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edenamador · 3 years

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100 Things about My Father

I forgot I was a poet. Skip down for the poem that came to me as clear as a crystal last night. Trigger warning - Suicide.

I mean I have an inclination toward having dreams at night,

thinking they have deeper meaning, and waking up with music in my head at 1:15am in the morning.

There is something about 1:15 in the morning which has a razor sharp precision to it. Even though I’m more of a disconnected abstraction. Some constellation of stars nobody has given meaning to. Dreaming about that straight crush in college twice in one night. All this after in real life, oh and he was a poet too, now in grad school, who knows if he is the happy academic he craved to be. Who knows if he is still writing poetry or writing technical sentences with so much jargon nobody can understand. . .

Its all rambly. I know it is annoying but that is how it comes to me. He asked me if I had followed the spirit and I told him I wrote the poem I was suppose to write. He was proud of me, like a dead ghost now, I loved him then but he is a stranger in a distant land now.

Yes, I was at Target, a place I worked so long ago and a previous co-worker said to me, “You look poetic, like you could be a poet.”

I didn’t know what to say but now I am dreaming of my poetic college muse and he is telling me to follow the spirit just as Beauvoir so now I’m on tumblr again because of that Target co-worker who said I should have a blog and get a following. An idea I laugh at because my poetry is well, I am poetic, I am not exactly a poet if I’m not writing poetry. So I guess I will share what came to me last night. At least a draft.

My mother always says, “You have choices to make.”

So when my boyfriend says, “You never talk about your father,” and then asks, “Why is that?”

I pause and my mother’s voice repeats, “You have choices to make.”

I could say a hundred things about the same thing. Like a simple fact about the color of a chair, “My father is dead.”

It sounds like, “The chair is red.”

1. My father died.

My boyfriend might ask how he passed away which means I have to say more. This leaves me with more choices but I haven’t even jumped the first hurdle. I don’t even run track but the baton has been given to me, “How did he die?” I could have anticipated the next question and already answered it more bluntly.

2. My father blew his brains out.

If I want to keep my boyfriend I should frame things particular to his way of life. That would be too precise and come off as indifferent like my father never mattered to me. He didn’t.

3. He died when I was four.

Again, if I put it this way he might ask, “How?” and I would get to say

4. He loaded a pistol. I think it was a .45 pistol or a glock, and took the weapon to rat lake where he blew his brains out.

If I present it with “when I was four” the cold way in which I say, “He blew his responsibilities away,” pops like a childhood bubble.

5. He’s pushing up daisies.

6. He’s seven feet under.

7. He croaked.

Before the gun fire went off out in the country where only the frogs and flora of the boreal northern forests would hear it the American toads reed. When the gunfire went off silence consumed the forest for a few minutes before returning to normal a few minutes later. A few hours later, with the loons calling, a friend of my father’s came across his body and reported it to the authorities.

8. My father was a mail carrier.

I could have said this as it would have delayed revealing the information about the death of my father, and how he died, the conversation about the long term effect it had on my psychology and the psychological impact on the rest of my family. Though, according to my mother everything turned out fine. Which is why as I approach 30 years old I am waking up in the middle of the night because I’m having dreams about people in graduate school programs saying, “He doesn’t even talk about his father! He talks about Black Lives Matter, Marxism, Gender Theory and all this crap, but he hasn’t even mentioned his father.”

9. My father is out of the picture.

10. I would rather not talk about my father.

11. I didn’t know much about my father.

12. I don’t remember much about my father.

13. My father left me with dry skin and a proclivity toward depression.

14. My mother was a single mother.

15. I guess I don’t talk about my father. Hugh, I wonder why that is.

I like this because I can act like I’m just as dumbfounded by it as my boyfriend is. Creative writer circles often told me I am not concrete enough. So I guess we were sitting at a park in Hutchinson Minnesota when my boyfriend at the time asked this question. A few years later when the relationship had faded and I asked to be dating again he told me, “Some gay men have issues.” While I cried about it and refused to speak to him ever again he was right. I was a gay man with issues, daddy issues to be exact.

16. My father had a beard.

17. My father was an alcoholic and when my mother said she had enough he couldn’t handle it and blew his brains out.

This one is the worst of them. It sounds like my mother caused my father to commit suicide. Nobody but my father took a gun to his head and blew his brains out.

18. My mother never remarried after my father was out of the picture.

Again, I could say this but it remains vague enough to lead to other questions any intimate partner would have the right to know. Or perhaps nobody has the right to know about my father and that I have the right not to talk about him to anyone. “Did they get a divorce?”

19. Do we have to talk about this. I’d rather not talk about this because I am not ready to reveal that story and its long term effects on me. Look, it’s a nice day and I’m happy talking about a million other things.

This might indicate I lack the trust necessary to share that story. He may take it personally and think that our relationship should be more open. Or he might respect that answer and remain curious. Most people would talk about both their parents openly and in positive ways.

20. All the options in my life have been formed by my father’s decision to kill himself.

21. He killed himself.

22. He offed himself.

23. He decided he no longer wished to live.

24. When given the option between suicide and coffee he chose suicide.

25. I need counseling to answer that question.

My mother was right. The choices were really endless. I could even use the same word presented in a different way. There were a lot of strategies for answering this question. Even after the question was asked I kept gathering new academic methodologies to answer the question, “Why don’t you talk about your father?”

26. If I open up about him I’m afraid I will scare you away because if I talk about my father I am admitting that I am a flawed human being with an abnormal childhood upbringing.

Again, more options appear even if I avoid the subject of my father all together. It seems that certain events have greater effect on the long term psychology of the individual than others. But was my childhood “abnormal” or was my mother “doing the best she could” in situations which were out of her control? But it couldn’t of been out of her control. . . “Everybody has choices to make. . .”

27. “My father died when I was four.”

28. “I was four when my father died.”

I cannot remember which of these I used but it was one of the two. So I said what I thought in the moment. I paused. I know I paused and my boyfriend said, “Only if you are comfortable talking about it.”

29. I might cry if I talk about my father. But I don’t think I will. I usually don’t but its sad. Don’t be sorry, you didn’t do anything. Why do people say sorry when I say this? What personal responsibility did they have for it? Why do I have to answer this question? Why will this question always come up when in relationships?

30. His death effect me because I was too young.

That’s a lie because I know it impacted the whole trajectory of my life. There were material consequences. For example his life was attached to the union. This left my mother with a small financial cushion to fall back on when she was left to raise three children. While it may have been small it was enough for her to go to college for ten years and get a bachelor’s degree in education.

31. I never talk about my father because then I have to talk about my mother. My mother looks like an American hero for the choices she didn’t make but talking about my mother also reveals the hidden demons I am not suppose to talk about as it might make her look bad.

32. I never talk about my father because it usually becomes a really long essay about masculinity, the effects of neo-liberal feminism, and requires a master’s degree in sociology and a Ph.D. in philosophy to get to the bottom of it. It requires skill, tact, intelligence, emotional strength, and persistence to answer with any certainty. It’s a philosophical question at heart and I am not a philosopher, I am merely a subject exposed to systems of power which shape my experience in a world I did not create.

“Why don’t you talk about your father?”

33. Why did he commit suicide? Why did my brother point a gun to my head? Why did my mother trust a teenager to get me to and from school going ninety miles an hour down icy unplowed country roads at seven in the morning? Why did the chicken cross the road? Why is the sky blue?

34. He’s sinking in the swamps.

35. The worms are feeding on his body.

36. He’s dead.

37. He’s gone.

38. He’s no longer with us.

If at this point the possibilities seem pointless, redundant, or obnoxious, imagine being at work when a co-worker flippantly says, “I’m ready to blow my brains out.”

39. My father hurt his back and wouldn’t go to see the doctor. It was severe pain and he couldn’t really talk about it. He drank his physical and mental pains away. Sometimes he would come home drunk and punch walls in. I do remember waking up to the sound of shattering glass. The stove glass broke because my father kicked it in during one of his masculine temper tantrums.

40. I didn’t know it when it was first asked but I now think my father died because of hyper-masculinity. I don’t think he was allowed to express any of the emotional or physical hardships he had. He likely had depression and was obviously having thoughts of suicide. Other’s in the family had committed suicide and had mental issues. When I go to the psychologist they show me genetic connections but as a sociology major I am thinking more about the limits on men expressing emotions. My father couldn’t express his emotions, that’s for sure, so he likely imploded, quite literally.

41. I don’t mean to come off as cold hearted or disconnected, it’s just that the death of my father strikes me more as an abstraction than a concrete reality. When it does come up I am reminded of my differences, my class upbringing, the social values that played out in my childhood.

42. For my brother my father was a something which became a nothing. For me my father is a nothing who, when asked about his existence, becomes a something that should have been, but wasn’t.

43. By opening up about my father I cannot really say who he is without explaining who he was not and for me he was more of a not than a was.

44. “Your father loved you,” my aunt says.

45. My father bought two stuffed monkeys. The monkey was Abu from the Disney show Aladdin. He did this a few months before he killed myself. In addition to that he also bought me a small baseball glove. My uncle on my mother’s side went with my dad to the store to pick these up. My uncle says he was likely planning his suicide during this time and asked my mother that we hide these items when my uncle was around so he wouldn’t be reminded of my father’s suicide.

How could my father have loved me if he blew his brains out? It hardly seems like an act of love to abandon your child at the age of four.

46. “God has a plan for everyone and even though it may not make sense to us down here there is a plan and there is nothing we can do about it.” Likely something my pastor said or something my grandmother said or something someone said along the way. When on a date with an attractive suitable man one doesn’t want to delve into religious theology and questions about the existence of God, determinism versus free will, the meaning of life, and deeper levels of spiritual enlightenment, or lack there of. One wants to eat ice cream, giggle about some superfluous thing, and see if one can see some concrete shape in the clouds: its a duck, a bird, a dinosaur, a giraffe. What do you see when you look at the sky? Is there something more out there?

When asked about my father I am asked about a whole series of causal effects. When asked about my father I am asked to see myself as an object in the world formed by what the existentialists refer to as facticity. At this moment I free myself from the container which shaped me and am allowed to reconstruct the object that I am as I choose.

I also begin to ask myself, “what if things had played out differently,” as I am prone to ask the questions I was told weren’t worth asking. I was told there were no answers to them but the questions which don’t have answers are the questions I like the most. So being asked about my father is really asking me who I am and how I became who I am. I am inclined to answer if one has the time for it. Most people don’t have the time, the intellect, the patience, the attention span, or the emotional capacity for such things. So I prefer to say,

47. “Shh, daddy is sleeping. We must not wake him. He’s a terrible ghost. Let’s play hide and seek with death! Can you count to one hundred?”

48. “In any case, that little boy didn’t want to grow up for fear of becoming serious.” pg. 327 Jean Paul Sartre War Diaries

49. “But as soon as man grasps himself as free, and wishes to use his freedom, all his activity is a game: he’s its first principle; he escapes the world by his nature; he himself ordains the value and rules of his acts, and agrees to pay up only according the the rules he has himself ordained and defined.” 326 Jean Paul Sartre

50. “And man is serious when he forgets himself; when he makes the subject into an object; when he takes himself for a radiation derived from the world: engineers, doctors, physicists, biologists are serious.” 326 Jean Paul Sartre The War Diaries

51. When my father died my mother was left to raise three boys. He was a step father to one of my brothers so one of my brothers still had a father. So my father is really three people: a dad who was then wasn’t, a dad who wasn’t then was, and a step dad.

I could have never explained all this that day I was asked. There in a rural town in the middle of a corn-field playing out the waves of one of my first gay relationships I simply said, “My dad is dead.” Reality is bleak like that. It restricts possibilities. Reality is only here in the field of “you have choices to make”. Reality are the options available. I am free to make choices in relation to concrete possibilities. For example I used covid stimulus money to pay for my rent so I could I have time to write this. I could have used it to buy copious amounts of liquor to subdue my existential angst. I could have used it to put it to my loans. I quit my job to give myself the time necessary to heal the wounds of the past. I refuse to conform to the pressure to buy a vehicle and get a license because I would have to buy car insurance which would mean I need a job to pay for the cars insurance. I would need gas to go back and forth to work where I would only continue to suppress my authenticity. Authenticity can never be achieved. It can only be something which is consistently reproduced. I reproduce myself as a writer only in the act of writing. Even the short pause between characters I realize other possibilities. Writing must be a consistent act I partake in everyday as a way of pursuing my own projects with the material conditions given to me.

52. My father is four people or five people because he was a co-worker to my middle school friend’s father, also a wife, a brother, an uncle. Six or seven people. He was never a grandfather though and could never be a grandfather. He could never have the possibility of being a grandfather so when my nephew says he doesn’t have a grandfather, his great uncle says he would be happy to fill the role. So my uncle, married to my mother’s blood sister, is my nephew’s grandfather.

The more I think about choices the more I start to confirm that choices are in relation to particular material conditions given to a situation which show the constricting impact of choices.

53. My mother, because of my father’s death, often found jimmy-rigged options for babysitters when family members were not available. When she realized my brother and I weren’t mature enough to handle being at home alone by ourselves, she looked into other options such as having me stay at the library until it closed. Later I learned that urban libraries have a phrase for this condition called, “Library latchkey kids,” which are children who’s parents are busy because of social economic conditions they end up going to the library after school for free baby-sitting.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16451347

I would stay in the library until it closed. My mother would slip the librarian a twenty dollar bill. I asked about it once and I learned in one way or another not to ask about such things.

When I took the Myers Briggs test in high school I scored nearly a hundred percent INFP which to me meant I was destined to be a genius like Shakespeare, taught in English classes all around the world for centuries to come. It meant I was introverted, intuitive, feeling, and perceptive. It meant that my room was messy but that my bookshelves were ordered perfectly with the Dewey decimal system. In high school I read Waiting for Godot with no idea it belonged to existential literature. On the question of why I don’t talk about my father, I am still Waiting for Godot.

54. My father’s suicide, in the long-term, meant I got to be alone with books. I often tired of reading and would chat with the librarian. She would ask me if I had a girlfriend and show me the things she wanted on craigslist. Sometimes she had to rapidly click her computer screen to hide some areas of the internet that should not be looked at while a minor sat reading Dr. Seuss, books about nature, or how volcanoes worked. I loved reading. I could never get enough. One of the librarians never believed I read as many books as I did and often discredited some of the books she believed were above my level. I was smart and there’s nothing worse to rural people than a smart, effeminate, boy with a love of reading.

I was always told that my mother was good and was always asked if she was still in college. For ten years I said yes she is in college. For twenty years I never told anyone my brother pointed a gun to my head because she left us unattended with the gun case unlocked. When I brought it up to her in my late twenties she said it wasn’t possible because my twenty year old cousin was there in the camper. When I asked I thought I was testing whether or not she could have subdued her ego enough to admit to the possibility that it may have not been the best choice to leave minors unattended with an unlocked gun case at home. That’s the way things were with her growing up so why would it be any different with us? All of a sudden she gets away with making the right choices because, “She pulled herself up by the bootstraps and got a degree in education.”

Anytime I try to explain my experiences of these circumstances I am caught in a social trap by which the liberal value of women choosing careers over a life of drunkenness and whoreish behavior to capture the love of a man my mother’s story overrides. My experience of having a gun pointed at my head by my own brother is over-ridden by another set of values.

55. I had a shot gun pointed to my head by my own brother because I was singing too loudly and he was hungover because he was drinking alcohol.

56. I didn’t know if the shot gun was loaded.

57. I stopped singing, fell backwards, and made a snow angel.

“Well, you’re mother could have brought over a bunch of rotten men. You could have been sexually abused.”

58. My brother used to chase me around the house naked and dry hump me. These are the effects of leaving minors unattended after school out in the country. And you know it which is why you started getting babysitters for us. It was after too many nights coming house to a destroyed house that my mother decided to have some family members watch over us and make sure we did our homework.

59. “Stop being a victim you liberal snowflake.”

60. But I’m actually criticizing the effects of applied feminism in the 21st century.

61. “You’re mother is a good person.”

63. “It could have been worse.”

64. “Everything turned out fine.”

65. “Everyone has trauma to deal with. Everyone has baggage.”

My boyfriend told me of growing up. His father was a chemist at Kellogg’s and his mother was an instructor at a community college. He was a potter, a knitter, and a banjo player. He became an English teacher. He told me that one time his dad brought home bags of Lucky Charm marshmallows for him and his sister to eat. His father recorded their responses to the marshmallows and adjusted the ratios of sugar based on those tests. That doesn’t sound like trauma to me. That sounds like a healthy childhood which leads one to have self confidence, self esteem, and the emotional stability necessary to face the mixed messages of life. In the meantime I seek out people who tell me I’m dumb, ugly, stupid, and will never amount to anything because I think that’s a normal relationship. If I am not doing that I am hiding in my room wondering what the point of being alive is wondering if there is any hope for me to heal and get better.

66. My father’s suicide is a traumatic past which shapes my entire experience. It’s a past that I have the right to represent by writing it. It’s a past which is not, “Everything turned out fine,” and no my mother did not, “Pull herself up by her bootstraps,” she had choices to make and one of those choices was to leave minors home alone with a gun case full of weapons and to trust that nothing bad could have happened in that circumstance. I will not limit myself to the blindness feminist discourse encouraged when I told my story to an existential philosophy professor at a liberal university. Yes, she could have chosen worse, but it could have turned out much better. I will not sit here silently submitting to my brother’s words, “Don’t tell anyone or I will kill you!”

“Why don’t you talk about your father?”

67. Well kill me. I’d be better off anyway. I am willing to die for the truth in the same way an American soldier is willing to die for his country. I am willing to stand for something even if I am alone. Pull the trigger. If it makes you feel like a man to point a gun at your brother you might as well pull the trigger.

“It wasn’t loaded. Do you think I would actually put a shot gun shell in it. I love you, I’m your brother. Do you think I’m an idiot? I wouldn’t actually do that. . .”

“Why don’t you talk about your father?”

68. It’s exhausting. It’s a threat to my existence. It reminds me that blowing my brains out is a real possibility whereas for most people its a thing you say when life sucks. The following is an example of that.

When I was working as an English as a Second Language instructor I thought I had made it. I thought that teaching immigrants and refugees English meant I had established myself as a concrete being in the world permanently enmeshed as a career oriented man. My degree in Sociology was justified and my graduate certificate was no longer a waste of time, energy, and effort. I quickly learned that my masculinity was always under question and that the few men in that field were perfectly miserable beings. The whole notion that people became teachers because they were heart filled beings with a passion for helping others vanished when my co-worker, a professional teacher who taught abroad in Japan, made the shape of a gun with his finger, lifted it to his head, and pulled the trigger. I had simply asked him how he was doing and it was apparently not well. I was feeling rather dismal and would like to think I responded like this.

69. It’s a great position to be in. A cock loaded full of cum in my mouth and my cock loaded full of cum in his mouth. The tension was rising. Would we ever get to the desired result of all of our efforts? Would we ever achieve orgasm? Would we ever blow? Rest assured we exploded and were perfectly satisfied. There’s just something about holes and filling them which none of us can resist. Yet, even when the hole is filled to the brim with hot cum we feel so empty that we can no longer go on and so we pause. It’s okay to have long periods of stagnation so long as we can pull out at the right time and forgive ourselves for our responses to the past. The future may not appear to hold much but there is so much time and so many holes to fill.

70. They covered my father’s hole with makeup. They closeted the cause of his death. At the funeral they closed the bottom half of the casket which made me think that someone cut my father’s legs off with giant scissors. I screamed. I was convinced that his legs were cut off with giant scissors and that someone had caused his death.

71. How is a four year old suppose to understand this when adults are unable to tell the truth when the child asks questions about his dead father. He isn’t going to understand these things if adults themselves still don’t understand them. Adults go to great lengths to omit the grievances and effects of such events. “Everything turned out fine,” and “You’ve got choices to make.”

A four year old’s brain is not ready to understand such things because adults don’t understand them. His memories are barely forming and he is still fascinated by blowing bubbles. Adults have lost their imaginations. He smiles at the sound of popcorn popping while adults drench popcorn in so much salt and butter that they die of heart attacks and call it death by natural causes. A child laughs when he sees a frozen lake swarmed by a hundred seagulls as teenage boys stuff frogs down the barrels of shot guns and laugh when American toad guts go spiraling into the sky like fireworks.

The events surrounding my father’s death are my first memories. There are many of them like the pastor holding me trying to give me comfort. I press my stomach for comfort. My first memories are the feeling of anxiety, that weird pang in the stomach which goes unexplained by doctors and still causes ulcers. There’s my cousin saying my father is away for a very long time and that he is in heaven. These memories attach themselves to future interactions when all compiled leave one wishing there were no choices to make at all. It leaves one wishing that there was one defined path meant for everyone which would eliminate all angst and all decisions. In fact it often feels better if there was no free will at all and that God really did have a plan for each individual.

There is another pastor, who many years later, told me my father was in hell. This leaves me with one of those ridiculous choices and questions, “Is my father in heaven or in hell?” There is my aunt who tells me that my pastor is wrong and the Bible never mentions. There is my uncle who says people who don’t believe in God are not allowed in his home. There is the ice cream I ate after I was taken out of the funeral home to ease the emotional burden a screaming four year old must have placed on my father’s friends and family members. The ice cream was a temporary cure which taught me that negative emotions could be easily drowned with chocolate sauce and colorful sprinkles.

72. My father is in heaven.

73. My father is in hell.

74. My father is in purgatory.

75. I don’t know where the fuck my father is.

76. Do souls exist?

78. What is the difference between agnostic theism and agnostic atheism?

79. It’s ok to think about dying now and again. I think everyone has thought about it now and again but I’m not sure. I’m only one person with so many heartbeats.

80. I don’t think I will commit suicide because it doesn’t solve anything. Living doesn’t solve much either but at least I can say I tried to count to one hundred.

81. I might cry if I talk about my father.

82. It’s ok to cry.

83. It’s ok to cry.

84. It’s ok to cry.

85. It’s ok to cry.

86. It’s ok to cry.

87. If you cannot sleep count the sheep or cry.

88. It’s ok to cry.

89. Real men cry.

90. Real men cry.

91. Real men cry.

92. Real men cry like big men.

93. Real men cry like grown men.

94. Real men cry like real men.

95. It’s ok to cry.

96. It’s ok to cry.

97. Facts may not care about feelings but feelings are always seeking out facts to justify themselves. One must be careful about the facts used to represent their feelings.

98. Over intellectualization isn’t crying. It’s a defense mechanism.

99. It’s okay to cry.

100. Everything turned out fine.

#spilled ink #spilled words #masculinity #manhood #lgbtq #free will #existentialism #Sartre #jean paul sartre #lyrical #lyrical poem #lyrical prose

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wolftraps · 4 years

Note

"They’ve got one single person who is Desolation + the End (an orphan Daisy found in the burned out shell of a house that they all sort of co-raised...)" Oh I'd love to hear more about them. Both in the Institute family accidentally an entire baby sense and in the WOW is this the wrong person to have mad at you sense. Give them a touch of the Hunt and they're deadlier than any Slaughter. (Course, thats what mum's for.)

Right, so, uh, I didn’t mean to write so much. But I guess that’s the story of Reverb. So, here’s 2500 words of Daisy and Jon raising a monster, I guess?

Basira finds the lead. There have been rumors that the Lightless Flame is trying to create a new Agnes. Jon thinks they may already have. He doesn’t Know, but his attempts to do so gave him a nasty sunburn for a couple hours, so he passed it off to them instead. Almost everyone involved in Agnes’s birth and childhood are gone, but there are still a couple known contacts, and at this point, Daisy can usually just follow the smell of burning.

It’s Basira who finds the lead, though, and takes them up to a tiny town about 100km north of Glasgow.

To what was a tiny town north of Glasgow. Most of it isn’t even smoking anymore by the time they get there. If anyone survived, they’ve already fled. All except for one. There’s no sound that gives them away. No crying or screams. Daisy just follows the scent of smoke to the epicenter of the destruction, and huddled in the middle of the burned out shell of a house, with their head buried in their knees, is a child.

Her first step into the building disturbs some rubble, just enough to get the child’s attention without immediately prompting an attack. Their head snaps up, and they may not be crying now, but the redness of their eyes says they have been.

“Daisy,” Basira warns as she takes a step closer, and Daisy motions for her to keep back.

Another step, the child tenses. Another, they still don’t attack. Another. Another. When she’s finally only a couple meters away, the kid makes ready to run. So that’s where Daisy stops, and sits down amid the rubble and ash.

“Hi,” she says softly. “I’m not here to hurt you. My name is Daisy.”

No response.

“Can you tell me your name?”

Nothing.

“That’s alright. You can tell me when you’re ready.” Daisy slowly gestures at the destruction around them. “I’m going to take a guess and say you did this.” The child tenses. “Also going to guess you didn’t mean to.” They stare at her suspiciously for another few seconds and then jerkily shake their head.

“That’s okay,” Daisy reassures them. “I understand. I’m going to sit here as long as you need to feel comfortable, okay? You can talk when you’re ready, but I’m only here to help.” Their eyes flick briefly to Basira, still standing just outside the demolished wall. “That’s my partner, Basira. She’s not going to hurt you either. She’ll stay right there unless you say she can come in.”

And so they stay for another twenty minutes, sitting in silence.

“D-Daisy?” the child says eventually, their voice cracking and hoarse from smoke.

“I’m here.”

“You… don’t really look like a Daisy.” Daisy laughs.

“My real name is Alice.”

“You don’t look like an Alice, either.”

“Yeah. I didn’t really like it. Daisy’s better.” They nod.

“I’m… I’m Shay.”

“Hi, Shay. Good to meet you.”

“I… I really didn’t mean to,” they say, and their shoulders shake, but there are no tears. Daisy suspects they may be too dehydrated. “I just… I just wanted to see. And- and then I couldn’t stop it. And everyone was screaming! And- and-”

“Shh-shh. It’s okay, Shay. Can I come closer?” Shay nods and Daisy moves slowly, no sudden movements, until she sits again at Shay’s side. “I’d like to hug you, if that’s okay.”

“I- I don’t-”

“That’s fine too. I’m right here. However you need me.” Shay studies her for a long moment, barely breathing, and then a sob wracks through them and they’re buried in her side.

“I didn’t mean to!”

“I know. It’s okay. I know.” She rocks them gently until the shaking stops.

“What’s going to happen to me now?”

“If it’s alright with you, I’d like to take you home now.”

“Your home?”

“My home.”

“With you and Basira.”

“With us, and my friend Jon. And Martin and Sasha. Our whole little family. And yours if you want it.”

“A child,” Georgie says incredulously. “Someone gave you a child?”

“Technically, Daisy acquired a child. I thought it best they learn in a more stable environment. Also they’re almost eleven. It’s not like we’re trying to raise a toddler in the Archives.”

“I’m not sure that’s better, Jon.” The child in question side-eyes them, but says nothing, just continues to sort papers. “They’re very quiet.”

“Now,” Jon scoffs a bit. “There was a bit of a row earlier, and a yell that may have spawned a small tornado. Shay is cleaning up the mess they created, in silence, or they won’t be going out with Sasha tomorrow to witness Hurricane Gabrielle hit Florida.” He meets Shay’s glare with a flat stare of his own. Stubborn ten-year-olds have a remarkable ability to not be intimidated by staring, though they still break first, with a touch of an embarrassed blush.

“Jon! They’re a child.”

“Georgie! They’re not human. And I’m certainly not going to push them to pick a second patron at this age, so I would rather they participate in events that will occur anyway than for them to start blowing things up near our home.”

“So if they don’t behave, you’ll starve them.” The glare Jon aims at her has her taking a step back. It’s not often Jon aims any of his powers at Georgie, but it’s abundantly clear that that isn’t something she should have said.

“If they don’t behave, they will be taken to northern Georgia, where the hurricane will likely cause serious flooding, but little irreparable damage. They’re already Desolation, Georgie, and I am not going to punish them for living.”

“Shay.”

“Oh, uh, hey, mum! W-what’s up?”

“Explain.”

“I’m just… protesting? Oh, come on! We’ve been careful. Minor injuries and some lingering trauma only. And you can’t tell me some of these assholes don’t deserve it!”

Daisy looks at them sternly for a good half minute, just enough to let them squirm.

“You’re targeting the wrong pressure points. And his lordship is over there,” she points to the building currently behind Shay, right on the edge of the localized earthquake they have going.

“Oh. Oops.”

“If you want to level the building three down from that, I won’t complain. Got a Stranger I’ve been after for a while squatting there.”

“Aww.”

“Don’t.”

“What? I think it’s sweet you still bring him Strangers for their anniversary!”

“You want pointers or not?”

“Not saying another word. What’s the secret to efficiently destroying a building?”

Jon finds them in the tunnels, sitting against a wall, wrapped around Patrząc. He sits beside them, just close enough to brush arms. Even then, he can feel the heat coming off them. Not burning, but feverish at least, if they were capable of having fevers.

Neither of them say a word for several minutes.

“I keep trying to cry,” Shay says, soft and flat. “I want to. I- I really fucked up this time, but I just… can’t. I can feel them, their terror, and… I can feel when it stops. Every single one, it feels like i’m being dropped into ice water, but I’ve been burning so hot, it feels more like a balm. I… I know we’re not human, but shouldn’t- shouldn’t I be sad? Or… something?”

Jon leans his head back against the wall and considers. “I- spent a lot of my youth blaming myself for… everything, really. It took me a long time to accept that ‘you always have a choice’ and ‘some things are beyond your control’ aren’t mutually exclusive. Just because there is a choice, doesn’t mean it could’ve gone any other way than how it did.”

“Didn’t you literally go back in time to change everything?”

“Yes. And I changed… a lot. It was hard to think of it that way at the time. Back then, it seemed like no matter what I did, everything was still going to go wrong. Some people probably would’ve been… No, no one would’ve been better off. Not in the end. That’s what I still have trouble remembering. We told you I came back because the world ended.”

“Yeah? Because of Jonah Magnus. You came back to kill him, so it didn’t happen.”

“I’m the one who ended it.”

“Wh- wait, what? But you…”

“We tried to run away, but I was too much the Archivist to go without statements. Basira sent us some, but Jonah slipped one in, and it held the words to perform the ritual. By the time I realized what it was, I couldn’t stop reading. It wasn’t a choice I deliberately made, but I ended the world.”

“Oh… fuck.”

“Heh. Yeah. And still, I wouldn’t have come back- I wouldn’t have been able to come back- if Martin hadn’t been killed.”

“I don’t-”

“Do you know about Agnes?”

“Agnes… Montague? I read some of the statements, why?”

“If Daisy never found you. If you were raised by the Lightless Flame. You were meant to be her replacement. Your birth was orchestrated to bring about the apocalypse in the image of Desolation.”

“… Oh.”

“Agnes was conflicted. She had doubts. Eventually, she decided she couldn’t do it. She told them to hang her, so her spark would return to the fires of Desolation and they could try again.”

“… Oh.”

“Do you know the difference between you and her?”

“She chose not to destroy the world and I’m going to do it by accident?”

“No. It’s the same as the difference between timelines for me. The people around Agnes made her choose between dying and ending the world. The difference is that your family would never want you to do either.”

“I… Jon- Dad- There- there are still so many lives being lost. Because of me. And-”

“And you can feel them. Yes. You said it doesn’t feel bad. Does it feel good?”

“Wh- Um… Not- not especially? Mostly it just… is. It’s almost like… part of me wants to be satisfied, but instead I’m just numb.”

“That’s probably the best we could hope for.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know. I’ll do my best to explain. We should go back up, though. Your mother is being gruff, but it’s because she’s worried about you.” Jon starts to lever himself up but is stopped by a warm grip on his arm.

“Could- could we stay down here, just a bit longer? The- the cold feels nice.” Jon smiles softly and sits and lets them lean in to rest their head on his shoulder, even though they’ve got enough height on him it can’t be comfortable. The two of them won’t be able to sit here forever. A fretting Daisy is already wearing a hole in the floor of the Archives with her pacing. And it’s unlikely the forest fire is going to go out without some supernatural intervention. He remembers this feeling, though, and how much he depended on Martin’s support.

He can give them this, for a little while longer, and then he’ll call Oliver Banks.

Ethan has been at the Institute for half a year when he finally meets Jon’s kid. They’re… a lot livelier than he expected. They blow through the Archives like a whirlwind (and, in fact, may spawn a small one, though it only disturbs some of the discredited statements, so it’s not like it matters), and almost slide into a seat across from Jon.

“Mum says you have something for me,” they say, practically bouncing. “What is it? What is it?”

“Hello, Shay. Lovely to see you too. I’m doing just swell, thanks for asking. How are you?”

“Oh please, you know exactly how i’m doing. But… yes, hi Jon, I missed you too.” Ethan has never once had any cause to doubt his mother’s love, but he doesn’t think he’s ever seen her look at him with half as much fondness as Jon looks at Shay. Though, in fairness, that’s probably because he’s a bit too close to the situation with his own mum. “Soooo?”

“The Vast.”

“Oooh, that’s a new one. I thought Martin still had a pretty good hold on the Fairchilds.”

“Simon is trying his hand at space exploration again and won’t answer our calls. Helena says this new avatar isn’t a Fairchild and has no stake in our alliance.”

“Is she telling the truth?”

“Unfortunately. Kinsey Harris is a former RAF pilot. In 2031, there was a malfunction and his plane went down. He did not. In August of 2032, he came to the Blackwood Institute and made a statement. Ethan?”

Jon has been doing this more and more lately, quizzing Ethan on case numbers. Sometimes he remembers from his searches through old statements, sometimes he doesn’t. On at least two occasions, though, he’s known without ever seeing it.

“Umm… 07.2031.2032/08/14… I/L/R?” Jon nods, and Ethan tries not to look too proud of himself.

“New guy?” Shay asks, looking him over. They had clearly missed him in their sprint to Jon’s office.

“Not that new,” Jon scoffs.

“Jon.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t need to! Martin and Mum and even Sasha did it for you! I’m pretty sure Sasha doesn’t know what year it is half the time, let alone how long it’s been since I last visited the Institute.”

“Sasha knows what year it is at least 86% of the time, and she knows when it’s been too long since you came home.”

“Can’t we go back to you asking me to kill a guy? That conversation was a lot more fun.” Jon stares at them until they start to squirm, just a little, and Ethan’s spent enough time with him that he’s pretty sure he can see Jon fighting a smirk.

“Kinsey took one of our HR employees, Buried-aligned. She was missing for a week before she crash-landed in the front hall. Now one of our library staff, Len, Pitch, is gone.” All of Shay’s fidgeting has stopped, and there’s a sense of… something in the Archives. Static tension. The calm before a storm.

“Right. Give me everything you have on him.”

“Ethan has been collecting it all. He can fill you in while you grab something from the canteen.”

Shay doesn’t so much roll their eyes as their whole head. “You cannot judge me for skipping a couple meals. I was busy.”

“I can and I will. Go. Eat lunch. And we will see you for dinner later.”

For a second it looks like there’s going to be an argument, but Shay stops before saying anything. “Who’s cooking?” they ask. Jon really does smirk now.

“Georgie and I are making curry.”

“Yessss. Okay. I’ll see you later. Love you!” They drop a kiss on Jon’s cheek and then Ethan is being pulled up the stairs by someone with Jon’s intensity and Ms. Tonner’s feral energy and he wonders if maybe he should be worried, but doubts he’s going to have much time for that.

#daisy tonner #jonathan sims #my writing #my tma fic #reverb ficlet #shay tonner #reverb #not a sad #ethan herne #the reverb in these holy halls #tma #Anonymous #you asked

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hamliet · 5 years

Note

Hello! Have you seen TROS yet? [Spoiler alert] I was really devastated by the ending - coming out the theater feeling upset and disappointed. Do you have any thoughts on it? Or maybe any plan to write fix-it fic? Thank you!

I am seeing it tomorrow. That said, I’ve read the plot summary, and no good execution can save that. So I was planning on posting this after I watched it with amendments made as I hope to enjoy it, but I’ll just post it now and amend this as necessary based on the film as I see it. (I still believe I will enjoy the film, even if I don’t think it’s a good film. I do think that. I really do... I hope.)

BASED ON THE PLOT SUMMARIES ALONE (grains of salt everywhere!):

I think it’s technically… messy writing at best and downright bad writing in other parts.* 10/10 it’s a blockuster-y, JJ Abrams-esque, (hopefully) fun, messy narrative movie that will be forgotten in 0.3 seconds.

Disclaimer before everyone comes after me: if you like it, AWESOME. If you think it’s good writing, great! Good writing and bad writing are inherently subjective; that said, there are general consensuses among literary studies about what constitutes bad and good writing. Hence, I’m relying on those consensuses when I call it messily written.

Before we get into specifics, I’ll compare it to two other major pop culture endings: Game of Thrones and Avengers: Endgame.

TROS is similar to the GoT final season in that it attempts to incorporate every aspect of fan speculation ever. However, it’s more like Endgame in that it is still somewhat true to the themes and characters—but unfortunately also like Endgame, it is not transformative or particularly interesting as a story on its own. In fact, it’s rather boring and honestly… bad storytelling. It tries to rehash Return of the Jedi but it doesn’t succeed in any way because the world and the overall story has grown since the early 1980s, and so the same story doesn’t work anymore.

Showing a cyclical story remaining cyclical with no sign of that breaking–instead, the cycles are even reinforced–does not give optimism nor does it give hope.

Redemption=death needs to die already. If we really want to reach people and tell them that the message is that you can always make a better choice (as Daisy Ridley and JJ Abrams have said about Kylo’s arc), maybe don’t send the message in each and every story that you have to die to redeem yourself. Look outside of cultural secular Calvinism, for the love of God and the betterment of the world and stories as a whole.

Now let’s talk Rey’s parentage.

We know Rey Palpatine wasn’t planned from the beginning (Trevorrow, the original write/director of IX, who was thankfully fired, said that he never planned for Palpatine to return), which means Rey’s parentage was most likely retconned from TLJ and there was no real plan for the sequel trilogy’s overall character arcs (save for Kylo’s, according to the actors and writers).

Listen to me. You don’t have to have everything planned when you start a three-film saga, but you gotta know the major beats.

This is like a sad game of movie telephone.

Yes, I know the OT Star Wars didn’t have a plan either and it’s like one of the only examples I can think of where no plan worked out–albeit not without hiccups (Leia kissing Luke, anyone?) If you expect lightning to strike twice in the same place, I’m sorry, but you are hopelessly naive.

Having Rey decide she wants to carry on the name Skywalker at the end is lame as shit. It’s a way to appease fans while being like nah she still isn’t related. Trying to please every fan is a sure way to guarantee that you will please no one. It might make for a perfectly pleasant film experience (I really hope it does), but not good, lasting storytelling (though not like, horrific either). It’s meh. It’s like… giving someone who is starving oatmeal. It will get the job done but will it satisfy and enthrall people? Not quite.

And let’s switch gears for a minute to Finn and Rose, my first and third favorite characters in this trilogy (Kylo is second, Rey is fourth). The sidelining of Rose is nothing short of a terrible attempt to please the white-supremacist-aligned Fandom Menace. Let’s not pretend it’s anything else. JJ’s lipservice about how wonderful it was that Kelly was cast at SW Celebration is, in hindsight, absolutely nauseating.

Shame on JJ. Shame on Disney.

But the main problem I have with this film is this:

Why did it need to exist?

The answer is money. Obviously. I know, I know stories exist to make money. That doesn’t mean I can’t criticize the fact that the story was sacrificed on the unholy altar of capitalism and Disney’s desire to own our souls. (Disney–the reason I like your movies is that a lot of them are good stories. I’m not interested in pandering soooooo.)

The Rise of Skywalker does not enhance the Star Wars narrative. Nothing about this film satisfies the Skywalker Saga nor the sequel trilogy, and it kind of all comes down to Kylo Ren’s death being the nail that sunk the entire world of Star Wars.

Keep in mind Kylo is not my favorite character when I’m saying this. Finn is. But I never spoke about Finn as much because the story didn’t utilize him properly. I never had concerns about Finn getting a happy ending while I was worried for Rey and Kylo’s arcs. (Finn’s arc, however, did have a ton more potential than was capitalized on; in particular, he would have been better if he was more conflicted over say, shooting other stormtroopers. His whole character humanized the usual red shirts, which when paired with Rose’s everywoman character, had so much potential I could shriek about it all day. That he didn’t lead other brainwashed stormtroopers into rebellion and freedom saddens me. Also, his ending again seems to bring about a good victim/bad victim dichotomy when it is compared with Kylo’s. The reason these two are my faves is that they were brainwashed as kids which, well, I can kinda sorta heavily relate to.)

Kylo Ren and Rey’s relationship doesn’t really get much better than it did in The Last Jedi. It actually rehashes that arc significantly. We already knew Kylo would fight for Rey and the galaxy, so… how was this different? Now, if he had lived, it would have been different, because it was the after the fight that proved that Kylo wasn’t ready to redeem himself in The Last Jedi. It was Kylo’s choice to stay at the expense of Rey and the Resistance that was literally the set up for conflict in the next film. This… turned it into nothing? Their conflict is rehashed and then whoo-hoo! Easy way out! Kill him so that they don’t have to deal with the “after” this time! They never have to deal with the conflict literally set up in The Last Jedi.

That’s bad writing, fam.

Life is infinitely more interesting. Leaving the story open with a living Skywalker instead of killing literally everyone involved with the Skywalkers except Rey who now adopts that name is… so unsatisfying I can’t even. Even if later material shows him showing up as a Force Ghost, like: cool saw that with Vader so this… adds nothing to the existing films. It doesn’t really reconcile anything.

It also… does not help the Rey=Mary Sue argument. She is NOT a Mary Sue, and that is a sexist term itself, but in no way is it a satisfying ending to her arc, because it isn’t a well-written ending which means it isn’t a well-written arc. The problem with Rey’s ending is a mirror of my problem with Kylo’s ending: it’s the very much a combination of her ending in The Last Jedi and her life before The Force Awakens.

She and Kylo are now separated (permanently this time).

She’s has her Resistance friends.

She’s alone on a desert planet.

But wait! Now she’s now happy!

Uh, why? The only reason I can think of is that the narrative demands it. Because honestly, what changes? The family she chose–the Skywalkers–are just as dead as her Palpatine birth family, soooooo. I suppose she reconciled with her heritage and come to peace with it and so that’s why she’s happy now, but… I can’t lie. It’s not hopeful. It’s not optimistic. It’s not Star Wars and it isn’t consistent for the message (especially if this is supposed to be the ending to the saga!) to be both:

life sucks for the Skywalkers and then they die–seriously, look at Shmi, Anakin, Padmé, Leia, Luke, Han, Kylo–it is LITERALLY ALL OF THEM; and

deciding to be a Skywalker means you’re at peace.

I can only assume Rey’s life will suck and then she’ll die, tbh, unless of course she is better off because of her blood… which negates the point of her being a Skywalker and is a really gross idea.

YOU CAN’T HAVE BOTH IN YOUR ENDING. PICK ONE.

Rejecting the Skywalkers would be anti-Star Wars, for sure, but marrying into them as a way of bridging the unfinished pain between Anakin and Padmé and Leia and her father? Much better. Or just leave it open. Honestly, leave it open for Kylo and Rey to both be alive and see each other again.

But you’re just upset your ship didn’t get a happy ending!

No, I’m upset about the storytelling, of which shipping is a part. A canonical part just as much as the lightsaber fights are. Anakin and Padmé. Leia and Han. Finn and Rose. Poe and Zorii. Rey and Ben.

The Force created Anakin, remember? All films–even the spin-offs–encourage our heroes to trust the force. “May the force be with us.” But the Force created an ENTIRE FAMILY THAT LIVED LIVES THAT SUCKED AND MADE LIFE SUCK FOR EVERYONE AROUND THEM AND THEN THEY DIED.

May the Force stay far the f*ck away from me, amen.

But seriously I can’t trust the world of a galaxy far far away or its narrative anymore. It’s a contradiction that causes all nine films to unravel. Why?

Again, let’s return to my earlier GoT comparison, because there is one thing TROS does that is more similar to GoT than to Endgame: Endgame drew together a bunch of unique distinctly separate stories into a crossover. TROS, just like GoT, relied on cliffhanger, incomplete endings to its films and therefore the ending matters a hell of a lot more than a stand-alone story.

I’m not dying to rewatch it like I am with stories where I realize I might learn more the second time. And by “rewatch it” I mean the entire nine-film saga. Knowing that canonically Leia, Luke, Han–they all die and their last descendent dies, the last descendent of Padmé and Anakin–for me, it’s personally gonna be hard to watch again. It’s gonna be hard to watch TROS going into it the first time.

And so the saga of bad endings continues.

Game of Thrones remains the worst at a -100 out of 10. It’s followed by Tokyo Ghoul:re which is still 2/10, and Star Wars is, on paper (meaning after I see it I am hoping it rises a few notches) now… 4/10. Endgame is a solid 6.5/10.

Banana Fish, sweetie, I’m sorry you were ranked down there. Your ending is a 7/10 but the rest of your story is like, 10/10 so you are sprung from this list.

Help me, Shingeki no Kyojin. You’re my only hope.

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haberdashing · 4 years

Text

What A Tangled Web We Weave (7/?)

TMA AU diverging from canon at the end of episode 92. Jon is forced into an arranged marriage by Elias; Martin does what he can to help.

on AO3

Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7

Martin slept well that night.

He wasn’t expecting to, really. When he put his head against the pillow, he was fully expecting a night filled with tossing and turning and nightmares and very little in the way of actual sleep. But both that night and the one before, once he made the decision that it was time to go to bed he was out like a light, lost in dreamless sleep, and before he knew it it was morning.

Part of Martin wondered if this had to do with his new connection to the Web somehow. Part of Martin wondered if it was just because he really needed the rest. Part of Martin wasn’t quite willing to look that particular gift horse in the mouth just yet.

He didn’t feel quite as, well, off as he had the day before when he woke up, either, and Martin figured it was probably time for him to head back to the Institute. No use putting things off any further, delaying the inevitable and risking seeming all the more suspicious because of it. Besides, he did still have a job to do... even if that job wasn’t nearly as mundane as he’d thought when he’d first signed on.

Martin was nervous on his way to the Institute, scared even, but that wasn’t really new. The specific cause was, sure, but he’d been scared of something ever since Prentiss trapped him in his flat, and probably even earlier than that if he was being entirely honest with himself. At least now the fear and anxiety had a clear rationale behind them, had a single cause he could focus on dealing with as best he could.

He’d picked his nails half to shreds by the time he made it through the front door of the Institute, but Martin was pretty sure his eyes were two in number and human-looking in appearance, that nobody was staring at him any more than usual, and that was more important right now than having intact fingernails.

Jon was tucked away in his office again, or so it looked from a glance towards the place to see the door to it closed and light peeking out from the gaps between door and frame. Martin wanted to try to draw him out of there, to give him comfort and reassurance, but he didn’t entirely trust himself to do so without something going terribly wrong, at least not yet. Maybe later he could just so happen to make himself and Jon a cup of tea and use that as an excuse to stop inside again, but for now...

For now, he had work to do.

Martin wasn’t sure if it was just his imagination, or if it was because of the day that passed without him in the Archives, or if it was because of his return to the Archives now, but the other archival assistants (including Basira, whose set-up was still a little haphazard, but was a fair sight better than sitting on the floor now; Daisy was nowhere to be seen, and Martin rather preferred it that way) were a lot quieter now than they were two days ago. No open-ended speculation about whether Elias’ claims were true, no discussion of Jon’s fate. Melanie was actually doing some research, by the looks of it, while Basira had another book open at her new desk, and Tim was playing a different violent video game on his work computer.

Was being the operative word there; as Martin booted up his own computer, he saw Tim pause his game before strolling over to him.

“Martin, can we talk?”

Martin shrugged. “Sure?”

Tim looked around the archives before adding, in a slightly lower voice, “I mean, can we talk alone?”

Martin gulped nervously. While he didn’t know exactly what Tim wanted from him, his mind jumped to the worst easily enough, and it being something that he wasn’t willing to say within earshot of the other archival assistants definitely wasn’t a good sign. “Y-yeah, sure.”

They followed the path together, no words needing to be exchanged beforehand; this wasn’t the first time Martin and Tim had wanted to speak without others overhearing them, and they’d identified one particular document storage room that went almost entirely unused some months back for that purpose. (Though back then if they couldn’t talk in the Archives, it was because they were avoiding Sasha--Sasha, whose death still felt like a freshly opened wound--and that memory sent a pang of loss coursing through Martin.)

As Tim closed the door behind him, Martin leaned against a pile of old boxes, though he regretted the move almost immediately as a cloud of dust emerged from the boxes with his touch and he had to fight to stifle a sneeze. “What did you want to talk about?”

Tim laughed a little, and that should have helped, should have eased the tension at least a bit, but the laugh was short and bitter and Martin didn’t trust it even slightly.

The pause between Tim’s laugh and his actual response to Martin’s question must have taken only a few brief seconds, but in Martin’s mind, that period of uncertainty and unease dragged on much longer.

“Did you really take a day off work just because your crush is getting married?”

Once Martin finished processing the question being asked of him, he couldn’t help but burst into laughter, even though it just made the fire in Tim’s eyes burn brighter.

“That’s what this is about? Seriously?”

Tim raised an eyebrow. “Why, what did you think this was about?”

“...nothing.”

“Right. Look, I thought you were still all gung-ho about working here. Did you change your mind about all that, or are you really just that taken with Jon?”

“I...” Martin had been prepared for a few different ways this conversation could go, but this fit none of them, and now he was left grasping at straws. “Neither, I guess?”

“Then why didn’t you come in to work yesterday, hmm?”

“I didn’t feel well.” Technically true, that, the best kind of true. “Might’ve had some sort of 24-hour bug, I’m better now.”

Tim’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, so you just happened to fall ill yesterday.”

Martin threw his hands in the air. “Yes! Why is that so suspicious?”

“Because you’re back now, not at all worried about being contagious, the very next day.”

It took Martin a moment to put together the pieces, to remember the time he’d chewed out Sasha (...was that Sasha? Martin didn’t know for sure, couldn’t remember the timing well enough) for coming into work after taking two days off for a cold and returning while she still had a slight sniffle, how he’d gone on a rant about how easily germs could spread in an office environment, but once he realized what he’d done Martin could feel his stomach sinking until it seemed like it must be resting somewhere around the floor.

“Maybe it wasn’t a bug, actually-”

“If you’re trying to avoid this place, trust me, it’s not that easy. But if you’re just trying to avoid Jon-”

Martin could feel his face growing pink and hot. “It’s not like that!”

“If you say so.”

“It’s not, I swear it’s not-”

And then Tim’s eyes went wide and he started backing away, and Martin didn’t know why until he realized that the room definitely hadn’t been this bright when he’d entered, and he could see the cobwebs in the corners more clearly now-

Shit.

“Tim?”

Tim kept his eyes fixed on Martin as he reached for the doorknob, only breaking eye contact once the door was flung open and he began running past it into the hallway beyond. Martin followed, but if he tried chasing after Tim Martin would likely end up losing the chase, and then he’d end up parading through the Archives looking like- like this, and everything would just unravel that much faster...

Better to try using his words, then. Maybe he could still talk Tim out of doing anything too drastic.

“Tim, stop!”

Tim went from sprinting away from Martin to practically screeching to a halt on a dime in a motion that looked more like something out of a cartoon than something unfolding in real life. It was almost comical, how quickly he stopped in his tracks when Martin said the word. Almost.

“Tim...”

Martin approached Tim, who was standing still in the middle of the hallway now, not moving an inch from where he’d been when Martin had called out to him. Martin circled around until they were face to face again, halfway between the archives proper and the room where their conversation had begun.

“Please don’t- don’t tell anyone about this. Don’t tell Jon about this, especially. Please. I know it looks bad, and it, it kind of is bad I suppose-” Martin let out a soft, bitter laugh. “But I want the time to figure this out myself, handle it on my own terms, alright?”

Martin looked into Tim’s eyes, which looked strangely unfocused, as if he were looking through Martin instead of at him. For a moment Tim didn’t respond, and Martin held his breath as he waited...

“Fine, sure, I won’t tell anyone.” The bitterness in Tim’s voice was audible, but Martin still let out a sigh of relief. “But if you go around looking like that, I doubt me keeping mum will help much.”

“Right, right, yeah.” Martin concentrated, thought back to those hours spent staring at his own reflection in the bathroom mirror, and the world grew dimmer and his peripheral vision shrank away as he willed eight eyes back into two. “There we go. Now, can we talk about this?”

Martin blinked a few times before realizing that his vision wasn’t failing him, that Tim really was nowhere to be seen. Apparently he’d taken the time Martin had used to adjust his appearance to run off to who-knows-where.

Martin sighed again. “Tim?”

No response came as Martin made his way down the hallway.

“Tim, I’d like to talk. Tim!”

Even once he reached the main part of the archives, Tim wasn’t there, wasn’t waiting at his desk as Martin had expected, his video game still paused on the same screen as before.

As Martin made his way back to his own desk, Melanie asked, “Looking for Tim?”

Martin tried to summon up a grin, though he wasn’t sure how successful he was on that end. “That obvious?”

“Well, you were practically yelling his name just now-”

“Right, uh, about that-”

“But he just ran off. Literally. Looked a little like a deer in headlights when he was at it.” Melanie paused, clearly hesitating before asking, “What was it you needed from him, anyway?”

Martin let out a laugh that he hoped sounded less bitter than it felt, shaking his head as he replied, “Nothing, actually. Nothing at all.”

#tma #tma au #tma fic #tma fanfic #the magnus archives #the magnus archives au #the magnus archives fic #the magnus archives fanfic #martin blackwood #web martin #web martin blackwood #personal #my writing

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iceeckos12 · 4 years

Text

dont spare the horses

Summary: Jon and Martin get domestic. The next logical step is to adopt some cattle.

did i write jonmartin fluff of post-159? I did! spoilers for 159 and everything that happens after. canon divergence after 160. warnings for attempted selfharm.

title is taken from ‘home’ by bruno major.

“How much work is it,” Martin wonders, “To take care of cattle?”

Jon lowers the book he’s reading so he can study Martin’s face. Jon is sitting on one end of the couch, and Martin is leaning against the arm, his feet propped up on Jon’s lap. Jon knows and he Knows what Martin’s face looks like, but it doesn’t hurt to study it again, just in case he’s missed any important details. Like the freckle under Martin’s right eye.

Then Jon remembers that he’s just been asked a question, and his partner is probably expecting for him to take advantage of the remnants of his Beholding powers to answer. Jon closes his eyes and reaches for the embers of it, slowly smoldering away in his soul. It gets harder and harder to find it each time. He thinks that it’s a good thing.

(Sometimes he misses the constant flow of information, the high of all the knowledge in the world at his fingertips.)

He sifts for a couple of seconds through useless information—the Highland cattle breed is the oldest registered breed in the world, happy cows make more milk—before finding what he’s looking for. He sighs and looks up into Martin’s expectant, cow-brown eyes and says, “They’re relatively low maintenance, apparently. I think they require a bit more space than we currently own, though.”

Martin hums and lowers his head to his laptop, apparently satisfied with that answer. Jon watches him for another second, before leaning back into the couch and finding where he’d left off on the page.

It’s not long before Martin speaks again. “How much do you think this safehouse would fetch?”

Jon doesn’t have to be an avatar of omniscience to know where this conversation is going, and how it will end. He would be happy to live out the rest of his days in quiet contentment in their cozy little safehouse, reading his books while Martin publishes award-winning poetry (he feels a little bit like a trophy wife, if he’s being honest. He finds that he doesn’t mind it in the slightest). But if Martin wants to move to somewhere with wide open spaces so they can raise herds of adorable little cows, then Jon will do what he can to make it happen.

Jon closes the book and squeezes Martin’s ankle. “I don’t think we’re allowed to sell Daisy’s safehouse without her permission. Do you want to call her or should I?”

Martin beams at Jon, and Jon thinks that there’s nothing he wouldn’t do to make Martin look at him like that again.

-0-

In the end, it’s Basira that saves them.

Three weeks into their stay at the safehouse, they’re woken by a phone call at two in the morning. Jon lets out a confused sound and makes to get out of bed, but Martin shushes him and tucks the blanket over his shoulders, and tells him to go back to sleep. The lack of statements has made Jon weak and tired, and sleep is more important than it ever has been.

Martin picks up the phone. The dirt in the floorboards is rubbing against his feet, and he’s still getting used to the way a chill seems to permeate the entire building in the middle of the night.

“Hello?” Martin murmurs, voice quieted by both his desire not to wake Jon and his proximity to sleep.

“Martin, is that you?” Basira asks, and there’s something in her voice that makes him stand straight up and pay attention. Something is wrong. “It’s Basira.”

“Uh, hi Basira,” Martin pushes his hair back from his face, flicking a gaze into their darkened bedroom. Should he wake Jon? “Something the matter?”

“I put together a bunch of statements for Jon, like I promised,” Basira begins, and there’s a soft rustle in the background. Paper? “I found something.”

Martin sits down slowly, finding and squeezing the edge of the small cardtable that they’ve been eating their meals at the past couple of weeks. “Okay…?”

“Elias—no,” Basira lets out a low, shuddering sigh. “Jonah was going to use Jon to start the apocalypse”

“What?” Martin gapes.

Basira’s voice is shaking slightly, cut through with horror. Martin has never heard her like this, not even when Daisy went missing. “He’s had everything planned right from the beginning—Prentiss, Sasha, whatever the fuck happened to his hand—he was planning on turning Jon into some—some sort of ritual to end the world—”

Martin thinks about the man lying in their bed, made small and terrified by repeated exposure to a world that made him very, constantly afraid. He thinks about the slow spiral, the hunger that ate at what was left of Jon’s humanity, piece by bloody piece. He squeezes the table, and imagines Jonah Magnus’ thrumming pulse beneath his fingertips. “Basira—”

“I wouldn’t have noticed,” she sounds tired, thready, “But there was a spider sitting in the middle of the page, and it drew my attention, and I read—”

“Did you burn it?” Martin demands, the world tilting on its axis like a top. If Basira didn’t burn it, then he will go to London himself.

“Of course I did,” Basira says, and Martin lets out his breath. “Of course I burned it. But Martin, you have to be careful.”

“We will,” he whispers. “You as well.”

“And tell Jon that I’m sorry,” she adds, and then hangs up the phone.

Martin lets the hand holding the phone fall to his thigh. His world is still spinning about him, thoughts jumbled and hazy and all he can think about is that stupid fucking birthday party, where Elias had sang ‘Archivist’ instead of Jon, and Martin hadn’t thought anything of it.

God. Jon.

Martin drops the phone and walks to the doorway of their bedroom, examining the small lump under the blankets. Jon’s long, black-and-grey hair is fanned out over the pillow, and his hands are curled into fists. His face is smooth, free of stress and fear, and for a moment Martin burns at the thought of Jonah Magnus, who’d looked at this nervous, bright man and thought, I will destroy the world with you.

If Jonah was here, Martin thinks, fingers twitching.

But then he sighs, because while Jonah Magnus is not here, Jon is. He comes around to his side of the bed and lifts the covers, sliding in beside Jon, who lets out a fuzzy, confused sound and rolls toward him.

“What was it?” he asks sleepily.

Martin takes Jon’s hand in his, rubbing his thumbs over the scarred knuckles, and says, “Nothing. Sleep. I’ll tell you in the morning.”

-0-

“What do you think about chickens?” Jon asks Martin.

Martin looks up from the flower he was admiring and blinks. It’s a perfect day for once, no clouds on the horizon, and the breeze has picked up just enough to be refreshing. The meadowgrass is soft and forgiving beneath their hesitant footsteps as they stroll arm-in-arm through the fields.

“Well, I mean…” Martin wrinkles his nose endearingly. “I’ve heard that chickens are kind of mean, actually.”

“Not quite as good as cows,” Jon agrees, “But it’d be nice not to have to buy eggs. And we have the space for it, now. We wouldn’t have to get too many.”

Martin studies him, as though searching for some ulterior motives. It’s different from the way people used to look at him at the archives, when that sort of suspicion is warranted. It’s almost playful, a warm smile teasing at one end of his lips. “Is there a particular reason why you want chickens?”

“Well…” Jon frowns, now trying to decide whether or not his reasoning for wanting chickens is embarrassing.

They have a real cottage now, rather than the rickety old safehouse. It’s warm and cozy, with clean white walls meant to be filled with photographs, and thick carpets that are wonderful to wiggle your toes on. More importantly, they are now the proud owners of a few acres of land, perfect for raising lazy herds of cattle.

“It’s just—when you’re raising farm animals,” Jon begins carefully, “I thought it was...standard to have chickens around as well.” It made sense, the way arithmetic made sense. One plus two equals three. People who raise farm animals have chickens, even if they’re not technically a chicken farm.

Martin lets out a light, surprised laugh, his hand finding Jon’s. “Jon do you—do you actually want chickens because you want chickens, or do you want chickens because you like the idea of having chickens?”

Jon feels a flush rise in his cheeks, but he stands his ground. “It’d be useful to have a bunch of chickens around.”

Martin shakes his head and presses a warm, fond kiss to Jon’s temple, like he simply can’t help himself. Jon tightens his hand around Martin’s. “Alright then,” Martin says, “We can get some chickens as well. On the condition that I don’t have to take care of them.”

“Come on,” Jon laughs, shaking his head. “Don’t be mean to my chickens.”

“These are still metaphorical chickens,” Martin corrects. “Who I will not defend you from if they decide to turn on you.”

“Liar,” Jon shakes his head again and smiles, and tucks his arm in Martin’s. They continue ambling onward, the scent of rain and fresh earth rising in the air around them.

-0-

Understandably, Jon does not take it well.

Martin is quiet as Jon falls apart, piece by piece, bit by painful bit. He is quiet as Jon grabs at his hair and makes muffled, heartbroken sounds into his knees, when he reasons out loud with himself, with Jonah. It’s only when Jon grabs a knife and almost gouges his own eyes out that Martin finally intervenes, wrestling the knife from Jon’s grip. Jon collapses into Martin’s lap, weeping, and Martin is crying too, just like he knew he would be if he spoke out loud.

Jon falls asleep against Martin. Martin doesn’t dare move, even when his whole body is screaming at the position.

Martin grimly screens all of their mail after that, every transcript that comes into their house. Jon is a skittish thing, hovering at the edges of the room as Martin scans page after page, starving but terrified of the idea of posing a danger to the world.

He tries to wean himself off the statements as best he’s able. At first he records once every couple of days, then once every four, going as long between each read as he can stand. Martin wishes that he knew how to soothe the worry, but Jon isn’t the only one recovering from the influence of a fear entity. The Lonely has made it hard for him to talk about things that need to be said.

They figure it out, though. Martin starts writing poetry again, figuring out how to put words to paper, figuring out how to put himself to paper. Jon stops beating himself up for choices he didn’t make and crimes that he didn’t commit. Because what else can they do? Sit still? They just didn’t end the world; it only makes sense that they try to at least enjoy it.

Slowly, they figure it out.

-0-

And so, Martin and Jon get some cows.

Martin is in charge of naming the cows. The first one they get is an older cow, a sweet, shaggy brown one Martin quickly names Henrietta. Martin is quite taken with her, always rubbing at the white star on her nose. The second one is a bull, a bit younger than Henrietta but no less sweet. He is dubbed Jackson, and he has a particular fondness for butting his head against your shoulder when you’re not paying attention.

Jon is deeply amused by the way Martin fawns over their cows. He rises well before Jon to feed them, and is usually still gone by the time the rest of the world wakes up. Jon can usually find Martin in the field, prattling away to Henrietta and Jackson, who are a surprisingly attentive audience. Sometimes, Martin even reads them some of his poetry.

Jon is quite taken with the cows as well, if he’s being honest. When he sees Martin in the fields in the morning, dew just beginning to burn off the grass, he’ll climb the fence and pat Henrietta’s star, and Jackson will chew lazily on his sleeve. Martin will beam at him, face gently lit in the rising sun.

Jon is, under no uncertain circumstances, in charge of the chickens. He is in charge of figuring out how to put up the chicken coop, putting up the chicken coop, but most importantly, naming the chickens. Jon’s never been good at naming anything, so he secretly picks the names from old statements. Martin thinks it’s hilarious that there are chickens running around with names like ‘Susan’ and ‘Laura’. The big rooster that Jon buys, that runs around and shrieks menacingly at you until you give him a swift kick, is dubbed, ‘Jonah’, because Jon has always been a bit of a bastard.

They still get letters from the Institute. Jon knows that they do, because each time Martin finds one, his face scrunches up with an awful, alien anger. The letter is quickly reduced to ash in their fireplace, though. Basira tells them all they need to know about the Institute these days, and they have better things to do.

-0-

“So what now?” Jon whispers.

Martin looks down at Jon, who is curled as close against Martin’s side as he is physically able. His long, black-grey hair is pulled into a loose ponytail that spills over and down one shoulder, and his glasses are tucked in his collar. Time has done a good job at wearing down some of his hard edges.

Martin tucks Jon’s bangs behind his ear and lets his hand rest there, gently caressing. Jon sighs and covers it with his own, still watching Martin with those dark, expectant eyes.

“I suppose now…” he trails off, thinking about the Institute, about the safehouse where they now live. Thinking about good cows, and the nightmares they can’t seem to shake, and meadowsweet, and the I love you’s, and the affection so kind that Martin had almost been in tears the first time he felt it.

“I suppose now,” he decides firmly, “we get to live.”

#tma #my writing #tma spoilers #tma post 159 #fix-it #the events of 160 never happen because FUCK that #jonmartin

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