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whileiamdying · 3 months

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Cass Elliot’s Death Spawned a Horrible Myth. She Deserves Better

The Mamas & the Papas singer was known for her wit, her voice and her skill as a connector. For 50 years, a rumor has overshadowed her legacy.

Michael Putland/Getty Images

By Lindsay Zoladz Published May 9, 2024 Updated May 18, 2024

Onstage with her group the Mamas & the Papas at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, Cass Elliot, the grand doyenne of the Laurel Canyon scene, bantered with the timing of a vaudeville comedian. “Somebody asked me today when I was going to have the baby, that’s funny,” she said, rolling her eyes. The unspoken punchline — if you could call it that — was that she had already given birth to a daughter six weeks earlier.

“One of the things that appeals to so many people about my mom is that there’s a certain level of triumph over adversity,” that daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell, said over lunch at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles on a recent afternoon. “She had to prove herself over and over again.”

Elliot was a charismatic performer who exuded infectious joy and a magnificent vocalist with acting chops she did not live to fully explore. July 29 is the 50th anniversary of her untimely death at 32, a tragedy that still spurs unanswerable questions. Might Elliot, who was one of Johnny Carson’s most beloved substitutes, have become the first female late-night talk show host? Would she have achieved EGOT status?

Half a century after her death, her underdog appeal continues to inspire. Last year, “Make Your Own Kind of Music” — a relatively minor 1969 solo hit that has nonetheless had cultural staying power — became such a sensation on TikTok that “Saturday Night Live” spoofed it, in a hilariously over-the-top sketch in which the host Emma Stone plays a strangely clairvoyant record producer. “This song is gonna be everywhere, Mama,” she tells Elliot, played by Chloe Troast. “Then everybody’s gonna forget about it for a long, long time, but in about 40, 50 years, I think it’s gonna start showing up in a bunch of movies, because it’s a perfect song to go under a slow-mo montage where the main character snaps and goes on a rampage.”

Cass Elliot performing on her television special “Don’t Call Me Mama Anymore” in September 1973. After she went solo, she found it hard to shake her nickname.Credit...CBS Photo Archive, via Getty Images

“S.N.L.” didn’t make a single joke about Elliot’s weight — something that was unthinkable half a century ago. During the height of her fame, Elliot seemed to co-sign some of the jabs at her expense with a shrugging grin.

“No one’s getting fat except Mama Cass,” the Mamas & the Papas sang in tight harmony on the self-mythologizing 1967 hit “Creeque Alley.” After the infamously tumultuous group broke up a year later, Elliot was a frequent guest on “The Carol Burnett Show,” where she occasionally went for the cheap laugh. In an otherwise uproarious sketch about two prudish women browsing a store’s “dirty books” section, Elliot holds up a book titled “Eat and Lose Weight” and says, “I got as far as ‘Eat’ and then I didn’t understand the rest.”

“As she had learned early on, the best way to deal with an uncomfortable situation is with humor,” Elliot-Kugell, who has her mother’s cascading hair and dry wit, writes in her new memoir, “My Mama, Cass.” But, as she said over lunch, that doesn’t mean her mother was always laughing on the inside. “That pain had to go somewhere,” Elliot-Kugell told me. “When I think about some of the things that had allegedly been said to her during her lifetime, you can’t hear that over and over and not let it hurt.”

But of course, the most enduring joke at her expense was the one she didn’t live to tell, or to rebut. Have you heard the one about the ham sandwich?

For years, the origin of the story that Elliot died from choking on a ham sandwich — one of the cruelest and most persistent myths in rock ’n’ roll history — was largely unknown. Then in 2020, Elliot’s friend Sue Cameron, an entertainment journalist, admitted to publicizing it in her Hollywood Reporter obituary at the behest of Elliot’s manager Allan Carr, who did not want his client associated with drug use. (Elliot died of a heart attack, likely brought on by years of substance abuse and crash dieting.) But that cartoonish rumor — propagated in endless pop culture references, from “Austin Powers” to “Lost” — cast a tawdry light over Elliot’s legacy and still threatens to overshadow her mighty, underappreciated talent.

The Mamas & the Papas: Denny Doherty, Michelle Phillips, Elliot, Scott McKenzie (who joined a later version of the group) and John Phillips.Credit...Bentley Archive/Popperfoto, via Getty Images

ELLIOT’S SISTER, LEAH, coined a phrase for the strong, brassy way everyone in their family sang: “the Cohen Honk.”

Cass was born Ellen Naomi Cohen into a music-loving household in suburban Baltimore. Her stage name partly came from her father’s penchant for calling his spirited daughter “the mad Cassandra.” She was a precocious, uncommonly bright child who, in the years after World War II, liked to ask dinner guests what they thought about the “world situation.” In high school she was known for her bold, slightly unkempt personal style that flew in the face of 1950s decorum. According to her biographer Eddi Fiegel, Elliot sometimes wore “wild combinations of Bermuda shorts and high heels, with white gloves to cover her bitten-down nails.”

Many people in Elliot’s life trace her struggles with her weight to when she was 6 and went to stay with her grandparents while recovering from ringworm. They fed her well, as grandparents sometimes do, and she quickly became self-conscious about her size. By high school, she had been prescribed Dexedrine, an amphetamine then used as an appetite suppressant. “The thought that something is wrong with you is bad enough,” Elliot-Kugell writes, “but the idea that a pill or a drug might fix you can be even more dangerous.”

Still, Elliot showed remarkable self-belief. The book recounts her telling anyone who would listen “that one day she was going to become the most famous fat girl that ever lived.”

She struck a deal with her parents: If she moved to New York and didn’t find musical success in five years, she would come home and study a more respectable field, like medicine. She left home in late 1960; “California Dreamin’” was released in December 1965. She later told an interviewer: “I really just made it under the wire!”

Broadway was Elliot’s first love, but folk music was the style of the day. She brought her own distinctive flair to it in her early groups, the Big 3 and then the Mugwumps, which featured a Canadian tenor named Denny Doherty. After the Mugwumps’ split, Doherty fled to the Virgin Islands with his new friends John and Michelle Phillips to work on material for a yet-unnamed group. Elliot had sung with them casually while they were all hanging out — at least once when they were all on LSD — and she knew her voice was the missing piece in their sound.

But John, the bandleader, was brutishly reluctant. According to Scott G. Shea, a biographer of the Mamas & the Papas, Phillips “had a vision in his head” of “a group that not only sounded like an electrified Peter, Paul and Mary, but also looked like them.” Shea puts it bluntly: “Michelle was to be the centerpiece, and, in his mind, Cass was too fat to even be considered.”

The group projected a chumminess that was central to their appeal, but few people know how hard Elliot had to push to become part of the band. She showed up unannounced in the Virgin Islands hoping to ingratiate herself, but Phillips wouldn’t budge until an act of fate intervened. While walking down the St. Thomas alley that the Mamas & the Papas would later immortalize in song, debris from a construction site hit Elliot on the head and knocked her unconscious. John Phillips would later claim that Elliot’s concussion caused her vocal register to change, and it was another of those stories Elliot learned to repeat with a self-deprecating joke.

“The real story is that John didn’t like my mother’s look,” Elliot-Kugell writes. She believes “he made up the story about a fake increase in vocal range to justify his choice to finally add my mom to the band months later.”

Elliot went solo after the short-lived group’s demise, buoyed by the success of “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” a Mamas & the Papas single on which she sang lead. The final solo album she released, in 1973, had a pointed title: “Don’t Call Me Mama Anymore.” “The moniker of ‘Mama’ had always felt like a reference to her size — that is, ‘Big Mama’ — and she hated that,” Elliot-Kugell writes.

From left: Joni Mitchell, Elliot and Judy Collins at the Big Sur Folk Festival. Elliot became known as a connector in the Laurel Canyon scene.Credit...Sulfiati Magnuson, via Getty Images

Elliot remains an underrated heroine in the story of the Laurel Canyon scene, not only as a musician but also as an amiable hostess who knew how to link up like-minded people. Doherty liked to call her “the Puppeteer.”

In 1964, she introduced her friends John Sebastian and Zal Yanovsky; they became the Lovin’ Spoonful. When she heard that David Crosby and Stephen Stills had begun making music together, she suggested they add a high voice to the mix, and brought them Graham Nash. “I will give you a hundred dollars,” David Crosby told Elliot’s biographer, “if you can find a single person who says they hated Cass.”

But there was also something bittersweet about Elliot’s kinship with all these men. “I think part of the reason they all adored her is they weren’t threatened by her,” Elliot-Kugell said. “She knew more about these guys and had a relationship on a deeper level than some of their own wives or girlfriends had.” She added with a wry chuckle, “Did that mean she didn’t want to jump into bed with half of them? She probably did!”

Elliot’s unrequited love for her bandmate Doherty was perhaps the hardest to bear, especially after he and Michelle Phillips had an affair that nearly broke up the band before their first album was even released. Elliot had been smitten since the night they met, at a Greenwich Village bar where they each threatened to drink the other under the table, and eventually decided to drink … under the table. As he put it in his one-man show about the group’s history, “I knew she loved me, and I loved her too, but not like she wanted me to. She did weigh 300 pounds, and I wasn’t man enough to deal with that.”

The most difficult passages of “My Mama, Cass” are those in which Elliot-Kugell reckons with her mother’s persistent loneliness. “After the shows, when they’re screaming her name onstage and she’s bowing, she was the only one going back to the hotel by herself,” she said. “Everybody else had someone, and she didn’t.”

Elliot’s need for love and companionship is what drove her to the decision — relatively radical for a famous woman in the late 1960s — to become a single mother. When she learned she was pregnant at the height of the group’s success, after a brief fling with its touring bassist, she was defiant in her decision to raise the child on her own. “As it turned out,” Elliot-Kugell writes, wrenchingly, “my mom’s desire to have someone in her life who wasn’t going to up and leave her was what led to her desire for a child. It’s how I came to be.”

The Mamas & the Papas onstage in 1966. The group split two years later.Credit...Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

WHEN I FINALLY got Sue Cameron on the phone, she was calling from the Atlantic Ocean, “somewhere between Bermuda and Portugal.” A journalist for more than 50 years who has published a book titled “Hollywood Secrets and Scandals,” she sometimes gives lectures on cruise ships. She was happy to reminisce about her old pal. “She had a big smile and this wide open face, very happy to see people,” Cameron said. “You just would immediately love her and want her to be your best friend.”

Cameron met Elliot when she interviewed the Mamas & the Papas in 1966; they realized they were neighbors and quickly became “sit-by-each-other’s-pool kind of friends.” Cameron has stories, like the one about the night they ran into Ann-Margret and Elliot delivered the perfect one-liner about her massive engagement ring (“I could skate on that”); or all the times Elliot would walk around with a credit card in her shoe because she didn’t like to carry a purse.

Her most painful memory is her final dinner with Elliot at Mr. Chow in the summer of 1974, before Elliot left for London. She’d never seen her friend so happy. “It was just a magical moment,” Cameron recalled. “It was just, like, the crescendo of her being. She’d had some TV specials, she was now going to go do a big nightclub act. Everything was fabulous.”

After a two-day stint of partying in London, Elliot told her friend Joe Croyle — a dancer in her show who was crashing with her at Harry Nilsson’s pad — that she was going to take a bath and turn in early because she was exhausted. Croyle figured she would be hungry too, so he fixed her a sandwich with ham, the only thing he could find in the fridge, along with some Coca-Cola. The ham sandwich, the cruelly cartoonish symbol that would come to define Elliot, was actually a gesture of care: a friend making her a meal she never got to enjoy.

Cameron heard about Elliot’s death in the newsroom of The Hollywood Reporter, where she was working at the time: “I kicked into professional mode and said, no one else is going to write that obit. I’m going to do it.” She tracked down Carr by phone in Nilsson’s apartment. “He could barely speak,” Cameron recalled. She asked what happened, and he said he didn’t know. “‘Oh, wait,’” she recalled him saying. “‘I see a half-eaten ham sandwich on the night stand. That’s good. You tell everybody that she choked on a ham sandwich, do you understand me?’”

“And I did it,” she added, “because I wanted to protect Cass.”

What was she protecting her from? “I was not aware of a lot of drugs,” she said. “I just wasn’t one of those people. And I had some suspicion around the time that she was going to London that she was on some sort of pills, but I didn’t really know anything.” In a split second, Carr and Cameron decided there was less shame in a woman ridiculed for her weight choking to death than there was in her having a drug problem. “What a terrible thing,” Cameron said, “but I was in too much of a state of shock to clean it up.”

She, too, is confounded by the story’s persistence. “Of all of the things I’ve done,” she said, “this ham sandwich has followed me my entire life.”

That story had long haunted Elliot-Kugell, too, though she felt some closure after Cameron privately divulged its origins to her when they met for lunch in 2000. Elliot-Kugell is cleareyed about what probably caused her mother’s death: “I mean, look. She was up for 48 hours, and she was at a party. Do the math.” But she doesn’t want to dwell on that. “The thing that was really important for me was that I didn’t want to write a salacious book,” she said.

In some sense, any memoir by a child of the Mamas & the Papas exists in the shadow of Mackenzie Phillips’s 2009 bombshell, “High on Arrival,” in which she accused her father John Phillips of sexual assault. But Elliot-Kugell’s memoir belongs on a different shelf entirely. It is a humanizing portrait of a woman whose legacy has, for far too long, been reduced to an outdated urban legend.

And it is a tale of an imperfect mother and a grieving daughter, of loss and long delayed catharsis. A few weeks before we spoke, Elliot-Kugell went to visit her mother’s grave. “It’s always weird when I go there, because I never know what to say,” she said. “But that day felt a little different because when I went up to the grave, I just said, ‘Hi.’ Like the way I would greet one of my cousins, or somebody who I know really well who I haven’t seen in a while.”

“I thought to myself, ‘Why, why why does it feel like this?’” she said.” All at once it dawned on her: “After going through this experience, I feel closer to her.”

Read by Lindsay Zoladz

Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.

#Mama Cass #Cass Elliot #Ellen Naomi Cohen #The Mamas and the Papas #California Dreamin’#Leah Kunkel #John Phillips #Michelle Phillips #Denny Doherty

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randomwriteronline · 2 years

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if you are looking for writing requests, maybe more ingo/gaeric/melli stuff or adaman stuff?

I will. Do both and one of them will be fucking incomprehensible and have blood in it (its the adaman one) bc i havent talked to Anybody abt the context of it

"Just so we are clear," Melli hissed out of absolutely nowhere while washing his tunic, "I will never fall for you."

Gaeric arched a brow and only gave him a puzzled glare.

The Diamond warden held it for a while before pouting excessively loudly, roll his eyes, and explain as he harshly rubbed soap against blue fabric: "We may share Ingo’s love and get along for his sake, but don't expect me to one day just turn around and court you as well."

"Ah," the bulkier man only said, nodding lightly and agreeing with the statement as he had no plans of becoming interested in Melli enough to court him either.

He wasnt able to vocalize that sentiment, interrupted by a late addition: "You've got nothing to like in a man, anyways."

Now.

Gaeric could not, in good conscience, pride himself on being level-headed.

There were... A frankly excessive amount of examples from both his youth and more recent years that flooded his mind within a second of himself very blatantly jumping to conclusions (and very often, consequentially, into trouble) at the first suspicion, percieved sign of aggression, or insult - though despite the habit being hard to break he had learned to calm himself, as he needed to do so, to become a proper worthy warden to mighty and unmovable Avalugg.

So instead of instantly knocking Melli right out of his body for implying he was the ugliest man alive, he focused on how his deep breaths caused his chest to expand and strayed the path of his thoughts to the man for whom he was not going to punch the Diamond a brand new set of teeth.

Come to think of it, he could not remember an occasion in which Ingo had been so absolutely fuming with rage to lose control of himself. Even in that one unprecedented, vaguely exhilarating case in which he purposefully and uncerimoniously tripped a particularly rude young woman straight into the freezing waters around the settlement with a fulmineous swipe of his leg directly across her ankles, he had first stewed for nearly two hours in her unwanted and unappreciated attentions, carefully calculating his odds before deciding mild petty violence was both a viable option and the one he wanted to choose.

How he could manage that was beyond him.

In that aspect they were really nothing alike.

Melli jumped when the Pearl warden suddenly interrupted his six whole minutes of perfect silence to burst into a booming laugh.

With opaque blue eyes turning to him wider than the hole in the sky as if he were absolutely insane, Gaeric waved a hand dismissively: “Worry not your pretty head,” he cackled some more, “I simply agree with you.”

“On what?” the younger man asked, confused.

“Oh, on your tastes and your stern romantic dislike of me,” the other replied with a mischievous grin. “I understand, really! Certainly you wouldn’t like a Pearl Clan warden, let alone a man older than youself - and I do suppose your ego wouldn’t really just let you keel over and accept him being able to defeat you in battle, would it?”

The Diamond narrowed his eyes with an unamused ‘hmph!’, unimpressed by what he believed to be boasting.

“And I do agree that I am a bit too loud for my own good-” now that fool understood, and Gaeric could have laughed in his steadily reddening face right then if he wasn’t as committed to the bit as he was “-But if it’s something to do with the beard I would urge you then to give it a chance, at the very least - you know, it can make a man look --”

Something wet and made of cloth hit the entirety of his face.

“SHUT!” Melli shrieked as the other broke out into laughter against the drenched tunic he had hurled at his face. The light blue eyes faced him again with a smirk that had his cheeks and ears burn strong enough to burst into flames, and he pointed a finger at him as viciously as he could, babbling wildly for a moment or two in absence of a proper argument.

“We even both have hair lighter than yours!”

“YOU--!!” kicking his feet around like a little kid, Electrode’s warden jumped upright and uncatiously landed a pair of slaps the brick wall of a man, who lucky for him was too busy making fun of him to get mad: “You’re- those are just - superficial details! He’s- you- you two are, you’re completely different!”

He was right, of course. But now that the similarities had been brought to his attention he felt like an idiot for trying to rile the other man like that only to become the one humiliated instead.

To add insult to injury his head was suddenly, viciously scratched and rocked from side to side by a large hand, in a way that reminded him far too much of the loving noogies Mai would administer when he was younger and that made him purple with embarassment.

“You’re one to talk!” Gaeric laughed. “You’re really nothing like him!”

Melli wiggled his entire lanky body out of the mighty hold with outstanding wrath: “And he likes me for that!” he shrieked back.

“So it is, so it is,” the other warden admitted placidly. Better to stop this here, before the somewhat light bickering went out of their control and they started getting seriously angry.

The sopping tunic was yanked away from his gracious offering hand and squeezed dry with a quiet string of frustrated mutterings. He wasn’t fluent in the dialect of the Diamond Clan, far from it - but he had heard Sabi slip into it at length enough to understand that the warden was saying something about children and treatments of sorts as he crouched back down to tend to his laundry. So this time at the very least he was certainly not being insulted.

He stretched his shoulders back as the sound of soap scrubbing on cloth got a lot more frantic than it had been previously and rolled his neck backwards, stopping halfway through to look at the sky.

It was a clear day, today.

Ingo was probably taking his sweet time coming back from Jubilife just to soak in the warmth like a Swinub in a hot spring.

Maybe he had even decided to have himself a nap in the grass. He had a habit of doing just that, he’d been told - with Gliscor on his face to both protect his eyes and discourage uncatious Pokémon thinking he could be an easy prey.

In that case, if they listened closely they could have probably heard him snore from across the region.

“Kind of strange for it to be us,” he commented to nobody.

After a moment of brooding silence, Melli caved in: “His partners, you mean?”

Grabbing one of his arms and stretching it behind his head, Gaeric hummed: “One somewhat similar to him and one not at all. Just looking at the two of us I don’t think anybody could find a pattern to make a perfect suitor for him.”

He felt a shoulder pop satisfyingly softly and repeated the exercise on its twin. Slowly, as he proceeded to work on his leg muscles in order not to remain idle, he heard the splashing sounds of washing cloth at his side quiet to a halt: when he turned to check if the other man was done he found him looking up to his face intently with no sign of aggression on his fair features, pinkish hands resting on his knees as he sat on his own heels.

They took each other in for a while, calmly, almost without thinking.

They really was nothing alike about them.

Except, maybe...

“He likes long blue hair,” Melli noted.

Gaeric nodded sagely: “He certainly does.”

“And blue eyes too.”

“Oh, definitely.”

Lady Lilligant had been incapacitated.

If even she could not fight back against whatever had been prowling through the Scarlet Bog, by all means, a meager human wasn’t going to emerge from a confrontation with it victorious - maybe not even in one piece.

But Adaman was still a young enough man for many older clansmen to think of him as a still grievously inexperienced child, and somewhere in his chest he ached to prove himself deserving of his title to those who doubted him more than he wanted to protect the settlement.

Leafeon followed, equally as stubborn despite the poisonous Pokémon of the swamps being more than well equipped to knock him out in one swift move, as his partner trudged carefully between a strangely meager number of Stunkies and Croagunks. Eyes and ears sharpened to the point of near straining them, both found themselves puzzled by a seeming lack of movement: even the Hippopotas and Hippodowns, usually busy with ridding themselves of pests coming too close for comfort, remained still in the muddled waters, at the edges of the bog, and even the Alpha Skuntank had left her post to retreat on more solid ground from which her flaming eyes trailed after the anomalous pair.

Just watching.

Almost... Strangely afraid.

A wet shift had Adaman turn his head in an instant.

His mind wandered, in a moment of strange detachment, to the memory of something he had heard - the description of a Pokémon, a Grotle: standing on four wide steady legs, with a shell thin in appearance yet hardy upon its back, green bushes sprouting lush from it, a mouth like a hook capable of biting a hand off if it so wanted, and big black eyes.

This did not look like that.

This, half hidden in the mud from which it arose and under the grime slowly dripping off of it as if its skin were smooth polished metal, sustained itself on a thin arm (the other seemed covered by some kind of cloth, a sleeve of sorts) and looked at him through small inescapable eyes the color of dark rotten Apricorns.

When the light shifted upon the murky waters its face laid half submerged in he saw its sclera was a horrible hue - like charcoal made liquid; the same hue coating long, sharp nails as it lifted its hand out the water to crawl forward.

Towards him.

He stepped back, Leafeon growling in some attempt at intimidation.

Between the skeletal fingers, now he could see it - between them the mud seemed to create a web that cut through the thick waters with ease, like boned fins; the hair, if hair it was, two lone long strands curling at the sides of its face, framing its peculiar simmetry centered by its broken nose, joining at the back of the buzzed head, was a dusty kind of brown that wouldn’t have been out of place on the crests of Lady Lilligant.

Its lips were pitch black, when they appeared out of the grime.

“Come a little closer, boy.”

That voice was sweet, sickeningly so. Pitched high and with a certain inflection to it that felt like honey pooling at his feet and turning hard as salt, trapping him in place. It didn’t fall out of the human-like mouth: it slithered and danced.

Its shoulders arose as its arms stretched to get itself into a crouching position. Its body was anthropomorphic in a strange way - covered in a long attush robe with patterns embroidered upon it, half of its chest escaping the elm bark fabric (ribs stretched the skin as if it had been that of a drum), one nearly atrophied leg sticking out of it as its twin laid shrouded within the cloth.

“Don’t worry,” it sang with its black and rotten green eyes pinning Adaman in place, with a tone playful in the same manner with which a Luxray’s paws push around its agonizing prey, with a curl of its nose that made the four spikes at its side move up and down.

The charcoal lips pulled back into a rectangular grin more reminiscent of a snarl: four canines - the longest he had ever seen - welcomed his sight hungrily.

“I don’t bite.”

If it had been as human as its appearance suggested the Leaf Blades would have cut through its limbs to color the puddle it still had not managed to leave a crimson even deeper that the sunset’s reflection on the mercurean waters.

With a potent gust of wind Leafeon flew across the marsh, little body landing on soft mud instead of on the rocks jutting from it by pure miracle. Adaman called out another attack uselessly, mind still stuck to a mere second before, sight and voice and hearing and the very consciousness of his own body catching up too late - only when his mouth still open in an interrupted scream was filled with dirt and acidic goo that made him want to gag and gasp for air, and his shoulder slammed harshly on the shallow bottom of the bog, and against his eyelids closed just in time he saw the burned afterimage of the ghastly face that had been so close to his.

Something sunk in his arm, through the bandages and the skin and nearly through the muscle, and with a yank his dirtied head was pulled out of the mud enough for him to vomit out the foulness on his tongue.

First he felt the wet on his neck, and then the impression of something weirdly flat grazing against it.

Then, finally, the piercing.

He spat out a scream muffled by what felt a liter of bog water as the teeth clasped around his throat, both sides of it punctured in two spots each.

It should have hurt, it should have made the adrenaline course through his body for him to writhe and struggle against the bite; and while the pain was so intense that it did make his eyes go blind for a moment, and a terrified chemical frenesy did overtake his limbs, he remained unmoving if trembling, mouth hung open even in silence, as the hold on his neck tightened so much that he could feel his bones strain under the pressure. He breathed still: it felt as if the air was warmer, saturated with a heaviness that reminded him of pollen.

A hand grasped his hair tight. Nails held his forearm in an iron grip.

He felt as if his lungs were being filled to burst.

Adaman fell to the wet ground barely registering the teeth leaving his throat or his own deep shuddering gasp. His body remained immobilized, and so all he could do was look up from where he had been uncerimoniously dropped, forced to spy through the corner of his eye.

There was a dangling ornate necklace running three circles across its clavicles - made of pinkish beads weaved inbetween tightly twisted braids of a kind of rope he could not remember seeing ever before. It was the same color of its hair.

Its wide snarling grin shined mockingly down on him, lip and fangs stained red. Its rotten green eyes were small and vicious as they glinted in the falling sun.

Its laugh was a cruel, slow sound, like the gekkering of a wounded Jolteon.

The air felt warm.

So warm.

His clansmen ran to meet him as he stumbled back up the slope to the settlement nearly on all fours, weak and near delirious, after Leafeon had returned alone yipping and barking in distress. Arezu cried and begged forgiveness when she saw the blood running down his neck, staining his clothes through the grime, pouring still in thin rivers, begged forgiveness for not assisting Lady Lilligant when she should have, for not accompanying him, for not disobbeying and following him when he insisted on taking this upon himself.

Her leader did not hear her, eyes glazed with remembrances of bright yellow eyelids behind black and green, and a voice like honeysuckle poison laughing at him, laughing.

“I’m in love,” Adaman spoke with a haunted, hoarse voice.

He collapsed prey to a spring fever as he was carried to his tent, and the wounds on his neck never healed.

#pokémon #pokemon legends arceus #warden melli #warden gaeric #pokemon adaman #random writing #blood tw #violence tw #snowmobileshipping #highlandsshipping #ingo is only mentioned so no tag for him #its surprisingly fun to make melli n gaeric interact #they wanna be nice. they wanna deck each other. they cant stand each other but if they let themselves just exist theyre almost friends.#btw in my brain melli - ingo - gaeric are respectively in their late 20s - 30s - early 40s #'thats very nice but what is. whats. whats happening with adaman' oh yea! (five minutes of silence)#so hey have you ever listened to california dreamin by the mamas and the papas #'is that supposed to be en-' its a baller song yall should listen to it

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