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mostlymovieswithmax · 3 years

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Movies I watched in July

Once again I’m doing my monthly round-up of movies I’ve watched. This was a good month for the cinema getting back on track and seeing new releases including the new M. Night movie, Old and James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. Pretty sure Marvel put out a new movie also. I’m hoping that this list can help in guiding a decision about what to watch (or what to avoid) and introduce people to movies they may otherwise not have heard of or bothered to see. These short reviews are my own subjective opinions on each individual movie and maybe a more informal approach to movie criticism can help include others who are just passing through. Here is every film I watched from the 1st to the 31st of July.

Bridesmaids (2011) - 4/10

Off to a good start. I won’t say Bridesmaids is a terrible movie but I don’t think I’m exactly the target audience. As far as I know, this is a beloved comedy but I just can’t get on board with all the boring, juvenile humour; with Maya Rudolph shitting in the street, with Rose Byrne and Kristen Wiig trying to one-up each other at a toast that went on forever, with Melissa McCarthy shitting in a sink… the conflict is so done to death and makes the movie feel unspecial. I do understand the appeal of the film, especially for women in that before this movie the likelihood of seeing something like this, where women play up the more crass and gross side of comedy, was probably few and far between. But the story is very tired and while I did appreciate some moments, namely a couple of decent jokes and some of the more intimate scenes, for the most part it felt like they wanted to corner a more quiet type of line delivery in a way that was supposed to be understated but very funny so as to not rely on over the top body language or musical cues, and it ended up being super dull.

Spectre (2015) - 7/10

As far as I can tell, a lot of people don’t like this instalment of the James Bond franchise… but I really enjoyed it! I’ve really taken a shine to these Daniel Craig-era Bond movies and while I can’t say any of them are the most amazing thing, I have a lot of fun with them. The biggest problem I have with Spectre is the villain being utterly pointless and uninteresting in basically every way. The idea of every villain Bond has fought before being tied to this one organisation controlled by this one guy is ridiculous, and what makes it worse is that the villain is barely in it! There’s so much that doesn’t come together in this but as it goes, I still had a really good time. Daniel Craig holds the whole thing together; he is excellent as 007 and the main reason I’m up for each of these movies is because of him. Sam Mendes directs again after the previous instalment and for what it’s worth I do think he does a good job with some of the action set pieces and the locations. I’m so ready for No Time To Die.

Shazam (2019) - 7/10

Shazam is a genuinely fun superhero movie that doesn’t take itself seriously at all. I was having a great time throughout and while it could conform to some of the same tropes we’re used to with these kinds of movies, it still remained playful and used the character of Shazam to his fullest potential in a way that showed an understanding of just how silly the idea of a kid who can turn into an adult and shoot lightning out of his hands is.

High School Musical (2006) - 6/10

So as you may or may not know, I co-host a podcast: The Sunday Movie Marathon. It’s a film podcast and every week I get together with my other co-hosts and watch movies. For episode 38, we watched the High School Musical trilogy. This first movie blew me away. I was really surprised with just how much fun I had, and if you want to hear more of my thoughts on the film, please listen to episode 38 of the podcast.

High School Musical 2 (2007) - 4/10

We then jumped into the second and while it’s certainly not as good as its predecessor, there are still some brilliant songs that manage to top the last movie. Again, more of what I have to say can be heard on episode 38 of the podcast.

High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2008) - 3/10

Senior Year was pretty hard to get through. I don’t remember it being as bad as it was, but then I didn’t really remember it anyway. It did however have one redeeming quality, which you can discover on episode 38 of the podcast.

The Piano Teacher (2001) - 9/10

What the fuuuckkkk. The Piano Teacher is horrendously affecting and I was so upset when it ended, maybe not because it’s not what I wanted but because it’s just so fucking dour and unrelenting. This is the second Haneke movie I’ve seen (after the original Funny Games) and I’m so impressed with how well executed it is. Following a woman who teaches piano, we get a glimpse into the life she lives, how sheltered she is from living with her mother at an age where you’d reasonably expect a person to be living alone or with a partner or friends (even going so far as to be sleeping in the same bed as her), and how repressed she is sexually. It’s clear she’s never experienced any kind of sexual interaction or romantic love with another person, so she goes out of her way to take control and make that happen. The upsetting nature of it comes from just what she does in pursuit of it or as a result of her repression, and what is done to her. It is by no means a movie to recommend to your parents but The Piano Teacher offers so much in terms of the ideas it presents (and I’ll admit there seems to be a lot more going on than I think I picked up on a first go round) about women in modern society, and about the portrayal of sex and expectations of people when it comes to how that is represented in a person’s character depending on their gender. I really enjoyed this movie but it is not for the faint of heart.

Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure (2011) - 1/10

My podcast co-hosts decided it’d be a right laugh to add Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure to this episode and that might have been a fun idea for them because they got to watch it together, but I was just watching it alone. Just a 24-year-old man watching Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure alone and having a miserable time, I might add. But for a short and sweet ramble on what we all thought, please listen to episode 38 of The Sunday Movie Marathon podcast.

Dr. No (1962) - 6/10

A lot of very iffy parts of this movie. A lot of discomfort arising from how black people are portrayed that really didn’t sit right with me. As far as a Bond movie goes, this first instalment in the series is one I’ve seen before and it’s not wholly engaging but it plants the seeds for the rest, with Sean Connery breathing life into the role and making an otherwise lacklustre plot bearable.

Black Widow (2021) - 6/10

I think probably the best part about Black Widow is the experience I had while watching it. It was great being back in the cinema with a couple of friends in a packed theatre. The energy was high and I’m sure for a lot of people, this is the first time they’d been to the cinema since Endgame. For what it’s worth, I did have a lot of fun with Black Widow and I’ve explained more of what I thought about the movie in episode 39 of the podcast.

The Climb (2020) - 10/10

The Climb was added to Now TV recently and I already knew I loved it, having seen it in an empty cinema theatre last year, which I had an absolute blast with. The Climb details the years of a rocky friendship told over scenes filmed as one-shots. Not only is the presentation something to gawk at, but the performances by the two leads playing these friends with a terrifically dysfunctional dynamic is truly captivating. They’re both trying to figure out their own lives and where one can come across as being rather selfish, the opposite is true in his counterpart, whom everyone loves. This is a truly funny and heartwarming movie with a lot to say about how we choose to live our lives and who we choose to be with. It’s a shame the distributors of The Climb didn’t do a very good job because if not for it being available on Now TV, it would be near impossible to watch without forking out more money than is necessary to purchase a film.

From Russia With Love (1963) - 5/10

The second Bond movie. I thought perhaps I’d change my mind on it with another watch, having seen it for the first time maybe a year ago. But no, it’s still largely boring and it treats women like absolute garbage. From Russia With Love is one of those movies I forget as I watch it, and I was trying very hard (in the middle of the day!) not to fall asleep.

The Good, The Bart, and The Loki (2021) - 1/10

I don't usually talk about the short films I watch but for this I'll make an exception. As we all should know, Disney owns The Simpsons now, through their acquisition of Fox, so, coupled with another of their properties, that being Marvel, they decided to make a six-minute animated film wherein Marvel’s Loki is stranded in Springfield. This felt as though it was a minute long due to the horrendously jarring pacing; it is a movie that feels adamant that it needs to exist, while trying as hard as it can to be over as soon as possible. It serves only to stare the audience directly in the face and say “look, characters from The Simpsons are dressed as Avengers”, shit out three credit scenes, then end before you’ve even processed the atrocity you just bore witness to.

Russian Ark (2002) - 8/10

For this next episode of the podcast, we watched a few Russian movies, starting with Russian Ark, a film shot completely in one take as the camera moves about a luxurious museum in a first-person perspective as this main character watches what is happening around him, seeing people moving about the place but unable to interact with them, guided only by another man who seems to be just slightly out of his own perception of reality. This is a tremendous feat in filmmaking and more can be heard about what I have to say in episode 39 of The Sunday Movie Marathon podcast.

Ivan’s Childhood (1962) - 7/10

For my own pick of Russian movies to discuss on the podcast, I chose the debut feature from one of my favourite directors, Andrei Tarkovsky. It’s amazing that while this is not his best film by far, Ivan’s Childhood is still such a stellar debut, jumping around in its timeline as it details a child’s experience in the second world war. Again, I do go into more depth in episode 39 of the podcast, so be sure to check that out.

Outlaw (2019) - 1/10

The third movie chosen for this marathon is apparently the fourth Russian LGBTQ+ movie ever made. I’m unsure of the ultimate goal of this movie but what seems to be clear is that it hates the LGBTQ+ community. This is perhaps the worst film we’ve discussed on the podcast to date, so listen to episode 39 to understand exactly why it’s such trash.

Almost Famous (2000) - 7/10

I too love heavy music and also studied journalism so it stands to reason that a movie about a teenager who makes his way onto a band tour, following them through America and interviewing them as they hang out and play shows is going to be a premise that resonates with me. This certainly did. I enjoyed Almost Famous a lot; this kid is living the dream and I was so along for the ride, seeing a lot of myself in what was being portrayed. That said, the story itself is at times a bit by the numbers and I really would’ve been more on board if the visual component was more interesting. For what it is, technically it’s fine enough but nothing in that department ever jumped out at me.

Minari (2021) - 8/10

It’s crazy that this didn’t get a theatrical run where I live in the UK. It feels as though I complain about film distribution all the time but I really don’t understand the process by which a movie gets no cinematic release and yet, months later will pop up on the front shelf of hmv, taking pride of place. But of course I got the blu-ray straight away. Minari has a lot to say about the immigrant experience, specifically in America as a family comes over from Korea and tries to start a business and make something of themselves. You get to see a lot of what you might not think twice about when you think about immigration: the hardship of coming from a place where you know everyone to somewhere rural and sparsely populated, having to make friends with locals and integrate within the community; the strain it can put on a family and on a marriage where this idea is presented about the importance of making it on your own in order to live and not just survive, while also taking into account why you’re doing it in the first place and the value you place on being part of a family that you decided to make because that was more important than money, than economy, than proving you were good enough to make it in a place that gave you very little advantage from the offset. This concept of the promised land, of the American dream is a construct. There are times when it’s not pretty, when you have no running water, or you’re in debt, or a family member is dying and it just feels like you’ve been dealt as bad a hand as you can get. But it is better to know you’re not facing all that alone.

Roma (2018) - 10/10

This was my recommendation for the podcast episode on Alfonso Cuarón movies. Roma is as beautiful as it is heart-wrenching and I would recommend listening to episode 40 of the podcast to find out more about my thoughts.

An American Werewolf In London (1981) - 8/10

In all fairness, London is enough to make anyone a little crazy at the best of times. An American Werewolf in London showcases some fantastically grotesque effects, akin to something like Carpenter’s The Thing, in showing the dead brought back to life and a horrifically gory transformation scene. Although the film is from the perspective of an American protagonist, directed also by an American, the depiction of British culture and climate is something I’ve not seen many films pull off quite so well, and I was pleasantly surprised at the more comedic tone the film has overall, which is something that works more in its favour than straight horror would.

The Party’s Just Beginning (2018) - 6/10

Karen Gillan’s directorial debut is… pretty good! There are a lot of ideas I like in this movie: a woman living life and through convenient circumstances, is confronted with death in many ways. Gillan obviously knows her homeland as well as she can, imbuing the whole thing with an intensely Scottish vibe (though maybe not in the same vein as something like Trainspotting) that makes it a bit more unique than a more run of the mill movie of this ilk, backed up in no small part by her own main performance. The plot itself is no great diversion from the kind of story I’m used to with these smaller movies and for something that’s trying to include messaging about transgender issues and suicide, it probably could have been handled better or done in a different way.

Solaris (1972) - 9/10

Another Tarkovsky joint, one I thought I’d revisit to see if there was indeed more to get out of it a second time. Well, it’s no surprise that yes, there was certainly more to get out of it. Solaris is a crazy trip of a movie and I would liken it to Kubrick’s 2001 in terms of how grand the scale of it feels. Yet this is a film that comes across as deeply personal, choosing to focus on a specific character as he goes to a space station to help those on board who are experiencing some kind of emotional crises, only to feel the effects of the planet, Solaris invading his own mind as it has the crew. To many, I can see this lengthy Russian sci-fi being a tad slow but my personal experience is one of deep engagement. Solaris pulls its viewer in a lot of different directions and it is always doing something unexpected in terms of where its narrative goes. There’s a lot to think about with the movie and thankfully it’s no chore to watch again.

Y Tu Mamá También (2001) - 9/10

Another recommendation for the podcast episode on Alfonso Cuarón movies. This is a very relaxed experience, following three young people as they go on a road trip, visit different places and have sex. Listen to episode 40 of The Sunday Movie Marathon podcast for more of my thoughts.

Children of Men (2006) - 10/10

My favourite Cuarón movie, one that never stops being tense as its characters are constantly moving towards the end goal. Set in a future where humans are infertile, the oldest living person is 18, and London is the last city in the world that’s still keeping it together, somewhat. This is masterclass filmmaking. Listen to episode 40 of the podcast for more insights.

Minority Report (2002) - 5/10

I’m really not the biggest fan of Spielberg… Minority Report is an interesting movie in terms of its concept of stopping crimes before they happen by way of prediction, but I just didn’t connect with the heart of it. The colouring is way too overexposed in a way that’s supposed to be eliciting a futuristic vibe but instead feels so early-2000’s in the worst way. My biggest problem with Minority Report is just how long it is, clocking in at two hours and twenty-five minutes which allows for a lot of meandering, all while never quite developing characters enough for you to care about.

Caché (2005) - 9/10

Oh god! Another Michael Haneke movie! Here we see a couple periodically sent video tapes featuring hours of footage of the outside of their house. The anxiety ratchets up and the mystery gets deeper with every minute. There’s always at least one moment in any of his films that have so far made me realise just how out of my depth I am. Caché is no exception, and I won’t spoil anything here because I think it’s better just to watch the movie and see for yourself. He is a director that wants the audience to know something and that something is never what is explicitly shown at face value; it is pressed into the fabric of the film - plainly evident, yet hidden. Caché is so stupidly clever in displaying its themes and messaging - making reference to the Siene Massacre of 1961 as well as a deeper study of colonialism - and there’s no way to change a single detail of it without risking the Jenga tower crumbling to the ground. It all works in tandem. It is passion and fury and haunting.

Coco (2017) - 7/10

Pixar had a string of around seven forgettable movies before this point so thankfully Coco emerged to show the company still had something good in them. Coco deals a lot with themes of death and legacy, remembering those who are gone in order to preserve them and while its plotting is quite basic and there are certainly moments that either drag or cannot escape the same Pixar formula, most of what the movie has to offer is a lot of fun, with creative, colourful animation and emotional beats that resonate the way they’re supposed to.

Incredibles 2 (2018) - 5/10

Oh, they almost had it! There's a lot here that could have been explored in far more interesting ways. Setting Incredibles 2 directly after the events of the first movie was not a good idea. If it had taken place five or ten years after, the characters could have been in different places in life and it would feel as though they'd actually changed and developed. But instead of trying to be a film that actually cares about its characters and the journeys they go on, a lot of the film is wrestling with the idea that Bob isn't supportive of his wife and Jack-Jack has to fight a raccoon… They have to shoehorn in a villain that in no way compares to the genius of the original. The ending of the original introduces another antagonist that gets wrapped up within this film's first ten minutes, except they don't catch him and he's never mentioned again. It's a real shame because the animation is fantastic and the acting is superb and there are great ideas sprinkled throughout. It just doesn't come together.

Toy Story 4 (2019) - 6/10

I was rather reluctant to watch Toy Story 4 because from the get-go I’m not really here for sequels being made just for the sake of it. Everyone loves Toy Story and making another one is a sure fire way to make money. This is the first time I’ve seen Toy Story 4 and for what it’s worth, I did enjoy it. The animation is immaculate and that alone feels like a huge flex from Pixar who tend to step up the game when it comes to animation in film, despite not having the best track record for films generally at this point. While it was nice to see these characters again, I found a lot of them to be side-lined (namely Buzz) in favour of a story that focuses mainly or entirely on Woody, who I just don’t like as much as in the previous movies. Generally the movie is good and decent enough but there’s no real antagonist and the plot is quite loose… it doesn’t feel as though it needed to be made from a story point of view.

Onward (2020) - 6/10

And with that I have seen every Pixar movie. And Onward is a fine one to go out on. While I don’t think it compares to the likes of earlier Pixar it’s still pretty fun. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for a medieval setting filled with bright colours and magic! Speaking of which, the animation was super and the medieval quest element is something that hooked me with the film. Again, plot-wise it does feel very familiar and I don’t know, maybe I’m past the point now of expecting Pixar to mix it up where their formula for story-telling is concerned but the movie is quite predictable. Nonetheless, while I’m not rushing back to see Onward I would hardly turn it off or refuse if someone wanted to watch it.

Old (2021) - 3/10

Oh boy! New M. Night movie dropped and my word, was it fun! For more of my thoughts on this… masterpiece (?) of a movie, please direct your attention to episode 41 of The Sunday Movie Marathon podcast.

T2 Trainspotting (2017) - 5/10

Trainspotting is perhaps one of my favourite movies and I had never bothered with the sequel, 20 years on, because the ending of that first movie is so conclusive. T2 felt more an excuse for these guys to get together again and in that, I probably would have preferred a couple of pictures on Twitter of the main cast and director, Danny Boyle having dinner or something. This is a fine movie - very arty in its presentation but meandering and dull in its story that doesn’t offer much in the way of proof that it had to exist.

Taste of Cherry (1997) - 9/10

What makes life worth living? This is a central question and theme of Taste of Cherry, and one that leaves such interpretation not only up to its central character but to the viewer as well. This film got me thinking about times in my life when I truly have had no answer to hard questions. Because it’s hard to convince people of things they are so adamantly against and harder still to rationalise what you believe if you’re not even entirely sure why you believe it in the first place. We are all of us alive and in recognising that, does that make it precious? And if indeed living is not a happy thing, why then should we fight so hard to preserve it? I felt upset as I watched this movie because I’ve been asked these kinds of questions before and it makes me feel stupid when I’m unable to answer. But the only real answer I can give is, everything. And if you can’t see the point then you’re not looking hard enough. Taste of Cherry is beautiful in its exploration of these topics and in its overall presentation, offering some of the best visuals in any movie I’ve seen - fitting for a feature with so much to say about the beauty of life - and an ending that as much pulls the rug out from under you as it does pull you out of the dark and make you realise just how lonely you’ve felt.

Bones (2001) - 2/10

Snoop Dogg is Jimmy Bones! This film is super funny but I’m not sure it’s trying to be and I really didn’t love it overall. But I do talk more in depth about it in episode 41 of the podcast.

The Duchess (2008) - 5/10

Another recommendation for the podcast. The Duchess was pretty much exactly what I thought it was going to be and there’s a lot to like about it but generally it’s a bit sparse. For more chat on the movie, listen to episode 41 of the podcast.

The Man With One Red Shoe (1985) - 1/10

This was another one for the podcast and man, was it awful. We had to watch it at 1.5x speed towards the end because it just wasn’t getting finished otherwise. To find out more, make sure to listen to episode 41 of the podcast.

The Emperor’s New Groove (2000) - 7/10

Pull the lever, Kronk! Haha! Slays me. I do quite miss this era of Disney, where the animation was hand-drawn and the stories were actually compelling and funny. The Emperor’s New Groove is vibrant, it’s got great characters and memorable moments that will forever be ingrained in the memory of culture. All in all, it’s just a solid flick that doesn’t waste time, developing the standard fall from glory type of arc but smoothly and in an entertaining way.

The Suicide Squad (2021) - 8/10

Oh, bloody hell! They actually made a good one! The Suicide Squad is not only better than the ‘Suicide Squad’ of 2016 in every way, it’s a genuinely great film! This time, James Gunn (director of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies) is at the helm and it seems clear that Warner Bros. basically let him do what he wanted with the movie, as it doesn’t seem to bog itself down with the restrictions of a more family-friendly rating. The result of this is a far cleaner, colourful film with a clearer vision that takes from early Vietnam movies and uses that style to craft a superhero/villain movie that differentiates itself among the copious amount of existing films of the genre. The Suicide Squad wastes very little time, introducing fun, crazy characters we’ve not seen on the big screen before and isn’t worried about killing a whole bunch of them, with standouts being Elba’s Bloodsport, Melchior’s Ratcatcher 2, Stallone’s King Shark (expertly rendered with fantastic visual effects), and Robbie’s returning interpretation of Harley Quinn. A lot of Gunn’s trademark sense of humour is laced throughout and more often than not, it hits. The audience at the cinema were truly loving this movie and I’ll admit, I was right there with them. This mix of the gritty, gory and absurd is not something that should work as well as it does but the basic premise of the film is already so silly (and boy, do they know it) that it just works! Certainly one of the best DC movies since The Dark Knight and one I’d be more than happy to watch again. This is what the modern comic book movie should be: just balls to the wall fun!

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bigskydreaming · 3 years

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Okay, long time followers will probably remember having read this, but I can’t find the original post and I’m trying to like.....force-reboot/jumpstart me working on my ‘Kings of the Sky’ AU again because I haven’t touched it in awhile and I have like literally eight different installments in various stages of completion and that’s ridiculous even for me. So here’s a repost of the first part of “Teachable Moments” the canon-divergence point of that AU series, where Jason calls Dick for advice after the Garzonas case and everything changes from there.

******

The way Jason Todd warily eyed the device in his hand, one might think it was an instrument of great and terrible destructive power, rather than just…his own personal cell-phone.

To be fair, he was Robin, and pretty used to the idea that even the most unlikely of things could be used for evil in Gotham. It could’ve been stolen and replaced at some point by a henchperson of Mr. Freeze, and using it could unleash some kind of cryogenic freeze ray that would turn him into a Robinsicle. Mad Hatter could be up to shit again, and dialing the phone at this very minute might mean syncing it up with a remote radio signal that would override his natural brainwaves and turn him into Tetch’s mindless minion of like…doom and stuff. Or…or…

Or sometimes, even in Gotham a phone is just a phone, and Freud is still a dumbass. And neither of the above possibilities had anything to do with why Jason was being a giant freaking pansy about entering the last digit of the phone number he would never ever admit to having had memorized for months now.

Nightwing had said to call if he ever needed to talk. He wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t actually want Jason to call, right? Like, its not as if Jason had remotely been expecting him to do that, so its not the sort of thing someone did just because it was ‘expected’ or shit. He was pretty sure. Rich people manners were weird though. Had to factor that in.

But Nightwing had also even made a point to say not talking to people about stuff was Bruce’s problem and that Jason shouldn’t let it be his problem too, and even though months ago Jason had been a starry-eyed dumbass who was totally drunk on the Bruce is the Bestest Kool-Aid or whatever, ‘Wing had definitely known what he was talking about there. So maybe he’d get it, and having this conversation with him wouldn’t be. Like. The actual worst idea in the history of ever.

Deductive logic said that Jason was getting worked up over nothing and there was no rational reason for him to be this nervous about dialing a fucking phone number. And he’d gotten pretty good at the whole deduction shit, given all the work he and Bruce had put into training his mind to view the world through entirely new paradigms, so Jason was pretty sure his math on that checked out. But on the other hand, Bruce was a hypocritical asshat that Jason was currently not speaking to, so what the fuck did he know about anything?

Aaaaand he was back to square one. Well damn. This was excellent. Very productive. Good hustle out there, Jay.

Sighing gustily, Jason flopped back on his bed, staring up at the ceiling and trying to pretend he hadn’t gotten used to how luxurious and cushion-y his ridiculously expensive mattress was. He’d gotten soft, he told himself. Then he scoffed at the idea that the past year and a half of rigorous Robin training and patrols had made him less tough than the pipsqueak he’d been back when living on the street, getting his ass kicked by bigger and badder on the regular. That hadn’t been hardness, that had been bravado.

But it had gotten him this far in life, so maybe there was something to be said for it after all?

Ugh. Decisions were hard. He objected on principle. He also really wanted to understand why he was this nervous…if he could literally fill the guy’s shoes and kick supervillain ass as Robin, what freaking sense did it make that he couldn’t even call him up on the phone?

Maybe you just know better than to ask him questions you don’t really want to hear his answer to, a smug voice said in the back of his mind. It sounded suspiciously like Willis Todd, which was all kinds of weird and fucked up, cuz Jason was damn sure his abusive a-hole of a deadbeat dad had never said anything that insightful in his life.

Which meant it was his own screwed up subconscious - presenting in the voice of his not so dearly departed douchebag dad, no less - that had Jason reacting out of spite, entering the last number and hitting Talk, all while totally on autopilot. Because apparently we’re all making healthy life choices in this Chili’s tonight, Jason snickered somewhat hysterically while his phone rang once, twice, three times.

Ugh. Was he always this fucked up in the head and he just never noticed, or was it a side effect of running around rooftops in a cape. Inquiring minds wanted to know.

“Hello?” Someone said then, answering on the fourth ring. Jason sat bolt upright, his nervous humor vanishing as quickly and unexpectedly as it’d hijacked him in the first place. For all that he’d only actually interacted with the older man a few times, his voice was instantly recognizable. As was his slight confusion.

Right. Because why would Nightwing have the untraceable number of the latest burner phone Bruce had given Jason, when the ever paranoid Bat had him swapping out phones every freaking week? Duh, Jay.

“Uh, its me,” Jason said hastily, as if he could somehow catch up to and overtake the epically long ten second silence he let lapse before his mouth started making words again. “Jason?”

“Jaybird! Hey! What’s going on?” The older vigilante’s tone instantly morphed into one of surprised delight, so apparent even across the phone that Jason actually pulled it away from his ear and stared at it, as if that could explain Nightwing’s inexplicable giddiness. He’d literally only met the dude three times. Give or take a concussion he was forgetting about maybe? Weird.

Then again, the older man was a circus performer from birth. Might just be good at faking being super excited to hear from people? Whatever. Still weird.

“Uh, you said to call if I was ever having, I dunno, issues with Bruce I guess? So I kinda had a question? I mean, if you’re not busy or anything.”

Just one question? Willis’ voice asked snidely, echoing in time with the rapid tripartite beat of Jason’s heart. Since apparently everything Jason said was trying to come out with a question mark attached to the end of it at the moment. Ugh, fuck you, subconscious, Jason thought forcefully, even as he ransacked the recesses of his mind for that bravado he was thinking about earlier. It had to be in here somewhere…

“No worries dude, I’ve got time. Hit me!” Nightwing said cheerfully. His lighthearted cadences were so at odds with the sweat suddenly breaking out on Jason’s forehead, the younger teen couldn’t help but wince in anticipation of its inevitable change once he got his actual question out. This was a bad idea, he decided, way too fucking late for it to make a difference. He had a hunch Nightwing wouldn’t be content to ‘just forget it’ or whatever even if Jason chickened out now.

So he took a deep breath, shrugged and did what Jason Todd did best. Said fuck it, put pedal to the metal, and drove at full speed for the metaphorical police barricade that was his way of picturing all the things telling him He Should Definitely Just Not.

“Do you think I’m someone who could kill somebody in like, cold blood?”

Aaaaand there went the lightheartedness. Well, he’d definitely stone cold killed that, Jason thought grimly into the silence that followed.

“Huh,” Nightwing said at last. “You’re gonna have to give me a second to switch gears here, Jay. I was kinda expecting something along the lines of ‘how do I avoid Bruce giving me the safe sex talk.’”

Jason flushed and nodded jerkily, not that the older man could see it. Still, it’d been enough of a workout just getting to this point. He didn’t trust what might come out of his mouth next if he kept trying to force it. Thankfully Nightwing didn’t make him wait too long before continuing.

“I think anyone’s capable of killing somebody in the right circumstances,” Jason’s predecessor began carefully. Except that was not remotely what he wanted to hear. Or helpful.

“I’m not looking for platitudes,” Jason grit out, not angry at the other vigilante so much as the whole fucked up mess and his inability to think about anything else at this point. “It’s just a simple fucking question. You’ve met me, do you think like, I’d be capable of just killing somebody or not.”

“I’m not offering platitudes,” Nightwing continued calmly, as if he wasn’t phased by the younger boy’s interruption or sudden aggression at all. “And its not a simple question at all. Speaking from experience, most people wouldn’t think of an eight year old as a cold-blooded killer, but that’s what I could have been if Bruce hadn’t stopped me from killing my parents’ murderer when I first tracked him down. And yet that’s still totally different from when I held a gun on Two-Face barely a couple years later, about to shoot him because somebody else told me to, and because I wanted to hurt him like he’d hurt me. Wouldn’t you agree those are two different situations and two different ‘kinds’ of cold-blooded killer? Context is kinda a big deal here.”

Huh. First off…what the fuck? Jason stared blankly up at the ceiling, trying to hurry up the processing functions of his brain because, again, what the fuck? He was like ninety nine percent positive none of that had been in the Dick Grayson Is The Greatest and Here Are All The Reasons Why brochure he’d had read to him every time someone new found out he was Wayne’s newest stray, and like. Uh. Yeah, that part would have definitely stood out. Because once more, with feeling:

“What the fuck?”

Oops. That hadn’t been supposed to be out loud. Bad mouth. Bad.

Nightwing just did a weird kinda half laugh half sigh combo. Rueful, Jason would describe it, if he were describing it to someone else, which it kind of felt like he was, relaying the conversation to himself now that it’d taken a hard right turn into the surreal.

“Blindsided you with that, huh? Sorry, should’ve figured neither of those are the kinda stories Bruce would want to share with you. Then again, I don’t really have any idea what Bruce has told you about me.”

“Not much,” Jason admitted. Which was a major source of irritation, if he was being honest. The much sung praises of Dick Grayson came from literally everyone he met except for Bruce. Who usually just got a pinched expression whenever Jason brought him up, and a rapid subject change that was not nearly as subtle as Bruce seemed to think it was.

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Nightwing sighed. “I hope you haven’t put too much stock in anything else you’ve heard about me then. I’ll admit to a bad habit of enjoying my mystique, so secondhand hearsay tends to lose my best nuances.”

Despite himself, Jason’s lips curved up and he let out a rueful huff of his own. “I mean, this definitely isn’t where I saw this conversation going.”

The older man chuckled. “Thought I was going to just assume the worst and chuck the book at you?”

“Well. Yeah.” Jason shrugged, even though he knew it wouldn’t come across. “Bruce did.”

Nightwing heaved an exasperated breath. “Yeah, that’s kinda the thing about B. Sometimes, he’s great. Other times, he’s an ass. Its kinda an either or thing. He’s never really mastered the art of finding a midpoint between two extremes. Mostly because he’s never seen the point of aiming for middle ground.”

“Well its not like he’s ever really had to,” Jason griped. It just slipped out before he could stop it, leaving him feeling guilty for bad-mouthing B when he wasn’t around to defend himself. Especially since he knew Nightwing wasn’t the guy’s biggest fan these days. But he couldn’t deny it also felt good, in a way.

To his surprise, Nightwing just laughed. And not even in a malicious, spiteful kind of way, but almost relieved.

“God, thank you. You’d think that ‘hey, so my billionaire guardian kinda has entitlement issues’ would be a water is wet kind of revelation, but try saying something like that to pretty much anyone else…”

“And they look at you like you’re an ungrateful asshole?” Jason finished for him. Not that he’d ever actually tried saying that to anyone before, though he’d definitely thought it a time or two. But he could all too easily imagine the reactions he’d get, which was pretty much why he’d never gone so far as to speak the words.

“Yup,” Nightwing drawled, dragging out the p and popping it with emphasis. “And its not about being grateful or not, its just…there are some parts of everyone that just aren’t up for grabs, for other people to weigh in on or take charge of, you know? And a lot of people just don’t get that…because nobody’s ever tried it with them, or had to deal with expectations that…overstep, let’s call it?”

“Is that why you left?”

Jason winced the second it left his mouth. Too far. Definitely way too far, but he’d just gotten unexpectedly comfortable with the back and forth, and now he’d done the overstepping thing himself and was left with just dead air.

But ten seconds of heavy silence stretched into twenty, and went no further, as Nightwing sighed into his side of the phone again.

“The spiteful part of me wants to say it was more of a push than me just up and leaving,” he laughed again, but this time with unmistakable bitterness. “But even while that’s true, its not really the right answer to your question, because no matter how much of a clusterfuck that was at the time, its not…I mean, I knew at the time how to fix it. Where and how I needed to cave in order to make up with him and let things get back not quite to normal, but at least close enough.”

The pause wasn’t as heavy or tense this time, as Jason could almost sense the older man gathering his thoughts, trying to put them into words. He bit his lip rather than risk any more unexpected utterances escaping. This might not have been where he’d thought his phone call would lead, but now that he was here, hearing the answers to questions he’d wanted to ask for over a year and finding them almost comfortably familiar, he wasn’t going to risk distracting Nightwing or shutting him up for well. Anything.

“But it would have meant me caving. Settling in ways that I just…couldn’t. So in a way, yeah, I did leave, it was still my choice. And all of that was definitely a big part of it. I love Bruce, I do. I just couldn’t live with him anymore. Not without feeling like I had to give up my own autonomy and just be what he wanted. Or what he’d expected me to grow up to be, back when he first took me in. And as grateful as I am to him for that, I can’t honestly say I would have stuck around back then if I knew that was the price tag attached. I’m not…I don’t do well with people trying to force me to stick to one place, one thing. I was born on the road, you know? When I was a kid, I expected to spend the rest of my life living like that. Home was people. Not places. And so Gotham…its never fit me quite right, the way it does him, or even Barbara. Its not like I was miserable there, its just.”

“It wouldn’t have been your first choice,” Jason finished again, quietly. There was silence again for awhile.

“No. No, it wouldn’t have been. Not then.”

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silkling · 3 years

Text

Of Mistakes Past and Missing Home

Of Moments of Life AU

———————————————————————————————————

“You enjoy painting.”

The voice came from behind Boulder, and the unexpectedness of it made him startle. Which, in turn, made him jerk and drag his paintbrush across his canvas. The result of which was him turning a small cloud above a red and orange flower field into a streak that cut through the whole picture. Oops. That wasn’t what he’d been intending.

He turned to see who had spoken, his optics shuttering with surprise when he realized it was Dreadwing. He was quick to realize that the Seeker’s expression had quickly shifted to one of regret.

“I apologize, youngling. It seems I caused you to ruin your art.”

Boulder only smiled, shaking his helm. “It’s no big deal.” he assured. “Part is the artistic process is making mistakes and having to start over. I did it a lot, in the beginning.” He glanced at the canvas, tilting his helm. “But that doesn’t mean every mistake requires you to start over from scratch. That’s the great thing about painting.” he remarked distractedly, tilting his helm in the other direction. “Sometimes, a mistake can be turned into something new, maybe even something better.” he narrowed his optics, then they lit up with a realization. “Sometimes,” he repeated. “All you need,” he reached out, then turned the canvas around so what had once been the flower field was now at the top of the painting. “Is a new perspective.”

When he glanced back, Dreadwing didn’t seem to understand. Boulder smiled. “Let me show you.”

He picked up his paintbrush again, then lifted it and in a few short strokes he added to the stripe that sliced through the picture he’d been painting. He changed colors, adding some more careful strokes around that, and stepped back. It would need refining, but the shape and idea of what he was going for were there.

“See? It’s a feather in the sunset, now.”

Dreadwing only blinked. “I suppose, though I’m afraid I do not much understand art. I always preferred to read data pads and learn about various fields of study.” There was a pause. “Skyquake enjoyed art.” It was a quiet addition.

Boulder found his smile softening. “Yeah? You’ll have to tell me about it sometime.” he encouraged. He glanced at his canvas. “I like art. There’s no set way to do it and there’s not much penalty for making mistakes. It’s nice.”

The Seeker hummed. “Do you believe most mistakes can be fixed with a new perspective?”

Boulder blinked, frowning. There was something off in Dreadwing’s tone. The others might not pick up on it, but he was good with other bots. He always had been. “…this isn’t just about painting anymore, is it?”

Dreadwing startled, surprise making his field flare. “You are far more perceptive than your teammates.” he said after a moment.

Blades smiled, turning to fully face the flyer. “Blades gets too anxious and wrapped up in his own helm to really pick up on more subtle emotions, Chase can barley understand the complexities of his own feelings, let those of alone others, and Heatwave is too proud and headstrong to really know what to look for. They’re all good bots, and I care about them a lot, but they aren’t the most..”. he searched for the right word. “Emotionally intelligent. Blades can read others really well when he isn’t swept up in his worries, but the other two are a bit hopeless.” He wasn’t saying it to be mean or to criticize. It was just the way his friends were wired, he knew. They were naturally better than him at a lot of other things. It was just how things were.

Dreadwing nodded, acknowledging his words. “You are correct. It is not just about painting. But it is my burden to bare, and I will not trouble you with my struggles.”

Boulder chuckled. “Well that’s a bad idea.” he said lightly. “You’ve already helped us a lot. Chase told the team what you did for him. We’ve all seen what you’ve done for Blades. Why don’t you let us help too? You’re one of us now, it’s gotta be about give and take.”

Dreadwing stared. “Wise words for one so young.” he sighed. “Very well, I will share my thoughts.” he vented harshly, then stared intently at the painting Boulder had been working on. “My mistakes are many, and brutal, and not nearly as neat or benign as a misplaced streak of paint. I suppose I merely cannot see how a new perspective would fix them.” he said after a moment.

Boulder was quiet, before he lifted his gaze. “Can I offer my thoughts?” At Dreadwing’s nod, he continued. “You’ve made a lot of mistakes. You’ve done a lot of terrible things. I don’t doubt that. And I know there are a lot of Autobots who would want to see you pay for those mistakes.” he tilted his helm. “I don’t know the full scope of the War. I don’t know everything you’ve done. But I do know how bad off Cybertron was before we left it.” The Seeker shot him a startled look, and he smiled a little sadly,

“I didn’t join the Rescue Force just because I wanted to help others, Dreadwing. In fact, in the beginning, my motives were entirely selfish.” he explained. “When I got to the age where I’d be expected to work, I was told that my first shift would be at a construction site in Kaon. It scared me. I knew how dangerous construction work was and I knew that even if it didn’t kill me it would kill my spark to be forced into something I hated so much. The only escape, the only chance I had at something different, was the Rescue Force. So I signed up to the Academy, and the day I got in was the day I escaped what I would have suffered through otherwise. The others may not have been as aware of just how bad things were, but…I was from the lower castes, Dreadwing. I knew.” he said quietly.

The Seeker was surprised, his optics wide. He saw how Boulder gradually shrunk in on himself as he spoke, and it made something unpleasant twist in him. The bulldozer was usually more at ease and bright, it didn’t suit him to look so…defeated. After a moment of thought, he put a hand on Boulder’s back and stepped closer. He knew Chase would not want more than this, but Blades preferred hugs as his method of comfort. Dreadwing didn’t know what the little green bot preferred so he wanted to play it safe. His bid seemed to pay off, because Boulder shot him a faint smile.

“What I’m getting at is, I know how bad off Cybertron really was. So even if I don’t know your exact circumstance, I do have an idea of what might have pushed you over the edge. I did originally come from Nyon, after all. Granted, I came from one of its nicer quadrants, but…it was still Nyon.” Boulder sighed. Nyon, at one time, had been the cultural and religious center of Cybertron, rivaling Praxus in beauty and grandeur. But under Zeta Prime, Sentinel’s predecessor, it had fallen into near-total ruin. “You made mistakes, and some bad choices, but you only did it in the end when you were backed into a corner and had nowhere else to go. Your choice was the only one you had that would let you remain alive, and that was wrong. No one should have to choose between death and living life serving a tyrant.”

Dreadwing hadn’t explicitly said any of this, of course. But Boulder was perceptive, like the Seeker himself had said. He’d read between the lines. He had understood what Dreadwing hadn’t been saying. It was one of the reasons he’d so quickly accepted the large bot as a new fixture in their lives. In his optics, this was Dreadwing’s chance at a life he should have had to begin with.

“That doesn’t change what you did, but it adds context. And given that the War destroyed Cybertron and decimated our people…” Which had been another thing Optimus had opted not to tell them. Dreadwing had had to share that particular tidbit. “Well, the War has to end someday, and if it ends in Autobot victory then we can’t afford to lock up every ‘Con. I don’t think there’s enough Cybertronians left for that.”

He realized he hadn’t yet gotten around to answering Dreadwing’s statement, and embarrassment flushed through him. “You made mistakes. That’s true. But context adds perspective. And you have a chance here to prove to anyone in the future who would want to hold your past against you that you can do better. Griffin Rock is your trial run. Heal, relearn how to live without War, and make amends while you’re here. Then, when everything comes to an end and the dust settles, it’ll be a lot harder for people to say that you never tried to make things right or that you’re unwilling to change.” he looked up to meet Dreadwing’s gaze. “Prove to yourself that you can be better than who you used to be, and when the time comes for you to face your mistakes, everyone will see that you have what it takes to make it right.”

Dreadwing was frozen, and Boulder found himself smiling at the hints of shock in his field and gaze. “I…had not considered those points.” the Seeker admitted after a long minute.

Boulder chuckled. “New perspective, remember? I just so happened to be able to provide it. That’s part of the benefit of letting yourself trust and rely on others.”

The flyer shot him an indecipherable look, and nodded. “Thank you for reminding me of that, young one. I have not been able to put such faith in another since I last saw my brother. It is good to be reminded that I do not have to handle my burdens alone.”

Boulder beamed, nodding. His somber mood was seemingly forgotten and he gestured to his painting. “Glad I could help! Now, if you don’t mind, I have sudden inspiration for this and I’d like to finish it.” he said, stepping towards the canvas.

Dreadwing let his hand drop, head tilting. “May I watch?” At Boulder’s nod, he settled on a nearby crate and watched the bulldozer work. It was oddly soothing, seeing the colors go down on the canvas, watching the patterns and shapes form into a familiar image. Into…a very familiar image.

After Boulder finished the sunset and feather, he had begun painting…the Rescue Force Headquarters. And Dreadwing picked up the longing and melancholy in the youngling’s EM field. The Seeker’s spark ached at the bulldozer’s visible grief, and he frowned. So Boulder hadn’t so easily shrugged off his earlier memories of home and his life on Cybertron. Dreadwing was not surprised to see him painting the Rescue Force HQ. From what the youngling had said, it would have been the first place he was truly free of the shackles that had threatened to bind him.

Dreadwing said nothing until Boulder finished and stepped back, and it seemed he hadn’t realized what he’d been painting until then, because when he took in the whole painting his only reaction was to let out a quiet, surprised “Oh.”

Dreadwing stepped closer, letting his own field nudge at Boulder’s, and upon finding no protest he let it curl around the youngling. Boulder’s vocalizer clicked and reset itself before he was able to speak. “I hadn’t realized…”

Dreadwing hummed softly. “You miss it.” he could tell in the aching and longing that all but swamped the bulldozer.

“I don’t know why. Like I told you, I didn’t have the happiest beginnings back on Cybertron. But I still miss it. All of it, not just the Rescue Force. Nyon, too.” he said in a whisper.

Dreadwing put a hand on his back, keeping his field soft and soothing. “It is only logical. It was your home. It shaped you and created the foundation for who you are. And I doubt all of your young life was horrible. You said you came from the better areas of Nyon.”

Boulder nodded. “Yeah.” he admitted. “The All Spark Day celebrations were always amazing. And the bots were great. We all had the same origins and the same troubles so we all just…came together. We were…like a community.” he said softly. “We all took care of each other and helped each other and even if the city wasn’t always the best, the neighborhood we lived in was actually alright, for Nyon anyway. I never starved, even if I didn’t always have the best fuel. My life wasn’t great, but…it wasn’t horrible either. I miss all the good things.”

Dreadwing bowed his head. He couldn’t fully relate. He had had no such struggles in Vos, at least not until the Senate had banned any from leaving the city, but he could understand the longing. “Cybertron is dead, but it’s children are not. And hope for our home is not gone either. Perhaps one day there will be a way to return, and even if not, we still live. Once this War ends, it will be possible to keep the life of Cybertron’s heart and culture alive, even if the planet itself cannot be repaired.” he said softly. “You did not get to know Cybertron’s death as the rest of us did, for we knew our home was dying with each day the War dragged on. We had time to come to terms with the loss. You were forced to be confronted with it in a single, harsh day. The rest of us lost Cybertron in pieces, and you lost it all at once. The loss is harder on you than it ever was on me, or any other Cybertronian involved in the War.”

He paused to let the youngling take in all he was saying, the hand on his back smoothing up and down his tightly clamped armor plating. His tone gentled. “I cannot give you back your home, and I know that reminding you of your new home here on Earth will not make the ache go away. So I will only say this: grieve as much as you want for what you lost. Mourn what you were not able to have and the things you will never get back. If you deny yourself that much, you hurt only yourself.”

Boulder was shaking faintly, his frame just a few degrees too warm from the overwhelming force of the grief was processor was buckling under, and his optics threatening to leak cooling fluid in response. He turned a wide, shining look on to the Seeker. His field probed at Dreadwing’s as if asking for comfort, and his vocalizer clicked and reset itself before he actually was able to speak. “…Blades said you give good hugs.” he said quietly, his field holding the softest undercurrent of hope.

Dreadwing only hummed, gaze softening. So that was Boulder’s preferred form of comfort. He nodded, then wrapped his arms around the shaking youngling and pulled him close to his chest.

As Boulder trembled and let himself finally mourn the loss of his home, he found only one thought on his mind.

‘He really does give good hugs.’

———————————————————————————————————

And here’s the next installment in the “of moments in life” AU! I hope everyone liked it! This was fun! I have so much inspiration for this AU you have no idea.

Boulder is the most well adjusted of all the Rescue Bots. That’s why I figured he’d be the best one to help Dreadwing with his own issues. But, even then, he’s still just a kid! A kid who woke up out of a very long nap to learn that his planet is dead and everything he’s ever known has been destroyed. He hid it well, but that shook him hard.

Dreadwing now has THREE children! All he needs now to complete the set is the fire truck! He also needs proper one-on-one bonding time with his helicopter child because their first real binding experience was with everyone watching. So there is that!

Until next time, friends!

#of moments in life au #tfp #transformers prime #tfrb #transformers rescue bots #rescue bots #tfp Dreadwing #Dreadwing #tfrb boulder #rescue bots Boulder #Dreadwing lives #Boulder is the only well adjusted one of the group I SWEAR #he’s the only one who doesn’t desperately need adult help #this time it’s Dreadwing who gets therapy! :D #Boulder is homesick though #it’s a good thing Dreadwing is there to make it better!#Boulder and Dreadwing bond #Boulder gets a dad!#macadam

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shih-coulda-had-it · 3 years

Text

casualty report

my entry for @queenangst‘s bnha gen contest! Link to AO3, but also contained below the Keep Reading.

WC: 2,454

Summary: Hospitals are supposed to be places of healing. Yet whenever Toshinori sits in one with Gran Torino, it seems that Toshinori is always clawing at his own heart. Spoilers up to C305.

The air is cold, sterile, and silent, save for the low hum of machinery and intermittent beeping of the heart monitor.

Yagi Toshinori enters Gran Torino’s assigned room in a similarly muted fashion, sliding the door open and shut with barely a click. He finds the chair where he left it; the old man hasn’t gotten any visitors besides him and the nurses. Like Midoriya, Torino teeters on the knife edge of survival, and like Midoriya’s classmates, Torino’s colleagues are swamped with work.

Toshinori has the privilege to visit them both. So he splits his time between his teacher-mentor-father and his student-successor-son and waits. They are similarly stubborn about clinging to life; Toshinori is confident they will wake.

Whether they will be happy about it…

As he sits, Gran Torino’s eyes crack open. His already labored breathing stutters, resulting in a full-body twitch that eventually culminates in a pained groan.

“Take it slow,” Toshinori advises.

“Stupid lesson from a stupid teacher,” Torino snaps. Toshinori looks away to focus on the bright yellow fabric bundled on top of a cabinet, neither laundered nor repaired. He’ll have to do it later.

The silence between them is tense. Surprisingly, it’s Torino who breaks it.

“Izuku?”

“Coma,” Toshinori says, fingers curling into fists. Before Torino can curse, Toshinori adds, “I think he’s talking to the predecessors of One for All.”

“Not something you could do,” the old man comments. He’s peering down at his injuries with a detached fascination: the maimed leg, the thick compress hiding beneath his bandages. Toshinori is uncomfortably reminded of his own injury, and of his own convalescence. He had recovered quickly, and privately, though he suspects that One for All had assisted with the process.

However lucky Torino is to have survived, Toshinori thinks the aftermath will be so much messier.

“It’s not,” he agrees.

“How can you tell?”

“A feeling,” says Toshinori. He forges on despite Gran Torino’s disbelieving eyebrows. “I think oshishou had a point, about the predecessors’ spirits living on in One for All. I’m not able to channel One for All anymore, but I think I still have some connection to the Quirk.”

“Ghosts in the machine,” says Torino dryly. He studies Toshinori. “Oh. You’re not joking.”

“I wouldn’t joke about this.”

Honestly, Toshinori had thought Torino would be ecstatic (as ecstatic as the old man ever got, as he swung between smugness, serenity, and seething fury) at the possibility of reconnecting with Shimura Nana. He had also quailed at the thought of telling Gran Torino that Toshinori’s own connection seemed to be a one-way thing.

And Toshinori doesn’t know how to tell Torino that he feels betrayed, in a way.

When he was researching the previous users of One for All, an alien-like urgency had pushed him past investigating to obsessing. As though a whisper had filtered through his head and said: what else, what more, why now?

Shinomori’s case. The hypothesis that Toshinori’s Quirkless heritage had protected him from the pitfalls of a stockpile Quirk.

The harsh intake of multiple people breathing in at once, even though Toshinori had been alone, with only stacks of heavily-redacted reports to keep him company. All of Toshinori’s devotion, and it had earned him nothing but sleepless nights and silent vigils.

Torino sighs then, heavy with resignation. And just like that, he moves on. “Shigaraki?”

“Escaped,” Toshinori reluctantly says. He doesn’t want to talk about the current situation of society and its failure to stabilize in the wake of so many terrible revelations and events. He really doesn’t want to talk about Tartarus. Except, it will be impossible to keep Torino in the dark about it forever. “Don’t have a heart attack on me, but—All for One’s back on the field.”

One heartbeat. Then two.

Something like forty years ago, Gran Torino and Toshinori had sat in a hospital room, numbed to the core by the very real confrontation and consequence of baiting All for One into the light. The superficial injuries belied the grief suffusing Toshinori’s body, and although he hadn’t recognized it at the time, the terror in Torino’s.

White-faced, Gran Torino had told Toshinori that they could not afford to stop moving.

Sleep. Wake up. Go to school. Your internship hours are going to be spent sparring with me.

For the rest of the year?

Until I’m goddamn satisfied.

It was a miracle they had survived the first week without killing each other. In retrospect, Toshinori could see the value in Torino’s decision to forgo the mourning period. Toshinori had still ended up sobbing on the ground, confessing to his father what he could not to his mother.

And of course, without dwelling on Toshinori’s admission, Gran Torino moved on to the next point of business.

“Cockroach,” Torino says through gritted teeth. The heart monitor stays impressively calm. “Third time’s the charm, then?”

“Torino-sensei, the third time was Kamino Ward. It’s safe to say the odds are against us.”

Toshinori’s bleak assessment earns him a narrowed glare, and it’s a sign of how exhausted and bitter Toshinori feels that he is unfazed. He can afford to be scared of Torino when Torino is walking of his own volition, cursing up a storm about the fact that he can no longer eat a whole box of microwaved taiyaki.

“Casualties?”

“Multiple civilians,” says Toshinori. “Multiple pro-heroes. None of the students, thank goodness.”

Torino stares at him. “There were no students at the hospital.”

“Many were… encouraged to participate in the mansion raid.” It still leaves a sour taste in his mouth. Terrible, yes, to see Eraserhead bandaged up yet again due to Toshinori’s failures, but it was even worse to see his students file back into U.A.’s dorms, eyes shadowed with something more than grief. Midnight’s death haunts them still.

The old man breathes.

“What else?”

“A loss of trust,” Toshinori says, leaning his elbows on his knees, fingers pressed together like a prayer. “Civilians want to protect themselves, and the remaining pro-heroes of Japan are stretched thin. Some died, and many are retiring.” He offers Torino a mirthless smile. “Yoroi Musha is out.”

“Twenty years too late,” Torino responds.

“You never liked him.”

“Gimmicky cowards with a chip on their shoulder shouldn’t be in this line of work.”

Well. Either Toshinori takes that as a personal insult, an unintentional dig, or Gran Torino’s acerbic sense of humor. He goes quiet anyway. Now is a good time as any for a lull in conversation to occur, but Toshinori doesn’t get long to contemplate his next move.

“What’s eating you up,” Torino demands flatly.

“Nothing.”

“Pull my other leg.”

“It’s nothing,” Toshinori stresses. “And if there was something, I wouldn’t want to talk about it.”

“Toshinori. When you bottle up your specific brand of guilt, it has a tendency to backfire on you spectacularly,” says Torino. “I’m not walking away for a long time, so get it off your chest right now while I’m wired to half a dozen machines.”

Toshinori interlocks his fingers.

“Toshinori.”

“The Public Safety Commission has been disbanded,” he tries. “Their headquarters were attacked the same time the raids occurred.”

“Unsurprising,” says Torino.

“I don’t think anyone could have anticipated a direct attack, Torino-sensei.”

“I’m not talking about the Commission. I’m talking about you. Deflecting.”

Hospitals are supposed to be places of healing. Yet whenever Toshinori sits in one with Gran Torino, it seems that Toshinori is always clawing at his own heart.

“Do I disappoint you?” Toshinori asks, resigned to hearing an answer he already knows, staring hard at his hands. He’s pushing the wrong side of his fifties, less grizzled and more gaunt, more of a beanpole and less of a pillar. It’s impossible to remember all the things he did right when all Toshinori can see is where he went wrong.

And even though Gran Torino looks so fragile, tiny and bedridden, bandaged and hooked up to more machines than Toshinori can count on one hand—he still has the strength to look ahead.

Toshinori didn’t learn that. He had thought he did, those six years ago when he survived the fight with All for One, because in spite of the grievous injury, All Might had forged on.

“You can be honest,” Toshinori says. “Just like in U.A.”

“We’re a long way from that time,” says Gran Torino. His expectant and unimpressed expression hasn’t changed.

“It was a yes or no question, Torino-sensei.”

“No, then.”

He says it so simply. Toshinori blinks. Torino tips his head to the side, watching with half-lidded eyes how Toshinori processes his answer. Except Toshinori cannot fathom when this change of perception happened, because just as recently as Kamino Ward, Toshinori had still been reduced to sitting on his ass, listening to Gran Torino’s instructions.

“You’ve done more than anyone should have asked of you,” Torino says. “And you did it well.”

“I overlooked so many problems,” Toshinori protests. “So many people didn’t feel safe.”

“Brat,” says Gran Torino fondly.

“Torino-sensei.”

“There’s something more than that. You’ve been dealing with that insecurity for decades, and you know as well as I do that even a Symbol of Peace can’t catch everything. What’s going on?” Torino is ruthless when he wants to make a point; Toshinori circles back to his original impulsive question and thinks—

“Midoriya-shonen,” says Toshinori in a soft voice. “He’s talking to the predecessors.”

“So you said.”

“And I couldn’t. I can’t, even now, even though I’m connected to One for All still.” From there, the words come spilling out. “Oshishou told me from the beginning that One for All had some kind of spiritual essence. She might not have said outright about the voices, but she hinted at it. That we could meet again, somehow. And all those years… forty years, Torino-sensei, and—and nothing. Not a word, not a vision.”

Midoriya’s crybaby genes must have bounced over the connection, because horrifically, Toshinori can feel his face contort and his eyes water. He hasn’t cried in front of Gran Torino in decades.

“Like I wasn’t worthy,” Toshinori concludes, choking on the last word.

Here is what Toshinori learned on his own, independent of Gran Torino’s teachings: don’t cry. Smile through the fear and the pain, and don’t cry.

Conveniently, Toshinori has forgotten that all those decades ago, Gran Torino never censured him for his tears. So it is now, that Toshinori feels the unfamiliar prickle and the cooling trails sliding down his face, and Gran Torino says nothing.

Until he does.

“You’re everything Shimura stopped hoping for. Did you know that?” Toshinori jerks his head up from its bowed position; he can hear oshishou saying in her wry tone, typical Torino. Can’t make eye contact when communicating an emotion. “I saw her through almost every big milestone in her life. Her pro-hero license, her marriage, her pregnancy. The loss of her husband, and then her son.”

“You didn’t try and stop her.”

“She knew best.” Torino’s grin is painful. “I believed that then, and I believe it now. Kotarou survived longer than he would’ve if he stayed in her custody, which was ultimately her goal. So Shimura was right on that, never mind what Kotarou did with his life after. And you… I told you already.”

“You know me,” Toshinori jokes. He recalls his rusty impression of Torino’s lecturing tone, perfected during those golden hours of patrol with oshishou. “‘It takes twice as long for me to tell you something, versus me beating the lesson into you once.’”

“Then listen,” says Torino. “When Shimura met you, she was still hurting from giving up Kotarou. She couldn’t stop being a hero, but she didn’t want to stop being a mother. And every day, the news cycle spoke of a crime wave, fueled by something bigger than the injustices of the world.

“I was enough to keep her from drowning in work. It wasn’t until she met you that she started smiling again. That she had a son again.”

Toshinori scrubs his eyes. “Really could’ve used this talk forty years ago,” he manages.

“I wasn’t this emotionally intelligent forty years ago.”

“If Hound Dog ever managed to sit us down for therapy, he’d diagnose us both as emotionally-stunted,” he tells Torino. “You probably perpetuated a family cycle, Torino-sensei.”

“One of us cries, and it isn’t me,” Torino shoots back waspishly.

“It’s Midoriya-shonen,” Toshinori agrees.

Torino’s laugh comes out as a wheeze, and Toshinori winces in sympathy. The exhaustion that comes out of crying begins to settle in; he hasn’t allowed himself to cry for a while. Not in front of the students, and not in front of his colleagues. Gran Torino is situated in that blurred zone of family and teacher and co-worker.

Gran Torino is tiring as well. The conversation’s taken a lot out of him, and it surely doesn’t help that he was treated to a hint of Toshinori’s resurfacing insecurities.

“You asked if you disappointed me,” the old man says quietly, hoarsely. “Didn’t I disappoint you?”

His throat sticks.

Torino smiles, wry. “I know,” he says.

“Torino-sensei,” Toshinori attempts, horrified at his slip. He should fix this. He has to make sure Gran Torino knows that the past is past, and that his efforts haven’t been wasted on an ungrateful child. As Toshinori opens his mouth to reassure Torino, an urgent flicker of something calls out to him.

His head jerks to the door. Outside, down the hallway, in another room—

“He’s waking?”

Toshinori looks back to Torino, distractedly saying, “Yes,” before he freezes. Gran Torino has propped himself up halfway, teeth gritted with the effort it takes. He has reached out and clumsily pressed his hand against Toshinori’s forehead, fingers dipping into his hair.

It feels like a benediction.

“I am,” Torino forces out, “so proud of you. I could not be prouder. You were worth it, do you hear me, Toshinori? You are, still.”

The moment doesn’t last forever. Whatever burst of adrenaline fuels Torino, it dwindles with emotional vulnerability. He pats the top of Toshinori’s head and slumps back into his pillow, looking gray with exhaustion.

For his part, Toshinori stares, wide-eyed, like he’s fourteen years old again, meeting Gran Torino for the first time.

“Go,” says Torino. “Izuku shouldn’t wake up alone. He should have his family with him.”

There is a weak grin pulling at Torino’s mouth, familiar in its toothiness. Toshinori gets to his feet. He’s unable to return the smile, because he is suddenly terrified that if he leaves this room, Torino will somehow find a way to escape the hospital, hole up in his apartment, and—and—

“He’ll need you too,” says Toshinori. “Get better soon, tou—Torino-sensei.”

Gran Torino closes his eyes, and Yagi Toshinori moves on.

#queenangst gen contest #bnha #torino sorahiko #gran torino #yagi toshinori #all might #shih.txt #/DIVES THROUGH THE FINISH LINE/ TOUCHDOWN #found family feels #except the found family won't/can't acknowledge it #this is a long overdue conversation i hope we get in canon

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secret-engima · 3 years

Note

I’m kinda curious what oz and team strq’s relationship is like in your ‘always i dreamed’ verse is like. got any headcanons to share?

ABSOLUTELY. :DDD

Now I could make this very angsty but I’m in a fluff mood so all aboard the (mostly) fluff train.

-Oz 100% becomes Team STRQ’s exasperated sibling figure and an adopted member of the team. They now refer to themselves only as Team STORQ (stork) because this is their Sad Headmaster Man. Ozpin is wary at first, but there is no stopping Raven once she decides to adopt and the others follow her lead.

-They have successfully moved into his apartment by the time they are fourth years, even if they hide this fact so Oz won’t get in any trouble for it. Just- this team of semi-feral and totally feral teens moving in and setting up shop in his too big apartment/could practically be a house inside another building that he inherited from the previous Oz. Taiyang is now the group cook, Qrow keeps flopping on the couch to play video games with the console he brought home from SOMEWHERE, Summer likes to maintain their weapons on the kitchen table and Raven is always down for sidling up next to his armchair to listen to him read aloud from whatever book he’s reading.

-Note that this is all the far side of a slippery slope for these kids, and it wasn’t an entirely fast process with Ozpin being stubbornly aloof afraid to make personal connections and Team STRQ being wary of their mysterious “only a few years older” Headmaster. But after Raven gets attached (read: breaks into his apartment at one point by accident because she had come to the conclusion someone had kidnapped him and discovered to her surprise that she could portal to him, which meant she was more attached than she thought) there is no escape. The adoption of Sad Wizard Man was inevitable.

-Team STRQ manages to hold a veneer of propriety in public right up until they graduate. Then they give it two weeks and promptly stop caring what the public will think and start openly hanging out with Ozpin. Qrow and Tai will drag him off on “guy hangouts” that USUALLY end in a narrow escape from trouble or even the police (Qrow’s luck at work), Summer will lure him into taking the day off to go book shopping with her, and if he stays in his office for too long doing paperwork when he should be clocking out and eating dinner/sleeping, Raven with calmly open a portal, march through, and then potato sack him back through the portal. No she doesn’t care if anyone is in the room to witness, Ozpin is terrible at self care and Raven is here to ensure he takes care of himself. Even if she has to force him to take breaks.

-All of Vale knows the rumors that Ozpin is in a relationship with all of Team STRQ by like- the end of the year after they’ve graduated, but these disaster children are 1000% platonic. They’re just like cats rather than conventional people. Sibling shenanigans and cuddle piles on the couch are all part of how they express affection and Raven and Qrow don’t care what society says and Tai and Summer have learned not to care either.

-Ozpin teaches all of them how to dance. Being a quasi-immortal means you know a lot of different dancing styles, and after Team STRQ gets curious he’s happy to teach them. His favorite is swing dancing but shhh.

-Ozpin is a school Headmaster and has memories stretching back thousands of years and many, many lifetimes. He knows how to comport himself with dignity and reserve, how to sit back and strategize rather than leaping into a situation before looking. He is unquestionably the Braincell of the group.

-Until he’s not.

-Qrow and Raven take far too much glee in coaxing Oz to act his *physical* age rather than the layers of mental age he has going on. And since he’s only in his twenties still when they graduate, that means they manage to talk him into doing some Really Stupid Stuff. Luckily, being a quasi-immortal and two ex-bandits means they are very good at escaping without being caught.

-Of course Team STRQ are involved in the Salem Thing, and so they do take orders from him, but off the clock they’re his gremlin siblings and he loves them fiercely. He honestly expects them to treat him differently after he tells them about Salem and the curse thing (they set up shop in his apartment back when they thought he was just a sad, too-young Headmaster who needed a Team of his own), but other than Summer acting weird and thoughtful for a few days to process and Tai stress baking to wrap his head around the “immortal queen of grimm exists” thing they go right back to treating him like they always have. So what if he’s a tangled ball of memories and magic limping around in a green scarf? He’s *always* been like that, now they just know why he can curse fluently in long dead languages.

-Ozpin still gives Raven and Qrow birb powers, Raven and Qrow proceed to take turns, when not on mission or otherwise busy, to perch on Ozpin’s shoulder for the day. All of Beacon knows about Ozpin’s “pet birds” by now and there are a lot of urban legends about it, but no one realizes that these birbs are his feral Branwen siblings keeping an eye on him and making sure he takes a lunch break while working.

-Because, as previously established, Ozpin kinda sucks at self care. Comes from having too many lifetimes worth of self-sacrificing mentality all blended around in one’s head.

-Raven fully abuses her portal powers to keep her family together. She and Tai have a nice place on Patch and Oz missed the flight over for the night when he was planning (read: ordered by Summer) to take the weekend off? No problem. Ozpin forgot something back at his apartment? Hi Glynda don’t mind her. Nice apartment by the way but Raven’s just passing through. (Glynda: sighs in annoyance but this has been happening for years and she doesn’t bother to care anymore)

-The Branwen twins were raised in a bandit camp, which means groups sharing economically sized (small) tents, which means sharing sleeping space. This means these two birbs have no concept of “propriety” when it comes to snoozing when there are loved ones around. It took a long time, but they slowly infected Tai and Summer with this lack of care too, and so when they got attached to Ozpin and discovered that this boy had possibly the largest bed ever (also inherited from his predecessor for reasons lost on Oz, since heaven knows Osamu had no interest in intimate relations), the result was inevitable. More than once Ozpin has woken up to discover that all of Team STRQ had migrated over to his bed at some point in the night and were passed out in varying positions and proximities on it. There is in fact enough room for them to all sleep without touching, but by morning Ozpin usually finds himself in the center of a tangled cuddle pile anyway with Taiyang serving as the space heater center and the others all clinging to one limb or another, either each other’s or Oz’s.

-It’s ... nice. It reminds him of lifetimes *lonng* ago when families all tended to live in one or two room houses. Or lifetimes when he had blood siblings who did this.

-Even though he knows this is flirting with death for them, because Salem would love to ruin this happiness he has, but he knows he cannot convince them to stay away, and he’s been starved for positive touch for lifetimes and he is ultimately a weak man who makes mistakes. And even knowing this will likely be one of them, he cannot bring himself to escape the pile.

-It just ... feels so good to not be alone. At least for one lifetime.

#SE asks #anon asks #Always I Dreamed verse #Secret Engima Rambles #Look i just want all the team storq fluff okay #all the platonic cuddles #and pranks #and just-#LET SAD WIZARD MAN BE HAPPY #thank you for coming to my ted talk

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yanderecandystore · 4 years

Note

yan! ceo with a robot assistant s/o? if you’re not doin the ceo anymore then anyone else is fine >v<

The thing about the CEO character is that I… Well, I technically don't have one 👉🏻👈🏻.

I mean, I have one, but- I didn't know if I wanted to make her official, so I didn't introduced her, so…

Maybe this is the best time to properly introduce her (because I don't have a male counterpart yet, so I'll do her first).

TW/Tags: We're going into the interesting land of probably pastel/ownership kink!! // people lying a lot!!// There are hints of LGBT identity and LGBT phobia/ignorance // family issues // Thicc tower woman but I didn't mention her physic enough ;-; but imagine her being really tall // naivety coming from the reader and simping hard coming from the CEO // low-key, CEO being rude.

🍭꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍮꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍰꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍮꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖🍭

Happy lies [Yandere!CEO Oc x A.I!Reader - Fanfiction]:

Ingrid Bright. A name that just by saying can send shivers down everyone's spine. All members of the Bright family were known for being ruthless, but Ingrid was indeed something else.

A woman of power, a woman of pride, a woman of determination.

A woman of mysteries.

She was known for being a merciless business woman. A person that wouldn't let the feelings of her co-workers overcome her own destination towards glory. She was ruthless, but it was clear that her path would lead her company to greater heights.

Her attitude wasn't the most pleasant or supportive, but if it wasn't for her lead, her family's company would probably die sooner than her predecessors anticipated.

It has been passed from father to son since the founder of the corporation. From a small inventor building steam machines, to one of the most powerful corporations in technology and science. Although their research is mostly done privately, their technology is shared worldwide, even if their products are… A bit too expensive.

You think that because of such high prices, and the consumers being only the 1% of the population, the corporation was starting to fall. Ingrid's father tried to make changes to the company that sadly, went unnoticed.

It was Ingrid who changed their usual business practices drastically, which although not being perfect, helped the company get to the right tracks to a better future.

Ingrid had saved her family's company, but in the process of being passed down from "father to son", Ingrid had separated herself entirely from her dad.

Not many people really understand what happened, but Ms. Bright had a terrible argument with her father, that caused the two to cut communication.

Ms. Bright still wears the name Bright proudly. It could be either for the meaning of it, or for her strong connection with her family.

You don't really know if it's true, but, you are 65% certain that Ms. Bright may miss her father in some way or another, and keeping the name not only honors her family's achievements and predecessors, but also keeps her being at least a little closer to her father.

Not that she would ever tell you the reason why, you're only left to speculate.

"And who am I in the story?" You may be thinking. Well, you're a hand built assistant android with the latest a.i, created to serve Ms. Bright.

And also, a gift, from Mrs. Bright to his only daughter.

You see, Ingrid has trouble communicating. She can be a little rude when in reality she means well. Although, you have to admit that even if you worked for her for five years now, she is really, really scary.

"- You're an overly glorified doll, an a.i that man built to assist me when every other person around me is absolutely incompetent." She told you as she was walking really, really fast to her office. You tried following her pace but it was really hard for you to go just as fast as her.

"- You're supposed to do the tasks that I order you to do, yet you went out of your way once again." She was scolding you because of an incident that occurred a couple of seconds ago. You're beautifully designed, perfect for being a social android capable of resolving simple tasks. But you weren't built for holding weight.

"- I-I'm sorry Ms. Bright-!" You tried helping a couple of manual workers that were rebuilding one of the rooms. They were holding really heavy stuff that although it was natural to them, it made your arms disattached and one of your legs break from trying to support your whole body and the extra weight.

You can't help but feel intimidated under her gaze, but you know that… Deep down, behind that rough exterior there is a person that doesn't want you to get hurt.

"- This is the eight time you do this and I can't stand that pompous prick! There is no way in hell I'll let that guy touch you again." She was talking about one of the robot engineers inside the building. You think his name was Mack, you're not sure.

Funny isn't it? You've been in his office seven times and you still don't remember his name! But you remember him being pretty funny.

"- Why won't you let Mack fix me?" You asked genuinely confused. Your naivety is adorable, but dear Lord, how infuriating it is!

"- That prick gives me some really odd glances, and besides, he's annoying." Ingrid entered her office pulling you in and closing the door. It's been such a busy day today, can't a woman enjoy her birthday in peace?

Ingrid was only being half honest. Yes, she finds Mack to be annoying, but the true reason why she hates him is because of the smug face he makes every time you two enter his office.

He knows there is something a little different from the way Ingrid treats you from the rest of the "underlings".

"- So, who will fix me?" She sits you down on the couch, as she storms around the room trying to remember all of the things she needs to resolve today.

"- I'll fix you up when I get back, I just need to- Argh, God, [Y/N] have you seen my phone?" She was crouching down to look under her desk.

"- It's, right in front of you, Ms. Bright." Her hand was right by the phone's side, yet she was so stressed out that she didn't seem to notice how close her phone was.

"- Unh? Oh." She is always in a hurry, especially on her birthday. You wish she could sit down and relax a bit, couldn't she just, don't work on her birthday? You think she should be able to stay at home at least one day.

While looking at all her notifications she reread all of the tasks you had to complete today. She decided that she'll first have her meeting with some executives and then she'll come back to fix you. She isn't really skilled in fixing robots but it'll have to do.

There is no way she is going to see that smug face today. And no way is she going to let that bastard's greasy hands touch you.

Oh, that rat gets too comfortable touching you. You're not only a fragile device but you're also property of Ingrid Bright, he is supposed to repair you whenever you're broken, not make fun of the CEO while she is right there! The audacity of this man to not only make fun of his boss in her presence, but also make jokes for you to laugh at.

"- [Y/N], when I come back I'll fix you, or maybe call someone else to do it, I don't know yet, but either way stay still. I'm probably going to take four to five hours to come back, so feel free to use the computer or read a book if you're bored." She was getting ready for her reunion, as she continued to walk in circles around the room trying to find some papers she was supposed to take to the reunion.

"- I can review some data in the computer, and probably fix some documents that need to get revised-" You wanted to be useful and try to continue your work. You feel that if you just stay in the room waiting for her to come back, you won't be really helping her like you're supposed to.

"- No, no, please, stay right there. You don't need to do your tasks today." She had cut you off stating that you shouldn't be moving so much. Your parts are almost falling down, and she still doesn't know how she'll fix you.

"- But!-" You tried to reason, but your boss was way too much of a hot head.

"- I'll be back, okay." She said as she closed the door.

Well. Guess is nap time! Or, restore energy time, I guess?

But before you managed to shut down, you heard a couple of knocks on the door.

"- I'm coming." You said hoping the person on the other side would hear it. You don't remember if anyone was going to visit Ms. Bright today, but you didn't want to keep the person waiting too long.

You tried to maneuver yourself to the door, as having one broken leg and both arms falling apart wasn't really easy.

"- Ms. Bright is having a meeting now, but I'm sure she can contact you later!" You warned the stranger, thinking that maybe they wanted something from Ms. Bright.

"- Can I help you- Oh!" You finally managed to open the door but there was no one on the other side. Only a box with flowers on top.

"- Pink lilies, yellow orchids and white roses, what a strange combination." You thought out loud. You're aware of how often Ms. Bright gains gifts from secret admirers, but never one so unusual and especially on her birthday.

Everyone knows she hates roses. You wonder if there is any card saying who is the sender.

You go back to the couch, with the bouquet in one hand, and the other one dragging the box to the couch, as you can't really pick it up. You try finding a gift card or any form of hint of who the sender is.

You found one! But… It's with the Bright Vision Corp symbol on it, and is saying that is from Mrs. Bright to Mrs.-…

Oh.

Oh, you know who sent this.

"- Mrs. Bright… You're really stubborn..." Ingrid's father always sends her a gift on her birthday, mostly flowers, with a gift card with his number.

Now that you think about it, maybe the flowers that were chosen aren't so unusual, maybe they mean something. Normally he would send hyacinths. A full bouquet of only hyacinths.

They were gorgeous, but…

Every single gift card contained his name, and Ms. Bright 's old name, and she really doesn't want to be referred to with that name. She had told him the other times he sent these how she feels about it, yet, the old man doesn't seem to comprehend his own daughters feelings.

Is it because of ignorance? Is it because of spite? Is it because he doesn't care? Is it because he doesn't know any better?

Which one? You personally don't know. And Ingrid, doesn't care.

The first time he sent her this gift, she called him, but things didn't really work out.

She doesn't want to interact with him anymore, and so she burns his gifts. You asked her why, but, she just doesn't want to have him in her life anymore.

He is living his life in the countryside with his wife, living a traditional and simpler lifestyle that he always wanted. While Ingrid is living her best life really distant from them, in this big city full of lights.

Even if that means missing them sometimes.

You respect Ms. Bright privacy, so you haven't continued asking her about her decisions. This bouquet is so pretty though, it would be a shame to burn such beautiful flowers.

"- I think… Maybe she should keep this…"

You look at the box that came with the flowers. Well, "with the flowers", as looking at the box more carefully you can see that it wasn't her dad that had sent the box to her, but rather it was something she had ordered online.

"- Oh, I can't believe it is here!" Honestly, this one box has taken three weeks to find its way to the company, what the hell it's inside? The curiosity of seeing her buy this but never tell you what it was, was eating you up inside.

She was being so mysterious about this, she didn't even let you use her computer. She probably thought you were going to see her history and see what she brought (and yes, you would).

"- It's probably another fancy imported dress. Or maybe it's one of those cute japanese trinkets!" You thought about picking up the box, but your arms would probably break if you tried.

"- Sigh, actually, it may be another piece of equipment for her office, like her last birthday." You sighed out loud once again, remembering how her least birthday was incredibly boring, even to you, and you don't really understand what birthdays are!

You get a little bit, it's a special date that commemorates the birth of a human being. They receive gifts and get a happy birthday party, and everyone says "happy birthday!"...

Okay, maybe you want someone to say happy birthday to you, but that is beside the point.

"- She probably have brought new computer just so she can keep being a workaholic and get stressed out every five seconds!" You probably shouldn't be ranting so loudly, but still! It 's her birthday! She shouldn't be buying things that are for her job, she should be focusing on buying stuff that makes her happy!

Actually, maybe you… Should give her something-

"- I'm back-" Oh dearest, that was kinda fast-

You throw the gift card aside, as you have thought about a really dumb but possibly great idea.

"- [Y/N], I- [Y/N]?!? What happened to your arm?!?" She started talking with a calm and almost soothing voice until she noticed that one of your arms has started to actually fall apart from your body.

"- Uhn, nothing much." I mean, to you is nothing, really, it's just inconvenient.

"- Oh dear… Pfft, Jesus you really are a handful." She is in an oddly playful mood, which is perfect actually! This is probably the first time she doesn't sound so terribly stressed.

"- Has everything gone well in the meeting?" You ask, while you follow with your eyes her moviments. She is hyperventilating from doing so much stuff and going around the place at full speed. (Although she just… Walks really fast).

"- Well, yes, you know the usual, a bunch of old people saying this, saying that-" She starts going in detail, but she doesn't really care about the meeting. She is tired and all that she wants is to take a bath.

She lays down on the other couch across from you and goes on her rant about her day, it's honestly kinda funny how she lets herself be more comfortable with you. She doesn't like shoving her problems down on anyone's throat but she is glad you're listening.

She can feel your soft gaze on her form. It's honestly comforting. Throughout the day she poses as an absolute untouchable goddess, and everyone, even you, looks at her like she is absolutely terrifying. And, yes she knows, and yes, she… Kinda likes it.

Don't get her wrong, it is not like she is going to come out of your bed and grab your foot at night. She just feels a little stronger knowing people see her as untouchable. She doesn't feel like she is, though.

And when it comes to you, is… it is different. It's weird… She likes how you look scared, but also look so relaxed around her.

How casual you act, and how affectionate your gaze feels.

She turns her head to look at you, to confirm her thoughts but-

"- Oh… Don't tell me." Flowers. Flowers again. She has two intuitions about what those flowers are. None of them are of her interest.

"- Oh- Oh, wait! These are…" Oh dear, are you really going to continue with this plan? You want to see her happy but- Something feels wrong about this plan, something feels wrong about lying…

"- These are from who, [Y/N]?" She was getting impatient, not because of your delay, but mostly because she couldn't stand the thought of her old man sending her flowers again.

She feels weak, every time he sends her these gifts. She feels like she is going to break down and… Call him again.

And if it is an admirer, well, there goes 60 dollars worth of flowers down the drain, because she is burning them. Such a shame, really.

"- It's, I- I brought this! Happy birthday!" You screamed, because your system couldn't take the heating coming from your processor. Why does it take you so much effort to just lie? And is not like it's a big-big lie, it's just a small lie?!?

"- Ah- I, what?" All of that anger, all of those intuitions, all of those plans to burn the hell of these flowers, went completely out of the window.

She is completely lost. She can't understand what, why, when, and how?? You don't even have money, how would you buy it??

"- Oh, [Y/N], you… You really don't follow my instructions, do you?" She joked as she started to tear up- Wait, no!

"- No! Please don't cry!! I'm sorry for going against your orders I just- I-I really wanted to give you something special!!" You didn't want to make her sad, why does everything that you do have the opposite effect??

"- N-No, dummy, I'm not sad because of you. I'm happy because of you." You never gave her something like this, she didn't think it was possible for you to give her something like this. They're beautiful. They're so precious.

You're so precious.

But why roses, though? Oh well, who cares!

"- Thank you so much, [Y/N]." She had approached you, taking the flowers and holding one of your hands.

She was towering over you which was making it really hard for you two to meet each other's eyes, so she crouched down to your level.

You're really broken down, she is sweaty and tired, but none of these things matters to her. This really feels like one of those special moments.

Well… Mostly to her. You're so naive, you just feel like you gave your best friend a nice gift!

Like a cat giving their owners a prey they have hunted down. You're proud of making her happy!

Oh, but things are never really so sweet, are they?

"- [Y/N], I have something- Oh, speaking of the devil, right?" She didn't finish her sentence as she noticed the box at your side.

' This day has gone from good to better!'

"- [Y/N], I also have a gift for you."

"- But I don't have a birthday-"

"- Today is your birthday, I mean, you were activated for the first time on my birthday. So, this kinda means that we share a birthday." She is talking with her normal soothing voice, but the slight tone of happiness that came with it didn't go unnoticed.

Just like your face brightening up at the news.

' It's my birthday?!!?!' You thought.

Ingrid opened the box, absolutely excited to see your face. She took your birthday gift from inside.

"- Take a look! What do you think?" She said holding an outfit that was inside the box.

Well, you were right in a way, it was an expensive imported outfit. But… You don't know, there is something different about this outfit.

It's not as fancy and modern as Ms. Bright, but it wasn't like your "futuristic" uniform. Your uniform was minimalist and grey and white, yet the outfit was- Uhn… What's the name?

Pastel! Pastel with laces! That's the name you were looking for!

It was... cute! You it's definitely more colorful than your uniform. You're just happy you have received your first ever birthday gift, and that you don't have to wear only grey uniforms.

But wasn't the outfit a little short? A little too reveling?

Inside the box there were a couple more clothes inside. All had the same theme.

"- Well, I guess now I have matching outfits!" You joked with Ingrid, not really getting the whole picture just yet.

"- Ms. Bright, I'm really thankful for your gifts! I'm so happy that-" She interrupted you by putting a finger on your mouth.

"- Call me Ingrid, [Y/N]."

"- Oh, sure!" You said, registering the new rule.

"- …" She keeps staring at you tho. Waiting for a better response.

"- Ingrid…?" You said half asking as you didn't know exactly what she was waiting for, but after seeing the satisfaction on her face, you understood that you did right regardless.

She moved away and started packing her stuff, she was planning on going back to her house.

"- It's really late now, maybe when we get home I can repair you in peace." She said.

"- But… I always stay inside the office, don't I?" You asked, genuinely confused. She didn't need to go out of her way to fix you, you could just wait until tomorrow.

"- You used to. Come on, I'll bring you home." She picks you up. You aren't as heavy, the only thing causing some weight to be pulled down is your arms falling off. She was so excited!

"- Oh, well, I guess we'll be back in the morning right?" You asked her, and once again, you showed how naive you truly were.

"- Uhn, no, you won't be coming back. I will." She said bluntly.

"- Wait, what do -"

"- You won't be coming to work anymore, [Y/N]. You're staying inside my house."

"- But Ingrid-"

"- You aren't really the "corporation's property", so there isn't any problem of me bringing something that is mine to my house." She is rushing her pace so she can get to her car faster. God, she can't wait to throw herself on her bed.

"- Ah-" You were coming up with a hundred questions. But she decided to interrupt you so she can try and explain to you.

"- Look, before you make any more questions, let me clarify the situation. You are my android assistant right?" She does sound a little pissed, even she can tell, but please don't interpret it as she being mad at you.

I mean, she is just a little bit, but it is not your fault, you're just scared of the sudden turn of events!

You nod to her, feeling more and more confused and scared. But why would you be scared? You shouldn't be scared! Ingrid is your friend, and she is also your boss.

And she is also your owner.

"- So, I… I'm going to need you to stay inside my house from now on. You'll help me with my housework from now on. I don't need your services inside the corporation anymore."

' But I still need you in my life. As cheesy as that sounds.' She thought.

"- Oh, well, I'm glad I'm still of service!" She can't blame you for having a narrow-minded mentality. You were built to serve. Just that.

But, she does need you in her life. Her personal life. It's a complete mess after all, so she isn't completely lying.

Of course she won't let you do too much work. But she knows that throwing a new environment and new concepts to you all in one night can be pretty heavy. Can't have you steaming up and exploding on her, right?

All that matters is that you're happy, she is happy, and you're both hiding the truth.

🍭꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍮꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍰꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖♡🍮꒰⑅ᵕ༚ᵕ꒱˖🍭

#yandere #sheep stuff #yandere x reader #sheep's stuff #yandere oc fanfiction #yandere fanfiction #yandere oc #yandere ceo #yandere ceo x reader #yandere ceo x robot reader #yandere ceo fanfiction #special delivery request #special delivery fanfictions #unofficial oc #but who knows 👀

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apothecarinomicon · 3 years

Text

Spring week 1 part 3

I wasn’t sure how often I’d have patients, so I spent much of the rest of the week cleaning up around the property and sweeping the cobwebs out of the cottage. As much as I was willing to be friendly, I was not about to run right to the blacksmith and ask for a favor the same day I met him.

Or for several days after.

I think the golem might have used the last of its existing power getting here, because it didn’t move at all the entire time I was working on the property. If I ever locate my predecessor, I must remember to pick her brain on the finer details of how she made it. I assume it was her that made it, though it could really have been any of the previous owners of the cottage. I’m still not entirely comfortable thinking of myself as its owner, honestly—I feel more like a guest, or perhaps a tenant.

As I worked, my thoughts turned to the Bankhead family. Evander introduced himself as Aidan’s husband, just like that, plain and in public. The ease of it ran so counter to my own experience growing up in Huntsmanland that I hadn’t even processed it in the moment, automatically eliding it so that it could surface for real in my mind at a later time.

Is this the norm in High Rannoc? Is it only in Greenmoor? Or are the Bankheads perhaps rebellious activists? Is this a place where I might be free from the whispers and rumors and derision that followed me for my entire youth?

I suppose further observation is required.

I stopped working after a few hours, sweaty and tired. I was hoping to potentially find some easy reagents in the overgrowth and piles of stones, but no such luck befell me. The job’s not nearly complete, though, and I may be lucky yet.

I’m going to wash off and then head into town, to see if I can find any dishes or cutlery, or at least a few glass bottles. Maybe some lunch, too.

────⊱⁜⊰────

My trip into town did not go as I’d hoped. My mind is racing a bit at the moment but I’ll try to get this down in order.

The town’s tavern is called The Copper Fox. It sits right next to the inn, and by comparison looks almost comically squat. It was busy when I walked in—looked like more than half of the adults in the town were there. I walked to the bar, intending to ask what food was available. The man working behind the bar met me as I reached it and slid a stein into my hands, cutting off my question by saying “on the house.” He was about as squat as the building he worked in, balding and with a thick mustache and thin beard. He held my gaze for a long moment, with a meaning that I couldn’t quite comprehend. A request, perhaps, or an admonishment.

Or perhaps a warning.

There was a bard standing near one wall, singing and playing guitar. She was finishing a song as I walked in, but as the last chord faded I heard a couple voices from the crowd cry “again! again!”

Gleefully, she started up playing again to a round of cheers and the scattered clinking of silver. It was an old ballad I’d heard a few times before, a bit grisly for my taste. There are a few different variations, but the one she sang goes like this:

The taxman came to collect tax and roused Jack out of bed And Jack, alack, he took an axe and struck him o’er the head The taxman, he fell to the ground and writhed and moaned and bled And Jack, alack, he swung and swung to ensure he was dead

Hey nonny hey What a day what a day Hey nonny hey Stay away stay away

Jack dragged the corpse into town square and loud and bold he said “He came and tried to take what’s mine and now his debt is paid” The townsfolk, they all gathered ‘round, and not a bit afraid All the townsfolk laughed and leaped and threw him a parade

Hey nonny hey What a day what a day Hey nonny hey Stay away stay away

They all marched to the edge of town and facing the frontier They set the corpse down by the road, held upright on a bier With this grisly sculpture the town made its message clear: “Take your bullshit somewhere else. You are not welcome here!”

Hey nonny hey What a day what a day Hey nonny hey Stay away stay away

As I said, it's terribly grim. Still, it’s better than the version where an army comes to massacre the town as revenge for the tax collector.

It was halfway through the second chorus that I began to feel eyes on my back. I glanced around and caught several people quickly averting their eyes. I found this unnerving, to say the least, and it only got worse when I started to hear people whispering. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I recognized the tone. It was one that had followed me my entire childhood, one that made my outsider status clear. I was the other, worthy of derision, of sanction.

Of violence?

I got up and left quickly, without finishing my beer.

────⊱⁜⊰────

I decided to visit the bakery instead. Aidan and Evander had been nothing but kind to me. It turned out to be a good call. They had me come in and upstairs to their apartment, where they were eating what they hadn’t sold that day with their son MacKay. They shared their food with me. They made me feel welcome.

I asked how Aidan’s thumb was doing. He showed me the bandages and how he could squeeze it without pain. He touched it to his fork, and when he lifted his hand the fork didn’t come with it. All was well on that front, it seemed.

I asked after dishes and cutlery, mentioning that there didn’t seem to be any in the cottage. Aidan stood and said that when my predecessor vanished, they were the ones she gifted her kitchenware to. Since they already had a set, Aidan said it seemed only right that it go to the new resident of the cottage, and Evander agreed. I offered to pay but they said there was no need—it was a gift. I took what was offered and thanked them for it.

With a slight sense of belatedness, Evander asked to what they owed the pleasure. I hesitated, not wanting to dampen the mood or be too vulnerable or in any way risk losing what I was quickly beginning to think of as an oasis.

But then again, maybe there was some clarity to be gained here. I started explaining about going to The Copper Fox, and the bard performing the ballad. I hadn’t even gotten past explaining the content of the lyrics when MacKay preempted me, mumbling something along the lines of “yeah, I bet that made you uncomfortable.”

It was clearly meant to be a private comment to himself in the way of adolescents, but we could all make it out. Aidan said MacKay’s name sharply, in warning or reprimand, but I was already spider-webbing through the potential implications of his statement in my head. I asked them what that meant.

Aidan and Evander shared a glance, and seemed to silently come to an agreement.

I can’t usually remember well enough to give exact quotes, but Evander was picking his words so carefully that I recall them clearly. He said “there’s a rumor going around that you’re a... spy for the Government.”

I thought he meant people were saying I was working for the mayor, and I protested that that didn’t make any sense. I’d only met her once and wasn’t familiar enough to get any more than surface information.

“No,” he clarified. “Capital ‘G’ Government. Not the local one.” He said most of the townsfolks’ interaction with any governing body larger than the local government was when tax collectors did in fact come to town, or when some new ordinance was decreed that required public observance. It was all very mysterious to them and seemed unaware of and uninterested in their actual needs—and that bred suspicion and contempt. Any outsider became a potential threat.

However, Aidan added with a pointed look at MacKay, not everyone in town was foolish enough to buy into the rumors. MacKay protested that he didn’t believe them, that it was just a bit of hazing that every new person to the town had to undergo. He rattled off a couple of names I didn’t recognize before Evander cut him off by saying that just because it had been done before didn’t make it right to do again. MacKay countered that it wasn’t his idea, and that reprimanding him wouldn’t keep me safe from the adults who might take the rumors more seriously.

I asked what that meant—was I unsafe here? Evander and Aidan agreed that I absolutely was not. For the entire time they’d lived here (and for Aidan, that was his entire life), there had never been a case of significant violence between townsfolk. It would not come to that, they assured me.

Still, it’s all very nerve-wracking.

────⊱⁜⊰────

It’s the middle of the night and I’ve just thought of something. Clearly the bartender did think I was a Government agent there to suss out illegal activity, as Evander said.

Because if he didn’t, he would have had no reason to try and bribe me.

────⊱⁜⊰────

I decided perhaps it was best if I wasn’t around in town too much—they can’t call me a spy if I’m not spying, right? So, I decided to spend some of my down time exploring the wilderness around Greenmoor without the pressure of a patient waiting on me.

The two major remaining areas that seem reasonably safe to traverse with what resources I have currently are Glimmerwood Grove and Hero’s Hollow. I wasn’t much in the mood to deal with a dungeon today—nor the denizens and adventurers therein—so the choice was fairly clear. I brought Ailean with me, so I could better attune with her, and so she might help with the secondary reason for my outing.

In addition to just wanting to be out of town, I went to the grove to see if I could find a princess toad, which one of my predecessor’s notes mentioned lived in the tangled undergrowth. Not only are several of their byproducts useful reagents, but I thought it might be nice to give Ailean some company—or at least show her where she could find it if she ever grew bored.

Glimmerwood Grove is genuinely beautiful, a forest in full Spring bloom. The undergrowth is dense, and seems reluctant to accept any human attempts to create walking paths—it encroaches upon or obscures even those close to the edge of the wood. Despite the near-total cover of the canopy, the entire place is kept well-lit by some means invisible to me (hence, I suppose, ‘Glimmerwood’). The whole place has an air of magic to it.

As I walked further into the grove, I found (as predicted) less and less path to follow. The patches that were bare of undergrowth this deep were blanketed by healthy colonies of moss. The sound of bells came faintly, from where I couldn’t tell.

I was staring off to my left—I thought I’d seen movement in between the trees and was looking to see if I could catch more—when Ailean made a noise that brought my attention to the ground in front of me. There, I saw a clutter of small pellets. Having lived with Ailean for nearly a week, I could recognize the size and shape as those of toad droppings, but the color was a strange lavender.

Well, I may not have found the toad itself, but these droppings were a useful reagent all their own. I used a small scoop (I brought it with me on my journey from Edith’s) and gathered enough for one use. There wasn’t enough for two, and despite its color the smell was enough to dissuade me from storing any more than I needed.

I got what I needed onto the scoop and stood, and that’s when I saw it.

Standing a few meters down the path was a pure white horse with a horn coming out of its forehead. It was looking directly at me, standing stock still. Sitting here writing this, I’m still shaken. Unicorns are of the domain of bedtime stories, fairy legends, explorers’ tales. They aren’t real.

And yet.

I went to take a step towards it and it immediately turned and trotted away into the woods. I could have sworn it grew translucent before it disappeared among the trees.

My first week here has been… fucking hell, it’s been a lot. That was just the cherry on top.

An enormous, unheard of, vaguely portentous cherry.

I’m going to bed.

⇦●〇●⇨

#writing #writeblr #writblr #fantasy #amwriting #writers on tumblr #original writing #apothecaria #entry #creative writing #fiction #rpg #roleplaying game #high rannoc #writeblr community #writers

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aminiatureworld · 4 years

Text

Hypnos

Ship: Geralt x Jaskier

Warnings: None

Premise: Jaskier realizes how unbearable sleeping next to one's unrequited love can be. Luckily that setup doesn't last forever.

Author’s Note: What was supposed to be a short fic went into the wee hours of the night, and since I wrote another fic (putting today's word count since midnight at above 3k) this isn't actually all that proofread, apologies in advance.

Hope you enjoy and thank you to all 33 people who liked/reblogged my last one. I’m eternally grateful to you all for being so kind!

Jaskier was beginning to wish that he’d just agreed to sleep on the floor. It was high summer and a bit of a dry season for Geralt. Jaskier had joked once that perhaps the heatwave was too much for the monsters, that they were probably all off on vacation in the north, and honestly he was beginning to believe his own joke more and more, for not only was the coin scarce, but half of the time the bard wondered if his boots weren’t one day going to simply meld to his feet, and he’d never be able to take them off again. The humidity didn’t help his singing much either. Not only was his voice not appreciating the sudden spikes in temperature, dreadfully hot in the beginning of the night and cool enough in the morning to cause complaining in his throat, but his lute was also suffering, as the wood kept swelling and throwing off the pitch, the pegs constantly sticking and refusing to turn. This certainly didn’t help in terms of funding, so when Geralt had suggested they’d share a bed to stave off sleeping under the stars, this town didn’t seem to have a nice patch of grass within ten miles of it, Jaskier had readily accepted, as the floor was terribly splintered and had a suspicious stickiness about it that kept them both with their shoes on.

Now however he wondered if it wasn’t worth getting a mysterious illness for a little bit of sleep, for sleeping next to Geralt seemed in the moment like the most difficult task Jaskier had yet to attempt while following the Witcher around, for although it was indeed frustratingly hot, although the bed was indeed small and cramped, and although the open window indeed let in more stench than breeze, none of that was comparable to the anxious feeling that was bubbling up in Jaskier’s stomach, or the tautness of his senses, as he now seemed to be aware of every little movement that came from the sleeping man next to him.

He kept his back to the Witcher, hoping that would ease the anxious feeling in his chest, the sweat running down his chest, half due to the heat, to his nerves. Whether it was indeed better than facing Geralt, Jaskier couldn’t tell, as it seemed every little movement he made caused such an obnoxious creaking that flipping over was quite out of the question. His every nerve seemed to be begging for sleep, his eyelids kept sliding closed, yet quickly he’d open them again, for his mind kept racing with all sorts of scenarios where he accidentally kicked Geralt, or got too close or, gods forbid, found himself tangled with the Witcher. Not that he didn’t want that of course, indeed Jaskier sometimes felt he wanted that too much, for being around Geralt had the sometimes unfortunate side effect of cause such a tightness and fluttering in his chest, as well as, well, other things. Still it was a lot easier to temper that with occasional flirting, which Geralt never seemed to pick up on; references in songs, also unnoticed; and a bit of secret staring, Jaskier was glad that hadn’t been found out yet; than to deal with the very immediate consequences of being stuck in bed next to the man that Jaskier wouldn’t hesitate to throw his heart at, if he thought Geralt wouldn’t catch it and toss it out the window. Straining his eyes to stare at the window, Jaskier wondered what decisions he made to get here and, accepting sleep was going to be in short supply that night, prayed to whatever god was listening that he’d never have to deal with this situation again.

Unfortunately whatever god was listening must’ve had a tight schedule for it was barely a week and a half before the situation happened again. Geralt had apparently felt nothing from their previous bed sharing, so when they’d landed in a particularly crowded inn he’d simply looked at Jaskier and said “I guess we’re sharing again tonight.” Jaskier had simply nodded dumbly, hit with such a wave of panic that he’d not managed to think of any sort of good excuse, and now here they were again, and here again was Jaskier wondering where it’d all gone wrong. It was a cooler night at least, though cooler was hardly the same as comfortable this year, and his nightshirt still stuck to his back, drenched in sweat. Somehow the bed seemed even tighter than the last one, and though Jaskier had managed last time not to run into his companion, he wasn’t quite so sure about this time around. Half of him wondered if the night wasn’t simply better spent in front of the window writing music by moonlight, but they were simply passing by this village, and tomorrow was going to be spent on the road, so sleep was a desperate need. Scooting slightly more into the bed, at least it seemed to be less creaky than its predecessor, Jaskier felt his back touch the Witcher. So that was how much space he had. Silently cursing the inn for only having two pillows per bed, Jaskier’s standard was usually closer to five, Jaskier lay shifted so his left arm wasn’t completely pinned underneath him and, praying that this would be another uneventful night, drifted off into a fitful sleep.

Jaskier woke up in darkness. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was, having been in the middle of an incredibly odd dream featuring a bunch of random schoolmates and a series of differently colored doors, also was there a war going on? Shivering slightly, it was awfully cold, Jaskier groped around for some sort of blanket. Unfortunately those seemed in short supply, and, quickly growing too tired to continue the search, Jaskier simply saddled up to the source of heat next to him and, vaguely thinking this was quite the odd pillow and had he simply not woken up, drifted off back to sleep.

The room that the two men had rented faced the dawn, and thus the sky was still slightly purple when Jaskier woke up. Blinking heavily a few times, the first thing that hit Jaskier was the freshness of the air, the second thing that his him was the pair of arms around him. A more efficient alarm there never was, and as Jaskier was aware of that he also became exceedingly aware of the fact that, during the night, his sleep ridden mind had apparently decided that wrapping ones arms around and nuzzling ones face into the chest of one’s unrequited love was a perfectly reasonable and sane thing to do. Now however Jaskier was discovering, indeed, that wasn’t the sanest or most reasonable thing to do. He wondered how he might get himself out of this situation without waking the Witcher when he heard a sleep filled “Jaskier” come from the lips of the man who he’d wrapped his arms around. Looking up at the sleepy Witcher, the sleepy Witcher who’d evidently not processed the situation, Jaskier felt the familiar burning in his heart and in his chest, the bittersweet warmth of falling in love, for at this point it most certainly wasn’t simple infatuation, with someone who’d never return the feeling. For a moment he felt a pang of jealousy, jealousy towards anyone who’d the Witcher had let into his heart, for sometimes Jaskier couldn’t be sure what his place was in that sense, whether he lay outside the walls of Geralt’s defense or not, but that quickly faded, replaced by the familiar tenderness the bard felt. Geralt was too good for that kind of jealousy anyhow.

Moments passed and Jaskier waited for Geralt to do something, to grow embarrassed or some such thing. But though his face turned an interesting glow of red, Geralt had yet to react, and for a moment time seemed to freeze, neither party making any move to break the odd spell, the situation they’d landed themselves in. Finally Jaskier made a half hearted move to go, but though Geralt slackened his arms around the bard’s neck he made no move to untangle himself. Finding the entire situation more and more unbearable by the moment, Jaskier felt the tension rising by the second. Finally a sort of desperation came over him and, seeming to realize at the moment how terrible an idea this was, Jaskier lifted his head and gave Geralt a quick kiss on the cheek.

If nothing else that certainly did the trick. Geralt’s face grew red as an overripe tomato, and he quickly lurched up to a sitting position. Jaskier did too and, realizing that he’d probably just thrown their whole relationship down the drain, began a string of apologies. “Geralt, I’m so sorry. You don’t… I don’t… we don’t have to go down a path even intersectional with that. I just, I suppose it was just that you’d made no gesture to move, and, well, I’ve kinda been wanting to kiss you for ages and ages now, but I really value your friendship more than anything like that, so we can just pretend that it didn’t happen if you want and I’m so very sorry!”

Geralt up to this point had made neither to move nor to speak, only sort of staring at Jaskier in what the bard supposed was a shocked sort of expression, really Geralt had such a hand on the reins of his facial expressions it was hard to tell, but seeing that the bard was at least pausing for breath he leaned closer. Immediately all thoughts were dashed from Jaskier’s brain. He felt a sort of disbelief that the Witcher hadn’t simply left yet, a disbelief that grew intensely when instead Geralt made to cup Jaskier’s cheek with his hand. Leaning slightly into the touch Jaskier still shook his head slightly. “I, I don’t understand.”

“May… may I show you?” Geralt gazed down at Jaskier, moving closer so their faces were inches apart. His mind working overtime, the situation finally clicked in Jaskier’s mind, and at that moment he felt such a lightness and joy that it seemed to completely black out the rest of the world.

“Yes please.” He breathed out before Geralt brought his lips to Jaskier’s and all else was immediately forgotten.

It had taken a much longer time for the two to get on the road than expected, though Jaskier, feeling delightfully spent, didn’t mind the disruption, and thus by the time night fell it was abundantly clear that they’d be camping, for the next town was still some miles away. As Jaskier began rolling out the beds he placed the two right next to one another, smiling devilishly at Geralt, who beamed fondly back. Jaskier’s smile also softened into an affectionate one, and he joined his companion who was currently focusing on building their fire. Plopping down next to Geralt, Jaskier began playing a soft theme, the kind that didn’t bring attention to itself while still being beautiful enough to be worthwhile.

“Sooo.” He spoke up. “Might I ask now about your affections towards me, I know I’m quite irresistible of course but I’d still like to hear it, and why you’d been so reticent about it?”

“You said nothing.” Geralt pointed out, but there was no attack in the words, only a sort of fondness. “And, well, people connected to me are always cheated by Fate. Everyone I’ve met who I’ve, well,” he threw his hands up slightly, “they’ve all met bad ends. I didn’t want that again. Not for me, yes, but not for you.” He gazed softly at Jaskier. “You deserve better.”

“Nonsense,” Jaskier replied softly, “I deserve only you, perhaps not even that, perhaps I’m not even good enough for that. But I’d still have you, if you’d have me.” He paused.

“I thought I made that quite clear.” Geralt replied softly, and, arms sliding around the bard’s waist, who in turn threw his arms around the Witcher’s neck, made to prove it.

#the first two books in the series arrived today and I'm so excited to read them #I finally wrote a kiss scene guys!#I mean it's a bit shit but whooooops #Sorry again this isn't well proofread normally I do better #geralt x jaskier #jaskier #geralt of rivia #geraskier #the witcher #witcher #witcher fanfiction #witcher fanfic #fanfiction #fanfic #oneshot #mine

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notapaladin · 3 years

Text

we are all walking each other home

Did anyone order plotless summer family fluff by the pool with snow cones? No? Too bad, that’s all I got. In which Acatl and Teomitl and their family have a good day.

Also on AO3!

If the young and devastatingly attractive Revered Speaker of Tenochtitlan wanted to invite his Imperial Consort’s close family to the palace to stave off the heat of the rainy season in his gardens and pools, none of them were going to gainsay him—especially not Acatl. Though his obligations nagged at him, he could set them down for a few hours to spend time with his brother and sisters. It would be nice to simply rest for once; Teomitl insisted it was the least he deserved.

Though I’m not sure how restful this is going to be, he thought. The gardens Teomitl had inherited from his predecessors were certainly lovely enough, all lush greenery and tiled fountains, even if they couldn’t measure up to his lover’s dreams for his own under-construction palace across the Sacred Precinct from Acatl’s temple. If they’d been left alone to walk the paths and stretch out under the trees, Acatl imagined he’d find it comfortable enough. But they weren’t alone, and that made all the difference. He was glad to have mended his relationship with his other sisters, he loved his nieces and nephews to distraction, but all of them together in the same space was...

“Ollin, stop running by the water! You’ll fall!”

“So then I said to Citlalli, I said...”

“And nobody’s offered for you yet, Coaxoch? Why, when I was your age—”

“Auntie!”

...Well. It was a lot.

He’d claimed a seat at the farthest end of one of the intricately dyed reed mats Teomitl had had spread out, watching the chaos unfold from under the shade of a sprawling tree. Ollin had not stopped running; he and a few of his similarly aged cousins had all gotten into what appeared to be an impromptu game of tag with Acatl’s dog Miton, who was yipping up a delighted storm and wagging his tail so fast it was an orange-tipped blur. His sisters Nelli and Icnoyotl had shown up gossiping about something someone’s brother had done and hadn’t so much as paused for breath since, with their husbands providing increasingly colorful—and increasingly loud—commentary. Mihmatini, enormously pregnant, had lowered herself into the waist-deep pool nearby and kept dropping down to dunk her entire body underwater in a way that suggested she was trying to either muffle her nephews’ shrieking or grow gills, whichever happened first. And Teomitl?

Teomitl was in his element. He’d shed all his finery save for the emerald piercing his septum—still too new to be removed so soon in the healing process—but he didn’t need any, not with the way he was crouched down and beaming at Nelli’s fourth daughter showing him a bug she’d caught. It could have melted a stone; Acatl’s heart didn’t stand a chance. He knew he was smiling helplessly, knew his adoration would be clear to anyone so much as sparing him a passing glance, but just then he didn’t care. I love you. I love you. You’re going to be a wonderful father.

“My lords!”

A few of his family members twitched. Nobody except Teomitl seemed to think that the servants carrying trays loaded with bowls of compacted mountain snow and pitchers of fruit juice were talking to them; he, meanwhile, sprang up and announced, “Ices for everyone! Excellent, set them down just there.”

“We get ice?!” That was Nelli’s daughter, her voice rising in a delighted shriek.

“You get ice,” Mihmatini informed her, accepting Teomitl’s arm to heave herself out of the pool with a grunt. “Eat it before it melts.”

Nobody quite swarmed the trays—they were all too polite or too overawed by the match their Mihmatini had made—but there was a general purposeful drift in that direction. Even Teomitl’s gray-and-white hound Ehecatzin slunk over hopefully to try to steal some; when one of Acatl’s brothers-in-law nudged him away, he settled for being scratched behind the ears. Miton, more singleminded, had to be ordered to sit. Acatl watched, finding himself disinclined to move. It was true that snow carried down from the mountains was a treat reserved for those of imperial blood or imperial alliances, especially on such a hot day, but he didn’t really feel like inserting himself into the crowd when everyone was debating fruit toppings.

Eventually, Teomitl padded over with a bowl in each hand, stretching out his long legs as he sat down. It was closer than he ought to be with so many eyes around them, but once again Acatl found he couldn’t really mind. Not when Teomitl was quirking up a smile as he set down a bowl of pineapple-drenched ice for him.

“Brought you some,” he said quietly. Not that he needed to keep his voice down; there was no way to put two dogs and over a dozen people in one space and not have it be loud enough to drown out any conversation they might have. Still, Acatl appreciated the discretion.

He picked up the bowl, noting that Teomitl’s own was the violently pink shade only pitaya fruit juice could give. The runners were fast and the ice had been stored well; it was still cold enough to chill his fingers through the clay. “I would have gotten up.”

“You looked comfortable.” There was another of those soft, sunny smiles, and he couldn’t help smiling in return.

“Mm. So did you.” His lover was always at his best in a friendly crowd, laughing and joking until his family saw past the jade and turquoise to the man beneath. All that energy needed a purpose. Rather like our dogs, he mused, but he knew better than to ever say that out loud even if they did all share a tendency to snore.

Teomitl shifted a little closer, so that they almost touched. The fingers of his free hand twitched as though he wanted to twine them with Acatl’s own. “I’m more comfortable here.”

Then he licked at his half-melted cup of snow, erasing all chances of Acatl managing to reply. The fruit juice was staining his lips and tongue; though he was graceful as he usually was when eating, a drop clung to the corner of his mouth and Acatl itched to brush it away. He didn’t. He wasn’t sure he could move. Teomitl made a soft noise of pure pleasure that sent a lightning surge of want through his veins, and he couldn’t look away. “Ngh.”

Teomitl cast a glance at him from under lowered lashes, lips curving in a wicked smile. “Hm?”

They couldn’t possibly be any more in public. Taking a deep breath, he wrenched his mind away from memories of what that tongue could do. “Nothing.”

Teomitl hummed, smugly pleased with himself, and motioned to their bowls. “Have some. It’s good.”

He studied his bowl for a moment before trying it; there were chunks of fruit as well as juice, cold and sweet enough to make his teeth hurt. The pain was well worth it, because it was delicious. He let his eyes slide closed as he ate, focusing on the sensations around him—the warmth of the sun through dappled shade, the chill of the ice on his tongue, the tingling awareness of Teomitl’s body next to his, the happy chatter of his nieces and nephews and siblings. He caught slivers of conversation too, Necalli’s first campaign and Nelli’s recipe for washing blood from dyed cotton mingling in his ears. His heart felt like a tiny sun.

This is what makes life living. He inhaled, breathing in the scents of fruit and crushed grass and warm water. The flowers, the jade. Mihmatini was right.

Eventually, all the ice was gone. He was aware of his siblings’ conversations around him; two of his brothers-in-law were discussing the weather with the grave importance it deserved, while his sisters were discussing Mihmatini’s pregnancy with a frankness that was turning Icnoyotl’s always-squeamish husband Chimalli slightly green. The children, unsurprisingly, were the first to throw themselves back into the water; Neutemoc and Chimalli were next, theoretically to keep an eye on them but actually to tow the smallest ones around in the water while they screeched with joy. Teomitl, still eyeing the remains of his ice as though there might possibly be some fruit left, actually set the bowl down and perked up at the sight.

Acatl nudged him. “Go on, help them corral the flock. It’ll be good practice for you.”

Teomitl’s smile was a little crooked, a little helpless, and terribly endearing. “I hope the baby gets along with its cousins.”

“They’ll certainly have plenty of options,” he replied dryly. Between Neutemoc’s five and all his sisters’ spawn, Teomitl’s child would have over a dozen cousins to play with by the time it was born. As always when he thought of it, he sent a brief mental prayer to the gods for Mihmatini’s continued health. She’s the Guardian of the Sacred Precinct. The Imperial Consort of the Revered Speaker. And she’d have my head for fretting over her.

“...They will.” Now the smile was wistful. “Your family is wonderful.”

He nudged him a little harder. “Our family. Or did you forget you chose this?”

Mihmatini was sliding back into the pool, and Teomitl’s eyes followed her for a moment. His fingers just barely grazed the back of Acatl’s hand. “Hmm. I did choose this, didn’t I?”

Then Teomitl left his side and plunged into the water, and he realized that he had perhaps miscalculated.

His lover was always beautiful, whether he was in a warrior’s armor or all the gold and feathers of his office. Even in the plainest clothing, the curve of his cheekbones and the brightness of his smile could take Acatl’s breath away. He’d thought, with the years they’d been together, that nothing could surprise him anymore.

Duality preserve him, he was wrong. He’d never seen Teomitl like this—all rippling water and rippling muscle, laughing and shaking water from his hair as Mihmatini splashed him playfully and Ollin clung whooping to his arm. Droplets hung sparkling in the sunlight like stars, running in rivulets down the well-sculpted lines of his chest and stomach. Surrounded by water—surrounded by family, head flung back in brilliant careless joy—he was more magnificent than he’d been at his coronation. Acatl had just eaten, but he felt as hungry as Toci. I love you. The words beat in tune with his heart. I want you.

Every line of his body felt like a taut bowstring, but he couldn’t move. If he moved, he was going to do something stupid.

Neutemoc’s voice snapped him out of his trance. His brother leaned on his elbows at the edge of the pool, water dripping off him onto the tiles, and flashed him a tired grin. “I’m sweating just looking at you, Acatl. Join us!”

“Nhm,” he managed.

Teomitl lowered Ollin back into the water and gave Acatl a grin of his own. “Please?”

Well, it was hot. But he was still strangely reluctant to move, and it took a long moment before he could stand up, stretch well enough that something in his back stopped complaining, and amble over to the water. The sun hadn’t warmed it as much as he thought; when he slid down into it, he had to clench his teeth at the chill. For a while he simply stood next to his brother, watching their family play.

Neutemoc elbowed him. “See? Told you it was better in the water.”

He nodded. True, they were surrounded by bright flowers and screaming life, but it was...peaceful, here. It reminded him of his childhood, before their father had died and everything had started to go so wrong. No. He shook his head, banishing that line of thought. Today had been wonderful so far, and that was how it would stay. He was standing in cool, clear water with a belly full of delicious food and his family around him. His nieces had roped Teomitl into some sort of splash-based war that involved a great deal of high-pitched giggling on all sides, whereas his older nephews were skipping the splashing in favor of an impromptu and very messy wrestling match. He was on the sidelines, content to observe.

And then someone’s errant flailing limb sprayed him with a fine mist, and he jolted out of his reverie.

“Sorry!” Teomitl called. It would have sounded much more sincere if he wasn’t grinning.

“Hrmph,” he grumbled, closing his eyes. He knew he was failing at suppressing his own smile, and Teomitl must be able to see it.

The peace of his immediate surroundings didn’t last long. The sounds of splashing water grew louder and closer, and his nieces’ shrieks took on the sort of gleeful pitch he associated with trouble. Oh no.

That was all the warning he got before a gout of water arced down and drenched him completely. He yelped, inhaling water, and as he coughed and spluttered and caught his breath he decided that someone was about to be in deep trouble. Grimacing, he scraped his hair back from his face, blinked water out of his eyes, and looked around for the perpetrator.

The unrepentant perpetrator. “You looked hot?”

He took a deep breath and leveled a glare at his lover. “Teomitl.”

“Ah,” Teomitl began.

And then Acatl taught him one of the benefits of growing up with a brother close in age. Namely, when you had someone who was willing and able to throw you into the nearest body of water at any opportunity, you got very good at fighting back in kind. He pushed off from the wall, wading rapidly towards him; before Teomitl could scramble out of range, Acatl’s arm came up to splash him in the face. “You asked for this!”

Teomitl danced out of the way, a grin splitting his face, and wasted no time splashing Acatl back. “Is it war, then?!”

It was war. Their nieces and nephews joined in, splashing both of them indiscriminately; Acatl reeled under the onslaught, but managed to stay on his feet no matter the weight of his wet hair. Teomitl was stronger than he was, but unused to fighting such a battle. It was easy to back him against the edge of the pool. And then the dogs, wanting to be a part of the fun, plunged into the water in a cacophony of howls and a storm of wagging tails, and he had to stagger back as Miton all but flopped on top of him.

“Bad dog—ack!” Opening his mouth was a mistake, for Teomitl took advantage of his distraction to splash his face again. He glared at his lover through the curtain of his dripping hair.

Teomitl took one look at his face and his eyes went wide; Acatl had a moment of satisfaction before his lover ducked sideways, dodging behind a very surprised Necalli. “Protect me!”

Just as quickly, Necalli darted out of the way. “My lord uncle, you are on your own.”

Teomitl was the furthest thing from a coward, but evidently he had learned when discretion was to be the better part of valor. He turned and waded rapidly for the far edge of the pool.

“Get back here--!”

Teomitl laughed brightly. “You’ll have to catch me first, Acatl!”

Oh, so that’s how it is. Feeling his face split into an unaccustomed grin, Acatl ran after him. Teomitl was younger, faster, and in better shape; but when he heaved himself out of the water and took off down the path, Acatl wasn’t too far behind. As he ran, he realized he didn’t have a plan, but he didn’t need one; it was a beautiful summer day, his blood was pumping, and he was alive. That was all that mattered. Teomitl swerved around a densely-flowered shrub, and he followed.

Whoever had planned the layout of the palace gardens had desired privacy; it was darker and quieter here, the chaos of the pool muffled by the greenery. Anything beyond that Acatl didn’t have a chance to absorb, however, because Teomitl was grabbing him and pulling him into a hot, hungry kiss.

Oh.

That was the last coherent thought he had for a while. His mind was full of Teomitl—of the heat of his wet skin, the strength of the arms around him, the way he still tasted of pitaya juice and mountain snow. One hand settled at his waist; the other slid up into his hair, burying into the thick strands until a soft growl of pleasure reverberated through them both. His body knew just what to do, arching to press himself even closer, and when he dug his nails into Teomitl’s back he was rewarded with a whine. If he didn’t need to breathe, he could have kissed him for hours.

When Teomitl pulled away, mouth red and eyes glittering with desire, he whispered, “I missed you. I’ve been wanting to do that all day.”

He wasn’t the only one. But before he could say that, a calloused hand slid down his spine, and Acatl sucked in a hard breath at the way Teomitl’s hips pressed against his own. His blood was still up, but now all that simmering energy was alert to a new purpose. “It’s only been a few hours.”

Teomitl’s expression turned wicked as that hand reached his ass, giving it a lingering squeeze. “And? You’re irresistable.”

Perhaps there was the occasional downside to having such a young and enthusiastic lover, he thought. Out loud, he huffed, “The children will hear us.”

“They’re playing with the dogs.”

The barking, splashing, and cheering ringing through the gardens were loud enough to muffle them—if they were careful. Still, Acatl bit his lip and shook his head. Children were one thing; his nosy sisters were another thing entirely. “My siblings will hear us.”

Teomitl scowled lightly at that. “Am I Revered Speaker or not?”

“Teomitl!” he hissed.

The scowl vanished as though it had never been. Teomitl lowered his head to nuzzle at Acatl’s throat, voice so soft it was almost inaudible. Any sweetness was tempered by the way he drew his nails lightly up the column of Acatl’s spine, hard enough to sting pleasantly but not enough to leave a mark. As his lover’s lips moved against his skin, Acatl shivered. “We’ll be quiet.”

It was tempting. Gods, it was tempting. Teomitl kissed him again, long and slow, and he felt his resolve weakening. His family could entertain themselves for a few minutes, surely. Half an hour. He would prefer more time—would prefer to give Teomitl his full attention all night—but he wasn’t a fool to turn down what was so freely offered. The breeze was cold in the shade, but that didn’t matter when his lover was so warm in his arms, the slide of skin on skin setting his blood on fire. “Mmm...”

“Come on,” Teomitl breathed, and shifted to press a thigh between his legs. Acatl found himself wishing briefly and desperately that they’d have the forethought to hide against something solid, but then Teomitl was mouthing at his throat and he wasn’t thinking anything at all.

“Nngh...” At any other time, he might have been embarrassed at the whine that escaped him, but shame was very far away at the moment. His self-control was hanging only be a few very thin threads, and only the din of his family gathering not nearly far enough away was keeping it in place. We could. They’re having fun without us; they won’t be looking for us yet. But...

But they could. Of course Mihmatini knew, and he was almost sure that Neutemoc did as well, though of course they’d never discussed it beyond the most vague assurances that yes, he was perfectly happy—but his other sisters were clueless, and the thought of their reactions if they discovered him in Teomitl’s arms was enough to turn his bones to ice. Reluctantly, he panted, “No. We shouldn’t.”

Teomitl sighed and pulled back, but he kept Acatl within the circle of his arms as though he couldn’t bear to let him go. “I hate when you’re reasonable.”

“No, you don’t,” he murmured fondly.

When Acatl lifted a hand to cup his cheek, Teomitl tilted his head into it with a faint stirring of a smile. “...No, I don’t.”

There was a particularly loud splash from the direction of the pool, and Acatl winced. “Let’s get back before they wonder where we’ve gone.”

“Mm.” With one final caress, Teomitl let him go. “Alright.”

Later, there would be dinner; later, there would be dancers and musicians to entertain them. Later, he and Teomitl would be properly alone. But for now, they would bask in the warmth of their family and the bonds they’d made.

#obsidian and blood #acatl #teomitl #mihmatini #neutemoc #teocatl #mihmitl #neutemoc's brood #paladin writes stuff

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blissfulalchemist · 3 years

Note

"steam rising from a bowl of soup" + dealer's choice!

Dealer’s choice said....

“I don’t care that it’s an inconvenience for you,” Stasia rolled her eyes, arm crossing over her chest, “You’re there to keep things under control.” Fifteen minutes, that’s how long she had spent talking to Jack, well arguing was probably the better term. She rubbed her temple listening to the flimsy excuses of her underling, calculating the time it would take to fly down there herself and fix the situation. “Jack I need you to fix this, that’s all I’m asking of you. If you think it’s an inconvenience for yourself imagine how much of one it’ll be for me if I have to go down there.”

His excuses continued as Stasia looked up at Carly, with her pale skin and blood red eyes, giving a small smile. Carly returned it making her way to the stove in the three bedroom house lifting the lid to inspect the contents inside. Stasia paced the kitchen lips tightening into a thin line, “Look I’m going to give you ten hours to fix this whole situation or to at least be in the process of doing so, got it?” She paused her eyes narrowing as she lowered her voice, “Jack if I have to go down there, you will regret it.” Stasia hung up the phone tossing it onto the table as Carly set the fresh bowl of soup in front of it. “You know I miss when you could slam a phone closed.”

“Or slam them against the cradle,” Carly laughed lightly, her smile widening showing off her elongated canines, “Can’t tell you how many of both I broke.” The two women laughed as they took a seat, Stasia leaning down to the bowl, steam brushing along her cheekbones. “Should I start making arrangements for the jet, Stasia?”

“Hm,” she waved her hand, “Not yet, no. They’re all incompetent but Jack is the least out of them all.”

“Which Jack is it?” Carly asked resting her chin on her hand, “Hit the Road Jack or Jack Hammer?”

“The one in New York,” Stasia smiled with a small eye roll, “You just love giving all of them code names?”

The pale woman shrugged leaning back in the chair, “Makes it easier to keep track of the region and we have like five different Jacks in leader positions.” Carly bit her lower lip focusing on the space behind Stasia, “New York is Jack DiCaprio, I don’t think that’s saying much.” Carly’s eyes focused back on Stasia as she brought the spoon to her mouth, “I can make some calls, have Hugo on the ready.”

Stasia gave a nod, a smile coming onto her face as she took the first bite, “My god Carly, you managing to keep your cooking prowess after all these years seems unnatural.” Carly smiled, head tilting down pushing a strand of hair back behind her ear, some human habits never left, her embarrassed mannerisms being the most prominent. “I am forever grateful that I get to be the one to reap that fact,” Stasia praised taking another bite, the phone vibrating once more.

She rolled her eyes, “I’ll go and make the call,” Carly said softly making her way to the basement of the house.

Stasia answered, putting the phone on speaker, “This better be life or death Jaqueline,” Maybe we do have too many Jacks.

“Kind of,” the woman on the other end replied, “We lost hold of Bexley ma’am.”

Her spoon clattered into the bowl, “You WHAT!”

“We lost-.”

“I heard you the first time,” she growled, rubbing her forehead, “What I want to know is how you managed to lose hold of it?”

“Uh,” Jaqueline’s voice wavered, “Well there’s a new Strigoi, he was some MMA fighter or something, and well he’s wanting to have a region to call his own.”

“And that’s it?”

“Well he’s very charismatic,” the woman added quickly, “Some of the uh women and men helped him.”

“Some of our people helped him.”

“That’s correct ma’am.”

Stasia took a deep breath, “So what do you plan on doing to get Bexley back?”

“Uhm,” Stasia could hear the movement of the woman shifting, “Well I was hoping to get your input on that.”

Stasia stayed silent, the woman doing the same for the next ten seconds, “Well tell me your plan.”

“Right, uh, yeah. My plan.”

“You don’t even have a plan,” she slammed her hand on the table, standing, “So what you just thought you could call me and I’d have one magically ready for you?” The woman on the phone stuttered, “That’s not how this works Jaqueline. I put you in charge so you could put out fires like this, so that I can focus on the bigger picture. I can’t keep coming over and doing your job for you otherwise what’s the point of having you around, hm.”

“I-I- Well you’re right. I’m sorry. I’ll- I’ll get. I’ll take care of this.”

Stasia crossed her arm, resting it in the crook of her elbow, “You better, because as your predecessor would tell you,” she lowered her voice, “there are no second chances.”

“But didn’t you uh,” the woman started to ask, swallowing hard, “You know uh that doesn’t matter. I’m gonna go and get right on remedying the situation.”

The woman hung up, Stasia gripping the phone, knuckles white, teeth grinding, “INGRATES!”

Her free hand shot out slapping the ceramic bowl off the table, its destination the wall to her right. The pieces fell ringing in Stasia’s ears, her hands resting on the table, nails digging into the dark wood. Carly approached her quietly, hand reaching out to her shoulder, “How hard is it to keep an eye on territory, Carly? Tell me, because you seemed to handle it just fine all those years ago.”

“Well back in my day,” Carly’s voice taking on a crotchety lilt, “I made sure there was loyalty among my faction, all I needed was a good punch.” The corners of Stasia’s lips quirked briefly in a smile, “You know how these kids are, they think the way to win is through mind games only.”

Stasia let out a sigh, “It makes it irritating,” her eyes met Carly’s, “Did you get Hugo on standby?”

She nodded, “Just needs to know where we’re going.”

“I hope you’re craving British,” Carly groaned, “We lost Bexley.”

Carly’s mouth fell open, “How-. We lost Bexley.” Stasia gave a short nod, “That should have been the easiest to keep an eye on.”

“Well Jaqueline had some traitors in her midst.”

Carly rolled her eyes, throwing her hands up, “Of course it’s Jaque the Ripper.” She shook her head, “I’ll call him and let him know we’ll be leaving after your-.”

The sharp ring of the doorbell had both women looking to the front of the house, Stasia glancing at the clock on the wall. Still too early for her apprentices to be showing up for their lessons. Carly gave a nod, making her way back down to the basement, Stasia glancing through the peephole once she made it to the door. She cocked a brow seeing the multi-colored hair of her newest addition. “Tia,” she greeted, opening the door, smile easily coming to her face, “I didn’t expect you to come by until later.”

The young woman looked down, pushing some hair behind her ear, “I know, I’m sorry. I just-,” Tia inhaled deeply, “I need to talk to you Stella.”

Stasia opened the door farther, “Of course, sweetie, come in.” Tia nodded, shoulders hunching over as she made her way over the threshold, “Can I get you anything to drink? Tea or water perhaps?”

Tia swallowed, shaking her head, Stasia catching a glimpse of the tears in the twenty year old’s eyes, “No thank you.”

Stasia put her arms around Tia’s shoulders, guiding her to the living room sofa, “Honey what happened?” The tears started to fall as the two women sat down on the sofa, “Oh Tia,” Stasia whispered, pulling her closer, smoothing her hair, “You can tell me anything.”

She nodded, sniffling, “I know. I know, but I-I have to drop out of my lessons with you.” She pulled away wiping at her face, “I have to go back home for a- Well I don’t know how long actually.”

Stasia’s brows knitted together, “What happened at home, sweetie?”

“My mom’s sick,” Tia whispered, eyes cast down, “I have to go and take care of her.”

“Your mom’s sick,” Stasia repeated, as the young woman nodded, “Well that’s terrible. I’m so sorry.” She smoothed the dyed hair, “Don’t worry about the lessons,” Tia’s eyes went wide, “You have enough skill to be able to practice on your own.”

“But I might not have the time to learn what you want to be teaching me. She might need around the clock care.”

“I was actually thinking that we change your curriculum,” Stasia grabbed her hands, giving her a sympathetic smile, “Magic is mostly about practice. So matter what kind of spell you do it will strengthen your power. I have some books downstairs that contain healing spells and rituals.”

“I-. Are you saying I could get rid of whatever is wrong with her?” Tia sat straighter, her lips quirked in a hopeful smile.

“Well,” Stasia looked down, letting out a slow breath, “no, not really. These are spells meant for minor illnesses and injuries.”

“Oh.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t use them to help your mom still,” Stasia brushed some of Tia’s hair back, “I assume it’s cancer?”

Tia nodded, “Currently Stage three.”

“Well you can use these to help in providing comfort and relieving some of the pain that comes with it.”

“Maybe stop it from getting worse?”

Stasia smiled, “Possibly. I can’t guarantee that though.” She patted Tia’s knee, “Here let me grab them for you. You just stay right here.” She stood making her way to the basement, smile spreading across her face.

Carly smirked watching as Stasia skimmed the library, “What’s got you all happy all of a sudden?”

“Tia’s mother is sick,” she glanced over her shoulder, “Stage three cancer.”

Carly blinked, her smile falling away, “Oh, that’s terrible,” Stasia nodded, mumbling to herself, “So why do you seem so happy about that?”

“A-ha,” Stasia pulled a black leather bound book, eyes scanning for another, “Well I told her that there wasn’t anything that could fully heal away her mother’s cancer.” She pulled a brown leather bound book along with a thinner journal, both with matching Nordic runes, “There is though.”

“So why not tell her that?”

“Because Carly,” she answered, setting the books down getting some supplies together for travel, “Tia could prove to be more useful than just a power source. I could make her a full time apprentice.”

Carly nodded along slowly, “Be nice to have someone like you on the other side of the world.” Stasia beamed at Carly, “But she seems so….nice.”

“Not until she gets a little taste of the power she could have,” she held up a vial to the light, “and ailing parents are such great motivators to try something a little more unethical in her eyes at the current moment.”

Carly’s red eyes flicked to the black book, “There’s a spell in there that can do that.” Stasia hummed, “And what if she doesn’t take the bait?”

Stasia looked at her slowly, “Don’t tell me the Jacks have gotten to you, Carly.” The undead woman put her hands up, “She’s still of use just less than if she does the spell I want her to do.” She closed up the box, bringing it to the stairs, “Trust me though, a girl like her always takes the bait. She’s just going to be the first to live through it.” Carly looked her up and down, frowning with her brows knitted together until Stasia was out of the door.

Tia stood hearing Stasia make her way back to the living room, “Here let me help you with that, Stella,” she rushed over grabbing the box from the bottom. “This is a lot of stuff. I don’t think I can accept all of this.”

Stasia waved a hand, “I insist. It’s just something to get you started anyway.”

Tears brimmed her eyes once more, “Thank you. Thank you so much,” Tia reached out with one arm, Stasia following in the embrace, “This means so much to me.”

“Oh of course honey,” she pulled away, hands on Tia’s shoulders, “Now you just call if you need anything in those spells that you can’t find at home okay? I can send some out to you no problem.” The young woman nodded enthusiastically, Stasia smoothing her hair once more, “Now you get going to your mother. She needs you right now.”

Stasia leaned in the doorway watching as the mint green VW bus drove off in the midday sun, hearing the basement door start to creak open. She closed the door coming face to face with Carly, “What did you mean she would be the first to live through that spell?”

“The one that’s needed takes a lot from a witch, some girls didn’t have the power needed. Shame for a few of them actually.”

Carly crossed her arms, Stasia gliding past into the kitchen, “What makes you so sure though?”

Stasia paused, looking over her shoulder, “Because I know exactly what Tia is and the power that comes with someone like her.” She gave a chuckle, grabbing the broom, “Well if it's at the same level of a Moroi.”

#stasia e. oc #not that long but a little something for the queen

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tellthestoryofmybrokendreams · 4 years

Text

Wild Heart

Fandom: Avatar: the Last Airbender

Pairing: Zuko/Katara

Status: Complete

Words: 2,805

AO3 Link

Desc: Sometimes Zuko wonders if his horrible Agni Kai and banishment or his struggles - with his nation, his destiny, and himself...if all his hardships were worth it. But then he sees her smile.

A/N: Hello all! I'm obsessed with Bleachers, and so many of their songs fit Zutara. So I challenged myself to write a fic for every song. Here's the first one! These fics are ordered in the track order, not in chronological order. Cont...

Basically everything in here is like canon level, except it goes into a bit of detail about Zuko's scar and the healing process. Some of the flashback dialogue/information is taken directly from the show, or Zuko's prequel comic and "The Search". (Which aren't canon, but it's easier to steal from them than to try to get a read on Ozai or make up Fire Nation traditions lol.) I put a lot of effort in to keeping literally everything canon except the very ending, the only difference is that you see Zuko's thought process throughout. This was tough, considering in early season three he's pretty WACK and like ridiculously OOC, especially in "The Beach", and I hate it, but I wanted to show all those little ways that Zutara is still pretty damn canon. Bryke just made Aang their self-insert so he HAD to get the girl.

Anyways, enjoy!

The Fire Lord sits in his study and looks over a proposition from the Earth Kingdom to impose sanctions on the Northern Water Tribe until they agree to help their sister tribe with rebuilding. He knew the first year after the war would be the hardest, but Spirits was this terrible. Every move, every decision, every little choice he made seemed to have boundless political repercussions. Was he endorsing this? Shaming that? At the last big meeting with the Fire Council and various noblemen of the country, he’d served wine to the attendees and apparently picked sides in an argument between two men who owned neighboring vineyards and both claimed the same bit of land between them.

Zuko sighs and rubs his eyes, dropping his head in his hands.

He was tired, he was confused, and he was more than a little fed up. Trials for those involved in the war were still ongoing, and he knew by the end of them all his army would be small and his prisons overflowed.

The other nations needed reparations, both in money and physical assistance as they rebuilt. He was happy to provide all the aid he could, but they needed so much help and the Fire Nation had to rebuild as well. The village his friends had described to him, the one destroyed by pollution from a Fire Army factory, was far from unique. It was clear to Zuko that his predecessors didn’t care very much about their people, or at least not at an individual level.

Was it all really worth this new life?

Zuko had lost his mother and his cousin when he was only eleven. He’d then endured abuse and manipulation from his father and sister ten times worse than before. He’d been indoctrinated into a culture of imperialism and superiority, hearing all throughout his childhood that his nation and his family were superior and deserved all the glory in the world.

Even with the presumption and arrogance he was surrounded and seduced by, he’d still been a source of shame for his father, and suffered for it. Azula was born lucky. He was lucky to be born. It was what his father had reminded him day after day when he couldn’t master firebending like Azula could, when he cared too much, when he spoke out of turn, when he expressed himself, whenever he was less than perfect.

He knows now, perfect in his father’s eyes is something he could never achieve. And if he had? Well, that would be a real reason to be ashamed.

And then he’d just wanted to go to a war meeting. He’d just wanted to show his father he was capable. That he was worthy of love and respect.

When he’d heard the general’s plans to send new recruits into battle as a diversion, like koala-lambs to the slaughter, he’d spoken out before he knew what he was doing. What he had known was that it was wrong, and that he’d hated it.

“You can’t sacrifice an entire division like that! Those soldiers love and defend our nation! How can you betray them!?”

“Prince Zuko! How dare you speak out of turn and oppose your superior! It is not your place to dispute General Himura’s plans, and to do so is an act of complete disrespect. There is only one response to your insolence, an Agni Kai!”

Zuko turned to General Himura, who must be a cowardly man to sacrifice their new recruits as a distraction instead of launching an invasion honorably.

“I am not afraid. I accept.”

At sundown, the Agni Kai began. Zuko may not have been as powerful as his sister, but he knew he could take a cowardly, and likely weak, old man. He had been confident, but when he turned to face Himura, he saw a face he’d never expect to oppose in a dueling arena. His father, Fire Lord Ozai.

Zuko fell to his knees, both in shock and submission. He couldn’t believe his father was prepared to duel him. Everyone knew who would win. But of course it was Ozai, he may have spoken against a general, but it was in the Fire Lord’s war room. Any disrespect in the Fire Lord’s sanctum is disrespect to the Fire Lord himself.

He could feel tears begin to well in his eyes as he bowed to Ozai, “Please Father! I only had the Fire Nation’s best interests at heart. I’m sorry for speaking out of turn!”

“You will fight for your honor!”

“I meant you no disrespect! I am your loyal son.”

“Rise and fight Prince Zuko!”

“I won’t fight you.”

“You will learn respect, and suffering will be your teacher!”

All Zuko could see as he looked up with tears rushing down his cheeks, was his father’s angry face. And then he raised his fist with white-hot flames blazing, and Zuko felt the worst pain he could ever imagine.

He woke up in the Palace medical chambers. He reached up to feel his damaged eye, and hissed at the pain of his bandages rubbing against the skin edging the burn. He couldn’t see anything from his left eye, and he prayed to the Spirits it was only because of the bandages.

His father stood above him, looking disgusted.

“Prince Zuko, you have shown yourself to be unworthy of the crown and unfit to stand upon the land of our noble ancestors. You are therefore stripped of your birthright and banished from the Fire Nation until you can prove your worth.”

Ozai turned and made his way to the door. Right before exiting, he turned back to his son, “I hope you will not be arrogant enough to keep your full head of hair after losing to the Fire Lord,” he sneered in cruel amusement, “No one likes a sore loser.”

Zuko pulls himself out of his memories and shakes his head to clear it. That was a long time ago. His father’s barbarism could no longer affect him.

Well, it did, but only in the ruined economy and society of the Fire Nation. Zuko no longer flinches when he enters the war room, nor does he feel the stab of pain and resentment in his chest when someone describes him as lucky in any capacity.

But his new life as Fire Lord, somehow boring and hard at the same time, and even all the strength he’d gained, doesn’t quite seem worth all his pain. Those three, almost four, years of searching desperately for the Avatar all across the globe, they weren’t fun. He’d had to face his father and his sister, two people who should have loved him unconditionally, and realize that they were twisted, evil people with no hope of being saved. He’d struggled with, and eventually accepted, the fact that nearly everything he’d learned throughout his childhood about the Hundred Year War and the man who started it was wrong. That what he was doing was wrong. He’d fallen into anger and hatred of himself more than once, despising himself for his actions, and the world around him for driving him to make them.

Really, was all that worth it?

And then his wife strides into his study with a smile on her face and makes her way to his side to give him a kiss. Katara settles into his lap and strokes his cheek tenderly, then snuggles into his chest and rests her head on his shoulder as she reads over the documents in his hand curiously.

��How’s my favorite Fire Lord doing today?”

He closes his eyes and leans into her hand. He can’t feel anything where Ozai burned him nearly five years ago, but he thinks he can always make out a ghost of his wife’s touch. She doesn’t even have to use her healing, there’s just something about her that makes the impossible seem otherwise.

“Better, now that you’re here,” he answers with a smile.

Thinking back, that’s sort of always been the case. His day has always been made better when Katara was around, even if that just meant Aang was close by. Really, even his past self, angry and stupid as he may have been, could appriciate her glowing brown skin and fierce blue eyes that never lost the love in them.

Even throughout his stupid decisions, his betrayal, and his repeated attempts to hurt them, she’s always seen right through him. She may not have trusted him, but she’d always known that beneath all the anger and hatred and animosity, he was really a scared kid who wasn’t sure what was right. Even when she’d yelled at him beneath Ba Sing Se, called him a terrible person and declared that as the Fire Lord’s son he was only capable of evil. Even when she blamed him for her mother, she knew. This time, she’d been the one covering things up with her anger, because she’d known that all he needed was to see the light. And honestly? She could have been just the person to help him.

When he’d offered up the story of his mother, desperate for her not to hate him, not even knowing why, she’d remembered the truth she’d always known. Her heart and hand reached out to him, and he took it. And really, he’d never let go. She’d apologized, and he’d confessed that he was considering choosing his own destiny. She’d even offered to heal his scar. And when she’d brushed her fingers across it, he’d known she was special, that she probably could heal it. Especially with that Spirit Water. Uncle had told him in their weeks at sea that the water from the Spirit Oasis could reverse death if the soul hadn’t left the body yet; he’d never imagined they’d give that away to the Avatar’s waterbending master.

But despite all this, he’d still been weak. He’d longed for his father’s love, convinced he had no one else’s. And he’d betrayed her. He’d fought her and the Avatar, and he’d stood aside in horror as Azula killed him.

“I thought you had changed!” she had yelled as they fought.

“I have changed,” he’d responded, and he had. He finally knew the truth, he just forced himself to ignore it.

“She has the Spirit Water,” he’d thought, trying to excuse it all. He’d get to go home, see the people and land he missed. His father would welcome him back with love, perhaps even hug him. His honor would be restored. It was everything Zuko had wanted.

And yet, it still didn’t feel right. All he could see when he went to bed every night was Katara, holding the Avatar’s body with a look of pure despair. He knew, even if he was loosening his grip on her hand, he still grasped her finger tips.

He’d kept a hold on them as he made his way through the beginning of the life he’d always wanted. Terrified of losing it if the Avatar resurfaced, he’d hired an assassin. And as soon as he’d gotten home, he’d collapsed on his bed and screamed, “Stupid stupid idiot why would you do that it’s not right he’s a child-”

This had run through his head on repeat, even as he’d tried to make it work with Mai. But she just hadn’t got it, hadn’t got him. He hadn’t been sure he’d made all the right choices, but she hadn’t seemed to care about his inner turmoil. Whenever he’d been concerned, her emotionless face had seemed to say “Why do you care so much? Why are you so freaked out? You’re the Fire Prince, what do you have to worry about?” She’d mostly wanted to kiss and laze about in that privileged way only royals could. He’d given her gifts, tried to be thoughtful, just like a boyfriend should. She’d just disregarded it, hadn’t even cared that he’d wanted them to be happy, he really had. And even though he’d fought with her and had no fun throughout their tiring relationship, he’d still gotten jealous of Ruon-Jian. She was the one who’d really wanted it, she was the one who had a crush on him when they were kids. And she still couldn’t keep her eyes off some idiot jock at a house party? She’d been chatting with him! She never chatted with anyone! He’d gotten angry, and he’d shoved Ruon-Jian. And then she’d yelled at him for not keeping his temper under control, and declared their relationship over. If he had been honest with himself, he would have known that it was a relief, a weight off his shoulders. But he’d still been deluding himself, and he’d still thought he wanted a perfect Fire Nation girlfriend.

The thought occurred to him once or twice that he needed Katara to lecture some sense into him, maybe smack him with a water whip a few times.

But he tried to make up with her, with Azula, with Ty Lee. They’d attempted to have a group therapy session, like they were normal teens with normal problems just contemplating their place in the Universe instead of four of the most important teens in the world at the time, each with a crucial role to play in the war they’d had no choice but to fight in.

He’d told them he was angry at himself, which was true, but he’d told them he didn’t know the difference between right and wrong anymore, which was a lie. He’d known the difference, but he’d still purposely chosen wrong and he was furious at himself for it. He’d silently cried himself to sleep that night, aching to reach out and take Katara’s hand properly, like he should have before, but knowing that he didn’t deserve to hold it then.

His uncle’s disappointment had hurt the most. And even though Iroh was so, so disappointed, he’d still sent that letter. As Zuko read the history of his great grandfathers, and heard Iroh explain the truth, he’d known Uncle was right. There was good and evil at war in him, confusing him, the good in his heart, and the evil forced into his mind over and over again. He’d known then his true destiny, to repeat this fight between good and evil carried out between two people who should love each other. Roku and Sozin were best friends and battle brothers. He and Azula were brother and sister.

And yet, selfishly, he’d stayed just a little bit longer. Mai was being good to him again and it was just so nice. He’d even let himself have a petty little Fire Court problem: he hadn’t thought he’d been invited to the war meeting. But he had! He’d gotten to sit at his father’s right hand and give his opinions without fear of getting a flaming fist to his good eye.

But then his opinion had led to Ozai and Azula deciding to burn the Earth Kingdom to the ground, and he had to admit the time for being selfish was long since past. He’d packed his things and prepared for the Day of Black Sun, writing a note to Mai explaining everything and timing his confrontation with his father so he’d have to listen instead of giving his son another scar.

And finally, he’d grabbed Katara’s hand properly. She pulled him up to his feet...and then tried to pull her hand away in fear of him gaining her trust again just to break it. He deserved it, obviously. But he fought to prove himself to her, and he did. Now her hand grabbed his tightly and pulled him close.

He would never let go again.

And now as they hold each other close once again, thoughts of family dancing at the back of their minds, he decides, definitively, that it was worth it. He’d do it all again, ten times worse, if it meant he could still have Katara.

“I will need your help on this one though my love, I’m afraid I’m far from understanding Water Tribe politics.”

She tosses her head back and laughs, and for the millionth time he memorizes her every detail. Her big, beautiful blue eyes, her long mahogany tresses she wears in Water Tribe braids pulled up into a Fire Nation top knot that holds her crown perfectly, her golden brown skin that always has that magical glow to it, the slope of her nose, the way her full lips curl in when she genuinely smiles...he could go on. He knows every little bit and bob of her body and he adores each one. Every night in their bed he lays a kiss to every inch of her, thanking the Spirits again and again for blessing him with this goddess.

He would do anything to keep them perfect like this, he knows it.

Further notes: For the record, my family and I had a huge debate on what degree Zuko's burn was and what level of damage it would have caused. It's weird since the scar's appearance suggests 3rd or 4th degree, but he can still hear and move his eye, suggesting 2nd. Eventually we settled on moderate 3rd degree and concluded that he lost sight in the eye but not movement. He's got a good amount of nerve damage, and his skin is likely leathery and tight. With modern medicine and skin grafting, he would have had a much better time, and if treated quickly enough he may have been able to eventually regain sight. Frustratingly, there isn't much documentation of thermal burns to the eyes and their effects, seeing as a burn like Zuko's is extremely rare. Generally, if your eye is burned your whole face is burned and they're usually more concerned with your ability to breathe.

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starstruckteacup · 4 years

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Cottagecore Films (pt. 11)

A Little Princess (1995)

starring Liesel Matthews, Liam Cunningham, Vanessa Chester, Eleanor Bron

synopsis

I was extremely disappointed in this film, to put it lightly. The story itself was beautiful, but that is thanks exclusively to the novel on which it was based. The movie itself utterly failed to convey the magic and timelessness of the book. The acting was flat, emotionless, and forced at every point, from every actor (except for maybe Cunningham, but he was absent for half of it). One would think a gaggle of girls would have some form of natural chemistry, whether pulling them together or apart, but not a single child actor portrayed even the remotest semblance of a relationship to another. (Note: I describe in my review of Pan’s Labyrinth what quality acting from a child looks like, for reference.) Even Matthews and Cunningham could not pass a believable father-daughter relationship, despite the story being about that. As far as emotional acting, the adults were just as bad as the children. They couldn’t even feign a single moment of joy, sadness, or anger, regardless of the context. I actually laughed for the entire scene during which Sara nearly died because of how bad the acting from the adults was. At least Chester seemed somewhat worried; Bron and the nameless police officers stood around so vacantly it looked like they forgot what was happening. I really was appalled by the abysmal acting, especially when so much was handed to them in the story. I want to preface my next point by saying that yes, I know computer animation was still a work in progress in the 90s. But this was horrifyingly awful. I have never once, not in my entire life, seen CGI as terrible as the monster in Sara’s stories. I nearly gave up on the entire movie within the first five minutes because of that monster. And it kept showing up, which absolutely ruined whatever favor I tried to hold for this movie. If you don’t have the budget, which this film clearly didn’t, don’t try to animate a monster. It’s that simple. I wish I had more words for it but it was truly so atrocious that I’m at a loss. Any good will I hold for this movie is due to my fondness for the story (no credit to the film), the settings (while not exceptional, they were fairly pretty), and Liam Cunningham’s acting. 2/10

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

TW: blood, mild gore, torture, racism against indigenous people

starring Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen, Abbie Cornish, Jordi Mollà, Samantha Morton

This film is the sequel to Elizabeth (1998) (see part 10 of my film reviews), which continues the story of Queen Elizabeth I as her rule progresses. Tensions between Catholic Spain and Protestant England grow ever greater, escalating to treasonous plots and assassination attempts. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and King Philip II of Spain conspire to depose Elizabeth and place Mary on the throne, restoring Catholicism as the national religion. Even as these events lead to war between the two superpowers, the court provides no sense of stability as new faces and new stresses surround the Virgin Queen. She forms a strong friendship with the pirate Walter Raleigh upon his return trip from the New World, where he seeks to establish colonies under the English flag. However, his stay is extended greatly when Elizabeth’s selfishness and pride take over, and are only broken down in the face of battle when she puts him at the forefront of the British navy. Outnumbered, Elizabeth will need Raleigh’s loyalty and cunning, along with the unwavering loyalty of her people, if they wish to survive the Spanish onslaught.

While still a drama, this film proved to be much more war-oriented than its predecessor, but I’m not sure it did either as well. I liked the deeper look this film gave us into the Elizabeth’s mind, especially with her social and emotional conflicts. They remind us that she is still human, despite the somewhat cold appearance the first film gave her at the end. She is more mature, and even more prideful, but there’s still a limit to what she can take as a person. I think the first film gave a better portrayal of her complicated mind, but this was a solid continuation of what years of ruling can do. I also liked how much detail they put into Raleigh’s character, which the first film didn’t do as well with its secondary characters. We got to know more about him, even if he did still feel somewhat surface-level. I think the dramatic aspects could have felt more high-stakes than they did, especially for the characters who were actually in danger. Even though so many characters were actively committing treason, I only felt that level of tension with one: Mary Stuart. Her death was particularly elegant and laden with symbolism, and even though I knew the outcome historically the scene still delivered the anxiety it was meant to. The others simply didn’t have the same delivery. Even the assassination attempt didn’t project any kind of concern, regardless of one’s historical knowledge. The war focus was a fairly different take than the first had, which I appreciated. The film established a strong balance between the tensions in England, Scotland, and Spain, and did a good job making the stakes very clear for each group. Given the uncritically positive stance on England that this film takes, I would have expected the film to villainize Spain a little more to form a stronger dichotomy between the two rulers, but Spain was presented rather neutrally to the audience. The Spanish ruler and nobles didn’t have much character, despite being the antagonist. As for that uncritical positivity regarding England, I do have a bit more to say. Although to an extent it makes sense that the film would lean in favor of England, given its content and the point of view from which the story is told, it became overbearing at times. England could do no wrong in this film, despite children dying in battle, indigenous people being humiliated and dehumanized for show, talk about slavery, and a complete disregard for the suffering of non-white and non-Protestant groups. In contrast, the first film heavily criticized England, from Mary of Guise shaming Elizabeth for sending young children to war, to Elizabeth frowning upon Walsingham’s torture methods (granted she never stopped them, but she didn’t approve as readily as she did in this film), and so on. Although England in truth did all of these things without rebuke, the film could have handled it more gracefully and came across less like propaganda, at the very least. 5/10

Loving Vincent (2017)

TW: suicide (action offscreen, death onscreen)

Sensory Warning: movement of the impressionistic paintings can be very disorienting for those with sensory processing difficulties. I had to break from watching multiple times so as not to become ill.

starring Douglas Booth, Eleanor Tomlinson, Jerome Flynn, Robert Gulaczyk

This fully hand-painted animated film follows Armand Roulin, a young man with a severe temper, on his way to deliver Vincent Van Gogh’s last letter to a living recipient. When he reaches the town where Vincent died, he begins speaking to a variety of villagers with their own stories about the artist, and their own theories about how he died. Armand tries to piece the puzzle together, wondering if the death was not a suicide as claimed, but rather something more sinister.

This film was spectacularly breathtaking. The amount of work that went into painting every scene was awe-inspiring, and definitely sets the bar high for any other films of its kind. The team of artists that created this film represented Van Gogh’s unique art style exquisitely through their loving application of oil-based paints, and truly brought to life the emotion he put into his works. I wish I hadn’t struggled so much with the constant movement, as I feel I would have been able to appreciate the film in its entirety better, but as it was I struggled to pay attention to the story because the art style consumed too much of my sensory processing capabilities. As for the story, I thought it was interesting, but I found it lacking despite the incredible artwork. Foremost, after some cursory research, I discovered that the homicide theory on which this film was based was only acknowledge by one individual, and spurned by hundreds of others. Although the film leaves the verdict open-ended, both to Roulin and to the audience, the story itself seemed to lean into the homicide theory, then completely give up on it with no resolution, so it came across as fairly noncommittal. I won’t argue for or against the theory, as I don’t know nearly enough about Van Gogh to assert an opinion, but I’m somewhat unsettled by the amount of weight it gave to it without any kind of evidentiary support, only to dump it as if the writers changed their mind themselves. The pacing was also slow for a murder mystery, which is basically what the story turned out to be. I would much have preferred the film to cover Vincent’s life, or even the days/weeks leading up to his death, instead of only featuring him in other people’s flashbacks. This kind of existential impressionism should capture the life of its creator, not the mundane views of people who didn’t understand him or even hated him. There wasn’t anything wrong with the film, per se, but I wish the writing was given as much love as the art was. 7/10

Part 1 // 2 // 3 // 4 // 5 // 6 // 7 // 8 // 9 // 10

#cottagecore #gardencore #naturecore #flowercore #cozycore #historical drama #period drama #art film #film #film review #movie #movie review #activities #mine

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mysterious-prophetess · 4 years

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4 AM thoughts on the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy-A Rant

So, firstly I’ll say this: If you like them-More power to you. You do you.

My thoughts are mine and I will not claim that they are the only opinion to have because that’s a wrong way to be.

Secondly: It is literally 4 AM as I write this. So, I will probably go off on tangents and there won’t be a lot of structure to this.

So, approx eight and a half months since I was dragged to The Rise of Skywalker and I go back to a trilogy and a franchise for that matter that I was kind of DONE with.

Yeah. Disney Star Wars ruined my love of Star Wars in general and I even liked the Prequel trilogy!

I liked The Force Awakens when I first saw it, but I think it was my nostalgia goggles blinding me to its issues.

One of which it was almost a beat-for-beat remake of Episode 4. Being that 4 is my favorite of all the Star Wars films, this also worked in its favor as it was just fresh enough for the nostalgia and partiality to its predecessor to work in its favor.

Also, the new trio--Finn, Rey, and Poe-- had a lot of great potential. Especially Finn. Former Stormtrooper & taken from his home to be raised as a soldier to find he no longer could stay with the First Order, but terrified of them. Yet, despite that fear deciding to go save Rey--who was one of his first real friends. That was a character’s journey with so much potential and the marketing made it seem like he’d be a jedi.

Yet, I wasn’t too upset when it was Rey.

In retrospective, Rey winning against Kylo Ren was dumb. She should have been decent at the weapon since she was able to protect herself and Kylo was injured but, the planet falling apart could have happened sooner to prevent her from going on a ass-kicking spree of Kylo Ren.

Then we get to 8 which had an opening crawl it didn’t need since it was literally just after 7.

I hated that btw

Then we get Poe who was shown as a smart ass in 7 but talked up as this great pilot but shown to be an IDIOT in 8. Rose’s whole storyline was badly handled.

People were shitty to Kelly Marie Tran over shit out of her control. Rose Tico was a terribly written character and the actress did what she could with what they gave her.

What they did to Finn was undid ALL of his character development from 7 and turn him into a joke for the rest of 8 and nothing in 9. I’ve recently learned that this was done to appeal to a certain market that has never liked Star Wars anyway. Way to go, Disney. You fucked up your new character with the most compelling backstory to appease a market that hates this product in the first place. Bra-fucking-vo.

The Light Speed tracking thing was bullshit. Canto Bite was a pointless side quest. Cut that stupid shit out of the movie and you lose nothing of value. You could cut from them landing on that pointless planet to them ending up in jail for parking illegally and saved the audience around 20 minutes of wasted time.

It didn’t advance the plot. It didn’t make Rose any more sympathetic. It just felt preachy. Also, Rose x Finn was so fucking forced. Kelly Marie Tran tried to sell it but again, she was given shit to work with.

I recently found out that who Rey was kept changing and It’s SOOO fucking stupid to not have a solid plan for a fucking trilogy. (and to find out my favorite idea of Rey as a Kenobi was the first one before Johnson came in and she was No One also is irksome)

Idk what Abrams planned but by not having it implemented over all and letting Johnson piss all over it with his ideas for a subversive mould-breaking story ruined any flow the films had.

Yeah, I am aware 4 was all but stand alone, but it was set up so it could connect to 5 & 6 just in case it was successful enough for 5 & 6 to be made. It was very stand alone because there was a chance nothing would come after 4.

7, 8, & 9 however, could be planned for there to be three because it was fucking STAR WARS. Which meant, they should have had people fucking plan out what they were doing. Instead, they didn’t, it shows, and it also seems to take an almost savage glee at pissing on the past.

Ruining Luke I-see-the-good-in-my-Father-who-committed-genocide Skywalker by having him give up on Ben/Kylo was one of the biggest betrayals of character I’ve ever fucking seen.

Trying their best to get all the other OT characters out of the way so their new shiny replacements can take center stage without any nuance was also irritating. And this is at the parks too. It’s apparently all Sequel shit now with no legacy characters.

Killing off Luke in 8 in a stupid way in how the force does not work. Continuing the force bullshit in 9. Wasting our time on a redemption arc for Kylo Ren/Ben only to KILL HIM AT THE END.

No. Make him face what he’s done and atone as a living person. No more redemption=death. Death is too easy.

And I hate that they brought Palpatine back in a corporal form. Nice way to piss on the BEST moments of the OT where Anakin, finally throwing off the ties of bondage to Palpatine and the dark side and destroying the man to save his son, sacrificing himself in the process, dying at peace. Nope. That now means NOTHING. Palpatine survived.

Force Ghosts fucking exist. Sith Ghosts FUCKING EXIST TOO. Just make him a force ghost possessing some fucker and I might not have been as pissed off.

That force diad shit? Either play it up more or cut it out.

Snoke being a Palpatine puppet was fucking dumb. If he’d been Darth Plageius’s creation then that might have been better than “it was palpatine all along.”

It’s just such a waste. Star Wars was a film series about hope. The first film was retitled to have its subtitle be “A New Hope.” These films? Are not about hope at all. They’re about cynical cash grabs and trying to signal the right virtues to try to exploit the movie going public of their money and attempt a moral high ground.

One more thing that bugs me: the fact they shunted a lot of shit per film to the novelizations. Fuck that shit. If your medium is FILM, you tell all your shit in that damn film. I shouldn’t have to read your tie in materials to understand your fucking film. e.g. Palpatine’s son is really his clone is in the last film’s novelization. That stupid casino world allegedly has a full explanation too.

No. It’s a sign of really poor planning and command of storytelling that you shunted this information into your peripheral materials. Then agian, we know the planning was shit because they couldn’t even fucking settle on who Rey was WHILE FILMING THE DAMNED TRILOGY AND EVEN DURING 9 THEY WERE CHANGING THEIR MINDS.

And there are lots of other things but better minds than mine have talked about them-like everything wrong with Poe’s backstory. That can of worms I won’t touch because I don’t have the expertise beyond wondering if Disney has a single person with any sort of common sense or any awareness of optics on staff.

Final mini-rant:

I fucking hate the way they’re trying to push their oh-so-special OC’s as better than the original cast at times. Luke and Leia were presumed to have been born the same day the empire was founded because THAT’S THE FILM’S APPARENT TIMELINE. But now. Now, somehow that took 2 days and now their new special snowflake character from Rebels Ezra Bridger has that Empire Day birthday and is force sensitive too and has a jedi teacher.

Like, I’m sure that the character isn’t as Gary Stu-ish as I just bitched about there, but from the outside looking in, it pisses me the fuck off because of all the other shit Disney’s been pulling with Star Wars to distance themselves from legacy characters and push the new characters at all costs.

It’s just I hate what they’ve done in their corporate greed.

#rant #anti-disney star wars

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juli-bahama-official · 4 years

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i have my manga list open let’s a fucking go! 10 worst manga in random order, for bonus points i limit myself to one manga by the same author. also i didn’t include oneshots. part of it is that i can’t remember what most of them was about, part of it is that oneshots can be fucked up in a way series do not.

zettai kareshi aka absolute boyfriend. fucking absolute boyfriend. the story is about a girl who is so desperate for a boyfriend she, get this, orders one online. she gets a glorified sex robot. the whole manga is highkey horny on main but it never really goes there, so we just have a bunch of blushing virgins and gags based around a robot wanting to bang.

anastasia club. i was torn between this one and basilis no musume, but anastasia club wins by having a lead bishounen who’s the grandson of anastasia romanov, as well as including the author’s fanfic about tchaikovsky where he’s no longer gay but instead has a kid with his sister. and also there was a ghost of rasputin. i think there was also a truck running into an antique shop? and something about jumping into sea from ships?

mizu ni sumu hana. some girl sees flowers on her body, yadda yadda, gonna be a priestess or something, yadda yadda, her predecessor’s trying to kill her, her cousin slash crush is actually a dragon god, he has to sleep with her to unlock his powers which would kill her in the process. the evil guy causes an apocalypse bc he wants to fight the cousin so badly, the girl really wants to fuck even if she’s gonna die, the cousin for some reason doesn’t want to do that. finally they bang but he doesn’t consume all of her vital powers, just 99%, so she gets revived. happy end!

zetsuai. somehow even more dramatic and overblown than the anime. mind you, i only read zetsuai 1989. and apparently the sequel is even worse. anyway i think that scene were bishounen a crashes a window (was it a window???) over bishounen b’s head to hurt him but then suddenly changes his mind and shields him with his body instead, thus protecting him from danger he himself caused in the first place, is really the epitome of the series. i also think bishounen a should learn to solve problems without stabbing anyone or threatening them or anything like that.

hitomi: the vision of escaflowne. the anime was so good, how can you screw up that badly? there are new characters, most of the original cast is missing, the story makes no sense, there are almost no robots AND no romance. it’s like you took escaflowne and threw away all the essential parts.

dengeki daisy. now it probably wasn’t so bad in itself, but it was way too long, it dragged on, it was too preachy, the heroine wasn’t very likeable to me, it was ugly, if it was shorter i would forget about it but reading it was such a chore i won’t forget it anytime soon (why did i keep reading, you ask? a friend borrowed it to me)

elfen lied. it currently holds second place on my list of manga with worst art. if you were into anime in 2010 or earlier you’ve heard about it, as it was THE edgy series everyone knew. it was rightfully known for being dumb and gorey. the manga was made by someone who clearly had no idea how a human body works, but still wanted to show it being torn apart. for bonus points we have a mc who is amnesiac and on the development stage of a very young child half the time, so we get such great scenes as her pissing herself in public. fun! there’s also some philosophy and missing memories. and relationship drama, cause that’s what we were missing.

fushigi no kuni no shounen arisu. it’s about a guy accidentally becoming alice in wonderland and getting the attention of some other guy who won’t take “but i’m a guy, too” for an answer. maybe. you see, the plot kept changing every chapter. and just when the author got decided on something, it got axed. so basically, a fanservice comedy that was unfunny and unsexy.

tsutsunuke love letter, about a girl who can read minds and an asshole boyfriend. forgettable, but it gets an honorable mention for being the first manga that frustrated me so much i deleted it immediately after reading.

random walk, aka terrible teen relationships galore. everyone is fucked up and everyone believes it to be totally normal. i think my favorite was the mc's ex, who cheated on her with his tutor (she was "giving him a reward"), got with her again, and broke up with her even though he loved her because a girl had a crush on him and was soooo sad he was with someone else, she got sick and ended up in a hospital, so he started dating her because of guilt. but he actually started liking her in the end! don't you love happy endings?

#alex.txt #this was v hard to make #first i couldn't find enough titles and then there were too many #i'm sure i'm still forgetting something

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erinptah · 4 years

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The Secret Commonwealth review: It was...pretty underwhelming, mostly

Finally got the audiobook of The Secret Commonwealth checked out from my local library!

(Here’s my review of its predecessor, La Belle Sauvage, if you want to start there.)

It’s 20 hours long. Whoof.

As for the contents…look, it was well-written prose. I didn’t get bored while listening. (Rereading that last review, I realized I’d written the same thing about the previous book, too.) But in retrospect, there sure was not a lot that happened in those 20 hours. Some notable action bits, in between a lot of padding.

And my reactions mostly consist of…complaints. Not “this is hideous, time to ragequit the series, this is an unqualified anti-rec” complaints, more a low-level churn of frustration.

(There’s one scene I know has made someone else outright refuse to read it, though, and I think it’s totally reasonable. More on that later.)

So I’m gonna try to unpack a bunch of it here. Hopefully in enough detail that, if you haven’t read it yet (and don’t mind spoilers), it can help you make an informed decision about whether it’s worth spending 20 hours of your life on.

Spoilers start here!

The Story

We open with Lyra as a 20-year-old student at St. Sophia’s, a women’s college in Oxford. She’s made some kinda-friends, including former booty calls that she’s still on good terms with, but she’s badly estranged from Pantalaimon.

Their rift is exacerbated by a couple of books she’s read that are popular with young intellectuals lately. One is a philosophy book, one is a novel, both of them seem broadly Ayn Randian in the sense that “teens/college kids get really into these books and decide it’s smart and fashionable to adopt their moral framework, ignoring both the logical failures and the ways in which this turns you into a horrible person.”

She’s been staying at Jordan between semesters, but political drama forces her to move, and that’s when Oakley Street swoops in to make contact. They’re the secret Magisterum-thwarting spy organization that Hannah Relf worked for in La Belle Sauvage. Employees now include Alice Lonsdale and Malcolm Polstead, who fill Lyra in on the events of the previous book.

Lyra crashes at Malcolm’s parents’ inn for a bit, but her fighting with Pan gets so bad that he takes off, leaving a note. He’s going to confront one of the authors of the fashionable/terrible books — who lives in Germany, so this could take a while.

Since Lyra can’t just hang around and go through the motions of a normal life while her daemon is visibly missing, she takes off too. First on a detour to the Gyptians, then on a sorta meandering cross-continental journey of her own.

Along the way, both Lyra and Pan keep uncovering new details about this ongoing side plot:

It turns out there’s a place, I think somewhere in the Middle East, where daemons can’t go — same as the area in the North that witches use for separation ordeals. If a human crosses that area, they arrive at the growing-place of a type of rose that won’t grow properly anywhere else, whose oil has the same effect as the seed-pod sap used by Mary Malone in the mulefa world — you can use it to make a Dust-viewing lens.

This rose oil can also be used to make all kinds of super-cool products, like the World’s Best Perfume and the World’s Best Rosewater, so it’s valuable for lots of reasons. But a few researchers have caught on to the Dust-viewing power, and the Magisterium has caught on that some dangerous research is happening with roses, so they’ve started destroying every rosebush they can find in the general region — wreaking havoc with the global economy in the process.

(They’re also trying to convince the general population that God Says Roses Are Immoral now. If this book had come out 5 years ago, I could’ve made some great connections with “there’s widespread successful Magisterium propaganda about how nobody should like or respect the work of botanists.”)

And there’s a related plot where Lyra’s uncle (she actually has one! Mrs. Coulter had a brother!) is playing a long game to re-consolidate as much Magisterium power as possible under a single individual. It gets us some good dramatic sequences…which I feel no need to break down here, because they’re exactly the ones you would imagine, with exactly the outcome you’re already expecting.

One of Uncle Wannabe-Pope’s employees is Bonneville Junior, the son of the miniboss from La Belle Sauvage. He’s a trained alethiometrist, but is more interested in his personal vendetta against Lyra than his actual job. Takes after Dad in that he’s not very deep or complex, just a straightforward fun-to-hate villain.

Pan eventually makes his way to the Terrible Author’s home, where he discovers that things are weird and creepy, but not very specific. Doesn’t achieve anything in particular, either. Disheartened, he sets off for the Region of the Weird Roses, with the idea he’ll meet Lyra there.

Lyra, meanwhile, has a notebook they recovered from an explorer who went to the Region of the Weird Roses. It includes a list of other (non-witch) people across the world who’ve been separated, because apparently they’re more common than you’d think, and have a secret support network. So she visits a few of these people along her trip, with an endgame goal of Weird Roseville.

Malcolm also makes his own journey toward Weird Roseville. I think it was part of an Oakley Street investigation into “what does the Magisterium have against roses these days?” In the middle of it, Bonneville Junior confronts him (Junior is having trouble finding Lyra, but has a secondary vendetta against Malcolm for killing his dad, so this is almost as good). Malcolm talks him down.

At last Lyra, Pan, and Junior all hit the same “creepy deserted town in the general area of Weird Roseville.” But none of them manage to interact before the book ends.

…In my LBS review, I said it had serious middle-of-the-trilogy syndrome, a whole lot of setup for no payoff. TSC spends very little time following up on any of it. To be fair, the Original Trilogy has happened in the meantime and this book also tries to address some of the events from that, but the vast bulk of it is even more setup for no payoff.

Complaints, Broadly Organized By Theme, In Loosely Chronological Order

Lyra at St. Sophia’s:

I really like how the opening sequence involves Lyra noticing a friend is in distress and helping her out! (Friend’s dad is in the rose-using business, and his company is going under.) And then…that’s the last we see of any connections with female friends her own age. In the entire book.

One of the Terrible Rationalist Books is spreading the idea that “daemons are a collective hallucination.” This is not a “rational” idea in this world! It would be like saying that faces are a collective hallucination!

And Lyra is the least likely person in this world to buy into it, because she’s visited a world without visible daemons, and got empirical proof (via Will’s and John Parry’s separation ordeals) that even under those conditions, they still exist!

I can appreciate the idea of Lyra and Pan being traumatized and scarred and having trouble, but this, specifically, is a nonsensical thing for them to argue over.

The book also gestures (not very hard, thankfully) toward the idea that Lyra is doubting the existence of magic in general. Which, again, is the equivalent of someone from our world deciding it’s rational to doubt the existence of weather.

Also, it seems like Lyra/Pan haven’t had any contact with witch society through these years. Why not? If anyone’s going to have sympathy and understanding and support groups for their separation-related trauma, it’s the culture where every single member formally goes through the same thing! And I’m sure Serafina would be delighted to see them! But they don’t even consider the idea.

Lyra and Malcolm:

Yes, they’re being telegraphed as a future couple, and yes, it’s just as creepy and unappealing as the internet has been saying.

And, look, I’m not going to say “20-year-old Lyra is too young to date anyone she wants.” Not after we got through all of Original Flavor HDM without saying “12-year-old Lyra is too young to go on an interdimensional journey with no adult supervision and save the multiverse.”

But he was one of her teachers when she was 16, and his POV includes remembering how he had to actively shut down sexual interest in her then, and here in the present Lyra still thinks of him as kind of a distant authority figure, and that’s weird, okay?

They only have a couple days’ worth of actual interaction before being apart for the rest of the book. That’s not enough time to believably develop their dynamic into something believably-potentially-romantic. So the narrative doesn’t try.

…but it still has multiple people ask Malcolm if he’s in love with Lyra afterward.

The foreshadowing on Lyra’s side is all in how she keeps thinking about how similar he is to Will. (Cat daemon, killed someone when he was a tween, etc.) Because that’s what we all want for Lyra’s romantic future, a knockoff Will-substitute, amirite?

Separately: Malcolm and friends tell Lyra the whole backstory about the magical boat trip from La Belle Sauvage, but it doesn’t seem like she tells them anything about “that time I went on an interdimensional journey, built a group of allies from multiple worlds and species including literal angels, killed God, and permanently rewrote the nature of death.” I feel like that should’ve come up!

General daemon stuff:

There’s a moment in the early chapters when Pan, wandering alone at night, considers eating some small critter (the kind that an ordinary pine marten would eat). It’s not like he’s going through a species-identity crisis, either. It’s just written as…a thing a daemon might do. So that’s weird.

In the original series, daemon separation is a major, improbable ordeal. Under normal circumstances, a human and a daemon being dragged apart past their distance limit will just kill them. At Bolvangar they figured out a severance method that would leave you physically functional, but dead inside. Witch-style separation only happens at this special daemon-repelling place in the North (you don’t have to be a witch to use it, see John Parry, but they usually don’t tell non-witches it exists), or on the shores of the World of the Dead. So far, so good.

In this series, we find out that there’s another place on this Earth with the same daemon-repelling properties. It’s also remote and isolated and associated with Cool Weird Stuff (the cities in the Northern Lights vs. the Dust-revealing roses). Again, so far, so good.

…And then we find out that random people can just kinda do a separation ordeal anywhere. Okay, it already happened to Malcolm in La Belle Sauvage, but now it’s all over the place. Lyra keeps spotting people on the street without daemons! Pan teams up with a kid who got dragged apart from her daemon in a shipwreck, and it didn’t kill them! It’s too easy. It’s unsatisfying. It undercuts so much of the monumental feeling separation had in the original trilogy.

It also makes it even weirder that nobody was able to hook Lyra and Pan up with a support group. Oakley Street couldn’t suss it out? Her friends among the Gyptians couldn’t catch an underground rumor and pass it on?

Related: when we saw daemonless kids in The Golden Compass, they were treated like horror-movie monsters. Like zombies, ghosts, bodies walking around without heads. But when people clock Lyra as being daemonless here, they treat it like it’s something immoral. Like she’s walking around topless and needs to cover it up.

There’s just a general pattern of rewriting HDM’s established rules about daemons, and not for the better.

And speaking of rewriting established rules…general alethiometer stuff:

There is a New Method for reading the alethiometer. It involves pointing all three hands at the same symbol, which already seems like a gimmick, not a useful way to frame a question.

And somehow, that gets you the answers in the form of…magic visions. No intuition or interpretation needed! The sights and sounds just get funneled directly into your brain!

The reason this isn’t a Plot-Breaking Hack is because it makes the user super-queasy. You can only use it when you’re in a position to be sick afterward, and people would rather not use it at all.

Lyra spends most of the story with the alethiometer, and without all the symbology books that go with it. She avoids using the New Method because of the nausea, but she also avoids using the Classic Method, on the grounds that it apparently can’t get her anything without the books.

She’s been studying these books for years now! Couldn’t she at least try to read it, and make her best guess at the interpretation? Maybe sometimes she gets it right, maybe sometimes she’s wrong and things go sideways and she realizes in hindsight which of the symbols she misread, maybe sometimes she gives up and gets depressed and puts it away without drawing a conclusion at all…but nope, she just flat-out doesn’t interact with it.

Midway through the book, Lyra gets a tipoff about a kind of truth-reading cards. That’s fine; we know there are other methods of truth-reading in the multiverse, including the I Ching and Mary Malone’s computer. Makes sense as a new tidbit of worldbuilding.

But towards the end of the story, someone helpfully gifts Lyra a deck of the cards. And she spends some time trying to infer answers from how the pretty pictures on the cards fit together. More time than she spends trying to infer answers from how the pretty pictures on the alethiometer fit together.

The alethiometer didn’t need a New Method or a total replacement in the narrative…but apparently it’s getting them.

And what was the point of Lyra dedicating herself to studying those symbols, for years, if she can get better and more-accurate data from a set of symbols she’d never seen before until this week?

Pan’s international voyage:

This all started when Pan got the idea that Terrible Author had “put a spell on Lyra and stolen her imagination.” Which sounds like a figure of speech at first, but no, apparently Pan thinks this guy is literally magic.

And yet, somehow, not magic enough to be dangerous, even for a single lone daemon whose only plan is “confront him directly and demand that he fix it”?

Most of the trip is uneventful, since it’s a long string of Pan successfully keeping out-of-sight.

There’s one clever part where, once he’s in Terrible Author’s hometown, he finds a school for the blind to ask for information. That way he can say “my girl is totally standing right over there, don’t worry about it, now, any chance you know where Terrible Author lives?”

…of course, the first person he asks has exactly the right answer and is happy to share. Convenient, that.

As mentioned, Terrible Author’s setup is suitably creepy and off-putting, but Pan doesn’t figure out anything about why. Doesn’t investigate. Didn’t come up with any kind of plan beforehand about how to coax Terrible Author into undoing his evil spell. Pan just confronts him, demands he fix Lyra, realizes this hasn’t fixed Lyra, and leaves.

There’s a bombshell much later on when Lyra finds out that Terrible Author is separated! And, although there’s a daemon who hangs around with him, they don’t actually belong to each other! This is fascinating and disturbing and would’ve been so much more satisfying if, you know, Pan had figured this out and was actively trying to bring the information to Lyra. Or, heck, if anything had been done with it at all.

Shortly afterward, Pan runs into this girl who just happens to be separated from her daemon, and is available and happy to team up with Pan, so they can head off to Weird Roseville together. Convenient. Again.

Lyra’s Bogus Journey:

Lyra has a much harder time staying out of sight than Pan, so she gets a lot more interaction along her trip.

Most of it is a long string of the same convenient “running into people who are helpful and friendly and have exactly the information she needs to move the plot along.” (More details on that below.)

When this happened in the original trilogy, it was the alethiometer deus-ex-machining her in the right direction, which worked! But here it seems to keep happening by accident. (She brings the alethiometer, but, as mentioned, she doesn’t use it.)

The Conveniently Helpful People also keep telling her (with minimal prompting, and what seems like total honesty?) whole backstories. All of which are more interesting than the actual narrative she’s going through.

They also occasionally mention God/the Authority, and Lyra doesn’t have much of a reaction. I wish, just once, she had snapped “it doesn’t matter what the Authority thinks! Or rather, what he used to think, since my boyfriend and I killed him when we were 12!”

The convenience also could’ve worked if Oakley Street agents were being cool and clever and actively tracking her journey in order to help. She does run into a few of them, but that seems to be by accident too.

And it could’ve worked if there was other magic steering her along — she keeps dropping the phrase “the secret commonwealth,” meaning the world’s hidden population of faeries and other supernatural creatures — but as of the end of the book, none of Lyra’s friendly helpers have been revealed to be anything other than human. (Some are modified in exotic ways, but they were human to start with, at least.)

Even farther towards the end of the book, after this long string of people being Conveniently Helpful For No Reason, she ends up in a train car with…and I wish I was making this up…a bunch of soldiers who are Inconveniently Attempted Rapists For No Reason.

That record-scratch moment your brain just did? That’s how it feels in the book, too. The attack comes out of nowhere, there’s suddenly a big action sequence with Lyra fighting back, their CO shows up and makes them let her go, and then she leaves the train and heads almost directly to the next bunch of Conveniently Helpful People.

If anyone wants more detailed spoilers, either to be prepared before reaching the scene or to decide whether you’ll read it at all, let me know.

To be blunt about one thing: from the in-scene descriptions I would’ve said none of these guys actually managed to get their dicks out, but a few days later we get the book’s first and only reference to Lyra having periods. And she doesn’t think “oh, thank republic-of-heavens, I’m not pregnant,” which suggests she knew it wasn’t a risk, but the whole Narrative Reason you write that in after an assault scene is because someone is afraid it’s a risk, so, what are you even doing, Pullman??

Okay, switching tracks.

Some of the people Lyra encounters, usually with personal stories that are way more interesting, and I wish they’d been [part of] the actual main plot:

A guy who meets her at a train station, says he has a friend who needs her help, leads her out into a maze of city streets where she explicitly thinks about how risky this is because she’s totally lost…but she does the mission and it’s fine and he leads her right back to the train station afterward.

The friend is a human who’s been modified by “a magician” to be some kind of fire-elemental person, and wants Lyra to help find his daemon, who was modified into a water-elemental form — a mermaid! This is cool and fascinating and scary and raises so many questions —

— and they get killed immediately after Lyra reunites them, and we never find out anything more about it.

The killer is the magician, who had been holding the water-sprite daemon captive. (And is possibly also the guy’s father? Finally, someone who can beat Marisa and Asriel in a “Bad Parenting Juice” drinking contest.) Which, again, is fascinating and evocative — how do you become a magician? Or are they born, like the witches? How many are there? What kinds of things are they doing in the world? —

— yeah, we don’t find out anything about that either.

Murderous Magician Dad just gives Lyra some helpful plot information, then sends her and the train-station guy off on their way.

A couple of guys who intervene when Lyra is being harassed at a bar.

They steer her outside, she’s prepared for a fight, but they hold up their hands and say they’re friendly, and also, they noticed someone steal the alethiometer bag off her earlier, so here, would she like it back?

They give her some helpful rumors, too. Don’t remember which specific ones, but they lead her to the next plot point.

A rich elderly princess who’s on the Daemonless International Support Group list, because her daemon fell in love (!) with another woman (!!) and eventually ran off with her (!!!).

Lyra thinks to herself that she’s seen other situations where a daemon and their human have different feelings about a romance. Just thinks it in passing, and then it’s gone. I want to see these situations! I want on-page exploration of multiple ways they can work! How do they correspond to the feelings of people in worlds where all the daemons are internal?

As for the princess, I already knew it was going to be a big scandal — two human women in that day and age could never be a couple, at least not in public, and A Literal Princess is a very public figure —

but then, in spite of the scandal, the princess moves in with the woman! And they travel together, they work together, they share a bed, she explains to Lyra that she played the role so thoroughly she made herself fall in love with the woman!

…and then it falls apart for some reason, and the princess leaves, but her daemon insists on staying. So that’s how they get separated. Deliberately walking away from each other.

There’s a brief reference to the idea of him wishing he was the other woman’s daemon, instead of the princess’s. How does that work? How do you get so disconnected from yourself, and in such a skewed partial-match with someone else, that you end up with that kind of yearning?

In case you can’t tell, I want to read this novel. I would trade the entirety of The Secret Commonwealth for this novel. No question, hands down.

Instead: Princess says “if you run into my daemon, tell him I’d like to see him again before we die?” Lyra says “sure, can do, thanks for the brunch.” And then, you guessed it, that whole scene is over and done with and we never get any follow-up on it again.

A pair of agents from Oakley Street, who say “hey, Lyra, have you considered using some basic disguise techniques, like dyeing your hair and wearing glasses?”

And then they give her a lovely haircut and a dye job and a spare pair of fake glasses.

This isn’t anywhere near the beginning of Lyra’s journey, by the way! This is more than 80% of the way through the book. There’s no special reason she needs it more after this point.

It’s like Pullman suddenly realized a disguise might help, wrote the scene at the point he had reached, and then never went back and edited to put it in a more meaningful location.

The stranger on a train who shows Lyra the deck of “exactly the same as an alethiometer” cards, gives her a demonstration of how to use them, and then leaves the whole deck behind for her to keep.

A married couple who don’t share any languages in common with Lyra, and don’t seem to have a lot of money…but feed her and let her stay at their house overnight, for free, even daemonless as she is. They also give her a free niqab so she can move around less conspicuously (she’s still injured from the fight with the soldiers).

A priest who invites her into his church, isn’t bothered when she takes off the niqab, helps treat her injuries, and gives her a motherlode of useful details about highly-illegal dealings he’s not even supposed to know about, but will unveil to this total stranger who just wandered in, because she needs them for the next plot point.

This when Lyra finds out that someone in this region has resurrected the Bolvangar method. But this time they aren’t kidnapping random children for it. No, they’re paying for it. If you’re poor enough, and desperate enough, and can’t spare any more kidneys, these people will buy your daemon to sell on the black market.

The city has a whole secret underclass of illegally-severed people working in the sewers.

Meanwhile, rich people who’ve been deserted by their daemons can purchase a stand-in. This is what Terrible Author did. Of course, it’s not a true replacement, but the dealers boast about their ability to make an excellent match.

There are also people who buy separated daemons for other scientific/experimental purposes. Details left to our imaginations.

This is a horrifying sinister mindblowing discovery, as much of a bombshell as the original Bolvangar was. I mean, it would’ve hit harder if Lyra had uncovered it by spying, or tricking someone into revealing the information, or anything more elaborate than “asking straightforward sorta-related questions and getting this whole sordid story infodumped by the first guy she asked,” but it’s still big.

So it’s gonna shake things up something fierce, right? Maybe Lyra won’t go full-on “calling in the cavalry to tear the place down” until Book 3, but this would be her new “stepping through the doorway into the sky” moment — where the horror of what she’s learned galvanizes her into making a pivotal decision, where she starts laying the groundwork for the revolution —

— no, of course not, this is where she starts going around to the hideouts of various undercover daemon-sellers and asking if they can help her find Pan.

Come on.

And this brings us to the end of the book. One of the black-market daemon-sellers guides Lyra to the creepy abandoned town where the final scene takes place.

In these last moments, the audience (but not Lyra) finds out that this guy has ulterior motives. Which would make it the first time in the whole book when “Lyra or Pan takes a Conveniently Helpful Person at face value with total credulity” turns out to be a bad idea.

(And, I mean, he’s a black-market daemon-seller. If anyone on that list was obviously an unethical scumball who shouldn’t be counted on….!)

Finally, a few things that don’t fit into any neat lists, but annoyed me enough to mention:

1) People curse in this book. Which is notable because they didn’t in HDM, and it wasn’t just the adults watching their mouths around tween Lyra — we got plenty of scenes that only had people like Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel in them. Those two would definitely be dropping f-bombs if it was a routine part of their world’s language, and this book reveals that it is.

So every time it happens it breaks your immersion, pointedly reminding you “this isn’t a real world, it’s a fake story where the author can switch the profanity-filter on and off at will.” Does it enhance the narrative in a way that’s worth the tradeoff? I don’t think so.

2) Before I read the book, I’d heard vague spoilers about “a character with a mermaid daemon,” and figured it was someone from a cool magical species — hopefully more expansion/exploration on the fairy from La Belle Sauvage whose daemon appeared to be “a whole flock of butterflies.”

But no, it’s a magically-modified human. His situation doesn’t get explored that deeply before he dies, or connect with anything else in the story. The fairy, meanwhile, does get mentioned when Malcolm tells Lyra about meeting her, but she doesn’t reappear or get any kind of follow-up.

In spite of the title, the only explicit appearance of any members of the “secret commonwealth” is some little glowing spirits, basically wights, that Lyra watches over the side of a gyptian boat one time.

3) There’s a scene where a bunch of people gather in a meeting hall to protest the Magisterium sabotaging their various rose-related livelihoods. A couple Magisterium reps are there. Malcolm is also there, and his POV basically goes “huh, looks like all the exits have gotten the doors shut. And barred. And suddenly they each have an armed Magisterium agent standing in front of them. That’s weird. Gonna keep quietly observing to find out what happens next.”

This guy is supposed to be a cool experienced anti-Magisterium spy! This is basically a giant neon sign flashing COMING UP NEXT: MASSACRE! (It is not a misdirect, either.)

And Malcolm sees it, but doesn’t read it, or take any action to try to subvert it, or even move to defend himself — it’s just like any cheesy horror movie where the audience is shouting LOOK BEHIND YOU at the unwitting character who’s about to get murdered.

Wrap-Up Thoughts

Whatever happens in the final volume of this trilogy, it might reveal things that redeem some of the problems in this book. But I’ll be honest, I’m not holding my breath.

And when I think about reveals that would address these problems, everything I come up with is stuff that should’ve just been in this book.

For example: let’s say the Fair Folk are directly involved after all, intervening to steer Lyra and Pan down the most convenient paths. In particular, the guy on the train who only appears long enough to give Lyra a set of alethiometry cards + a tutorial on how to use them — I really want him to be Fae. It’s so contrived and random if he’s not.

But the readers should know about it! Back in HDM, we would get scenes about the plans and activities of all the other factions at work. It might take a while to discover the exact details of (for example) the witches’ ultimate goal that Lyra was part of, but we knew they had a goal, and were supporting her in service of it. If the Secret Commonwealth is actively involved in the plot, we should’ve gotten that by now.

Semi-related: I feel like, if the rest of the book was better, then I’d have no trouble explaining a lot of the Lyra-specific issues as “she’s super-depressed, not in a place to make great choices or take a lot of decisive action.”

But it’s not like she’s drifting around in a trauma fog that hampers her ability to get things done. Her journey, while not perfect or threat-free, still comes together with improbable smoothness — as if the writing hasn’t noticed that she’s not being proactive and prescient and well-coordinated and overall super-competent about it. Meanwhile, other characters are underwhelming in the same way. (Looking at you, Malcolm “I Can’t Believe It’s Now a Bloodbath” Polstead.)

So it doesn’t seem like a conscious narrative choice to write Lyra this way. It just seems consistent with the complaints I have about everything else in the writing.

…let’s be honest, I’m almost certainly gonna read the third book anyway. I’m enough of a completist that it’ll bother me not to, I don’t have a lot of hard-stop dealbreakers that would make me bow out anyway, and, well, I do a lot of work that requires time-passing listening material. The Secret Commonwealth is nowhere near the most-frustrating audio I’ve used to fill that time.

But it hasn’t left me excited or optimistic or Shivering With Anticipation, either.

Mostly I just anticipate getting some useful stuff done while I listen, and then having a final set of reactions to work through in another one of these posts.

#His Dark Materials #HDM #The Book of Dust #The Secret Commonwealth #tsc spoilers #review

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