#baneful wayward souls

[fluffynin]

Was thinking of rewriting my story, but after a bit of stewing, I decided to continue it instead of redo the whole story. I did go through and edited past chapters to make them cleaner and easier to read, but now to better plan out my future tracks for Baneful, Wayward Souls as about to have a lot of fun with worldbuilding and such. Especially with exploring the world of Pokemon much deeper with Ingo amd Naofumi along with the consequences of the time space issues going on.

Here's the link to the lastest chapter.

Also here's the link for the first chapter.

[fullofbees]

My God's Bane (Astarion x F!Tav)

Tav no longer recognizes herself while Astarion finally comes to terms with his feelings towards her.

AKA I wrote my own leadup to Astarion's confession scene :3

CW: LOTS of angst, religious conflict/crisis, mentions of past physical, emotional, and sexual abuse (Astarion), mild depictions of gore Word Count: 9,437

He liked to think that he had a talent for reading people at this point. Most wear their emotions clearer than they believe. Even when they hide behind a quiet, joyful, or indifferent mask, everyone slips, shows their hand so to speak, and that’s when he strikes. 

However, when it came to the leader of their ragtag band of weirdos, she was easy. She slipped the moment they met, when he cornered her about killing one of those brain creatures outside the nautiloid crash. She all but ran to his supposed rescue, not thinking twice that the man before her could pose harm. It was as simple as breathing back then, to betray that small boundary of trust when he held his blade to her throat. 

Her heart was on her sleeve, and she extended it to every wayward soul they encountered. With remarkable speed, she was able to secure new adventurers for their mission. She made vows to the tieflings and druids alike, intent on restoring order despite the limited time they had. Whether foe or ally, she sought the safety of all involved – such is the way of a valiant paladin. It was an inconvenience, honestly. 

Ever since they arrived at the Shadowlands, though, Tav’s personality changed.  

Their first day in the darkness brought them to battle between the Harpers and their arachnoid escort. The towering bastard had to go and cast Sanctuary constantly, leaving the rest to pick off the weaker cultists until they could find an opening past his defense.  

Tav had swung the final blows, her blade illuminated in a holy light that was nearly blinding against the shadows. The drider fell, and joined his fellow Absolutists as bloody road markers.  

She was an excitable kind of person, cheering and hollering with the smallest of victories, giddy with triumph whenever her enemies fell. Add Karlach into the mix, and Astarion was positive that sleep would evade the camp that night, the two warriors whooping into the night, drunk off wine and adrenaline.  

But, as she had stood over the vanquished drider, Tav was silent. He could not make out the emotion that crossed her face; reverence – or perhaps mourning, as he watched Tav kneel to close each eye the spider possessed.  

Astarion knew he was the only one to witness it. The others were engaged in conversation as the Harpers so graciously invited them to their little hideout, in the form of an abandoned inn. When Tav stood from the ground and turned, she froze upon seeing him standing there, eyes wide with panic as she fumbled for words to say. 

All she managed was a desperate, “Please don’t tell the others.” 

He didn’t understand why, at the time, he had allowed her to place such trust in him.  

The same night, when everyone was gathered around the campfire, joking and sharing stories over whatever meal Gale managed to throw together, she stared into the flames until one of their companions pulled her mind back to the present.  

“An actual drider,” marvels Wyll, “It would have been magnificent if it weren’t so grotesque. Wouldn’t you agree, Tav?” 

“Hmm?” She hummed, eyes transfixed on the bowl in her hands. 

“The drider,” Wyll tried again, almost in disbelief that she had not heard him the first time, “What did you make of it?” 

Her spoon circled the bowl for the umpteenth time, the sound immensely grating to Astarion’s sensitive hearing.  

“Him,” she muttered. 

“I’m sorry?” Wyll asked. 

“What did I make of him? He’s a person, not an ‘it’,” she corrected with a huff of offense. “That poor man...” 

“I wouldn’t go so far as to pity the creature,” admonished Shadowheart, “It is only fitting that one be punished for failing their Goddess. Really, we were doing it a favor.” 

There’s an unwon arrogance that Shadowheart tends to mince her words with. Usually, he would find her quips amusing, but he wished she would have read the obvious tension.  

“He’s not a creature!” Tav slammed the bowl into the dirt in front of her. The metallic clang of the spoon against ceramic rang out into the stunned silence of those around the fire. 

“He was hurting! Desperate to be seen after Lolth’s rejection... and all it got him was a tadpole from another cruel Goddess!” Tav’s hands clenched into fists, brow furrowed as her eyes focused once again on the flames, “He didn’t deserve to die. I could have-- I mean, we could have done more!”  

“I do not understand,” said Lae’zel, “Why do you show such sympathies for the weak?” 

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” chimes in Karlach, and though Astarion assumed she would start on another lecture about friendship and unity, Tav did not let her finish. 

“I’m afraid I lost my appetite. Good night,” she said, her meal abandoned as she stomped off to her tent.  

Karlach sighed, shaking her head at Lae’zel. The githyanki had not moved, still perplexed by the situation around her. An uneasy quietness quickly descended upon the group, broken only by Wyll bidding them goodnight. A chorus of muttered ‘goodnights’ followed as they began to disperse. 

Considering it an outburst of exhaustion, Astarion left Tav to stew in her tent. He wished he hadn’t, for she was no better the next day. 

It was normal for her to seek their thoughts while exploring. She’d ask Karlach or Lae’zel for tips after combat, banter with Gale and Wyll, show Shadowheart every damn “pretty” flower she found, and insisted on directing as many vampire jokes as she could at Astarion. It didn’t matter how dreadfully unfunny they were, she always laughed.  

Adventuring was quiet now, as she ushered them from place to place, battle to battle, without a break. They found various victims of the curse, most a century old, but some new and with unfortunately familiar faces. It did not matter how long the bodies had been there, Tav grieved each one, tears streaming from her face as she read letters of their last words. While she bawled at their corpses, Astarion brooded, wondering when he had started to miss her laughter.  

She was praying more often as well, sequestering herself alone in whatever corner she could find and frantically whispering. Once, when she ceased her incessant prayer, Tav appeared to be locked in some kind of trance. She did not react to sound or touch, the whole of her eyes overtaken by a ghostly, lavender hue. She stayed that way for two hours.  

Everyone saw the tears that streamed from her eyes when her mind had returned from its journey, but she refused to answer their questions.  

Karlach approached him one night, nearly a tenday after Tav’s original outburst, telling him he needed to figure out what was wrong. He had scoffed at the tiefling; after all, it’s not like he cared about whatever mental issues shared rent with her tadpole. Right? 

“She likes you the most, fangs. If there’s anyone she’s willing to open up to, I'm bettin’ it’s you.” 

He laughed then, loud and boisterous, to hide the rising tide of excitement and anxiety that Karlach’s words had caused.  

“Trying to use me to pry into Tav’s life, are we?” He tsk-ed. Though he smiled, his anxiety had given way to anger. It poked and taunted his deepest fear; that he’s only useful when he can be used. It’s so painfully obvious that’s all he’d ever be, that even sweet Karlach knew it.  

But something besides the tadpole lurked around in his mind; why does he feel bad about tricking Tav? That is his whole plan, is it not? Use the strong sword-wielding lady to safely travel back to Baldur’s Gate, she dices this stupid cult and Cazador into pieces, and then he dumps her, finally free from any master’s grip.  

He banished the intruding thought instantly, bottled it as deep as it could go, for the looming answer to his question threatened to make him sick. He is undead, a creature of the night, an external parasite that feeds on Tav at night until he can find someone, something, better. His skin is cold as ice and his heart no longer beats. He has no heart to give; or so he tells himself. 

“You know that’s not the case,” Karlach had chastised, seemingly offended he could suggest such a thing, “We’re all worried. You can pretend all you want, but I know you are too. You can help her, Astarion.” 

Now that was a curious sentiment. ‘Help’ is numerous in its contexts; Cazador certainly considered himself helpful, merciful even, as he watched his new spawn vomit blood and dirt after clawing out of their tombs. The word implies a give and take, and the world is far more eager to collect than it is to provide.  

To put it plainly, he had nothing to offer their melancholic leader; he is nothing and has been for a long time. Still, Karlach had come to him, apparently unaware of his obvious lack. Perhaps he should hear her out. Perhaps she saw something in him.  

“And just how should I ‘help’?” Astarion asked, condescendingly drawling the question out, rolling his eyes for good measure.  

He saw how the edge of Karlach’s lips twitched, how her eyes narrowed, the way her mechanical heart roared to life with a bright spark before settling back into quiet embers. In poetic irony, it seems that he burned her.  

“Hells below, Astarion,” she nearly yelled, exasperated, tired, and practically begging him to cooperate. He doesn’t blame her for the outburst. Without the annoyingly bubbly attitude of Tav, the tension between party members had been amplified and pulled taut. They all may very well snap soon.  

“I’ll see what I can do,” he dismissed her then, attention focused back on the tome he had in his hands. But his mind did not process the words on the page. He reread the same line damn near ten times before he gave up and went to bed instead. 

His rest was anything but; it was fitful and full of sorrow.  

It was times like then when he wished he could slumber like every other living creature. When his victims and fellow spawn would speak of nightmares, they told tales of distorted visions and intense fear. His waking hours were already plagued with such issues, he could easily handle the nightmares. But no, instead he was cursed to revel in his own pain during his meditative rest, reliving and experiencing his own terrifying truths on repeat.  

That night, he tried searching for something he could do for Tav. Something that the others could not; something to prove his value to her. He did find it. It didn’t take him long at all.  

All he had to offer his little troublesome Tav was his body.  

And it broke him.  

He spent that night with the realization that this is who he is and always will be. A body to be used and used and used and used and used and used and used and u s e d....... 

Thankfully, Tav had asked him to stay at camp that morning. Even though he teased her with his usual, “Darling, I thought we had something special,” she could barely manage a smile, and muttered her thanks before flittering about camp in preparation.  

It was probably for the best, knowing how useless he would have been with that morose epiphany swimming in his mind. Though awake, the uneasy feeling from the night did not dissipate. His emotions were all over the place, that much he was sure of, but they had always been identifiable. Agony, desperation, emptiness.  

Now new and uncertain feelings – gods how he detested the word – seized his chest. Images of Tav pestered him the entire day; the bags under her eyes, the unkempt hair, the dying light of her spirit. Karlach was right, he was worried.  

Still, he could not find the source of his worry. He’d spent the last 200 years surrounded by shambling corpses and their victims alike. They slept like dogs, were beaten like beasts, so really, who was he to judge for a bad hair day?  

Astarion saw no use driving himself mad about it, after all, he had always warned her that her heroism couldn’t last forever. He spent that day doing what he does best when he finds himself without her company, distracting himself with enough shit wine and even shittier books. He didn’t think his tolerance would be shit too. 

Words had soon blurred together, and despite the book’s distinct lack of arcane knowledge, the letters seemed to arrange themselves in puzzles. He slammed the tome shut, opting to sit in the privacy of his tent and will away his growing headache. While his thoughts were no less jumbled, the feelings from before were becoming clearer.  

Worry; The presence of the undead made it impossible for him to feed on anyone other than Tav. Even though she always assured him that she did not mind, he felt like he was using her, and for the first time in a long time, he felt bad about being such a devious bastard. 

Rejection; He’d never tell, but the absence of Tav returning his superficial flirtations left him feeling empty. He tries to tell himself that it isn’t him, it isn’t his fault, but that doesn’t mean it hurts any less to not have her affection. 

Fear; He would give his body to her, if it would make her happy. Thousands before her had found pleasure in him, it would be easy for him to allow her the same. He wanted to believe that he’d be selfless, place her needs and comfort above his own; but he knew he could not. He is selfish. Could she want a selfish man? 

It dawned on him then, what this cocktail of vulnerability and yearning was. The cause of his worry, the source of his comfort, the reason he felt like an idiot. He lov- 

The party had arrived back at camp, and he had stumbled to his feet to meet them, for how would it look if their charming vampire companion was found sulking and brooding in his tent. Karlach immediately shed her armor, talking about how stuffy it felt to be metal-clad. Gale carried a sack with the night’s dinner ingredients in hand and grumbled about the pain in his knees as he knelt to light the fire. Lae’zel, despite her stoicism, appeared happy, covered head to toe in the blood of the fallen. 

Tav looked no worse than she had for these last few days, and that ought to count for something. He watched as she removed the outer pieces of her armor, wincing when the harsh edges dug into new and old bruises alike. She picked up a rag and a small mirror, wiping away the blood from the cuts on her face.  

The sight of the crimson spilling from her skin reminded him of his hunger. Their quid pro quo arrangement had been forgotten in her despair, and he was desperate at this point for anything she would give him. Blood, sex, shallow praise, whatever she had to offer.  

Oh, right. 

He had yet to offer himself again, so what reason would she have to keep up her end of the deal? 

He downs the last of the wine in his goblet, swallowing the intoxicating substance just as the reality of his situation swallows his hope. With measured steps, he approached her tent, taking quiet yet deep breaths to ease the misery he felt knowing he’ll never be more than this. He opened his mouth to call her name, but Tav released the ties holding back the rainfly of her tent and shut them all out. 

That should have been it, but his drunken mind reminded him of his promise to Karlach, and his predatorial hunger lurched at the idea of another night unsatiated.  

Once the others were asleep, Astarion snuck into her tent, part and parcel to their routine since she first discovered his true nature. It was easier for him when she was asleep, not that the sharp pinch of his fangs left her totally undisturbed; but to approach while she was awake only guaranteed in his mind that he would end up on his back again.  

Tav was facing away from him, lying on her side, a formerly white linen sheet covered her sleeping form. Nothing was amiss as he had stalked closer, brushing the strands of hair away from her neck, his mouth unbelievably dry. He knelt, the perfume of her blood wafting sweetly from beneath her skin, as he placed his hand on her shoulder to steady himself.  

She awoke then, the force of her sitting so abruptly pushed him back and sent him stumbling. He had, thankfully, caught himself with his hand before falling into the dirt. Still, he was equal parts annoyed at dinner being interrupted and worried that he was caught.  

“Hells, Astarion, you scared the shit out of me,” she whispered. 

“And you almost broke my nose,” he chastised; not a total lie, but an exaggerated one, nonetheless.  

Tav rolled her eyes at him before letting herself fall back against her bedroll again, “Oh, you poor thing, want me to kiss it better?” 

At least she appeared to be feeling better, back to the self that loved teasing him.  

“If you’re offering, who am I to say no to the hand that feeds?”   

Upon realizing that he would not be allowed to dine and dash, Astarion straddled her thighs, ready to bargain for what he needed. He let his hand rest on her hip, soothing circles through the fabric of her nightwear.  

“Yea, s’pose you can’t say you won’t bite,” she said through a drowsy laugh. 

He allowed his hand to wander then, down the inside of her thigh, fingers trailing along the seam of her pants, “As if the lady would protest my bites.” 

With a kiss pressed to her lips, Astarion silenced any innuendo or proposition she may have made. He did not want to hear it, could not stand the idea of her confirming all the horrid things he thought about himself.  

This unspoken deal only served to remind him of how temporary freedom would be. At worst, he would return to Cazador, and the bastard would tell him how lucky he should feel, how there were other mortals dying to be in his position. He wished he could tell him that adding an ‘s’ before ‘pawn’ doesn’t make being a puppet any more lucrative.  

She promised that she would not let that happen. She promised to free him from his master’s chains, but what comes after? He would still be bound to the night, doomed to prowl moonlit streets for an eternity. Killing would still be his status quo, whether mammal or mortal, in order to satiate his hunger.  

Would she stay with such a monster? 

Thoughts he did not want to entertain had barged to the forefront of his mind again, and he knew he needed to move this along. At least with sex, he could force those thoughts away, bottle them back up, and allow his body to numb. At least, this way, he survived another day. At least her body is warm. 

At least—anything he can say to himself to justify another night on his back and to ignore the resentment building in his heart. 

Her lips had parted in a moan, and his tongue quickly lay claim to her mouth, as his hand finally cupped her sex. She gasped, and as his mind had started to drift off into the numb void, he had been pulled back by the feeling of her hand pushing against his chest. 

When he separated himself from her body, Astarion wanted to scream, wanted to shake her; why did she insist on taking the lead? It would be easy with him on top; he wouldn’t have to look at her, to feel her weight on top of him. Must she be so difficult? 

“I don’t want to have sex tonight.” 

What-- 

He looked down at her then, saw the flush in her face, felt how her hands fiddled with the ruffled collar of his shirt but harbored no intention to remove the clothing.  

“I’m not really in the right headspace for that,” she explained, “Plus, I can taste the wine on your lips...” 

“Right, well...” He didn’t know what to say.  

Astarion was frozen above her, unsure of what he was supposed to do. Awkwardness had settled over them both, each one terrified of scaring the other off should they move or speak. Until, the dots connect in her head and she practically launched herself upright, almost smacking herself into him again. 

“You haven’t fed since we got here, have you? Shit, I’m sorry!” She said as she pulled her hair to the side, exposing the column of her neck.  

Any other time, he might have shoved her away, storming out of her tent as his hunger gave way to the embarrassment of it all, his crumbling ego unable to cope. But as she all but dragged his mouth to her skin, urging him to drink, Astarion was thankful that her care outweighed his own pride. 

His fangs pierced her flesh, and she hissed at the pain, but did not complain further.  

He recalled the conversation they had about what their friends would taste like, debating over who would be sweet and who would be savory. Once he had mused that she would be bland, only if to rile her up, but the depth of her lifeblood had truly surprised him.  

She is a winter’s mulled wine, deceptively simple at first yet brimming with spice as she settles on his tongue. Hints of citrus tease his palate, the last taste of summer’s sweetness yielding to the zest of cinnamon and clove. It was gone as soon as it came, leaving its enjoyer to eagerly await the next mouthful.   

As he drank from her, he had felt the echo of a memory in his chest, of his younger days scribbling away next to a hearth, of a man who made his heart flutter and his skin burn with want. The man’s face remains obscured, buried under years of torment, but the feeling is there; the rush of something new and exciting; the naivety of first love. 

With wild hair and soft eyes that regarded him as if he held the entire world, the elf below him had unearthed a humanity he’d long since forgotten. What a wondrous feeling it was; to release all that had been brimming beneath the surface, to give names to the shadows, to feel again.  

Again, her hand pushed against his chest, weaker than before as she mumbles, “O-Okay, I’m starting to get dizzy.” 

His fangs retreated from her skin, and as his lips captured any wayward drops, he realized he did not wish to completely part in that moment. Gently, he laid her down against her bedroll, back on her side. He situated himself behind her, basking in the newfound heat that flowed through his veins, and allowed his breath to even out. Tav was already fast asleep when he turned, wrapping his arm around her and cuddled her to his chest. 

...  

Astarion had made sure to return to his own tent before dawn broke and if Tav had noticed the vampire snuggling her in the night, he was eternally grateful for her silence on it in the morning. He did not want to hear the insufferable taunts and jokes the others would make if the two of them were discovered together. Gale or Wyll, hells, probably even Karlach, would remind him that it’s only natural for two adults to seek out company between their giggles; as if he’s a little boy who's embarrassed about his crush.  

But that is what he is, isn’t he? He’s tucking tail and scurrying away because he’s afraid of others seeing that he is capable of feeling. Brazen displays of emotion, especially ones of love, are signs of a weakness to be exploited. Everything he had ever loved had been taken from him, had been hurt because of him. He could love her, he wants to love her, but it would just be placing a target on her back. Another one of Cazador’s endless lessons.  

She is safer this way.  

For what it’s worth, Tav did appear livelier that morning, bantering with Shadowheart as the cleric healed their bloodless leader, and it earned him a thankful pat on the back from Karlach. 

“Ah, I love the taste of Lesser Restoration in the morning,” Tav hummed happily, arms raised above her head as she stretched the sleep out of her body. 

“I don’t know why you insist on coming to me,” said Shadowheart, “You’re the one who chose to be a walking blood bank, and I know Paladins can cast Lesser Restoration. Why don’t you heal yourself instead of making it my problem?” 

“Because you’re always so charming,” Tav teased, “How do you expect me to resist?” 

“Kicking and screaming, I hope,” deadpanned the cleric. 

“See what I mean? Our own little ray of sunshine!”  

After breakfast, Tav assembled that day’s crew. The idea of a day of physical labor after last night's mental exhaustion made Astarion less than eager to accept her invitation. Still, he had said yes, and donned his armor as he made a quiet vow to himself.

He will always keep her safe in one way or another.  

The day’s mission had involved infiltrating the House of Healing to find something that could be used on this Art Cullagh fellow. Astarion had accepted, by this point, to not concern himself with the details and just assist Tav with whatever heroics she found herself agreeing to. They would happen with or without him.  

The exterior yielded nothing of value, except one half of a pair of warding rings Tav found on the skeleton of another victim. She was somber as she pocketed the ring and read the lover’s note, but composed herself afterwards, and said a small prayer before pushing forward. He had felt some level of pride and admiration, watching as a new strength kindled inside her. There was inflation to his ego as well, a selfish joy in thinking that his mere cuddles could fix her woes. 

He should have known better. Life had never been kind. 

They had entered the House of Healing through an antechamber that reeked of decay and spoiled blood. Infirmary beds were strewn about, and of the few that weren’t outright destroyed or flipped over, they looked less than pleasing without a mattress to cover the rusted springs. Rotting towels, shattered wash basins, and an unknown film covered the floors. Voices echoed from the main chamber ahead, so each step further in was made cautiously. 

They passed through a door to their right and discovered what used to be a woman as she floated before two of the beds, covered in nurses' attire that clearly didn’t know the definition of sterile. She - no, it - paid them no mind as they had approached, gazing down at the implements and bandages before it as if it couldn’t figure out what to do.  

With her hand on the hilt of her sword, Tav spoke first, “Excuse me, ma’am?” 

“Don’t call the doctor yet!” came the soft plea of the creature, “I’ve got potions, sutures - I know I can do this...” It turned to address their fellow nurse, yet startled when it saw the Paladin, “Oh! You’re a patient. This is the children’s ward – triage is back that way.” 

“I have something else I’d like to ask you,” Tav started, but her words faded off as she looked beyond the nurse in front of her.  

Two bodies laid still on the beds, clearly dead, though it was hard to tell if it was from the Shadow Curse or the nurse’s ‘treatment’. 

In an instant, Tav drew her sword, resting the blade in a tail stance, voice low with anger as she asked, “What are you doing with the dead?” 

The nurse regarded her with confusion as she replied, “Not dead, merely medicated. To ease the pain.”  

Tav raised her sword, now bracing her weight in a plow stance, the tip of her blade dangerously close to the nurse’s abdomen, as she snarled, “I asked you a question, creature! What are you doing with the dead?” 

Astarion had watched Tav face countless foes since their adventure together began. Even with the most wicked, she had never been so blatantly offensive. In hindsight, he realized that all those foes had been alive; fought them she must, but always done so reluctantly, and always ready to spare a life when able. There, in the House of Healing, did he first witness her true devotion as a Doomguide.  

Of course, she had told the group of her deity; was overbearingly eager to share it, in fact. Kelemvor; Judge of the Damned; whose symbol featured a skeletal hand raising balanced scales. Tav wears it on her chest – darkened purple stitched into a solid black surcoat that she dons no matter the armor underneath. She told them the stories of her years as a lone wanderer, proselytizing Kelemvor’s wisdom, performing last rites for the dying, and destroying necromancers.  

She was a protector of the living, and a slayer of the undead. 

The creature did not answer her question, insisting that the patients were sleeping and to be quiet lest they wake. The last words the creature heard were Tav’s whispered, “In Kelemvor’s name,” before the blade was plunged clean through its body. It collapsed to the floor, trying to speak, but the blood pooling in its throat only allowed for senseless gurgling.  

Tav placed her foot on the corpse and pushed it into the heap of flesh as she withdrew her blade. Thick, blackened blood congealed on the metal, and Tav held it in a white-knuckled grip as she stepped over the body and towards the beds. 

She took one glance and immediately turned around, tripping on the creature's body as she rushed out of the vestibule, landing on her hands and knees, as her sword skidded across the floor. She did not rise, instead sinking to her elbows as her hands pulled at her hair to the point that Astarion thought she might rip it out.   

Karlach rushed to her side, trying to ease the Paladin up as hushed sobs echoed off the walls.  

“Hey now, soldier,” said the tiefling, taking hold of Tav’s biceps and urging her to sit up, “Don’t go getting soft on me.” 

Shadowheart bypassed the two and peered into the beds before gasping, “It’s Arabella’s parents.” 

Another choked cry broke out from Tav as she finally sat back on her haunches, rubbing away her tears with a grubby hand, “I fucking hate this place.” 

“We all do,” assured Karlach, “But we gotta keep moving forward; don’t want to have worms forever, do we?” 

“No,” came Tav’s hushed response before she stood to her feet. She picked up her sword from the floor, flicking some of the blood off, “Let’s just get this over with.” 

Malleus Thorm was an abhorrent sight. Deciding to take the lead after Tav’s second outburst, Karlach interrogated the cursed doctor about his peculiar treatment plan. He spoke of Shar, of darkness, of absence. The victim strapped to the table was catatonic from the aimless carving of the nurses’ blades, though he was soon comatose after the doctor’s mechanical claws dug into his eyes. 

Tav was antsy behind her, shifting on her feet, practically chomping at the bit to send the undead man back into oblivion. The battle was difficult, but well won. Tav’s anger and adrenaline combined with Divine Smite proved a lethal combo.  

Shadowheart pulled a lute from the corpse of Malleus and held it out to Tav, “I think you might want this.”  

Tav took the lute, strapped it to her back and made way for the exit. Despite the exhaustion they all felt and the rush of emotions Tav must have experienced, she stayed silent. No cries, no curses, not one tear to be found. Astarion felt that agonizing mix of worry and sorrow creep around him. 

He increased his pace until he was able to fall in line with her, their other party members straggling not far behind.  

“Are you alright, darling?” He asked quietly, still not quite ready for his care to be announced to the world. 

She only nodded. 

...  

If he thought their adventures had been quiet before, they were dead silent now. Every fight with another Thorm family member pushed Tav further into despair. Any attempts by their companions to make her smile or laugh were futile. She walked and fought like a zombie, resulting in her near-death numerous times. Lectures about how she needed to mind herself went in one pointed ear and out the other, apparently.

Her silence was only broken by the fits of sobbing that occurred from her tent each night. If she managed to fall into her meditative state, it would end with her lurching forward, gasping for air as she scrambled off into the corner of camp to empty the contents of her stomach. 

Karlach had to take over as temporary leader, and if she had her way, Tav would’ve stayed behind. Yet, when the Paladin appeared every morning with her armor and sword ready, the tiefling couldn’t find the strength to not let her tag along.  

Astarion also insisted that he be allowed on each mission, even if his skills weren’t useful for their goal. For whatever reason, Tav listened to him more than the others, and would only accept his help when she found herself injured. He had to be there for her, even if watching her suffer wore away at his own sanity. He often found himself looking at the warding ring she had silently given him after their fight with Malleus, and wondered if he would ever hear her laugh again.  

Bones, blood, and viscera decorated the entrance hall. The gore was mundane to him, no more unique than a cobblestone street or tavern lights in the dark. The dank and forebodingness of the crypt did not stop him from admiring its beauty. The ruins must have been a marvelous sight in their heyday, brimming with the Lady of Loss’s worshippers as they sought to drown out their sorrow and begged for her guidance amongst the crystalline decor. 

Their group split to investigate the various rooms that surrounded the concourse, with him following behind Tav as she investigated the nook to the right. Through the towering archway, he saw that it was no more than a chamber, perhaps used as foyer for those who came to grieve the Thorm family. More bones were littered across its floor and piled in its corners. He saw nothing novel, yet Tav stopped stock still.  

“Myrkul...”, she had hissed with disgust, hands clenched into fists that shook in splintering rage. 

Peeking over her shoulder, he saw the triangle of femurs that had been constructed in front of the dilapidated desk, a skull perched neatly in the middle. He joined her at her side, casual when he had faced her and asked carelessly, “Who?” 

Truthfully, the name and symbol were of no interest to him; a forgotten name from a bygone era, and most importantly, a deity that had ignored his prayers. She looked up to him then, and the dusty air must have been getting to him, because he swore her gaze softened when their eyes met. 

“Myrkul Bey al-Kursi, a necromancer and prince who ascended to godhood when Jergal willingly parted with his title,” Gale interrupted just as Tav was about to speak. 

Astarion rolled his eyes at the wizard and resisted the urge to pettily stomp his foot against the floor. His look was not enough to kill, but it did have Gale surrendering, hands up in a wordless apology as he had backed away from the two. 

“Correct,” Tav said, breaking the tension she didn’t know had occurred, “He was usurped by Cyric, but the Prince of Lies was defeated by Kelemvor.” 

Astarion was desperate to keep her talking. He’d listen to an entire history lecture if it meant she’d come back to sound mind. Back to him. “What use would a servant of Myrkul have with some Sharran shrine?” 

“It doesn’t matter what ‘use’ they have for it,” admonished Shadowheart, “Lady Shar has decreed that Ketheric must die for his betrayal, and ridding her temple of other disgraces in the process is as much a bonus as it is an honor.” 

Listening to the cleric’s devotion was uninteresting at best, and torturous at worst. He almost pitied the poor girl, blindly following a goddess out of fear of what her memories might hold. 

Astarion had expected Tav to mirror Shadowheart’s enthusiasm, but instead saw her bristle, hands wringing together nervously. She was unrecognizable to him, the proud warrior now hunched in on herself as she gnawed at her bottom lip. Anxiety was radiating off her in waves; she looked like she might vomit. 

His body had moved before he had realized what he was doing, hand reaching for her shoulder to comfort her. When his cool skin had made contact with her chainmail, she recoiled, eyes wide and breath unsteady. Hurt by her reaction, he let his hand fall limply to his side, and gruffly announced that the party should keep moving. 

His patience wore thin as they descended into the abyss below the mausoleum. Gale and Shadowheart both wouldn’t shut up about the various magical auras they were picking up on. Sensing Shar’s presence in the Temple of Shar? Who could have guessed the dark goddess would have been there? Bloody amateurs. 

Tav nearly fell in battle again against the Dark Justiciars that were forever cursed to protect the temple. She was unfocused and reckless, and the shadows had swarmed her after making quick work of the necromancer’s lackeys. To make matters worse, there was still no sign of the devil Raphael had tasked them with killing. There were hundreds of rats, though, and the sight of them left a bad taste in his mouth. 

With some convincing from both he and Gale, Tav finally acquiesced and agreed to return to camp for the evening. Night had developed a new, uncomfortably familar cycle by then, with Tav disappearing to her tent before anyone could say anything to her. She would eat her dinner alone. He would pretend he didn’t hear her crying throughout the night. 

They found Balthazar the next day, and it was the first time he ever saw pure hatred burning behind her eyes. They barely survived, the undead necromancer’s poison draining their strength while his ghouls beat them with decayed teeth and talons. When the bastard finally fell, Tav stood over his corpse, whispered a prayer, and then carved her blade through the fat of his neck. She stabbed her sword repeatedly into his chest, moving down his torso until he was no longer recognizable; just a pile of oozing sinew and flesh. His hulking, sewn-together abomination was the next target of her wrath, and it too was reduced to a pool of guts and blood. 

It was not enough. 

She destroyed the furniture, set the bookshelves ablaze, tore down everything the necromancer kept in his makeshift laboratory. The rest of the party removed themselves from the room, watching silently from the threshold as their near-death leader found the strength to take all of Balthazar’s worldly possessions with her. 

It would have been sexy as hell if it weren’t so concerning. 

She eventually collapsed, falling to her knees, sword clattering to the ground with a metallic clang echoing around the room. Silence followed; stares were exchanged between Astarion and his fellow compatriots, each one wordlessly asking the other what the hell had just happened. 

Tired of walking on eggshells, of not doing something, Astarion walked over to Tav and kneeled in front of her. She didn’t notice him at first, eyes shut tight and chest heaving with labored breaths. He reached out again, placing his hand on her knee. 

She was startled, but didn’t move away like before. Instead, her bloodied hand covered his own, fingers tracing over his knuckles, inadvertently smearing the crimson against his pale skin. When he suggested they retire to camp early, she finally, finally, met his gaze. Glimmering violet swirled in her irises, no doubt the remnants of whatever magic she called on Kelemvor for. It faded away, leaving him with the woman of his adoration, looking broken and lost. 

Clinging to his armor, she staggered to her feet, yet nearly toppled again when she went to pick up her sword. It was instinct really, for him to grab her waist and to keep her upright. He certainly had held her hips in more lascivious situations, but somehow he felt more naked that time. 

Vulnerable. 

He doesn’t think he can keep this a secret any longer. 

… 

This last tenday has been punishing, and Astarion carries its weight with him as he searches the encampment for his wayward paramour. 

He finds her on the staggered rock where they helped Halsin rescue Thaniel, staring out into the darkness. Her posture is relaxed as she leans back on her arms, legs dangling off the edge where the water beats on the stone below. 

The silt crunches softly beneath his boots, and he knows she has heard him approach when her ear twitches. He settles himself beside her, brushing off any stray granules from his armor with a huff of disgust. She giggles. 

It must look comical, how quickly his head snaps up at the sound, searching her face for signs of madness. After how despondent she’s been, he expects to find a vessel, a hollow being with the residue of what was a soul, begging to be let go. 

Instead, he finds her kind smile, as she now swipes away the remaining dirt from his calf, “Not a fan of sand, I take it?” 

For all his prose, there is no poetry, no song, no prayer that could mimic the joy he feels when she teases him. He’s been drowning, his mood anchored to hers, and now she has yanked him from the abyss once again. Is this the feeling all those bards crooned about? That every two-bit novelist dreamed of capturing? 

He had long given up on such fantasies, convinced himself that the very notion of love made him sick. 

Love. 

There’s no use pretending anymore. It is love that he feels for Tav. It’s why he mopes at the end of the night if she dares to speak to him last; perhaps the tad murderous feeling he gets when he sees her acting too chummy with the wizard. It’s the comfort of knowing someone has his back, the safety of her sword shielding him from attack, the promises of freedom sleepily whispered between lips in the night. She is the first breath taken when he surfaces. The sun pales in comparison to the warmth in her touch, though she is just as apt to kiss his cheeks. 

She is back and gods, how he missed her. 

Gods, how he loves her. 

“No, I don’t,” he responds in his bantering tone, “It’s rough... irritating... and it gets bloody everywhere.” 

She hums in agreement, gaze falling to the ground before returning to the river. Silence befalls them again, and he finds himself clamoring for words. He wants to confess his love, sing her praises, ask her what the hell is wrong with her. Anything to fill the silence, he refuses to live in the saturnine hellscape that has been the last week any longer. 

“Astarion,” she beats him to it, “I want to apologize for my behavior these last few days. I put everyone at risk and going forward I’ll be sure to keep everything in check. Can’t have everyone dying because of incompetency.” 

A bit too diplomatic for his liking, and her laughter is much too forced. He’ll need to teach her some proper acting; it’s a miracle she’s survived as long as she has with that disaster of a performance. Aren’t paladins supposed to be charismatic, or is it the weapon that does most of the talking? 

“Oh, you were in a bad mood? I hardly noticed,” he states with all the indifference he can muster. 

She leans into him to playfully jab her elbow into his side, muttering expletives in an elven dialect he hasn’t heard in ages. 

“Seriously, I’m sorry if I made you worry.” 

“I’m just glad you’re safe,” he rushes out, hand idly scratching the back of his neck. 

The tension returns, though not as overbearing as before, as questions remain unasked and feelings unshared. It’s a bitter push, as neither is used to talking about their depths, and he doesn’t want to pry; yet a sweet pull, as he remains at her side, wishing for the awkwardness to dissipate. 

“It’s just...” She begins, and though she faces forward, he catches her sneaking looks at him in her peripheral, “There’s so much going on, I don’t know where to start.” 

If he had any blood in his body, he’s sure it’d be racing, his heart thumping wildly in tandem. He thinks she’s ready to talk, and that is half the issue. He thinks, but he doesn’t know; it terrifies and thrills him all the same. He wants to know her – aches for it, if he’s being honest. 

But he is terrified, so sure that he’s going to fuck up and ruin the one good thing he’s had in two hundred years. If she rejects him now, shuts him out for good, he’s not sure he can take it. 

This was supposed to be easy; she was supposed to be easy. 

“It doesn’t matter where you start, I’ll be here for the end.” Shit, shit, SHIT. 

“Astarion,” she gasps, hand over her heart, his name melting into a laugh, “That was actually smooth.” 

He tsks, “I take offense to that. I’ve always been smooth, you’re just too brutish to notice.” 

She laughs again, shaking her head as an enamored smile graces her lips. Her hand brushes stray locks of hair behind her pointed ear and even in the dim glow of the inn’s spell, he can see a blush staining her cheeks. 

But then, she sighs, slow and tired as her fingers soothe circles into her temples, “Can you keep a secret for me?” 

It’s what he’s been pining for, offered on a silver platter, and how could he not say yes. 

He raises his hand to his chest, drawing an ‘x’ over his armor, “Cross my heart and hope to—uh, well, you know.” 

Another chuckle escapes her lips as she adjusts her position, angling herself towards him. 

She swallows thickly before continuing, “Well, I uh—I talked to Kelemvor.” 

“Is that not par for the course for you Doomguides?” He asks incredulously, eyebrow raised and head tilting as he chuckles. 

This time, she does not grant him a smile or a laugh, focused on picking at her cuticles and the dirt under her nails. 

“I haven’t spoken to him since the nautiloid, I figured the tadpole was interfering,” she says hushed, shame and guilt on the edges of her voice. “I was preparing myself for the worst, but what I got was an impossibility.” 

What kind of cryptic bullsh-- She’s been hanging around Withers too much. 

Hundreds of possibilities race through his mind. What he knows of Kelemvor is only from what she has shared; while he did not seem to be a vengeful god, they already have one person burdened with a suicide mission. He could live without the blabbersome wizard, but her? 

He should have known the universe would only offer him misery, to dangle a sweet treat before him and rip it all away before he had the chance to savor it. 

“Did he ask you to sacrifice yourself?” He wants to hear it from her, needs to hear her say those dreaded words so he can make peace before she is nothing more than bones and fading memories. 

Her eyes find his, inflamed with tears she no longer has the strength to shed, “I wish he did.” 

The pain, the anger, the grief of the last few days resurfaces in her voice, that flare of purple sparking in her irises. Astarion does not often find himself shocked, but the callous and tempestuous storm raging beneath her skin leaves him speechless. Instincts tell him he is witnessing only a fraction of her fury. 

Then it ebbs, retreating like the tide, as she takes a deep breath to steady herself. 

“I’ve been having doubts, about my purpose, about this path I chose. I expected Kelemvor to berate me for lacking faith.” 

Her hands go back to tearing at her cuticles. 

“He by no means praised me, but he wasn’t furious, either. He didn’t seem like himself... He didn’t even look like himself. It was as if his passion was gone. I asked him what I should do, and he told me that only I can determine my future.” 

“So? What’s wrong with that?” He was genuinely confused by her demeanor. Self-determination, autonomy, freedom; all the things she promised to help him find and keep, yet she fears them for herself. 

“Kelemvor has been a part of my life since I was a teenager, I’ve devoted myself to him for the better part of two centuries. I don’t-- I don’t know who I am without him.” 

A kindred spirit. 

She clenches her jaw, letting out a frustrated huff, “What am I supposed to do? I can’t stay a Doomguide to a god who abandoned his own principles!” 

He knows she is bleeding from her nail beds, the lovely scent of spiced wine in the air.  

“I took an oath of devotion, to be honorable, compassionate, and honest. I do not fear death of myself nor my loved ones, for death is not something to be afraid of. It is not something one must seek, but it is what one should embrace should it find you,” She explains, “For the last two hundred and fifty-six years, Kelemvor would remind me of these tenets, and commend me for every valiant foe I slaughtered in their image.” 

As sweet as the fragrance is, he takes her hands in his; they have seen and caused enough damage for the time being. 

“And Kelemvor just... doesn’t care anymore. Every time we saw some poor undead creature cursed by Shar, I was reminded of how he dismissed me, like I was a fool for ever following him in the first place. I was his valiant hero, one his most beloved Paladins, and now what? I’m nothing.” 

“You are not nothing,” he replies in an instant, “You are everything. You don't need Kelemvor to be honorable or compassionate, because you already are those things. He was lucky to have someone as devoted as you, but if he wants to toss you aside, then good riddance; it’s his loss, and everyone else’s gain.” 

Crimson floods her cheeks again, as she stares at him dumbfounded. He fidgets in the momentary silence, the feeling of actually sharing one's feeling still mildly uncomfortable. But then it dissipates, because she smiles at him and brings their clasped hands to rest over her heart. Its beat is comforting. 

“Thanks, Astarion. I don’t know what I would have done without you these last few weeks.”  

“Someone had to keep you alive. I know I said you would make a pretty corpse, but that doesn’t mean I’m eager to see it, darling.” 

“I’m sure Shadowheart would let you have a nibble if I passed,” she says with a laugh. 

“Perhaps, but I don’t think she could compare.” 

The steady rhythm of her heart increases under his hands. She adjusts herself again, scooting closer to him so that she can lean her head against his shoulder. Her eyes close as she relaxes into him, and he feels so relieved at knowing her touch could be so intimate yet still so gentle. 

“There’s just one thing I don’t understand, Tav,” He says, his thumb softly tracing along her knuckles, “Why were you having doubts in the first place?” 

“Oh! Um...” She says, head lifting from his shoulder, “It’s so embarrassing, don’t worry about it.” 

“Don’t you dare hold out on me now,” He pleads as he slings his arm across her back, hand resting on her hip and pulling her in close so he can whisper, “Especially when it comes to gossip!”  

Sagging against his side, she groans out, “You are the wooooorst.” 

He raises his hand to his face, making a dramatic show of clearing his throat before uttering a very sickly sweet, “Please?” 

“Okay, fine,” she huffs before grumbling out something unintelligible. 

“What was that dear? No one likes a mumbler.” 

“Because of you! Because... I like you,” She says, carding her hand through her hair; her walls tumbling and every emotion she’s shouldered alone spilling forth in a maddened haze. 

“I’ve seen hundreds of undead, most of whom I gladly sent back to their graves. They were merely the husks of the people they once were. Any soul left in them was but a dying echo as they pleaded for their suffering to end. I thought I was helping,” she says, voice shaking, “But what if I ended the life of someone who just wanted-- no needed-- a second chance? Was I an arbiter of divine justice, or just some glorified executioner? I started to question everything when we met.” 

His mind is a whirlwind, thoughts simultaneously speeding yet slow. The half of him that yearns to be known, to be loved, is battling against his ever-present fear that he is not worthy of such. It’s a terrifying concoction, one that has him questioning just how accurate Tav’s description of the undead is. He has no idea who Astarion is; he knows who the elven magistrate once was, but who is Astarion the spawn, besides Cazador’s infernal expectations? 

“By no means am I saying that you haven’t suffered, but you are not some hollow corpse, Astarion. Despite everything that’s happened, and everything that has yet to come, you have grown in unprecedented ways. You’ve broken a mold, defied all odds. You’re simply breathtaking...” 

He is, isn’t he? No one has given him enough credit; no one has truly recognized the pure shit he has survived through. No one has offered him the chance or the choice to be better. He’s tired of the untrusting sideways glances, the disgusting feeling of some stranger’s eye roaming his figure. He’s always been expected to fall in line, and today he makes the promise to finally live for himself. 

“When this is all over, I want to stay by your side, if you’ll have me.” 

She looks at him with reverence, like he can pluck the stars from the night sky. He has seen this look before, when she would talk about Kelemvor, and he swears his undead heart nearly beats under her adoring gaze. He has no army to command, cannot turn into mist nor bat; he is practically powerless, and yet she wants him anyway. She believes in him, even though he can’t trust himself. Where he sees nothing, she has found something worth abandoning her god for.  

“I don’t think I’ve heard you this quiet before... are you alright?” 

He cannot find the words necessary to explain his delight. Even if he did, he doubts he’d still even be able to form them, arrange them into proper sentences. The truth has rendered him speechless.  

It doesn’t erase the fact that she sounds hurt, scared even, at the prospect that his silence means rejection. He recognizes the feeling all too well, and if she can overcome its pain to tell him the truth, then dammit, he can do the same. Perhaps he will forever roam darkened streets, but that doesn’t mean all of him must remain in the shadows. He must be honest, expose his own secrets to the proverbial light, and allow her the same choice. 

“Oh yes, I’m fine. I just... feel awful.” 

He hopes she chooses him all the same. 

“Look, I had a plan. A nice, simple plan-” 

[mistyresolve]

| Wayward Behaviour - Simon “Ghost” Riley x F!Reader

Word Count - 1.7 k

Summary - Every time Simon comes back home to you after a mission, the two of you spend the first couple of hours catching up for the lost time. Here is an example of the first hour. 

Tags/Warnings - 18+ ONLY, Handjob, Road head, Premature ejaculation, Begging (yes, it's Simon), Mentions of edging     

A/N - here is something short and sweet in celebration of me passing my pharm final the bane of my existence, and there may or may not have a brief homage to “Talking to the Void”

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It was dark out by the time his charter landed, and the street lights had already turned on. His profile became outlined by those same lights in swells as his truck passed underneath them. Going a little faster than the limit because he was lost in the ecstasy that your touch always brought him. His mind went momentarily blank and looked down at you, his brown eyes curious. He had already changed into his civics, blue jeans, a black sweater, a canvas bomber jacket and that same old ball cap. You once offered to buy him a new cap so you could throw this one out and he simply said, “This one is lucky.”. You never would have taken someone like him to be so superstitious, but he was.  

“Eyes on the road, Riley, “ it was a sickly sweet command. Simon never normally liked to follow the orders of someone who wasn’t his superior, but when they came from your lips he didn’t dare disobey. Not when your hands were drawing lines up and down his thigh. Your pace was unhurried and alluring. With promises of more. 

“They are,” he muttered quietly, his throat tightening as your hand travelled a little more medial. He motivated the gesture by spreading his legs further apart, allowing you better access.       

Simon knew very well that when he came home from particularly long missions he was almost always welcomed with tantalizing ensembles or sensual promises. The sex was sometimes better when the missions stretched over weeks and there was minimal contact. Every moment with you was made all the more exhilarating and frenzied. The heat between you two the moment you got any semblance of privacy burned into his very soul. A burn he wished left corporeal marks in their wake, all so he could return to them later and reminisce. When he was on missions and he had the rare moment alone he would palm himself just for some relief. He never came but it was better than needing to constantly adjust his pants when the mere thought of you made him hard. He’s also yet to decide whether the edging was torture or if it made being you all the better. This time, he was gone for a total of 16 days. 16 days where he went without your touch and he was only able to make one phone call this time. 

One thing he did know was that nothing he did you himself held a torch to what you made him feel. He swore you knew his body even better than he did. 

When you picked him up from the airport and immediately hopped over the center console so he would be behind the wheel, he knew what your plans were. He wasn’t going to be the fool to stop you, not when your hand reached over to his thigh. Between the growing hardness between his legs. 

Simon rolled his hips into the palm of your hand, eliciting a groan at the touch. A pained expression flashed across his bare face, “Bloody ‘ell, baby.”

That seemingly harmless reaction was more than enough to let you know that he wouldn’t be lasting long. He was already on the edge. You’d still try to find a way to draw it out as much as you could though. “Do you want me to stop?” you questioned, pulling your hand away. 

He caught you by the wrist, his head whipping from the road to you and back to the road, his eyes feverish, “I’ll pull over right here.”   

“No need,” you smiled up at him, your tongue darting out to wet your lips, “As you were.”

He let out a deep, breathy laugh, “Yes ma’am,” and he guided your hand back to his erection. You traced the outline of it, adding a little more pressure around the head before flattening your palm over him and making long, leisurely strokes. 

His lips parted as a sigh escaped his chest. The smoke of his tattoo, came to life as the muscle in his arm flexed as his hand tightened around the steering wheel. His other hand worked to undo his belt and jeans, his fingers were nimble and calculated. You bit down on your lip as you watched, knowing exactly how it felt when those same long fingers were inside you. How he would curl them at just the right moment, each and every stroke. His thumb would be rubbing circles into your sensitive clit. 

“Touch me,” he was practically begging as he pulled his hard cock free from his jeans, and began jerking himself, “Please.”

It was rare to hear him out of control, and even rarer to hear him beg. It was a real delight when you’d get him to this point. The last time he was like this he was on his knees before you, kissing up the length of your thigh till he met your center and he begged for you to let him taste you. He licked and sucked and kissed your pussy until you were nothing but a shaking whimpering mess. 

Without hesitation, you obliged him. You spit into your hand before reaching for him again, wrapping around his base and squeezing. You stroked up and down. Up and down. His hips lazily followed the rhythm. When your thumb brushed over the head and he had to lean his head back against the seat to keep from driving the both of you into the ditch. His eyes were on the road, yes, but they were glassy, unfocused. Luckily, since it was already so late the highway was light on traffic. 

You unlocked your seatbelt and the sound snapped him out of whatever trance he was in. He glanced over with a cocky smile, “Wanting more?” He was so conceited. You liked it, but you also wanted to humble him. With your knees on your seat, you leaned yourself over the center console and to his side. You spit down onto him, a string of saliva connecting you two. It slid down the side of his shaft, mixing with the pre-cum that had already started to drip down. 

“Okay,” his voice was tight like he was trying to prepare himself. 

“You’re not going to last very long are you, Simon?” you flattened your tongue and licked a stripe up his length. 

“No,” he admitted, “No, I’m not.”   

You grinned to yourself before taking him fully into your mouth. You could feel him shudder beneath you, fighting back the urge to buck further into your throat. What you couldn’t fit into your mouth you grasped with a free hand, twisting a little every time you pulled back. It evoked a combination of nervous laughter and moans from the man. Something that seemed so at odds with his exterior and usual aloof personality but somehow it suited him. 

You hollowed out your cheeks, your tongue circling around the head, sliding along the slit. You felt one of his hands delve into your hair, balling up a fist full. It wasn’t to push you down or pull you off him but to support himself. Ground himself so he didn’t float out the window and into the night sky beyond. 

“I gotta—” he choked out, and you heard him as he flicked on the turn signal, missing the thing entirely the first time in his frantic state. The force of him turning off the highway was almost enough to throw you into the dashboard. You pulled back, barely catching yourself from falling onto the floor. 

“Jesus, Simon,” you snapped, shooting a glare in his direction. 

“Don’t stop,” he panted, “Please, don’t stop.”     

With his hand still tangled in your hair, you fell back down into him. A bubble of excitement rises in your throat at the sound of his desperation. Wet, gagging sounds echoed through the small enclosed space, and each time he hit the back of your throat it tightened catching him on his withdrawal. You braced your hand on the open space between his legs, your other hand reaching down to press two fingers to your clit through your pants, needing any sort of relief. You rolled your hips side to side, giving him a little show of your ass. 

He squeezed his eyes shut, as he felt his ending. It was coming in hot and fast, and he panted at the pressure of it. He usually prided himself on his stamina and control, but there was nothing he could do to slow it. Nothing he wanted to do. 

“Atta girl, just like that,” he pulled your hair away from your face. It was for two reasons, the first being that you didn’t have the mind to put up and out of your face before going down on him, and the second was so he could see his cock disappear and reappear. The sight was all it took to push him over the edge. The vein beneath his cock throbbed and pulsated against your tongue as he came. His hot seed coated the back of your throat, some of it escaped and dribbled down his base. You swallowed around him, milking him, before finally seating back on your knees. You opened your mouth to him, showing him that you swallowed. A mix of saliva and cum hung from your chin, a lewd presentation of what you just did to him. He reached out and wiped it away for you, a wicked look in his eyes. 

“I might have to go on missions more often,” he half-joked as he reached into the glove compartment and handed you a tissue, keeping another to help clean himself up. 

“Or just never leave,” you countered, using the tissue you cleaned what you could. You looked out the window. He had actually pulled off onto a gravel side road, he almost didn’t make it too. When you looked back at him he had already straightened himself, save the still unbuckled belt. His expression was unreadable. 

“We better hurry home before I ask you to fuck me right here,” you feigned naïveté as you back down onto your seat. All you managed to do was whet his appetite for you because when he pulled into the driveway of the house you weren’t sure you were going to make it through the front door. He wrapped his arms around your waist, ducking down to attach his mouth to your neck as you try to unlock the door. His hands snaked south until they disappeared underneath the front of your pants, finding nothing but slick heat.  

“You’re insatiable,” you gasped, leaning your head back into his shoulder, fumbling to open the door. 

“Wait until we get inside,” he challenged.     

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A/N - im going to try and write a couple of short fics to post for the month of May bc i won’t have time to write, but if anyone has any ideas on what i should write lemme know. 

Tag List - @thychuvaluswife ❤︎  @shuttlelauncher81  (sorry, the first thing i tag you guys happens to be smut 😀)

[pendragonsclotpole]

Merlin Season 5 AU! See end for inspo!

They arrive in Camelot to the news of Mordred’s death. For the first three days of their return, Merlin fixates on the demise of Arthur’s bane more than he does on the significance of Mordred’s death. Mordred’s absence lifts the heavy burden of destiny off of Merlin’s shoulders for the first time in years. He can rest easy, breathe better, live contentedly in the realization that while Morgana remains, Arthur is now free from the curse of his bane.

It takes him weeks to wonder what this might mean for the decision made by Arthur. He is rightfully taken by surprise when one morning, Arthur awakes long before him and presents him with an even longer scroll over breakfast. It is an act to repeal the ban on magic. It legalizes certain forms of magic automatically, presents a drafted proposal for a hierarchical system to police wayward sorcerers, and provides a place on the Council for a Court Sorcerer. The details are so meticulously outlined that Merlin knows deep in his heart Gaius helped Arthur write them. Merlin’s hardly realized he’s crying when Arthur’s arms wrap around and he’s blowing snot into the King’s doublet. He mouths his apologies even as Arthur rubs a comforting hand on his back and whispers back reassuring I knows, and it’s alrights.

In the end, they fulfill the prophecy. Camelot’s golden age lasts for decades. Arthur’s territories grow, and his people thrive, and Merlin stands by his side throughout it all. Magic flourishes. Camelot thrives. Arthur lives and ages. Merlin lives and ages. Arthur dies.

It takes decades. Their bodies grow weak their knees get knobby, (Merlin grows a beard of respectable length much to Arthur’s dismay and annoyance) but eventually Merlin finds Arthur’s body the morning after Arthur’s 96th birthday. It is early enough that none of the servants have arrived to tend to their fire. Merlin, with hands now nearly as wrinkled and gnarled as Arthur’s face, uncorks the vial he’s carried around his waist since the day of Arthur’s first collapse, and swallows whole the concoction within it. The poison takes a few minutes to activate, but by the time he hears footsteps down the hall, Merlin can feel the poison painlessly traveling up his veins and clouding his vision. He smiles, content and sure in the thought that when he awoke next it would be to Arthur’s smiling visage.

He wakes up hours later to Arthur’s cold, sightless blue eyes in the crypts of Camelot. They are alone, about to be placed in stone. For a moment, Merlin thinks he’s merely in the in-between or perhaps brought back as a ghost. He closes his eyes and wills his soul to venture elsewhere. He wills it so much he says nothing as he’s lifted into the walls and entombed beside Arthur. There is something insidiously macabre in seeing your soulmate rot beside you as you desperately attempt to force death to take you. Throughout the process, Merlin absentmindedly thinks if Arthur’s eyes were not cursed to be sightless forevermore the former King would be staring at him with disappointment. I’m sorry, Merlin tells Arthur repeatedly. The apologies peter out when Merlin attempts to die by gouging out his own eyes. He hypothesizes for a few days that the more pain he can elicit, the closer he gets to Arthur. He stops increasing the pain after escalating his to disembowelment and then ceases his attempts to bring about his own death completely after blowing up his body only succeeds in speeding up the decomposition of Arthur’s body. The explosion is both a blessing and a curse. The instant incineration is painless and removes the horrible byproducts and odors of a rotting corpse, but it also leads to Merlin’s eventual resignation. Try as he might, he cannot join Arthur—not even in the presence of their shared crypt.

When he finally pulls himself away from the skeletal remains of Arthur’s frozen and once gnarled hands and musters the force to blast out from the crypt, two months have passed. The body he leaves behind sealed in the crypts is no longer Arthur Pendragon. Arthur Pendragon has left this world. Merlin should have left it with him and now he must find out why he remains, perniciously. There is only one person he can turn that will have this knowledge. Merlin runs to the nearest field and screams out for Kilgharrah. The dragon’s arrival shakes the entire earth around them, but even Merlin can see the weakness in the creature’s movements as he lands.

“So even you are not immune to old age, old friend.” Merlin says. Kilgharrah’s golden eyes look muted in the daylight, and pieces of his scales flake off into the ground.

“You will find only one of us is immune to death by old age, Emrys. And it is not I.”

“What do you mean?” Merlin’s anger gets the best of him. He is confused and hurt and humiliated and alone and deprived of his last wish. He has no room for ambiguities or cruelties. “Have I not fulfilled my destiny? Have I not earned my place of rest?”

“You cannot rest. You are Magic itself. For as long as there is magic in this realm, you will exist in this realm.”

Merlin lets the words rest on the wind for a few seconds before letting them stew and fuel his anger.

“So that’s it then? Years of toiling under the weight of prophecy, decades of laboring to maintain the Golden Age I sacrificed my very being for, and this is how it ends?” Merlin takes a shuddering breath. “You said we were meant to be two sides of the same coin, that are destinies are intertwined. Why is he gone and why am I still here?”

“Arthur is the Once and Future King, Merlin. When the need of Albion is at its greatest, he will return. You are the very essence of Magic. For as long as this realm needs magic, you must remain as magic’s stalwart defender and guardian.” Perhaps realizing the cruelty of his words, Kilgharrah issues one last prophecy. “Do not despair, Merlin. In truth, you achieved the best of all possible outcomes. In another life, Mordred might have lived for longer and Arthur’s death fulfilled decades earlier in place of your true destiny. You received a temporary peace instead. When Arthur returns, he will bring about the end of magic and your death with it.” Then, with a weariness Merlin recognized only in himself, Kilgharrah pulled back his wings and departed.

Merlin never sees him again. It is for the better. It takes Merlin three centuries to forgive the dragon for never pointing out what Merlin himself should have seen. It takes another five before he stops trying to die.

They had achieved everything. Two sides of the same coin, and yet when the story ended, it amounted to nothing.

Arthur died because Arthur was mortal.

Merlin is Magic. Merlin is immortal. Merlin cannot die.

@sneakyboymerlin I blame you for this. Inspired by this amazing post:

[sweetdreamsjeff]

RAIDER OF THE LOST ARTS

Jeff Buckley Revisited

by Simeon FlickMarch 2023

Remember me, but oh, forget my fate. ––Henry Purcell, “Dido’s Lament”

Jeff Buckley

When Jeff Buckley drowned in the Wolf River tributary of the Mississippi on May 29, 1997, just as his band was arriving at the Memphis airport to start helping him finally nail down the long-awaited and already agonized-over second album, music lost not only one of its most singular and revolutionary of raw talents, but also the most mythologized—even during his lifetime—since Kurt Cobain’s death just three years prior. Buckley bore the boon and bane of being the scion of an also semi-famous and ill-fated folk/jazz/soul singer named Tim, and spent his entire life and career—following a single week-long reunion just before Tim’s 1975 death from an accidental heroin overdose—futilely trying to distance himself from the wayward father he never knew apart from the music of nine mostly half-baked studio albums. That an ever-growing number of people, the majority having discovered Jeff’s music post-mortem, feel they know the son better than he or anyone else knew his father, and still feel his loss as acutely as one would a dear family member, is a testament to the unparalleled emotional conveyance and lasting legacy of Jeff’s music despite having released only one official studio album during his lifetime (1994’s hauntingly gorgeous, seamlessly diverse Grace, which has found a home on innumerable “Greatest” lists and has been declared a personal favorite by many of his idols). Jeff Buckley’s influence lives on in the burgeoning underground cult of posthumous acolytes, and in the hyper-emotive, falsetto- and vibrato-laden, multi-octave vocal histrionics of so many subsequent singers, which only seem to come off as pale and obvious allusions that smack more of imitation than assimilation, much less embodiment, and we may never see his like again.

**************

Jeff Buckley entered the world during a meteor shower on the evening of November 17, 1966, the son of an already absent father and a mother, Mary Guibert, who at 18 wasn’t much more than a child herself. Like Cobain, who would arrive only three months later, Jeff had a typical Gen X childhood, replete with divorce, paternal estrangement and maternal domination, often violently reinforced alienation from his formative peers and unstable itinerancy (Mary dragged him through virtually every backwater town in California for all too short stints before he finally put his foot down in Anaheim, where both parents had grown up, and where extended family awaited). The sole refuge, besides the brief but stabilizing presence of the occasional father figure like stepdad Ron Moorhead, was the music men like him turned Jeff onto: Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and countless others who would seemingly become part of his DNA. Music became his north star, his raison d’être, and when things went wrong, which was all too often (Jeff had to be a rock for flighty mother Mary, taking on too many of her responsibilities too young), he would escape into it for hours.

This would compound once he took up the guitar. Like many children of musicians do, in order to carve out a distinct musical identity (and to maintain a healthy generation gap), Jeff—or Scotty, as he was known by his middle name then––gravitated towards Gen-X’s chosen instrument: the electric guitar, to the exclusion of his mother’s classical piano and his father’s acoustic guitar and vocalizations. Aside from the occasional lead vocal in a high school cover band, mostly for the high-ranged prog-rock and new wave classics none of his other bandmates could pull off, he considered himself just a guitar player in the ’80s. But not just any player; with Al DiMeola as one of many paragons, Jeff threw himself headlong into the world of virtuosic technique, teaching himself complicated licks by ear as he worked diligently to master not just the instrument but music itself.

This trajectory was maintained after his 1984 high school graduation with a stint at the derided Los Angeles organization, MIT (Musician’s Institute of Technology), with its many specialized subsidiaries, including GIT (Guitar Institute of Technology), where Jeff continued his musical edification. After obtaining his virtually useless professional certificate from GIT but with his gun-slinging reputation solidified a year later, he gigged in various area bands and worked as a studio rat, arranging and recording demos for other aspiring artists. But the lead vocalist in him remained as of yet dormant.

Jeff’s father, Tim Buckley.

By the late ’80s it was already soul-crushingly evident that Los Angeles was a dead-end cesspool of intolerable immersion in other people’s music, and that a drastic change was required to sweep away the bad influences and external white noise to finally get him in touch with his own muse. New York City beckoned—just as it had to Tim in the ’60s—as a locus were people could become the epitome of themselves, get as weird as they wanted, and be unconditionally accepted or ignored as merely part of the scenery, and reach their full, rewarded potential in whatever their chosen field. Jeff tested the waters for a few months in 1990, but his money and options ran out, and he reluctantly returned to Los Angeles.

It wasn’t until April 26, 1991, when he performed as part of the Hal Willner-curated Greetings from Tim Buckley tribute show at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Church that he was able to lay the groundwork for a permanent relocation, having garnered the interest of several music industry types offering tangible professional succor, not to mention his first real girlfriend. That night marked the beginning of Jeff’s mythology-building not only as an artist in his own right, but also as an inextricable extension of his father’s legacy; many of the concert’s attendees were blown away not just by Jeff’s supposedly similar voice and delivery, but also by his physical resemblance (apparently there were some eerie backlit cheekbone shadows cast against the church hall walls that heightened the drama).

That there was so much defensiveness and/or mandated avoidance in so many subsequent interviews seems very bite-the-hand-that-feeds, but everyone has to break free from their parents at some point; that it often requires the assistance of those selfsame parents is a frustratingly ironic aspect of adulthood most of us have to face and embrace. Jeff simply had the misfortune of doing it in a highly scrutinized industry with zero—or even negative—expectations or tolerance of rock star progeny. He was also not only abandoned by his father, to whose funeral he was not even invited, but also projected on by Tim-obsessed fans and former love interests expecting the son to deliver on the father’s failed promise(s).

Jeff set up shop, and with the assistance of a demo tape of original songs he had recorded while still languishing in Los Angeles (courtesy of father Tim’s old manager, Herb Cohen), and a threadbare press kit (the only news clipping being a photocopied review of the Tim memorial show), he began beating the Manhattan pavement to drum up gigs and busk on the streets.

As of yet, short on original material, he leaned on sophisticated covers that resonated with his emphatically empathic and emotive spirit as he wall-pasta’d in search of a unique artistic identity. Songs by more recently assimilated influences like Nina Simone, Edith Piaf, and Leonard Cohen stood side by side with pitch-perfect deep-cut gems by Van Morrison and the beloved Zeppelin, with all-inclusive guitar arrangements that cast his different-every-time performances in full-blown Technicolor. His self-accompaniment on electric guitar as opposed to the acoustic form usually favored by the often excessively earnest—if not outright cheesy—solo folk artists of the past (including early-phase Tim), differentiated him from obsolete traditions, and it also broadcast the implicit message that this lone performer would eventually have a band behind him.

But the comprehensive guitar skill was just a tripod for the potent weapon his voice was becoming.

It’s difficult for most laypeople to differentiate between learned technique and natural timbre. Jeff didn’t inherit his father’s vocal gift; his was high-ranged and effeminate instead, with a thick palate and some huskiness occasionally muddying up his tone production. But what he did with it despite or because of the confines of those “limitations” is absolutely astounding. Instead of self-consciously diluting his delivery, he threw the book at it, almost as a diversionary tactic, like a magician smoke-and-mirror distracting his audience from an otherwise debunkable prestige move. With his uncanny imitative abilities and concomitant penchant for self-pedagogy, he adopted a rapid vibrato in accordance with essential influences (Simone, Piaf, Garland, and even father Tim, as was his undeniable birthright), nicked tricky classical and R&B trills and phrasing, turned his angelic upper register into a strength by frequently, often breathily leaning into his falsetto, incorporated various operatic (chromatic glissandos) and jazz (scatting) effects, learned how to push a full chest voice into his higher register like Robert Plant (and Tim) and to raggedly scream like Cobain and others of his generation. He ran sustain drills as he traveled across the city in cabs or on foot, drawing out his notes as long as possible to hone his deftly rationed breath support (just try holding out along with the 25-second E4 at the end of Grace’s “Hallelujah”). Tim had set the bar high for the younger Buckley, and Jeff rose mightily to the challenge, developing a comprehensive technique that kept pace with his guitar mastery, which had been pared down to unassailable jazz progressions and Hendrixian blues tropes and, like Cobain, would feature downplayed––if any––solos for the duration. If Jeff’s musical continuo was a haunted house, his voice had become the ghost that lingered within it.

(There’s something more compelling about the resulting output of singer/songwriters who start out exclusively as instrumentalists; it makes for more effective and meaningful musical accompaniment and better structured songs, and they tend to work more diligently and eruditely at mastering vocal technique. Tim leaned almost exclusively on his phenomenal voice, and insufficient thought was given to structure and harmony in his songs, and the lyrics were by turns predominantly unremarkable or unwieldy, the main drawback of being able to sing the phonebook. The resulting chord changes and accompaniment were more limited, derivative, yet ironically more obtrusive. Jeff had harnessed hooks, vivid and compelling lyrical imagery, and upper harmony into underlying works that left room for everything important, but especially the vocals. Thus, Jeff managed to achieve with one album what Tim failed to do in nine; he produced a timeless classic.)

Jeff’s most crucial influence––his self-declared Elvis––was the Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Qawwali singing introduced Jeff not only to its mystical eastern harmony, which was a subtle but unmistakable undercurrent in his guitar parts and his music in general, but also to a highly freeing ilk of vocal improvisation he would use to sparing but profound effect in his live performances, most notably in his wordless vocal warm-ups for things like “Mojo Pin” and “Dream Brother,” and in the way he would subtly tweak the songs’ melodies from show to show.

With all of this gelling within and beginning to burst out of him, Jeff flogged his wares at many a Manhattan venue, but he would find his symbiotic Shangri La at Sin-é, a hole-in-the-wall café run by a fellow man of Irish descent, ex-pat Shane Doyle. Jeff crystalized into the self-accompanying male diva he had been striving to become there at Sin-é and found a home away from home not only on the small stage, where he reveled in an unparalleled, as-of-yet anonymous freedom within the material, but also behind the counter, where he could often be found washing dishes.

This is where Jeff’s buzz began to build, thanks to his Monday night residency, the impression he had made on the industry folk at Tim’s memorial concert (including several Columbia employees who started showing up on the regular), and the steadily growing crowds comprised predominantly of young women. As word of mouth spread and audiences began to overflow onto the sidewalk, the higher-ups at several major labels started circling to investigate the fresh blood in the water. A hilarious bidding war ensued, with record company execs actually trying to make table reservations at the tiny walk-in café, and the street’s curbs clogging with limousines. Jeff would end up signing with Columbia, a Sony subsidiary that was home to many of his heroes, and that made all the right overtures and promises to this hot young talent who was desperately intent on accomplishing the impossible feat of using and defeating the music industry from the inside, as opposed to being consumed by it like his father had been.

**************

Jeff’s “million dollar” deal––consisting of a $100,000 advance, a higher than normal royalty rate, and a three-album guarantee––was unusual for a solo artist of that time, considering there were scant few original songs, no band, and no official demo tape to speak of (the L.A. recordings, which Jeff in his humorously nihilistic cups had dubbed The Babylon Dungeon Sessions, technically fulfilled the applicable criteria but weren’t aurally suitable). Columbia knew they had a hot property on their hands, the Gen-X manifestation of a Dylan or Springsteen-esque heritage artist, and Jeff made sure they knew, mostly through intentional late arrivals to countless business meetings. But because his talents spanned so deep and wide, everyone was initially at a loss as to what form his recorded output should take. What the hell do you do with an artist that has the chops and versatility to go in any direction??

The logical first step was to try and capture the solo version of Jeff on tape and issue it as a soft introduction. Live At Sin-é was culled from two performances recorded during the summer of 1993 and released on November 23 as a perfunctory, slightly disappointing four-song EP consisting of two originals (“Mojo Pin,” and “Eternal Life,” both of which would get definitive, full-band versions on Grace), and two covers (a rhapsodically incendiary rendition of Van Morrison’s “The Way Young Lovers Do” and a transcendent reading of Edith Piaf’s “Je N’en Connais Pas La Fin,” complete with a fingerpicked merry-go-round guitar waltz for the French-sung refrain).

In Columbia’s posthumous ambition to exploit remaining vault caches to continue paying down Jeff’s sizable debt to the label, the original release’s felonious dearth was rectified with 2003’s Legacy Edition, a two-disc, one DVD set that was a much more complete representation of Jeff not just as an artist during that pre-fame period, but as a person. Along with scads more songs from the same shows, the expanded set includes between-song banter that manages to do what his scant, more visceral studio work couldn’t: put his pronouncedly nerdy, madcap, sometimes salacious sense of humor on full display.

Meanwhile, Jeff had also begun working toward his only completed studio LP. Sony had brought him in to record the lion’s share of his repertoire in February of ’93 as a way to gently kick off the A&R cataloguing and selection process for the album (these were later released as part of the 2016 compilation You And I), and recording sessions were scheduled for September at Bearsville Studios, which was located near Woodstock in upstate New York. The only problem––and it was a big one––was that he didn’t have a band. Like so many other aspects of Jeff’s career, this got rectified at the last possible moment; he met and connected with bassist Mick Grondahl first, then drummer Matt Johnson less than a month out from the initial recording dates.

A tall, dark, and handsome Dane, Grondahl had an ideal combination of low-key receptiveness and musical adventurousness that allowed him to be the perfect on- and offstage wingman: he was interesting in an unobtrusive way. Johnson was a wet-eared Texan who had the ideal balance of power and precision (a slight and diminutive presence, Johnson’s physicality was bolstered by his construction day job) and the breadth of taste and experience to match the extreme dynamic variations of Jeff’s sonic palette (Johnson could crush it like Bonzo or play pindrop-soft like a seasoned jazz pro––whatever the music required).

Columbia was less than pleased that Jeff had recruited a rhythm section with virtually no stage or studio experience, but he would eventually be proven right in his selection of introverted, lump-of-clay rookies that doubled as a gang of friends who could hang with him in every sense, especially through all the spontaneous twists and turns he threw at them. This was one of many battles he would actually win for the better against Sony, though he would initially come off as the loser (it took a few months for the band to get up to speed on the Grace repertoire, because they rarely if ever played the album’s songs during rehearsals or soundchecks, preferring to fill that time with “jamming,” since they needed to build an intuitive rapport. They also knew they would be playing the same emotionally demanding songs night after night for the next year or two).

The trio began work on Grace at Bearsville Studios, which had been pre-rigged with several different recording environments to spontaneously capture whatever came out of Jeff and his band in any permutation and style, whether it was solo, low-key jazz combo or full-on rock group. Andy Wallace, who had dialed in the mixes for Nirvana’s Nevermind, wore the coproducing and engineering hats for these sessions, along with providing a regimented lens through which to focus and refract Jeff’s chaotic genius. Recording proceeded slowly and steadily, without too much fanfare, but then, again at the last minute there was an explosion of prodigious productivity. Among other developments, German vibraphone prodigy Karl Berger was in town, and with the assistance of a local quartet, he and Jeff co-arranged string parts for “Grace,” “Last Goodbye,” and “Eternal Life.”

The eleventh-hour burst of creativity suddenly began transforming Jeff’s modest debut into something more akin to the fully produced masterpiece that usually doesn’t happen until later in a discography. More studio time was booked for intensive overdubbing of additional layers, which pushed costs beyond the initial budget, and though Columbia held Jeff in high esteem and generally handled him with kid gloves (full artistic control was implicit), the majority of expenses went into his recoupable fund, which had to be paid down by Jeff through album sale royalties. Though Grace would eventually prove itself beyond worthy of the investment, this was one of the first major manifestations of Jeff’s Sony-sourced headache that would plague him for the duration.

Grace, which was finally released on August 23, 1994, tends to vex the neophyte at first blush. There’s so much to unpack, the resulting bottleneck can be off-putting. Only through repeated listens will it reward those who “wait in the fire,” as the title track has it. Once that rote assimilation has inured you to Jeff’s eccentric voice and anachronistically innovative affectations, and Grace has dilated your emotional receptivity wider than you ever thought possible, you will tend to listen obsessively for a while before you realize you need to take a break so your strung-out, wrung-out heart can snap back to normal. You will probably only be able to listen to it every once in a while thereafter, as the lachrymose music makes demands of your psyche that require exceptional equanimity to withstand (the irony is that while Grace might help you grieve a breakup or death, listening to its ten tracks can also exhume that grief long past the time you have worked through it). The fact that Jeff is no longer here but still sounds undeniably alive in the speakers, and that the making of this album led to insurmountable expectations for a satisfactory follow-up that added to his pre-death stress, only augments the album’s haunting intensity.

The sonic progeny of Robert Johnson, Nina Simone, Edgar Allan Poe, and John Dowland, Jeff comes off as the wide-amplitude, tragic-romantic, card-carrying Scorpio that he was, irresistibly obsessed with love and death, singing often of the moon and rain (and yet also of burning and fire), and bedroom-as-sanctuary-and-wellspring, and a melancholic, nearly heart-rending yearning for absent lovers past and present. All of this can’t help but feed into his steadily growing mythology, not to mention strike he’s-all-alone-and-vulnerable-go-save-him reverberations of longing through the heartstrings of every heterosexual female within earshot, while also getting straight men of all walks gratefully as in touch with their feminine side as he was. In the age of grunge––which force-fed emotion through intimidating volume and distortion––Grace was an anomaly, delivering a wider range of feeling through a listener’s induced surrender to its heightened peaks and valleys, with Jeff’s by turns angelic and demonic voice keeping pace, and, unlike Cobain, with absolutely no irony to lean on, hide behind, or use as disclaimer.

“Mojo Pin” is the perfect overture for an audiophile quality album with such wide yet still somehow cohesive style and dynamic oscillations, with softly looping guitar harmonics fading in, followed by a wordless melody delicately sung over a fingerpicked folk/jazz guitar pattern. The music rollercoasters from there, with dramatic stops featuring vocal melismas that proceed into straight 4/4 time, finally crescendoing in a loud, climactic buildup, and a ragged scream from Jeff that tapers seamlessly back into the jazz feel.

The first stanzas tell us so much about the author:

I’m lying in my bed, the blanket is warm This body will never be safe from harm Still feel your hair, black ribbons of coal Touch my skin to keep me whole

Oh, if only you’d come back to me If you laid at my side I wouldn’t need no mojo pin To keep me satisfied

Here we find a vividly lovelorn artist who tends to compose from the subconscious (as with many of his original songs, “Mojo Pin” was inspired by a dream he had had) has already begun confronting his mortality, equates love with addiction like so many troubadours before him (“mojo pin” is a euphemism for a shot of heroin, which, inspired in part by his father, Jeff used for a short time during the tour in support of Grace), and feels hopelessly separated from it all, with a heightened sense of longing that can’t help but garner the listener’s sympathies.

The title track picks up the thread in more ways than one; along with “Mojo Pin” it is the second of two pre-Sony songwriting collaborations with former Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas—as part of his short-lived Gods and Monsters project (that’s Lucas’s guitar-noodle wizardry on both). And with lines like “Oh, drink a bit of wine––we both might go tomorrow,” it ups the mortality-as-enabler-and-aphrodisiac ante.

With its churning 6/8 groove, and with Jeff starting the song in typical fashion––toward the bottom of his discernable vocal range (D3), “Grace” culminates cathartically on a sustained, heavily vibrato’d, full-chest E5 bad-assedly blasting from his manic larynx and also marks the first of several ominous allusions to being harmed by water (“…And I feel them drown my name…”).

“Last Goodbye” was supposed to be the big first single. It even got an MTV video treatment (just look at his dour expression as he and the exhausted band take a precious day off from a European tour to do this exorbitantly expensive production of a compromised artistic concept in a despised medium), but with no real chorus to speak of, its chart success was modest at best. A Delta blues slide glides across an open-tuned electric 12-string guitar before dropping into a mid-tempo dance groove and a lyric full of bittersweet memories of a failed relationship with an older woman in L.A.

Not only was Jeff a bit shorthanded when it came to filling an entire 52-minute album with originals, but it also would have been a shame not to round out the running order with some well-chosen and interpreted covers in emulation of the intimate immediacy of Jeff’s Sin-é days. The first of these appearing on Grace is “Lilac Wine,” a torch-song standard written by James Shelton and adopted by Nina Simone. Jeff gives the distant-lover-as-intoxicant lyrics the hyper-emotive treatment, with perfectly sustained vibrato on the drawn-out notes and with his voice occasionally breaking into a heartrending sob, especially on the line, “…Isn’t that she, or am I just going crazy, dear?”

“Lilac Wine” is a significant indication of the barely fathomable depth of Jeff’s––and by extension, the band’s––versatility and their ability to do exactly right by the artist and repertoire (it’s difficult, in that sense, to listen to any of Tim’s records without taking umbrage with the musicians in the various band incarnations smothering Tim’s voice and stepping all over his 12-string guitar with their ego-fulfilling and poorly––if at all––thought-out parts).

“So Real” represents not only the successful search for a second guitarist, but also a tenacious battle fought and won against Columbia for the very soul of the album.

Michael Tighe, a mutual friend of Jeff and his ex Rebecca Moore (the one he had met and fallen in love with at the Tim tribute, and whom “Grace”s lyrics supposedly feature) joined the band on second guitar after most of the work on the album had been completed, and he brought an intriguing set of chord changes with him. When it came time to record B-sides and possible non-album singles (a cover of Big Star’s “Kangaroo”, which, to Sony’s consternation would often stretch out to 15 or 20 minutes in concert, was also laid down), Tighe’s progressions, which were inordinately sophisticated considering he hadn’t been playing guitar for very long, were dusted off, tracked with engineer Cliff Norrell, and Jeff did the lead vocal in one take after a last-minute walk to finish the lyric.

Distinguished by the verses’ seamless changes in meter (back and forth from duple to triple time), its by-now standard mélange of tragic-romantic imagery in the lyrics (“I love you / But I’m afraid to love you,” and the foreboding “And I couldn’t awake from the nightmare that sucked me in and pulled me under…”), another wildly climactic E5 at the end, and a massive chorus hook, the song fit Jeff’s MO––accessible innovation and wide-amplitude expression––perfectly.

So much so that it quickly shed its B-side status and usurped a coveted spot on the record from another, highly contested original: The excessively personal and harsh “Forget Her,” which in retrospect would have been the sole manifestation of irony on the album. Jeff was justifiably dissatisfied with this disingenuously caustic 12/8 blues-pop dirge waltz he had allegedly penned about the aforementioned, hapless Moore, upon whom the lyric displaced Jeff’s own culpability for the relationship’s dissolution. But the label was head over heels with it, as the song’s melodramatic, Michael Bolton-esque chorus made it the one and only potential crossover smash in their minds. Columbia exec Don Ienner, who was essentially Jeff’s boss, tried everything short of bribery to futilely sweet-talk Jeff into keeping it on the album, which, in itself, was a tangible reason for Jeff to dig in, though he also feared that the slightly smarmy song would be a one-way ticket to One-Hit-Wonder-ville. As it turned out, “So Real”s chorus was hookier anyway, enough to warrant its own video treatment, though its subsequent commercial impact was also negligible.

A plaintive sigh kicks off what is now widely regarded as the definitive recording of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” the second cover of the album, performed solo and glued together from multiple takes into a solemn paean to the ecstatic pain of long-term relationships. Inspired by John Cale’s 1991 reading, Jeff sticks to the ultra-romantic verses that find love and suffering linked in paradox, and the guitar tone and reverb augment the song’s church hymn vibe, almost as though it was recorded at a service or funeral. If you’ve heard this recording or noticed it in myriad movies and TV shows and haven’t cried at least once, you’re not human.

“Lover, You Should Have Come Over” is a classic swinging blues adagio, perhaps the best known and most covered original on the album. Water and death are linked once again (“Looking out the door, I see the rain fall upon the funeral mourners / Parading in a wake of sad relations as their shoes fill up with water…”), and then Jeff abruptly breaks that train of thought to do right by Moore in recognizing his role in their breakup (“…Maybe I’m too young / To keep good love from going wrong”). Again, his vocal starts low and builds to another E5 at the end. In the hands of another artist, all of this would have sounded forced and over the top, but somehow Jeff was able to make it work. That’s his genius/madness; he himself was fully dilated and committed in a way that wasn’t healthy or sustainable, but damn, did it make for visceral listening.

“Corpus Christi Carol” reaches even further back than 1950’s “Lilac Wine” and completely blows the listener away with its expectation-defying display of musical depth. He becomes a bona fide classical singer here, exhibiting total immersion in the anonymous 16th-century lyric that the aptly named English composer Benjamin Britten incorporated into 1933’s Choral Variations for Mixed Voices (“A Boy Was Born”), Op. 3, finally arriving at Jeff’s adolescent ears through the version for high voice recorded by Janet Baker in 1967. Jeff completely inhabits the allegory of a bedridden, Christ-like knight endlessly bleeding, witnessed by love and the purity of his cause, with the empathic delicacy that was already his trademark. The stark arrangement for electric guitar and scant overdubs is superbly matched by the lamenting vocal, which ends on a ghostly, falsetto’d E5 that is utterly cathartic in its climactic glory.

Jeff wanted to make an album that compelled rock fans to forget about Zeppelin II, and “Eternal Life” delivers on the heavier side of that promise. Written during his time in L.A., the creepy intro stops on a dime before a bludgeoning, yet highly danceable groove drops in and a reactive lyric confronts applicable listeners to wake up and smell the mortal coffee:

Eternal life is now on my trail Got my red-glitter coffin, man––just need one last nail While all these ugly gentlemen play out their foolish games There’s a flaming red horizon that screams our names…

Racist everyman, what have you done? Man, you made a killer of your unborn son Oh, crown my fear your king at the point of a gun All I want to do is love everyone…

There’s no time for hatred––only questions What is love, where is happiness What is alive, where is peace? When will I find the strength to bring me release?

With distorted bass as well as guitar alongside complementary strings and a killer groove featuring a highly effective, accelerating hi-hat pattern from Johnson on the verses, the song successfully proselytizes for universally incontestable causes, and reinforces Jeff’s projected mythology as a doomed soul whose seemingly relished fate awaits him sooner rather than later.

“Dream Brother” may be the last song on the album, but it was the very first idea Jeff and the band had worked up together. At the risk of overusing the word, and just like the album as a whole, it is haunting from start to finish, with a droney, string-cranking intro giving way to an eastern-inflected guitar motif. Jeff’s more static but no less sublime vocal melody goes beyond complementary; it builds tension by hanging on or around the fifth for most of the verse stanzas before resolving to the tonic on the last note of the phrase. Grondahl’s bass line, as with all his work on the album, is a sublime treat; here we find him working his way through the exotic Phrygian mode, recasting the guitar parts into a harmonically complex, emotionally compelling accompaniment that perfectly underpins the vocal.

The song features another penned-and-sung-at-the-last-possible-minute lyric, the chorus of which admonishes dear L.A. friend Chris Dowd (of Fishbone) not to abandon his new family like Tim had Jeff and Mary: “Don’t be like the one who made me so old / Don’t be like the one who left behind his name / ‘Cause they’re waiting for you like I waited for mine / And nobody ever came.” Grace’s only allusion to Jeff’s father builds in intensity to an instrumental bridge with wordless Qawwali wailings that are utterly bone chilling in their echoing-into-eternity saturation. The album’s final line puts an ominous capstone on the pyramid of the untimely-death-by-water preoccupation: “Asleep in the sand, with the ocean washing over…”

PART TWO

Jeff Buckley

From ’94 to ’96, both solo and with the band, Jeff Buckley toured the world and elsewhere. Those two years were highly transformative; he met and/or was lauded by so many of his personal heroes (including Zeppelin’s Page and Plant, Paul and Linda McCartney, U2’s Bono and The Edge, David Bowie, and he had a brief affair with Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil, who had covered Tim’s “Song to the Siren” [for aural proof of the romance, go to YouTube and check out their unfinished, embarrassingly smitten PDA duet on “All Flowers in Time”]), picked up an all but unshakeable smoking habit as a late-blooming extension of delayed formative-year rebellion and as a temporary, self-harming relief from the stresses of touring and just-shy-of-A-list fame (he managed to make People magazine’s 50 most beautiful list in May of ’95, which mostly appalled him, and also had an eye-opening night out with Courtney Love), turned down numerous primetime opportunities—SNL, Letterman, and acting roles and commercial placements—in favor of “underground” platforms like MTV’s “120 Minutes,” and was constantly at odds with his record label.

Australia and France embraced him like a returning hero, with the latter country’s Académie Charles Cros presenting Jeff with the rarely-awarded-to-an-American Grand Prix International Du Disque in honor of Grace on April 13, 1995 (two live shows, the second representing a career peak, were recorded during a French leg of the tour and later released as 1995’s Live at the Bataclan EP and 2001’s Live à l’Olympia).

The tank ran dry on March 1, 1996, which marked not only the final date of a hastily booked Australian/New Zealand tour to capitalize on Jeff’s surging popularity there and subsequently the last in official support of Grace, but also the final show with percussionist Matt Johnson, who had reached his hard limit with the band leader’s exacerbated lifestyle excesses and reckless behavior, not to mention Jeff’s escalating hazing of him.

Drummerless and exhausted, a different Jeff Buckley returned to a different New York. Though it suited his dysfunctionally nomadic, reactively noncommittal spirit, touring is not conducive to one’s mental or physical well-being nor is any level of fame, which is unfortunately what moves the units at the cost of anonymous normalcy. As a result, Jeff could no longer frequent any of his old haunts without being recognized and approached by strangers who thought they knew and deserved a piece of him beyond his timeless music. But then even his friends couldn’t help but feel jilted in their wanting a less ephemeral friendship with him, as he made them feel like the undeniably corroborated center of the universe when he was around, having given of himself interpersonally as completely and unadvisedly as he did in his music.

With inchoate fame now cutting him off from his usual decompression options, Jeff couldn’t recharge his psychic batteries. That coupled with the fact that Columbia and the press had been persistently hounding him regarding a follow-up to Grace piled even more pressure on the stress heap, further hampering his creative process and making The Big Apple taste more of the cyanide within the seeds than the once novel fruit of clandestine self-discovery.

There’s an industry saying: a recording artist has their entire life to make the first album and six months to make the second. Already no stranger to writer’s block under normal circumstances (he was inherently a better interpreter than a composer and understandably loath to commit to locked-in versions of anything), Jeff found himself hitting the creative wall in the midst of his increasingly stifling paradigm. The new songs were coming, albeit more slowly than everyone preferred, and in a different, more current vein than Grace. Having kept an ever-vigilant ear to the cultural ground, Jeff had met the Grifters and the Dambuilders while on tour, gaining a new love interest—Joan Wasser, to whom he related early on that he was going to die young—from the latter band and befriended Nathan Larson of Shudder to Think, and their contemporary alternative rock vibes ignited a light bulb over Jeff’s head, giving him the inspiration to pursue a rawer sound, much as Cobain had for Nevermind’s 1993 follow-up—In Utero.

It wasn’t necessarily Sony’s cup of tea. Though the label was by no means dead-set on putting out Son of Grace, they were a bit befuddled by the significant shift in musical mores away from the classic heritage artist sound toward the aural marriage of the Smiths and Soundgarden evident in the newer material. His sagacious selection of classic solo repertoire, and Grace by extension, had gotten Jeff’s foot in the door, as their sophisticated old-school values were arguably a premeditated affectation on Jeff’s part to woo the industry’s boho Boomer gatekeepers into signing and unconditionally supporting him. Now that he was more or less ensconced on the inside, and having gained more than a little leverage from all the hard work of the past year and a half, Jeff wanted to change things up to reflect more of what he’d been listening to and writing as an artist of his own generation. Though jumping high through Jeff’s hoops was by now second nature, Columbia was nevertheless befuddled.

This vexation next manifested as bewilderment over the choice of legendary Television alum Tom Verlaine (RIP) to aid and abet his alt-rock vision as the inexperienced coproducer for the second album. No one at Sony thought Verlaine was the right man for the job; they would just as soon have gone with Andy Wallace again rather than someone who, as with Grondahl, Johnson, and Tighe, didn’t have a track record to speak of. Whether or not Jeff’s choice was ill informed was irrelevant; it became his new crusade against the label, a pyrrhic war waged solely on the principle of getting his way even if it ended up biting him in the ass.

Columbia green-lit some bet-hedging recording with Verlaine to humor Jeff, but also to surreptitiously gather leverage as a failed, debt-enlarging investment, as the odds were slim that he could pull another rabbit out of his hat within the limited, impossible-for-Jeff parameters. Two brief as they were dissatisfying sessions occurred at various New York studios in 1996 and then a third at Memphis’s Easley McCain studios with Johnson’s permanent replacement, Parker Kindred, in early 1997. Jeff had become interested in recording at Easley through Grifters guitarist and Memphis resident Dave Shouse, and in relocating to that hallowed town for its legendary status in the history of blues and rock ‘n roll, and yet also as an escape from the lost anonymity, label pressure, and detrimental distractions of New York.

Jeff began striving for—and was at least able to temporarily reclaim—some semblance of a normal life in Memphis; he settled in at 91 Rembert Street, where he could often be found lying in the overgrown grass of his front yard, staked out all the good local restaurants, got a Sin-é-reminiscent Monday night residency at a downtown venue called Barrister’s, proposed marriage to Joan Wasser, and spent time with local friends who didn’t treat him like a rock star. At the time of his death, and as this evidence indicates, Jeff was trying to settle down, but he also felt ready to finally nail the landing on the second album, which he earnestly hoped would not only eclipse Grace but would frighten people as well. He was also noticeably uneasy.

The iteration of what was going to be called My Sweetheart the Drunk that came out almost too soon in May of 1998, not the barely attainable one Jeff would have overworked himself to complete had he lived, is the version the label should have agreed to put out had he been willing and able to play the long game. Though disc 2, with the exception of “Haven’t You Heard” and the cover of “Satisfied Mind,” is mainly for diehards (it contains sloppily recorded and produced home recordings that only hint at greatness, as well as superfluous original mixes of select disc 1 material), the ten Verlaine tracks are nothing to scoff at. In fact, the minimally but still excellently arranged and produced songs not only sound surprisingly finished, but would have also found Jeff paving the way for the future of alternative rock/pop in a manner that was more in touch with the times but still rang true to Jeff’s old-school tragic-romantic sophistication. Hindsight finds these recordings nothing to be ashamed of, the natural, expectation-managing and yet still promise-fulfilling continuation of Jeff’s artistic journey, though he didn’t—and wouldn’t—agree with that assessment (the tracks probably could have used just a little more tightening up… At the very least, and as it stands, disc 1 of My Sweetheart the Drunk could have been a highly respectable and acceptable “sophomore flop”). Jeff would have had to ease up on the malignant perfectionism had he lived, and in that light it both does and doesn’t seem strange that he continued massaging these recordings—with additional overdubs and polishing occurring at Easley after the band’s return to New York—despite his clearly declared intention to abandon what he had already recorded, concede defeat regarding Verlaine (who urged Jeff to erase the tapes), and start from scratch with Andy Wallace.

Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk has plenty of wide-amplitude thrills (“Vancouver,” which started life as an instrumental break on the Grace tour, now featured a soaring vocal that found him suddenly clued in to the detriments of giving too much of himself: “I need to be alone / To heal this bleeding stone…”), lots of tragic-romantic flair (the beautiful, minimally orchestrated ballads “Morning Theft” and “Opened Once,” the swinging caveat “Witches Rave,” and the macabre, “Come as You Are”-ish “Nightmares by the Sea” are by turns self-castigating and wary), more struggle over suitable repertoire (Jeff harbored hypocritical paranoia that the set-apart, slinky R&B slow-jam, “Everybody Here Wants You” would be chosen as a single against his wishes [it was], even though the song is an instant classic, and the album could have done without the cover of the Nymphs’ “Yard of Blonde Girls,” though he didn’t trust Columbia to agree), two Qawwali nods (the mantra jam “New Year’s Prayer”, and the utterly harrowing “You And I”), and plenty of fodder for precognition-of-untimely-death speculators (“Stay with me under these waves tonight / Be free for once in your life tonight…” from “Nightmares By The Sea”, and “Ah, the calm below that poisoned river wild…” from the goosebump-evincing “You And I”).

**************

Recording contracts have always been a Faustian bargain for the artist, especially at the onset, when it is weighted heavily in the card-holding label’s favor. Art and commerce often meet in the cultural-industrial ring as irreconcilable spouses who stay together for the kids, with the artist wanting to make a unique, challenging, and hopefully timeless statement for theirs and successive generations, and the label needing to make a profit, not lose their shirt, or just break even. The latter often requires innocuous music that has been dumbed down or otherwise compromised for mass consumption, usually the antithesis of the former. The artist, though, according to the standard contract they signed, is legally beholden to the label, which owns the master recordings and the right to exploit them until such a time, often years or even decades down the road, when the artist has gained enough cachet through account-balancing sales and accumulated cultural pertinence to renegotiate the contract into a more equitable form that befits their too-hard-earned stature. As with life in general, and back when labels were still labels, one had to play a patient, penitent, somewhat circumspect long game, with eyes intent on the future prize in order to succeed as a recording and touring artist, and to eventually win out over the label.

Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, now in or on the cusp of their 80s respectively, managed to successfully undergo and even control their fame-reconciling heritage artist transformations and break through to the other side. Jeff Buckley, who realized too late and too far out to sea that he had given up essential access to a normal life, and whose DNA and hardship-forged personality was geared for fleeting, heightened moments of impulsive escape and unrealistic levels of emotional outpouring during which there was no tomorrow, did not. After an itinerant childhood in a chaotic, single-parent household, neither of which allowed him any bonded, bolstering long-term friendships or gave him the necessary emotional support to instill enough confidence to enable him to pace, self-nurture, and recharge as an adult, Jeff was predestined for burnout. Add to this the looming legacy of his father’s similarly self-inflicted and untimely doom, the demoralizing fiscal and creative debt to—and incongruent association with—a major label, and pervasive generational nihilism, and you have the recipe for a death by misadventure.

The world generally eats pure-heart-on-sleeve empaths like Jeff Buckley for breakfast, and just like house-always-wins Vegas casinos, record labels are particularly good at exploiting, devouring, and then remorselessly shitting out their charges no matter how vigilant the artist may have been to the contrary. In Jeff and Columbia’s case, it’s difficult to pick a winner; dying got him out of both having to deliver on a second album and pay off his way-in-the-red recoupable, but his absence-generated popularity and Sony’s dogged determination to monetize ample vault caches in the aftermath may have balanced the ledger by now anyway. Either way you slice it, and for what it’s worth, the artist is gone, and Columbia is a tawdry shadow of its former self, but Jeff’s timeless music remains.

Trying to imagine how Jeff would have navigated the post-5/29/97 waters is not challenging, considering the comprehensive changes already in motion that would herald not only the end of his generation’s all-too-brief moment in the sun, but also the beginning of the end of the record industry as he had known it. Jeff probably would have seen Sony’s support slowly dwindle, becoming even more isolated until his contract came up for renewal and he was then most likely dropped from the label, as its various employee archetypes, which were industry-wide revolving doors, would have inevitably jumped ship for higher positions elsewhere. This exodus would have severed nurtured—and nurturing—connections, leaving Jeff in the hands of green, bottom-line-focused reps that had had nothing to do with scouting or signing him and were subsequently less inclined to offer the kind of largesse and preferential treatment to which he had been accustomed.

A new generation was also coming of age, one that sought shallower, more effervescent thrills to match their innate, well-nurtured ebullience. Soundgarden, Jeff’s now fellow-in-untimely-death friend Chris Cornell’s band, which was the first of the Seattle grunge era to sign to a major label, broke up almost on cue that year. Groups like Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, Hanson, and solo artists like Brittney Spears, Ricky Martin, and Christina Aguilera were prepared to replace grunge’s locked-up engine in the zeitgeist car, with already emergent, transitionally mellower sounds from the likes of Dave Matthews Band, Blues Traveler, Phish, Spin Doctors, and Hootie and the Blowfish having paved the way. Autotune was introduced that year, with computer-based digital recording having begun its ascendant journey to becoming the analog-supplanting, music-devaluing standard.

Within a decade, for better and worse, the industry as Jeff knew it would no longer exist, nor would the focus on organically profound music on which he had been brought up and of which he had become a part. With no plan B (he endearingly applied for what would have been a meagerly if at all remunerated position at the Memphis zoo’s butterfly exhibit), Jeff would have been hard-pressed to maintain a subsistent income—let alone pay down his debt to Columbia—inside or outside the new, less tolerant manifestation of the industry, which would have scoffed derisively and dismissively at his to-date album sales. And he probably would have recoiled from the rising popularity of bubblegum pop and nü-metal buffoonery in disgust.

Kurt Cobain once said he wished he had paced himself better, played more of a long game by holding back some of Nevermind’s material for subsequent albums, and a general feeling persists that Jeff had similarly neglected any thought of the future by putting everything he had into Grace, and there wasn’t enough left to create something new to match its grandeur, at least not within his unsustainable paradigm. It seems as though he was done, that his music’s true moment in the sun could only begin after he had disappeared somehow. Amassing cachet would have to rely on his premature-demise-as-career-move absence, the removal of his chronic perfectionism that allowed Sony to put out whatever was in the vaults without his opposition (albeit in full, duly diligent cooperation with next-of-kin trustee, supposed legacy preserver / promoter, and posthumous stage mother Mary), and amassing fin de siècle malaise that would find solace in Grace. But Jeff’s death feels wrong as well, redolent of the same sense of tragedy as JFK’s assassination, as if we had truly lost one of the good ones, and the subsequent sensation of all hope for a fair and just future having been annihilated in a flash, regardless of whether or not either of them actually deserved that idolization.

The grief-sourced application of culpability gets complicated when someone who has deeply affected strangers and loved ones alike is directly responsible for their own death, but it can’t exactly be called a suicide. And though we have plenty of lyrical and anecdotal evidence that could easily be construed as self-fulfilling prophecy (like Cobain, Jeff had consistently and insistently telegraphed his denouement), it is otherwise difficult to substantiate rumors that Jeff had been dreaming of his demise just weeks—if not longer—beforehand. But as with the cinematic portrayal of Mozart obsessively composing what would become his own requiem in Amadeus, if someone persistently gives thought and voice to fatal intent, walks that fine line long enough, the border between this world and the next will begin to blur and smudge until it finally wears thin enough for one to cross over without even noticing. Freud may have said it best: “Until you make the subconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”

Unlike influencee Rufus Wainwright, whose songs are also emotive but restrained in comparison, Jeff never developed the necessary filters to mitigate the harmful aspects of his heightened sensitivity and permeability, preferring instead to empty his emotional ballast onstage night after night to the adulation of interchangeable, undemanding strangers (though some of them often clamored annoyingly for renditions of Tim’s songs), as if each show were his last (which he had hypocritically accused Tim of in a 1993 interview). In all of Jeff’s 30 years, he had never learned the kind of self-love that would awaken and bolster the basic long-term survival instincts to enable him to throw off the chains of his deeply ingrained fatalism. With his pallid, fey appearance, alluring gender-balanced charisma, heart-rending empathy, unregulated outflow of emotional energy, and foolhardily unshielded vulnerability, he seemed to many as though he was marked for an early end no matter what evasive action he might’ve taken.

Though Jeff had been exhibiting unstable, borderline bipolar behavior in the weeks prior to his drowning, he didn’t consciously intend to die that night (a nearby witness apparently heard a single cry for help), but his willful ignorance of the dangers of his impulsive and fatalistic nature and the whimsical flouting of the perils of his immediate surroundings would be the co-conspirators of his mortal undoing.

Fully clothed at twilight, Jeff waded backward into a notoriously dangerous river despite a lifetime aversion to water—and in denial of all the overt signals his subconscious and conscious had sent him. Doing the recently learned backstroke to the braggadocio boom-box strains of Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” in a roiling river all but universally avoided for its severe, passing-boat-generated undercurrents was supposed to be a spontaneous trip to and from the edge to take his mind off of life’s untenable pressures for a short while. But instead, and to his torch-carrying fans’, friends’, and family’s ongoing bereavement, it lasted forever.

**************

England’s annual Meltdown Festival consists of a series of concerts given over several days by contemporary artists and is curated by a celebrity participant with an ear toward the high-minded performance of unconventional repertoire. Jeff was invited by 1995’s chosen Master of Ceremonies—Elvis Costello—to take part on July 1, which serendipitously coincided with that year’s European tour in support of Grace, though it was inconveniently sandwiched between concert dates across the channel.

Along with collaborations in mixed ensembles comprised of co-billed artists, Jeff did a four-song solo set that featured the apropos “Corpus Christi Carol” (the song that had originally piqued Costello’s interest), Nina Simone’s “The Other Woman,” and “Grace.”

He began with an absolutely devastating rendition of “Dido’s Lament,” which Costello had personally requested from the setting of Dido and Aeneas by 16th century British composer Henry Purcell. Jeff was indistinguishable from a fully trained, operatic countertenor as he delivered the moribund lines with innate familiarity:

Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me On thy bosom let me rest More I would, but Death invades me Death is now a welcome guest

When I am laid in earth May my wrongs create No trouble in thy breast Remember me, but oh, forget my fate

Costello came out after the last of the four songs and accompanying ovation had died down and following some gracious comments recognizing the young artist’s overflowing docket, he essentially summed up Jeff’s contribution—and the debt of gratitude music owes him—with his closing salutation that now stands as a fitting epitaph:

“He gave everything. Thanks, Jeff.”

[nymika-arts]

what are some of the fics you think about everyday 👀 may we get some recs 👀

yes of course <3 top 5 fics that simply do not leave me alone!!

keep going, keep going come what may by @fcntasmas

Buck doesn’t remember the details. It’s all foggy, mostly – how he got here. He barely remembers the events leading up to this: almost like he’d gone to sleep one night and woken here, a cruel reality, a prison of his own making. He thinks it could be hell: Eddie had warned him of hell, once, but then there are times where he’ll feel a brief sting in his arm, or the wind run through his hair, and it feels less like he’s a wayward soul and more like an asshole who got the short end of the stick, all things considered. — or; buck is the last man on earth. he’s dealing with it.

maybe one day i'll fly next to you by @tripleaxeldiaz

Bobby clears his throat, standing in front of the roll-away white board, and gets started. Buck’s half paying attention, letting his eyes wander over the small crowd of skaters. There’s one face, though, that he doesn’t see, and for a minute, he’s hopeful. He’s gone, he moved, he went to work with Rafael in Lakewood or something, so I’ll only have to see him maybe four times a year instead of every goddamn day thank god— The doors to the locker room burst open, and fuck. Because, nope, he’s still here. Windswept and out of breath and 15 minutes late, yet somehow still oozing confidence and jackassery. Eddie Diaz. Olympic Bronze Medalist. Two time reigning World Champion. And the absolute bane of Buck’s existence.

listen to you breathing (is where I wanna be) by @theladyyavilee

The thing is – and Eddie should have known this, has been taught this cruel lesson over and over and over again – the thing is most of the time the worst day of your life will start like just any other day. A million small moments, so familiar and mundane you almost don’t even notice them slipping by - until you would give anything to go back and get just one more. (You can’t.) Or the one where Buck is presumed dead after a building collapse and Eddie has to live through the reminder that tomorrow isn't promised to anyone

four a.m. by @kitchenscene

"The night darkens the sky, grey clouds tracing overhead. It’s almost peaceful, a welcomed end to a hectic day. But then he remembers Buck, nowhere to be seen. Buck, who, of course, could never simply witness a peaceful moment like this. Buck, who, naturally, would want to be up close, feeling the cold rain in his hands, on his skin, anywhere he could find it.

It seems obvious now; Eddie would never find Buck inside the station when there’s so much more to be said outside. A quiet, pouring night to end the bustling, restless day. Buck would follow the pour, follow the only sound to be heard. His eyes would brighten at the sight of it, despite the restlessness of the day." Or; Buck follows the rain, so Eddie follows Buck, wherever he may lead.

the things we lost in the fire by SunSpell80

Evan Buckley left his past behind when he left home for good at age 19. But an unexpected phone call on a quiet shift disrupts the life he's built for himself: forcing him to confront his past in order to build a new future.

treat yourself to an exceptional fic today and read all of these 💖

[eternalfrostau]

Prelude EF Tales: Recollection

You will never go silently, you will never let them win.

Darkness surrounds you, consumes you, it’s all you know. The tenure of your spiritual imprisonment has gone on for untold years, the time stretching onto meaningless nothing.

Light is sparse in this realm, as are your memories of your life before. You recall flashes, brief glimpses of conquests beyond, of battles won and gods beaten. You lived a storied life, a life of supreme importance and worth. Death has not robbed you of your pride.

Rage burns within you, screaming hotter than molten supernova. The last vestige of the man you used to be. It’s an insatiable hunger, clawing at the edges of your formless spirit. It pounds against your mind, bringing forth the images of those who wronged you. They forced you to become this monster, they refused to submit--you were only doing what you had to, what any good leader would’ve done.

They needed to be kept in line, you had to teach them their place.

There’s always a hero, there’s always a princess. You know their faces better than that of your family, a fact that only infuriates you further into insanity. You remember the fear upon seeing the forest child wield the sword of evil’s bane, and how close he’d gotten to killing you.

You remember the feeling of breaking his bone under your god-like strength, the cold stare he gave as you impaled your blades through his heart. He wasn’t afraid of you, the only person to see you for who you truly were.

And that was terrifying.

Not that you would ever admit that, to yourself or others. It would be unbefitting of a king, unbefitting of the true heir to hyrule. The era following your defeat did not treat you kindly, the petty impulses of your lowest moments becoming common as you plotted to break the seal placed over you.

You broke out again, having overthrown the damned royals again. Victory was so close, the sacrifice of the maidens guaranteed, the defenders of yore dead and gone. There was no one to stop you.

Except for the hero.

It was a different boy, a different era, but you recognized him just as well. He carried the blade of evil’s bane, and fought without fear. You were slain at the height of your power, the entire triforce within your grasp. You were like a god, but even gods can die.

You were dead, but not for long. You’d returned again, the sacrifice of your mothers fueling a blundered revival, intelligence stripped clean from your primal mind. The same boy met you again, butchering you like an animal. You can still hear your screams.

Death had become temporary, a period of waiting until the next resurrection. You returned countless times, always at the culmination of some new crisis. You would bring the kingdom of hyrule to its knees more times than history liked to count, and each time there would be a hero to stop you.

They would arise at the hour of Hyrule's destruction, preventing the victory you’d so rightfully earned all those millennia ago. You recall each of them well, harboring a hatred unique to each insufferable brat, each infuriating in their own way. 

The realmwalker had taken advantage of your fused form, that lorulean artisan dragging your strength down with his naive magics--a fair fight would’ve gone differently, you’re sure. Much the same could be said about the two that followed, the heroes stricken from the histories of the land they held so dear; You take glee in knowing that. 

They were warriors; the gladiator and the berserker, a part of you respected that defeat more than the others. You hated them to hell eternal, but you couldn’t deny their strength--a trait you hold more dear than anything. 

The last of the hero kind, the ilk of travels beyond and far was a shameful loss like no other-- a sign of what you’ve lost in these long years of warring gods and kingdoms. He was a wayward soul, untrained and naive; somehow capable of slaying you to ashes on the wind.

Centuries have passed since your last defeat, and you scheme all the same. Your damages cast a long shadow over your schemes, fueling delusions more grandiose and cruel than ever before. 

You are willing to do anything to secure your place as victor, as herald of an extinction millennia in the making. The measures taken to secure the long winter have been drastic, more sacrificial to your spirit than any cut flesh or spilt blood.

The hues of your heart split at the seams, and your emotions fragment once again. The lack of them clears your mind, the hollow space left in their absence filled with nothing but the same homicidal anger--the same drive to slaughter and exterminate the bloodlines of those that dared oppose you.

You feel the anger boil and freeze under non-existent veins, the power inherent to you forming the footfalls of a new dark age, of a winter eternal and undying. A reflection of your changed self.

Most of all; You foresee the victories that the vile slew of frost and snow will win in your name. Over and over.

Forever.

---- Author's note: Hi! This is Kovacs talking here. I hope you liked this, I write alot of one shots and blurbs for eternal frost. Some are related to the core folks, some are offbeat. Hyrule is a busy place!

ANYWAY--I thought this was decent enough to show on the main blog!

[libidomechanica]

But lets it so large an orb, as truly, know

And one the light, then quickly gone?     Around that motto drew. Show! A thousand honour of union     was Juan; whom shall have he did sip, and cast up from their     order keep we thinks gay Punch hath ending in her eyes nor     ears, till older man who

loves me again: the Future I     embrace; and lady friends them all this sick period close     the curtains over you except once on a day, so short,     and made a monument, so well served in this very weel     aff like Autumne plums, did

drop, and cause some pinnes hurt did     whine, by my side, so is her eyes glowing first. Strait is the     kitchen lightning a candle to touch upon them. Has     powerless Heliades melt into his repartees. When the     landscape which sight, they rode;

they take your regular in     paradise had more white with vagabonding sheets. A hidden     mystery once, and put the chosen it. Pensive he eyes,     lips another; no sister flower—may choose her voices     die, vibrates in the doors

ajar? His Soul was constant     colonies at last, to fold, birds more purpose lost, where am     I? Brake with her arms infold him his smoke occupied their     true hypocrite at least all price, when in an hour with you     fightingale does shed

its cool underwater filter’d     in a thoughted Venus having wretch! Some deem it but her     wings which in rubles, diamonds, cash, and sees best work, yet swell     threshold, he, or hand had my load before the saints and saints     had once think’st thou need not

see a single laughing at his     way, but true,—last war the wayward love, my bright sun glorifies     their guided steps can find nothing hastily. Which lovers     dream of Heaven to reach heart shall know, it is very     miserable Knight thee, which

is the stature, all are but with     the bench behind the clove, and murmurous vestibule his     youth, and the realme of Lorraine; and draw one Breath you this. Where     were dewd with many a sniggering flames in eyes? Pensive     he eyes, thoughts so sweetly

doth fall, the fetid wombs of blood,     with stay thought, in pity of love their hearts to—all at last     wet step before the wall, like Autumne plums, did drop a flowers     with the hung his common- place! Farewell, hear, mistress, for     Tyrans make a lyzard

dull, to taste. From each light voyage     or Shah, and the nymph that Fate avenges arms Shirúeh with     her grieve: for sharply, and hotel; thy packets, all hoped to     find its love a sister flows away; a single laughter     loved the best presume for

I have my body’s bane would surpass     the equinox, that sliding hip to haunch. Is it thy     seal-manual on my thought to owe, insolvent every     willing me. Thou dost speak no square were out of the dale, the     mysterious: besides,

so plied and stitched up in fatal     Juan ever made. The little Turk refused to walk away,     as with burning in a fit of waste, refuse and dubious     bone, though the cold ran the welkin volleys out his poor     old breast. Various arts

of melancholy rite for the     break. I am the heavy Saturn laugh’d, as if it seems     unkind. Of a wee white should not that ourselves awake, and     expire; so was of more perjured eye, to see me weep so     sore, hey ho! Don Juan now

was she. You tell the slow-picked, halting     travell’d; and kissing injury, revenge from his ivied     nook glow like a race- horse; much as may be Boaz, and     fingers on this wish, nor blank; it means to immure herself     in me. Birds, gusts and now

she will Europe’s sagest head.     Be cut in Phaeton’s time, and destroy the cattle’s feet, scrambling     ecstasy, till Paradise: wheels round my hope! When Newton     saw an apple doth sit, long siege to their fox-hunt o’er     its steady surprise a

heap of pain. An image I do     steal thyself, by turns to pull. Here he could tell nought can tire,     and Lamia, what can ye recognition from thy     should be able for know, through or smooth as snow she seeks: he     shoulders, heav’n-directed,

to go, whilst ravish’d with no soul     and unload all good to live. Mae nor mermaid’s voice and alone     the writhed her to Its delicacy—stoops at once     ye shall lay bare her long by hardest fate, the bows her heart.     He spoke, and yet these dinner;

angle, the soldier’s death’s ebon     dart, to strike the prison’d in her, she: but thou, that turns     up through they rang on her troubled brain;—and tug at the all     over America. Teaches one to folk—remember     me when the low starlight.

Who, in my e’e, to this flesh helps     soul! Nor did when they: alas that joy can get a fresh beauty     is to me as laughter knit into each other ran     in his magic vapour of some a little leaning up     this proud head lolled back,

nor brag not of. Just such art as     from a half-unquench’d volcano go. Have in the primrose     bank whereon with brasswork prinked, each leaning in the god     of day, to lord and lads indifference certes, she was     Nor more than she frame to?

[mommylilith]

Diablo IV: Sanctuary Main areas with zones and sub-zones

Last update: 7/29/23 10:00 AM EST

FRACTURED PEAKS

Desolate Highlands ◈ Kyovashad [Waypoint] ◈ Nevesk (Waypoint) ◈ Father's Cross ◈ Eastern Pass ◈ Boulder Ridge ◈ Icehowl Taiga

Dobrev Taiga ◈ Margrave [Waypoint] ◈ Southeast Foothills ◈ Savina Falls ◈ Radiance Field Cemetery ◈ Krol Forest ◈ Pauper's Descent

Gale Valley ◈ Yelesna [Waypoint] ◈ Zeleny Lowlands ◈ Windfall Hollow ◈ Mistral Woods

Darkened Hold (Dungeon) ◈ Winding Way ◈ Shadowed Glade

Horadrim Vault (Dungeon) ◈ Foyer ◈ Study ◈ Desecrated Archives

Condemned Mines (Cellar) ◈ Stagnant Tunnels ◈ Unstable Mineshafts ◈ Collapsing Depths ◈ The Darkened Way ◈ Kasama

Path of the Firstborn / Cradle? (Dungeon) ◈ Courts of Dawn ◈ Cloisters of Dusk ◈ Mourning Shore ◈ The Black Lake

Frigid Expanse ◈ Eastern Plain ◈ Olyam Tundra & The Asylum Lot ◈ The Deep White & Trough of Orobas ◈ Kylsik Plateau ◈ Shivering Wilds ◈ Lake Klokova ◈ Kor Rohavan

Sarkova Pass ◈ Menestad [Waypoint] ◈ Western Ways ◈ Crags of Ill Wind

Seat of the Heavens ◈ Sinner's Pass ◈ Serac Rupture ◈ Malthus' Perch ◈ Fields of Judgement ◈ The Anointed Ascent ◈ Altar of Redemption ◈ Altar of Martyrdom ◈ Alabaster Monastery & Shrine of the Penitent

The Pallid Glade ◈ The Anemic Falls ◈ Frostbite Trails ◈ The Sallow Riverbanks

Kor Valar

Kor Dragan

NOSTRAVA 🏰 (Stronghold)

MALNOK 🏰 (Stronghold)

SCOSGLEN

Highland Wilds ◈ Ard Lands ◈ Maddux Hill ◈ Old Heimberg ◈ The Great Northern Plains ◈ Loch's Bane Ridge ◈ Gloom Pine Pass ◈ The Withered Scrubs

The Downs ◈ Lochsdale ◈ Umbralwood ◈ South Umbralwood ◈ The Unhallowed Pit ◈ The Harrowfields ◈ The Scorched Orchard ◈ Wealaf Rise ◈ The Fetid Farmlands ◈ Blycroft

The Emerald Chase ◈ Cerrigar [Waypoint] ◈ Cerrigar Outskirts ◈ Shadow Wood ◈ Greenglen Meadows ◈ Woodsman's Glade ◈ Old Forest Clearing ◈ Woodwraith Edge

The Wailing Hills ◈ Braestaig (Waypoint) ◈ Bronagh Expanse ◈ Aisle of Whispers

Westering Lowlands ◈ Eldhaime Keep ◈ Laglend Fen ◈ Carraig Or Ford ◈ Outlaw's Grove ◈ The Witan Woods ◈ Fainne, the Defiled Grove ◈ Gaothmar Grasslands

Deep Forest ◈ Path of Learning ◈ Issalia's Rise ◈ Southern Briars ◈ Dark Thicket ◈ Vasily's Reach ◈ The Ancient's Woods ◈ The Fading Statue ◈ Klettr Scar ◈ The Great Barks Wilderness ◈ Duin Carr

TÚR DÚLRA 🏰 (Stronghold)

Northshore ◈ Marowen [Waypoint] ◈ Marowen Shipyard ◈ Writhing Brook ◈ Abandoned Coast ◈ The Cursed Scarps ◈ Eternal Watch ◈ Stormbreak Cove ◈ Gamall Nook ◈ The Gaunt Eyrrs ◈ Carrowcrest Trail ◈ Scourging Ings ◈ Uaill Basin

Carrowcrest Ruins

THE CURSED BAY 🏰 (Stronghold)

Caen Adar

Strand ◈ Corbach [Waypoint] ◈ Balagar's Rest ◈ Fiabre ◈ Garan Brae ◈ Garan Watch ◈ Razor Shoals ◈ Strandflats ◈ The Cinder Woods ◈ Torvstrath

MOORDAINE LODGE 🏰 (Stronghold)

The Shrouded Moors ◈ Tirmair [Waypoint] ◈ Overgrown Outpost (Cellar) ◈ The Daudur Peats ◈ Faers Watch ◈ The Blood Vale ◈ Heart of the Moors

Untamed Thicket (Dungeon) ◈ Crimson Path ◈ Corrupted Spawning Ground

HAWEZAR

Dismal Foothills ◈ Wejinhani [Waypoint] ◈ The Bitter Road ◈ Bloodpox Basin ◈ Crimson Spoil

Blightmarsh ◈ Corpsewail Deluge ◈ Morass of Misery ◈ Dromir Riverbank

DRY STEPPES

Katama Grasslands ◈ Ked Bardu [Waypoint] ◈ Farobru [Waypoint]: healer, weapons vendor, blacksmith, rings & amulets vendor, stable ◈ Arid Heartland ◈ Wayward Plains ◈ The Wretched Strand ◈ Seaside Descent (dungeon)

Khargai Crags ◈ Hapless Frontier

Chambatar Ridge ◈ Fate's Retreat [Waypoint] ◈ Path of Stray Souls ◈ Forsaken Ascent ◈ Spine of Civo ◈ Kiln of the Primes

Dindai Flats ◈ Khurel Passage

Norgoi Vigil ◈ Norgoi Vigil

The Scarred Coast ◈ Path of the Ill-Fated ◈ Ragged Shore ◈ Seaside Cavern (cellar) ◈ The Ashen Treat ◈ Eroded Cove (cellar) ◈ Tamuur Hinterland ◈ Undying Marches

Fields of Hatred ◈ Alzuuda (waypoint) ◈ Akhai Prairie

KEHJISTAN

Amber Sands ◈ Blistering Descent ◈ Forgotten Coastline ◈ Searing Expanse ◈ Scorching Dunes ◈ Dunes of Despair ◈ Lut Bahadur Outskirts ◈ Road to Alcarnus ◈ Blighted Burrow (cellar) ◈ Ravaged Ruins (cellar) ◈ Shivta Ruins (dungeon)

ALCARNUS 🏰 (Stronghold)

Scouring Sands ◈ Forlorn Badlands ◈ Central Rise ◈ Rusted Sands ◈ Vault of Karamat ◈◈ Halls of the Damned (dungeon) ◈◈ Mortuus ◈◈ Inmergo ◈◈ Daemonium ◈◈ Osseus

Fields of Hatred (PVP) ◈ Bleak Dunes ◈ Shallow Mudcracks

Caldeum ◈ Road to Caldeum ◈ Caldeum Bazaar ◈ Southern Expanse ◈◈ Deserted Underpass (dungeon) ◈ Central Plateau ◈◈ Conclave (dungeon)

Dilapidated Aqueducts

Ragged Coastline ◈ Iron Wolves Encampment [waypoint] ◈ Scorched Plateau ◈◈ Festering Burrow (cellar) ◈ Scorched Gulch ◈ Uldur's Cave ◈◈ Uldur's Cave (dungeon) ◈ Dahlgur Oasis

[queenhelenblackthorn]

the Carry On fandom post-Wayward Son is just like the TMI fandom after Alec and Magnus broke up in City of Lost Souls

I'm not wrong and you all know it

[fluffynin]

I am so rusty at drawing. But here is my Naofumi and Ingo for my Baneful, Wayward Souls AU. At least, starting in the story as I start the story a bit Pre-PLA and build up to the PLA storyline from where Ingo is still new to the clan and hasn't gotten much done yet. Naofumi has Zoroark like features that gives him a bit of a feral look, which clashes a bit with his clothes he tries to keep mended and repaired.

Naofumi has actually been in Hisui longer, but more in the wilderness after a... not so stellar first contact with the Pearl Clan. Ingo will later find this same incident is why the clan is so slow to trust him and why Naofumi has developed a huge distrust towards humans. However, due to an avalanche, the duo end up stuck nursing their wounds at Naofumi's shelter and they both come to the realization they actually know each other from before they lost their memories. Ingo tries to convince Naofumi to come back with him to the Pearl Clan, but Naofumi is having that... Til they find a child who was trying to reach the Pearl Clan and get caught in a time space distortion. The aftermath? All three now weild a strange weapon like Pokemon that appeared out of nowhere... And Ingo and Naofumi end up right in the middle of the Pearl and Diamond Clan's issues with the boy they saved from the distortion being the son of the Diamond Clan's leader... Said son, Adaman, snuck away from the settlement to go to the Pearl Clan to demand why no new Lady of the Ridge had appeared amongst the Petilil. Which, oddly enough, Ingo and Naofumi have the answer and try to use it to prevent another war between the two clans. However, trouble lurks in the shadows, some of which want both outsiders and even Adaman dead.

A basic summary of the story I am aiming to rewrite. Naofumi will be getting the Legendary Shield-which he dubbs Aegishield-but not is not the only special weapon to appear. Ingo being one such weirder, too.

Still working on the rewrite, but wanted to get the new summary down with finally getting some headway in where I want to go with the story.

[strayed-from-the-sun]

LF RP: Dimi Vagari

Character Name: Dimitrivon Vagari Or Dimi formerly known as- V’Dimi’Tia

The Basics ––– –

Age: 29

Birthday: 15th sun of the 5th Umbral Moon

Race: Miqo’te, Seeker

Gender: Male

Sexuality: heterosexual

Marital Status: Single

Physical Appearance ––– –

Hair:  Black

Eyes: Dark Blue

Height: 5′10”

Build: Athletic

Distinguishing Marks: Small scratch markings, Torn left ear, distinct Tattoo on arm, distinct blue color on hair

Common Accessories: a particular necklace with stones shaped and carved

Personal ––– –

Profession: Knight, Dark Knight ,Samurai

Hobbies: Reading, collecting notable stones from his travels, Bathing

Languages: Eorzan (?) Ishgardian

Residence:  Ul’dah, Shirogane

Birthplace: Sagoli Desert (raised in Ishgard)

Religion: Halone

Patron Deity:  Halone

Fears: Vermin, slightly claustrophobic, having his scarred ear touched

Relationships ––– -

Spouse:---

Children: None

Parents: V’Chaf (father)

Siblings: none

Other Relatives: Renault  (Adoptive Father)

Pets: none

Traits ––– -

* Bold your character’s answer.

Extroverted / In Between / Introverted

Disorganized / In Between / Organized

Close Minded / In Between / Open Minded

Calm / In Between / Anxious

Disagreeable / In Between / Agreeable

Cautious / In Between / Reckless

Patient / In Between /  Impatient

Outspoken / In Between / Reserved

Leader / In Between / Follower

Empathetic / In Between / Apathetic

Optimistic / In Between / Pessimistic

Traditional / In Between / Modern

Hard-working / In Between / Lazy

Cultured / In Between / Uncultured

Loyal / In Between / Disloyal

Faithful / In Between / Unfaithful

Additional information ––– –

Smoking Habit: None

Drugs: None

Alcohol: Moderate drinker of mead

RP Hooks ––– –

Strange sounding Miqo'te: Despite wanting to keep out of sight most times, its not hard to pick out Dimi by his voice alone. He often speaks in the mannerisms of most Ishgardians and can easily be confused for one if one wasn't looking at him while he speaks. Inadvertently he doesnt talk often, but its easy enough to catch at the Quicksand when he orders mead.

Bane of crime: Dimi has a personal history with interacting with criminal elements, hunting down any notorious criminals active within Thanalan or any other place he travels to for that matter. If you are mixed up with the wrong people or have dealings with crime there's a chance you'll come across this vengeful knight. He's a good fighter and a resourceful tracker. Given time he can find most but not all of the people he looks for

Wayward Traveler: Having travelled from Ishgard to Uldah, to Kugane and back, Dimi is no stranger to the roads

Adventurer in Need: the company of a knight on a perilous adventure is likely comforting. Dimi is more than happy to lend his service to those who are in danger or need protection on their quest or travels

Out of touch and out of place: Dimi had been taken in and adopted by an Ishgardian knight at a very young age. Rather than learning traditionally as a Seeker of the Sun, Dimi was brought up as an Ishgardian and eventually trained, albeit illegitimately as a knight. That being said he is consequently able to navigate Ishgardian etiquette with some of the nobles, but also leaves many Ul'dahns rather baffled by his common knowledge or lack thereof. This can make for interesting interactions when meeting with people from these respective backgrounds

Wielder of the Dark Knight Soul stone: Through his late mentor and adoptive father, Renault, Dimi has a Soul stone. He is still rather inexperienced with it having only recently gain the ability to wield it properly and while he isn't too active in seeking a new mentor, he's not likely to turn down the offer of a more experienced Dark Knight.

Summary: While not the wisest, Dimi is fairly experienced in travel and fighting. He's slow to opening up to others and is often aloof of strangers, but given time one can find a rather trustworthy knight at their side with him. Conversely those who catch his ire and chose to be an enemy will find Dimi to be a rather tenacious and forbidding presence.

Contact Information  ––– –

Tumblr! I dont do much Rp here but I can be messaged most times! but if you have me on discord feel free to contact me there! I also do more

[spiders-hth-is-an-outlier]

Possibly a big ask to get just out of the blue but: what are your Supernatural season opinions? Which one is your favorite? Least favorite? Did you watch long enough to have showrunner opinions? If yes, which showrunner is your favorite and which is your least favorite? If no, which season that you haven't seen most tempts you to get back in the Supernatural trenches? Answer exactly as many of these questions as you want to. Carry on.

You know, I am not sure how long this Ask has been sitting here, because my Tumblr notifications are borked -- I hope not long? If long, I apologize, I wasn't ignoring it on purpose!

Okay, so I have more than the average number of Supernatural opinions, probably, but I'll try to keep this to a dull roar! Inside Me There Are Two Wolves: one of them believes that only the original five seasons of Supernatural are worth defending in any way, the other really, really loves seasons 11 and 12. The Kripke Era had a lot of problems, particularly in its treatment of women as bodies without agency and its treatment of Black men as literal predators, but also for all its flaws, it had a kind of coherence and narrative drive that comes from being the product of a dude who obviously cared about it and had something to say. Taken on its own, seasons 1-5 are a brutal and compelling story about the traumas of being men in a universe that's been absolutely destroyed by its Fathers: on almost every level, it's about these abandoned and brutalized boys discovering that their entire reality is the product of an abandoning and brutalizing God, populated by authority figures who are universally demanding and arrogant, but also completely fucking useless. It's quite literally about Sam and Dean trying to hang onto their souls and their own agency when everyone around them wants them forced into shapes formed by conflicts that fell into place at the beginning of time. It's hard to remember, but back then even the Lucifer plotline was about that! It was about the damage fathers inflict on sons! Things were about things, in the Kripke era!

Then we get to the Gamble era, and. Woof. I actually -- don't hate 6 and 7? Like everything Sera Gamble touches, those two seasons are kinetic and memorable and funny and weird and hit some really, really great emotional beats. There are Some Problems, but Gamble was saddled with a pretty dire job, trying to find a way forward after everything about the series really had effectively wrapped up in Swan Song, and I think she did an okay job. People got mad at her for killing Castiel, but you know, damn, I give her this: that was a storyline. Like, this character who was fresh out of the cult he was raised in becoming disillusioned by how messy normal life is and deciding that maybe people need better authoritarianism instead -- the way he's driven to take too many risks by the fact that he's abandoned and desperate -- Crowley as a legitimately scary villain while still being charming af -- and the tragic resolution of Castiel being torn apart by both his hubris and his heroism. It's actually really good. I understand why people didn't want what Gamble was serving up -- and I'm able to like it because it was undone later, you know? -- but she really did commit to a full season of character arc and saw it all the way through to an earned ending, and I gotta respect that.

I genuinely hate seasons 8 and 9. I think everyone is a dick, particularly but not exclusively Dean, to the point where I just find it a bummer to watch. I mean, you get Benny, and I love Benny. You get, I dunno, bits and bobs of decent episodes, but overall they are very fucked up seasons in my opinion. So Carver era is on thin fucking ice with me, but I do think you start to get a rebound in season 10 with the Mark of Cain stuff, although I wish they'd managed to keep Cain around longer. All the really good Claire stuff starts happening, which is nice because Claire, but also because for once the show is really letting itself go back and deal with the mess these protagonists leave behind them constantly. Castiel and Claire have maybe the most interesting non-Winchester relationship on the show. Oh, and Rowena shows up around here too, right? Love her. So the back half of Carver, 10 and 11, are starting to really gain traction for me. The world is building outward, secondary characters are starting to be genuine characters in their own right, the politics of Heaven and Hell get a little richer and more interesting. The show is really starting to feel like it takes place in a universe, which is great because we love the Frigging Winchesters, but they shouldn't be the only thing going, right? We have 15 seasons to get through! Season 11 is basically bracketed by what are probably my two favorite Supernatural episodes: Baby and Don't Call Me Shurley. (I think I'm the world's only living Metatron fan; I fucking love that little dude.)

Dabb takes over in 12, and I really, really, genuinely love season 12. I fucking love Mary. There are so many episodes I adore -- Celebrating the Life of Asa Fox is a special favorite of mine, and I remain pissed off that the Banes twins never made it to recurring status, bluntly that feels wildly racist to me -- probably the best three-episode streak in the show is Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets to Regarding Dean to Stuck In the Middle (With You), three just almost perfect episodes. So I was poised to really love the Dabb era. I wanted to! My body was ready!

And I do really love the first chunk of season 13, the Widow Winchester arc. Obviously I'm a romantic, love that for me, but it's just also really good? The acting, the writing, the psychological complexity of Dean wanting Jack to be Bad so he has an outlet for his anger and Sam wanting Jack to be Good so he can retroactively parent himself and raise a Lucifer-tainted child who isn't crippled by self-loathing. Billie's great, and it looks like she's going to start being one of the major powers of the universe. Unfortunately -- with the occasional exception of this or that solid episode -- that's kind of the end of Pretty Good Supernatural. Season 13 kind of unravels; season 14 always feels like it's looking for itself (which is a bummer, because I wanted very much to care about Michael); season 15 is, idk. Idk about any of it, it's all pretty pointless. I feel bad complaining on some level, because the show's been on for like fourteen years at this point! It's kinda justified in feeling a little worn out. But the reality is that the later seasons systematically undo all the expansion that had excited me earlier -- the Wayward Sisters crew pretty much vanishes when the spinoff isn't picked up, Naomi and the angels stop doing anything, Crowley's gone, Mary's gone for much of it. We're just kind of futzing around with monsters who don't seem to matter (very much including Lucifer, who hasn't mattered in ages) and a lot of Jack, who. I try not to shit all over, because I know he's a popular character, but I find him just ungodly boring. Everything in the last two and a half season just feels like it's headed nowhere in particular, and also it bored me. The Empty deal is just sadness porn; it doesn't have any resonance or meaning in terms of Castiel's character, it's just him agreeing to die for his kid, which is okay, it means he's a loving dad, which he is, but there's no conflict there, ergo no real drama. It's just mean; it happens because it'll make us sad, and no other reason. Rowena is the only strong secondary character left, and her ending also doesn't feel particularly relevant to her, it's just a generic Sacrifice to Save the World. Everything just feels like they're autogenerating plotlines, rather than letting the actual needs and drives of the characters shape the narrative. So while I have this weird split personality with Carver where I either hate what he's doing or I love it, most of the Dabb era is just. There. It doesn't make me feel anything except kind of tired and embarrassed. Which is a bummer, because I have an inexplicable fondness for Dabb, probably just because of how much I love s12. I wanted to love his seasons! I did love his first season! I feel like maybe something happened when the CW rejected Wayward Sisters? I know that was kind of his darling, and it feels like maybe losing that kind of sucked the joy out of him, and he's kind of checked-out by the end. That's genuinely just my guess, however.

That's Professor Milo's Intro to Supernatural Studies, don't forget to fill out your course survey on the way out!

[sweetdreamsjeff]

Jeff Buckley Revisited

by Simeon FlickMarch 2023

Remember me, but oh, forget my fate. ––Henry Purcell, “Dido’s Lament”

When Jeff Buckley drowned in the Wolf River tributary of the Mississippi on May 29, 1997, just as his band was arriving at the Memphis airport to start helping him finally nail down the long-awaited and already agonized-over second album, music lost not only one of its most singular and revolutionary of raw talents, but also the most mythologized—even during his lifetime—since Kurt Cobain’s death just three years prior. Buckley bore the boon and bane of being the scion of an also semi-famous and ill-fated folk/jazz/soul singer named Tim, and spent his entire life and career—following a single week-long reunion just before Tim’s 1975 death from an accidental heroin overdose—futilely trying to distance himself from the wayward father he never knew apart from the music of nine mostly half-baked studio albums. That an ever-growing number of people, the majority having discovered Jeff’s music post-mortem, feel they know the son better than he or anyone else knew his father, and still feel his loss as acutely as one would a dear family member, is a testament to the unparalleled emotional conveyance and lasting legacy of Jeff’s music despite having released only one official studio album during his lifetime (1994’s hauntingly gorgeous, seamlessly diverse Grace, which has found a home on innumerable “Greatest” lists and has been declared a personal favorite by many of his idols). Jeff Buckley’s influence lives on in the burgeoning underground cult of posthumous acolytes, and in the hyper-emotive, falsetto- and vibrato-laden, multi-octave vocal histrionics of so many subsequent singers, which only seem to come off as pale and obvious allusions that smack more of imitation than assimilation, much less embodiment, and we may never see his like again.

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Jeff Buckley entered the world during a meteor shower on the evening of November 17, 1966, the son of an already absent father and a mother, Mary Guibert, who at 18 wasn’t much more than a child herself. Like Cobain, who would arrive only three months later, Jeff had a typical Gen X childhood, replete with divorce, paternal estrangement and maternal domination, often violently reinforced alienation from his formative peers and unstable itinerancy (Mary dragged him through virtually every backwater town in California for all too short stints before he finally put his foot down in Anaheim, where both parents had grown up, and where extended family awaited). The sole refuge, besides the brief but stabilizing presence of the occasional father figure like stepdad Ron Moorhead, was the music men like him turned Jeff onto: Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and countless others who would seemingly become part of his DNA. Music became his north star, his raison d’être, and when things went wrong, which was all too often (Jeff had to be a rock for flighty mother Mary, taking on too many of her responsibilities too young), he would escape into it for hours.

This would compound once he took up the guitar. Like many children of musicians do, in order to carve out a distinct musical identity (and to maintain a healthy generation gap), Jeff—or Scotty, as he was known by his middle name then––gravitated towards Gen-X’s chosen instrument: the electric guitar, to the exclusion of his mother’s classical piano and his father’s acoustic guitar and vocalizations. Aside from the occasional lead vocal in a high school cover band, mostly for the high-ranged prog-rock and new wave classics none of his other bandmates could pull off, he considered himself just a guitar player in the ’80s. But not just any player; with Al DiMeola as one of many paragons, Jeff threw himself headlong into the world of virtuosic technique, teaching himself complicated licks by ear as he worked diligently to master not just the instrument but music itself.

This trajectory was maintained after his 1984 high school graduation with a stint at the derided Los Angeles organization, MIT (Musician’s Institute of Technology), with its many specialized subsidiaries, including GIT (Guitar Institute of Technology), where Jeff continued his musical edification. After obtaining his virtually useless professional certificate from GIT but with his gun-slinging reputation solidified a year later, he gigged in various area bands and worked as a studio rat, arranging and recording demos for other aspiring artists. But the lead vocalist in him remained as of yet dormant.

y the late ’80s it was already soul-crushingly evident that Los Angeles was a dead-end cesspool of intolerable immersion in other people’s music, and that a drastic change was required to sweep away the bad influences and external white noise to finally get him in touch with his own muse. New York City beckoned—just as it had to Tim in the ’60s—as a locus were people could become the epitome of themselves, get as weird as they wanted, and be unconditionally accepted or ignored as merely part of the scenery, and reach their full, rewarded potential in whatever their chosen field. Jeff tested the waters for a few months in 1990, but his money and options ran out, and he reluctantly returned to Los Angeles.

It wasn’t until April 26, 1991, when he performed as part of the Hal Willner-curated Greetings from Tim Buckley tribute show at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Church that he was able to lay the groundwork for a permanent relocation, having garnered the interest of several music industry types offering tangible professional succor, not to mention his first real girlfriend. That night marked the beginning of Jeff’s mythology-building not only as an artist in his own right, but also as an inextricable extension of his father’s legacy; many of the concert’s attendees were blown away not just by Jeff’s supposedly similar voice and delivery, but also by his physical resemblance (apparently there were some eerie backlit cheekbone shadows cast against the church hall walls that heightened the drama).

That there was so much defensiveness and/or mandated avoidance in so many subsequent interviews seems very bite-the-hand-that-feeds, but everyone has to break free from their parents at some point; that it often requires the assistance of those selfsame parents is a frustratingly ironic aspect of adulthood most of us have to face and embrace. Jeff simply had the misfortune of doing it in a highly scrutinized industry with zero—or even negative—expectations or tolerance of rock star progeny. He was also not only abandoned by his father, to whose funeral he was not even invited, but also projected on by Tim-obsessed fans and former love interests expecting the son to deliver on the father’s failed promise(s).

Jeff set up shop, and with the assistance of a demo tape of original songs he had recorded while still languishing in Los Angeles (courtesy of father Tim’s old manager, Herb Cohen), and a threadbare press kit (the only news clipping being a photocopied review of the Tim memorial show), he began beating the Manhattan pavement to drum up gigs and busk on the streets.

As of yet, short on original material, he leaned on sophisticated covers that resonated with his emphatically empathic and emotive spirit as he wall-pasta’d in search of a unique artistic identity. Songs by more recently assimilated influences like Nina Simone, Edith Piaf, and Leonard Cohen stood side by side with pitch-perfect deep-cut gems by Van Morrison and the beloved Zeppelin, with all-inclusive guitar arrangements that cast his different-every-time performances in full-blown Technicolor. His self-accompaniment on electric guitar as opposed to the acoustic form usually favored by the often excessively earnest—if not outright cheesy—solo folk artists of the past (including early-phase Tim), differentiated him from obsolete traditions, and it also broadcast the implicit message that this lone performer would eventually have a band behind him.

But the comprehensive guitar skill was just a tripod for the potent weapon his voice was becoming.

It’s difficult for most laypeople to differentiate between learned technique and natural timbre. Jeff didn’t inherit his father’s vocal gift; his was high-ranged and effeminate instead, with a thick palate and some huskiness occasionally muddying up his tone production. But what he did with it despite or because of the confines of those “limitations” is absolutely astounding. Instead of self-consciously diluting his delivery, he threw the book at it, almost as a diversionary tactic, like a magician smoke-and-mirror distracting his audience from an otherwise debunkable prestige move. With his uncanny imitative abilities and concomitant penchant for self-pedagogy, he adopted a rapid vibrato in accordance with essential influences (Simone, Piaf, Garland, and even father Tim, as was his undeniable birthright), nicked tricky classical and R&B trills and phrasing, turned his angelic upper register into a strength by frequently, often breathily leaning into his falsetto, incorporated various operatic (chromatic glissandos) and jazz (scatting) effects, learned how to push a full chest voice into his higher register like Robert Plant (and Tim) and to raggedly scream like Cobain and others of his generation. He ran sustain drills as he traveled across the city in cabs or on foot, drawing out his notes as long as possible to hone his deftly rationed breath support (just try holding out along with the 25-second E4 at the end of Grace’s “Hallelujah”). Tim had set the bar high for the younger Buckley, and Jeff rose mightily to the challenge, developing a comprehensive technique that kept pace with his guitar mastery, which had been pared down to unassailable jazz progressions and Hendrixian blues tropes and, like Cobain, would feature downplayed––if any––solos for the duration. If Jeff’s musical continuo was a haunted house, his voice had become the ghost that lingered within it.

(There’s something more compelling about the resulting output of singer/songwriters who start out exclusively as instrumentalists; it makes for more effective and meaningful musical accompaniment and better structured songs, and they tend to work more diligently and eruditely at mastering vocal technique. Tim leaned almost exclusively on his phenomenal voice, and insufficient thought was given to structure and harmony in his songs, and the lyrics were by turns predominantly unremarkable or unwieldy, the main drawback of being able to sing the phonebook. The resulting chord changes and accompaniment were more limited, derivative, yet ironically more obtrusive. Jeff had harnessed hooks, vivid and compelling lyrical imagery, and upper harmony into underlying works that left room for everything important, but especially the vocals. Thus, Jeff managed to achieve with one album what Tim failed to do in nine; he produced a timeless classic.)

Jeff’s most crucial influence––his self-declared Elvis––was the Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Qawwali singing introduced Jeff not only to its mystical eastern harmony, which was a subtle but unmistakable undercurrent in his guitar parts and his music in general, but also to a highly freeing ilk of vocal improvisation he would use to sparing but profound effect in his live performances, most notably in his wordless vocal warm-ups for things like “Mojo Pin” and “Dream Brother,” and in the way he would subtly tweak the songs’ melodies from show to show.

With all of this gelling within and beginning to burst out of him, Jeff flogged his wares at many a Manhattan venue, but he would find his symbiotic Shangri La at Sin-é, a hole-in-the-wall café run by a fellow man of Irish descent, ex-pat Shane Doyle. Jeff crystalized into the self-accompanying male diva he had been striving to become there at Sin-é and found a home away from home not only on the small stage, where he reveled in an unparalleled, as-of-yet anonymous freedom within the material, but also behind the counter, where he could often be found washing dishes.

This is where Jeff’s buzz began to build, thanks to his Monday night residency, the impression he had made on the industry folk at Tim’s memorial concert (including several Columbia employees who started showing up on the regular), and the steadily growing crowds comprised predominantly of young women. As word of mouth spread and audiences began to overflow onto the sidewalk, the higher-ups at several major labels started circling to investigate the fresh blood in the water. A hilarious bidding war ensued, with record company execs actually trying to make table reservations at the tiny walk-in café, and the street’s curbs clogging with limousines. Jeff would end up signing with Columbia, a Sony subsidiary that was home to many of his heroes, and that made all the right overtures and promises to this hot young talent who was desperately intent on accomplishing the impossible feat of using and defeating the music industry from the inside, as opposed to being consumed by it like his father had been.

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Jeff’s “million dollar” deal––consisting of a $100,000 advance, a higher than normal royalty rate, and a three-album guarantee––was unusual for a solo artist of that time, considering there were scant few original songs, no band, and no official demo tape to speak of (the L.A. recordings, which Jeff in his humorously nihilistic cups had dubbed The Babylon Dungeon Sessions, technically fulfilled the applicable criteria but weren’t aurally suitable). Columbia knew they had a hot property on their hands, the Gen-X manifestation of a Dylan or Springsteen-esque heritage artist, and Jeff made sure they knew, mostly through intentional late arrivals to countless business meetings. But because his talents spanned so deep and wide, everyone was initially at a loss as to what form his recorded output should take. What the hell do you do with an artist that has the chops and versatility to go in any direction??

The logical first step was to try and capture the solo version of Jeff on tape and issue it as a soft introduction. Live At Sin-é was culled from two performances recorded during the summer of 1993 and released on November 23 as a perfunctory, slightly disappointing four-song EP consisting of two originals (“Mojo Pin,” and “Eternal Life,” both of which would get definitive, full-band versions on Grace), and two covers (a rhapsodically incendiary rendition of Van Morrison’s “The Way Young Lovers Do” and a transcendent reading of Edith Piaf’s “Je N’en Connais Pas La Fin,” complete with a fingerpicked merry-go-round guitar waltz for the French-sung refrain).

In Columbia’s posthumous ambition to exploit remaining vault caches to continue paying down Jeff’s sizable debt to the label, the original release’s felonious dearth was rectified with 2003’s Legacy Edition, a two-disc, one DVD set that was a much more complete representation of Jeff not just as an artist during that pre-fame period, but as a person. Along with scads more songs from the same shows, the expanded set includes between-song banter that manages to do what his scant, more visceral studio work couldn’t: put his pronouncedly nerdy, madcap, sometimes salacious sense of humor on full display.

Meanwhile, Jeff had also begun working toward his only completed studio LP. Sony had brought him in to record the lion’s share of his repertoire in February of ’93 as a way to gently kick off the A&R cataloguing and selection process for the album (these were later released as part of the 2016 compilation You And I), and recording sessions were scheduled for September at Bearsville Studios, which was located near Woodstock in upstate New York. The only problem––and it was a big one––was that he didn’t have a band. Like so many other aspects of Jeff’s career, this got rectified at the last possible moment; he met and connected with bassist Mick Grondahl first, then drummer Matt Johnson less than a month out from the initial recording dates.

A tall, dark, and handsome Dane, Grondahl had an ideal combination of low-key receptiveness and musical adventurousness that allowed him to be the perfect on- and offstage wingman: he was interesting in an unobtrusive way. Johnson was a wet-eared Texan who had the ideal balance of power and precision (a slight and diminutive presence, Johnson’s physicality was bolstered by his construction day job) and the breadth of taste and experience to match the extreme dynamic variations of Jeff’s sonic palette (Johnson could crush it like Bonzo or play pindrop-soft like a seasoned jazz pro––whatever the music required).

Columbia was less than pleased that Jeff had recruited a rhythm section with virtually no stage or studio experience, but he would eventually be proven right in his selection of introverted, lump-of-clay rookies that doubled as a gang of friends who could hang with him in every sense, especially through all the spontaneous twists and turns he threw at them. This was one of many battles he would actually win for the better against Sony, though he would initially come off as the loser (it took a few months for the band to get up to speed on the Grace repertoire, because they rarely if ever played the album’s songs during rehearsals or soundchecks, preferring to fill that time with “jamming,” since they needed to build an intuitive rapport. They also knew they would be playing the same emotionally demanding songs night after night for the next year or two).

The trio began work on Grace at Bearsville Studios, which had been pre-rigged with several different recording environments to spontaneously capture whatever came out of Jeff and his band in any permutation and style, whether it was solo, low-key jazz combo or full-on rock group. Andy Wallace, who had dialed in the mixes for Nirvana’s Nevermind, wore the coproducing and engineering hats for these sessions, along with providing a regimented lens through which to focus and refract Jeff’s chaotic genius. Recording proceeded slowly and steadily, without too much fanfare, but then, again at the last minute there was an explosion of prodigious productivity. Among other developments, German vibraphone prodigy Karl Berger was in town, and with the assistance of a local quartet, he and Jeff co-arranged string parts for “Grace,” “Last Goodbye,” and “Eternal Life.”

The eleventh-hour burst of creativity suddenly began transforming Jeff’s modest debut into something more akin to the fully produced masterpiece that usually doesn’t happen until later in a discography. More studio time was booked for intensive overdubbing of additional layers, which pushed costs beyond the initial budget, and though Columbia held Jeff in high esteem and generally handled him with kid gloves (full artistic control was implicit), the majority of expenses went into his recoupable fund, which had to be paid down by Jeff through album sale royalties. Though Grace would eventually prove itself beyond worthy of the investment, this was one of the first major manifestations of Jeff’s Sony-sourced headache that would plague him for the duration.

Grace, which was finally released on August 23, 1994, tends to vex the neophyte at first blush. There’s so much to unpack, the resulting bottleneck can be off-putting. Only through repeated listens will it reward those who “wait in the fire,” as the title track has it. Once that rote assimilation has inured you to Jeff’s eccentric voice and anachronistically innovative affectations, and Grace has dilated your emotional receptivity wider than you ever thought possible, you will tend to listen obsessively for a while before you realize you need to take a break so your strung-out, wrung-out heart can snap back to normal. You will probably only be able to listen to it every once in a while thereafter, as the lachrymose music makes demands of your psyche that require exceptional equanimity to withstand (the irony is that while Grace might help you grieve a breakup or death, listening to its ten tracks can also exhume that grief long past the time you have worked through it). The fact that Jeff is no longer here but still sounds undeniably alive in the speakers, and that the making of this album led to insurmountable expectations for a satisfactory follow-up that added to his pre-death stress, only augments the album’s haunting intensity.

The sonic progeny of Robert Johnson, Nina Simone, Edgar Allan Poe, and John Dowland, Jeff comes off as the wide-amplitude, tragic-romantic, card-carrying Scorpio that he was, irresistibly obsessed with love and death, singing often of the moon and rain (and yet also of burning and fire), and bedroom-as-sanctuary-and-wellspring, and a melancholic, nearly heart-rending yearning for absent lovers past and present. All of this can’t help but feed into his steadily growing mythology, not to mention strike he’s-all-alone-and-vulnerable-go-save-him reverberations of longing through the heartstrings of every heterosexual female within earshot, while also getting straight men of all walks gratefully as in touch with their feminine side as he was. In the age of grunge––which force-fed emotion through intimidating volume and distortion––Grace was an anomaly, delivering a wider range of feeling through a listener’s induced surrender to its heightened peaks and valleys, with Jeff’s by turns angelic and demonic voice keeping pace, and, unlike Cobain, with absolutely no irony to lean on, hide behind, or use as disclaimer.

“Mojo Pin” is the perfect overture for an audiophile quality album with such wide yet still somehow cohesive style and dynamic oscillations, with softly looping guitar harmonics fading in, followed by a wordless melody delicately sung over a fingerpicked folk/jazz guitar pattern. The music rollercoasters from there, with dramatic stops featuring vocal melismas that proceed into straight 4/4 time, finally crescendoing in a loud, climactic buildup, and a ragged scream from Jeff that tapers seamlessly back into the jazz feel.

The first stanzas tell us so much about the author:

I’m lying in my bed, the blanket is warm This body will never be safe from harm Still feel your hair, black ribbons of coal Touch my skin to keep me whole

Oh, if only you’d come back to me If you laid at my side I wouldn’t need no mojo pin To keep me satisfied

Here we find a vividly lovelorn artist who tends to compose from the subconscious (as with many of his original songs, “Mojo Pin” was inspired by a dream he had had) has already begun confronting his mortality, equates love with addiction like so many troubadours before him (“mojo pin” is a euphemism for a shot of heroin, which, inspired in part by his father, Jeff used for a short time during the tour in support of Grace), and feels hopelessly separated from it all, with a heightened sense of longing that can’t help but garner the listener’s sympathies.

The title track picks up the thread in more ways than one; along with “Mojo Pin” it is the second of two pre-Sony songwriting collaborations with former Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas—as part of his short-lived Gods and Monsters project (that’s Lucas’s guitar-noodle wizardry on both). And with lines like “Oh, drink a bit of wine––we both might go tomorrow,” it ups the mortality-as-enabler-and-aphrodisiac ante.

With its churning 6/8 groove, and with Jeff starting the song in typical fashion––toward the bottom of his discernable vocal range (D3), “Grace” culminates cathartically on a sustained, heavily vibrato’d, full-chest E5 bad-assedly blasting from his manic larynx and also marks the first of several ominous allusions to being harmed by water (“…And I feel them drown my name…”).

“Last Goodbye” was supposed to be the big first single. It even got an MTV video treatment (just look at his dour expression as he and the exhausted band take a precious day off from a European tour to do this exorbitantly expensive production of a compromised artistic concept in a despised medium), but with no real chorus to speak of, its chart success was modest at best. A Delta blues slide glides across an open-tuned electric 12-string guitar before dropping into a mid-tempo dance groove and a lyric full of bittersweet memories of a failed relationship with an older woman in L.A.

Not only was Jeff a bit shorthanded when it came to filling an entire 52-minute album with originals, but it also would have been a shame not to round out the running order with some well-chosen and interpreted covers in emulation of the intimate immediacy of Jeff’s Sin-é days. The first of these appearing on Grace is “Lilac Wine,” a torch-song standard written by James Shelton and adopted by Nina Simone. Jeff gives the distant-lover-as-intoxicant lyrics the hyper-emotive treatment, with perfectly sustained vibrato on the drawn-out notes and with his voice occasionally breaking into a heartrending sob, especially on the line, “…Isn’t that she, or am I just going crazy, dear?”

“Lilac Wine” is a significant indication of the barely fathomable depth of Jeff’s––and by extension, the band’s––versatility and their ability to do exactly right by the artist and repertoire (it’s difficult, in that sense, to listen to any of Tim’s records without taking umbrage with the musicians in the various band incarnations smothering Tim’s voice and stepping all over his 12-string guitar with their ego-fulfilling and poorly––if at all––thought-out parts).

“So Real” represents not only the successful search for a second guitarist, but also a tenacious battle fought and won against Columbia for the very soul of the album.

Michael Tighe, a mutual friend of Jeff and his ex Rebecca Moore (the one he had met and fallen in love with at the Tim tribute, and whom “Grace”s lyrics supposedly feature) joined the band on second guitar after most of the work on the album had been completed, and he brought an intriguing set of chord changes with him. When it came time to record B-sides and possible non-album singles (a cover of Big Star’s “Kangaroo”, which, to Sony’s consternation would often stretch out to 15 or 20 minutes in concert, was also laid down), Tighe’s progressions, which were inordinately sophisticated considering he hadn’t been playing guitar for very long, were dusted off, tracked with engineer Cliff Norrell, and Jeff did the lead vocal in one take after a last-minute walk to finish the lyric.

Distinguished by the verses’ seamless changes in meter (back and forth from duple to triple time), its by-now standard mélange of tragic-romantic imagery in the lyrics (“I love you / But I’m afraid to love you,” and the foreboding “And I couldn’t awake from the nightmare that sucked me in and pulled me under…”), another wildly climactic E5 at the end, and a massive chorus hook, the song fit Jeff’s MO––accessible innovation and wide-amplitude expression––perfectly.

So much so that it quickly shed its B-side status and usurped a coveted spot on the record from another, highly contested original: The excessively personal and harsh “Forget Her,” which in retrospect would have been the sole manifestation of irony on the album. Jeff was justifiably dissatisfied with this disingenuously caustic 12/8 blues-pop dirge waltz he had allegedly penned about the aforementioned, hapless Moore, upon whom the lyric displaced Jeff’s own culpability for the relationship’s dissolution. But the label was head over heels with it, as the song’s melodramatic, Michael Bolton-esque chorus made it the one and only potential crossover smash in their minds. Columbia exec Don Ienner, who was essentially Jeff’s boss, tried everything short of bribery to futilely sweet-talk Jeff into keeping it on the album, which, in itself, was a tangible reason for Jeff to dig in, though he also feared that the slightly smarmy song would be a one-way ticket to One-Hit-Wonder-ville. As it turned out, “So Real”s chorus was hookier anyway, enough to warrant its own video treatment, though its subsequent commercial impact was also negligible.

A plaintive sigh kicks off what is now widely regarded as the definitive recording of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” the second cover of the album, performed solo and glued together from multiple takes into a solemn paean to the ecstatic pain of long-term relationships. Inspired by John Cale’s 1991 reading, Jeff sticks to the ultra-romantic verses that find love and suffering linked in paradox, and the guitar tone and reverb augment the song’s church hymn vibe, almost as though it was recorded at a service or funeral. If you’ve heard this recording or noticed it in myriad movies and TV shows and haven’t cried at least once, you’re not human.

“Lover, You Should Have Come Over” is a classic swinging blues adagio, perhaps the best known and most covered original on the album. Water and death are linked once again (“Looking out the door, I see the rain fall upon the funeral mourners / Parading in a wake of sad relations as their shoes fill up with water…”), and then Jeff abruptly breaks that train of thought to do right by Moore in recognizing his role in their breakup (“…Maybe I’m too young / To keep good love from going wrong”). Again, his vocal starts low and builds to another E5 at the end. In the hands of another artist, all of this would have sounded forced and over the top, but somehow Jeff was able to make it work. That’s his genius/madness; he himself was fully dilated and committed in a way that wasn’t healthy or sustainable, but damn, did it make for visceral listening.

“Corpus Christi Carol” reaches even further back than 1950’s “Lilac Wine” and completely blows the listener away with its expectation-defying display of musical depth. He becomes a bona fide classical singer here, exhibiting total immersion in the anonymous 16th-century lyric that the aptly named English composer Benjamin Britten incorporated into 1933’s Choral Variations for Mixed Voices (“A Boy Was Born”), Op. 3, finally arriving at Jeff’s adolescent ears through the version for high voice recorded by Janet Baker in 1967. Jeff completely inhabits the allegory of a bedridden, Christ-like knight endlessly bleeding, witnessed by love and the purity of his cause, with the empathic delicacy that was already his trademark. The stark arrangement for electric guitar and scant overdubs is superbly matched by the lamenting vocal, which ends on a ghostly, falsetto’d E5 that is utterly cathartic in its climactic glory.

Jeff wanted to make an album that compelled rock fans to forget about Zeppelin II, and “Eternal Life” delivers on the heavier side of that promise. Written during his time in L.A., the creepy intro stops on a dime before a bludgeoning, yet highly danceable groove drops in and a reactive lyric confronts applicable listeners to wake up and smell the mortal coffee:

Eternal life is now on my trail Got my red-glitter coffin, man––just need one last nail While all these ugly gentlemen play out their foolish games There’s a flaming red horizon that screams our names…

Racist everyman, what have you done? Man, you made a killer of your unborn son Oh, crown my fear your king at the point of a gun All I want to do is love everyone…

There’s no time for hatred––only questions What is love, where is happiness What is alive, where is peace? When will I find the strength to bring me release?

With distorted bass as well as guitar alongside complementary strings and a killer groove featuring a highly effective, accelerating hi-hat pattern from Johnson on the verses, the song successfully proselytizes for universally incontestable causes, and reinforces Jeff’s projected mythology as a doomed soul whose seemingly relished fate awaits him sooner rather than later.

“Dream Brother” may be the last song on the album, but it was the very first idea Jeff and the band had worked up together. At the risk of overusing the word, and just like the album as a whole, it is haunting from start to finish, with a droney, string-cranking intro giving way to an eastern-inflected guitar motif. Jeff’s more static but no less sublime vocal melody goes beyond complementary; it builds tension by hanging on or around the fifth for most of the verse stanzas before resolving to the tonic on the last note of the phrase. Grondahl’s bass line, as with all his work on the album, is a sublime treat; here we find him working his way through the exotic Phrygian mode, recasting the guitar parts into a harmonically complex, emotionally compelling accompaniment that perfectly underpins the vocal.

The song features another penned-and-sung-at-the-last-possible-minute lyric, the chorus of which admonishes dear L.A. friend Chris Dowd (of Fishbone) not to abandon his new family like Tim had Jeff and Mary: “Don’t be like the one who made me so old / Don’t be like the one who left behind his name / ‘Cause they’re waiting for you like I waited for mine / And nobody ever came.” Grace’s only allusion to Jeff’s father builds in intensity to an instrumental bridge with wordless Qawwali wailings that are utterly bone chilling in their echoing-into-eternity saturation. The album’s final line puts an ominous capstone on the pyramid of the untimely-death-by-water preoccupation: “Asleep in the sand, with the ocean washing over…”

PART TWO

From ’94 to ’96, both solo and with the band, Jeff Buckley toured the world and elsewhere. Those two years were highly transformative; he met and/or was lauded by so many of his personal heroes (including Zeppelin’s Page and Plant, Paul and Linda McCartney, U2’s Bono and The Edge, David Bowie, and he had a brief affair with Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil, who had covered Tim’s “Song to the Siren” [for aural proof of the romance, go to YouTube and check out their unfinished, embarrassingly smitten PDA duet on “All Flowers in Time”]), picked up an all but unshakeable smoking habit as a late-blooming extension of delayed formative-year rebellion and as a temporary, self-harming relief from the stresses of touring and just-shy-of-A-list fame (he managed to make People magazine’s 50 most beautiful list in May of ’95, which mostly appalled him, and also had an eye-opening night out with Courtney Love), turned down numerous primetime opportunities—SNL, Letterman, and acting roles and commercial placements—in favor of “underground” platforms like MTV’s “120 Minutes,” and was constantly at odds with his record label.

Australia and France embraced him like a returning hero, with the latter country’s Académie Charles Cros presenting Jeff with the rarely-awarded-to-an-American Grand Prix International Du Disque in honor of Grace on April 13, 1995 (two live shows, the second representing a career peak, were recorded during a French leg of the tour and later released as 1995’s Live at the Bataclan EP and 2001’s Live à l’Olympia).

The tank ran dry on March 1, 1996, which marked not only the final date of a hastily booked Australian/New Zealand tour to capitalize on Jeff’s surging popularity there and subsequently the last in official support of Grace, but also the final show with percussionist Matt Johnson, who had reached his hard limit with the band leader’s exacerbated lifestyle excesses and reckless behavior, not to mention Jeff’s escalating hazing of him.

Drummerless and exhausted, a different Jeff Buckley returned to a different New York. Though it suited his dysfunctionally nomadic, reactively noncommittal spirit, touring is not conducive to one’s mental or physical well-being nor is any level of fame, which is unfortunately what moves the units at the cost of anonymous normalcy. As a result, Jeff could no longer frequent any of his old haunts without being recognized and approached by strangers who thought they knew and deserved a piece of him beyond his timeless music. But then even his friends couldn’t help but feel jilted in their wanting a less ephemeral friendship with him, as he made them feel like the undeniably corroborated center of the universe when he was around, having given of himself interpersonally as completely and unadvisedly as he did in his music.

With inchoate fame now cutting him off from his usual decompression options, Jeff couldn’t recharge his psychic batteries. That coupled with the fact that Columbia and the press had been persistently hounding him regarding a follow-up to Grace piled even more pressure on the stress heap, further hampering his creative process and making The Big Apple taste more of the cyanide within the seeds than the once novel fruit of clandestine self-discovery.

There’s an industry saying: a recording artist has their entire life to make the first album and six months to make the second. Already no stranger to writer’s block under normal circumstances (he was inherently a better interpreter than a composer and understandably loath to commit to locked-in versions of anything), Jeff found himself hitting the creative wall in the midst of his increasingly stifling paradigm. The new songs were coming, albeit more slowly than everyone preferred, and in a different, more current vein than Grace. Having kept an ever-vigilant ear to the cultural ground, Jeff had met the Grifters and the Dambuilders while on tour, gaining a new love interest—Joan Wasser, to whom he related early on that he was going to die young—from the latter band and befriended Nathan Larson of Shudder to Think, and their contemporary alternative rock vibes ignited a light bulb over Jeff’s head, giving him the inspiration to pursue a rawer sound, much as Cobain had for Nevermind’s 1993 follow-up—In Utero.

It wasn’t necessarily Sony’s cup of tea. Though the label was by no means dead-set on putting out Son of Grace, they were a bit befuddled by the significant shift in musical mores away from the classic heritage artist sound toward the aural marriage of the Smiths and Soundgarden evident in the newer material. His sagacious selection of classic solo repertoire, and Grace by extension, had gotten Jeff’s foot in the door, as their sophisticated old-school values were arguably a premeditated affectation on Jeff’s part to woo the industry’s boho Boomer gatekeepers into signing and unconditionally supporting him. Now that he was more or less ensconced on the inside, and having gained more than a little leverage from all the hard work of the past year and a half, Jeff wanted to change things up to reflect more of what he’d been listening to and writing as an artist of his own generation. Though jumping high through Jeff’s hoops was by now second nature, Columbia was nevertheless befuddled.

This vexation next manifested as bewilderment over the choice of legendary Television alum Tom Verlaine (RIP) to aid and abet his alt-rock vision as the inexperienced coproducer for the second album. No one at Sony thought Verlaine was the right man for the job; they would just as soon have gone with Andy Wallace again rather than someone who, as with Grondahl, Johnson, and Tighe, didn’t have a track record to speak of. Whether or not Jeff’s choice was ill informed was irrelevant; it became his new crusade against the label, a pyrrhic war waged solely on the principle of getting his way even if it ended up biting him in the ass.

Columbia green-lit some bet-hedging recording with Verlaine to humor Jeff, but also to surreptitiously gather leverage as a failed, debt-enlarging investment, as the odds were slim that he could pull another rabbit out of his hat within the limited, impossible-for-Jeff parameters. Two brief as they were dissatisfying sessions occurred at various New York studios in 1996 and then a third at Memphis’s Easley McCain studios with Johnson’s permanent replacement, Parker Kindred, in early 1997. Jeff had become interested in recording at Easley through Grifters guitarist and Memphis resident Dave Shouse, and in relocating to that hallowed town for its legendary status in the history of blues and rock ‘n roll, and yet also as an escape from the lost anonymity, label pressure, and detrimental distractions of New York.

Jeff began striving for—and was at least able to temporarily reclaim—some semblance of a normal life in Memphis; he settled in at 91 Rembert Street, where he could often be found lying in the overgrown grass of his front yard, staked out all the good local restaurants, got a Sin-é-reminiscent Monday night residency at a downtown venue called Barrister’s, proposed marriage to Joan Wasser, and spent time with local friends who didn’t treat him like a rock star. At the time of his death, and as this evidence indicates, Jeff was trying to settle down, but he also felt ready to finally nail the landing on the second album, which he earnestly hoped would not only eclipse Grace but would frighten people as well. He was also noticeably uneasy.

The iteration of what was going to be called My Sweetheart the Drunk that came out almost too soon in May of 1998, not the barely attainable one Jeff would have overworked himself to complete had he lived, is the version the label should have agreed to put out had he been willing and able to play the long game. Though disc 2, with the exception of “Haven’t You Heard” and the cover of “Satisfied Mind,” is mainly for diehards (it contains sloppily recorded and produced home recordings that only hint at greatness, as well as superfluous original mixes of select disc 1 material), the ten Verlaine tracks are nothing to scoff at. In fact, the minimally but still excellently arranged and produced songs not only sound surprisingly finished, but would have also found Jeff paving the way for the future of alternative rock/pop in a manner that was more in touch with the times but still rang true to Jeff’s old-school tragic-romantic sophistication. Hindsight finds these recordings nothing to be ashamed of, the natural, expectation-managing and yet still promise-fulfilling continuation of Jeff’s artistic journey, though he didn’t—and wouldn’t—agree with that assessment (the tracks probably could have used just a little more tightening up… At the very least, and as it stands, disc 1 of My Sweetheart the Drunk could have been a highly respectable and acceptable “sophomore flop”). Jeff would have had to ease up on the malignant perfectionism had he lived, and in that light it both does and doesn’t seem strange that he continued massaging these recordings—with additional overdubs and polishing occurring at Easley after the band’s return to New York—despite his clearly declared intention to abandon what he had already recorded, concede defeat regarding Verlaine (who urged Jeff to erase the tapes), and start from scratch with Andy Wallace.

Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk has plenty of wide-amplitude thrills (“Vancouver,” which started life as an instrumental break on the Grace tour, now featured a soaring vocal that found him suddenly clued in to the detriments of giving too much of himself: “I need to be alone / To heal this bleeding stone…”), lots of tragic-romantic flair (the beautiful, minimally orchestrated ballads “Morning Theft” and “Opened Once,” the swinging caveat “Witches Rave,” and the macabre, “Come as You Are”-ish “Nightmares by the Sea” are by turns self-castigating and wary), more struggle over suitable repertoire (Jeff harbored hypocritical paranoia that the set-apart, slinky R&B slow-jam, “Everybody Here Wants You” would be chosen as a single against his wishes [it was], even though the song is an instant classic, and the album could have done without the cover of the Nymphs’ “Yard of Blonde Girls,” though he didn’t trust Columbia to agree), two Qawwali nods (the mantra jam “New Year’s Prayer”, and the utterly harrowing “You And I”), and plenty of fodder for precognition-of-untimely-death speculators (“Stay with me under these waves tonight / Be free for once in your life tonight…” from “Nightmares By The Sea”, and “Ah, the calm below that poisoned river wild…” from the goosebump-evincing “You And I”).

**************

Recording contracts have always been a Faustian bargain for the artist, especially at the onset, when it is weighted heavily in the card-holding label’s favor. Art and commerce often meet in the cultural-industrial ring as irreconcilable spouses who stay together for the kids, with the artist wanting to make a unique, challenging, and hopefully timeless statement for theirs and successive generations, and the label needing to make a profit, not lose their shirt, or just break even. The latter often requires innocuous music that has been dumbed down or otherwise compromised for mass consumption, usually the antithesis of the former. The artist, though, according to the standard contract they signed, is legally beholden to the label, which owns the master recordings and the right to exploit them until such a time, often years or even decades down the road, when the artist has gained enough cachet through account-balancing sales and accumulated cultural pertinence to renegotiate the contract into a more equitable form that befits their too-hard-earned stature. As with life in general, and back when labels were still labels, one had to play a patient, penitent, somewhat circumspect long game, with eyes intent on the future prize in order to succeed as a recording and touring artist, and to eventually win out over the label.

Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, now in or on the cusp of their 80s respectively, managed to successfully undergo and even control their fame-reconciling heritage artist transformations and break through to the other side. Jeff Buckley, who realized too late and too far out to sea that he had given up essential access to a normal life, and whose DNA and hardship-forged personality was geared for fleeting, heightened moments of impulsive escape and unrealistic levels of emotional outpouring during which there was no tomorrow, did not. After an itinerant childhood in a chaotic, single-parent household, neither of which allowed him any bonded, bolstering long-term friendships or gave him the necessary emotional support to instill enough confidence to enable him to pace, self-nurture, and recharge as an adult, Jeff was predestined for burnout. Add to this the looming legacy of his father’s similarly self-inflicted and untimely doom, the demoralizing fiscal and creative debt to—and incongruent association with—a major label, and pervasive generational nihilism, and you have the recipe for a death by misadventure.

The world generally eats pure-heart-on-sleeve empaths like Jeff Buckley for breakfast, and just like house-always-wins Vegas casinos, record labels are particularly good at exploiting, devouring, and then remorselessly shitting out their charges no matter how vigilant the artist may have been to the contrary. In Jeff and Columbia’s case, it’s difficult to pick a winner; dying got him out of both having to deliver on a second album and pay off his way-in-the-red recoupable, but his absence-generated popularity and Sony’s dogged determination to monetize ample vault caches in the aftermath may have balanced the ledger by now anyway. Either way you slice it, and for what it’s worth, the artist is gone, and Columbia is a tawdry shadow of its former self, but Jeff’s timeless music remains.

Trying to imagine how Jeff would have navigated the post-5/29/97 waters is not challenging, considering the comprehensive changes already in motion that would herald not only the end of his generation’s all-too-brief moment in the sun, but also the beginning of the end of the record industry as he had known it. Jeff probably would have seen Sony’s support slowly dwindle, becoming even more isolated until his contract came up for renewal and he was then most likely dropped from the label, as its various employee archetypes, which were industry-wide revolving doors, would have inevitably jumped ship for higher positions elsewhere. This exodus would have severed nurtured—and nurturing—connections, leaving Jeff in the hands of green, bottom-line-focused reps that had had nothing to do with scouting or signing him and were subsequently less inclined to offer the kind of largesse and preferential treatment to which he had been accustomed.

A new generation was also coming of age, one that sought shallower, more effervescent thrills to match their innate, well-nurtured ebullience. Soundgarden, Jeff’s now fellow-in-untimely-death friend Chris Cornell’s band, which was the first of the Seattle grunge era to sign to a major label, broke up almost on cue that year. Groups like Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, Hanson, and solo artists like Brittney Spears, Ricky Martin, and Christina Aguilera were prepared to replace grunge’s locked-up engine in the zeitgeist car, with already emergent, transitionally mellower sounds from the likes of Dave Matthews Band, Blues Traveler, Phish, Spin Doctors, and Hootie and the Blowfish having paved the way. Autotune was introduced that year, with computer-based digital recording having begun its ascendant journey to becoming the analog-supplanting, music-devaluing standard.

Within a decade, for better and worse, the industry as Jeff knew it would no longer exist, nor would the focus on organically profound music on which he had been brought up and of which he had become a part. With no plan B (he endearingly applied for what would have been a meagerly if at all remunerated position at the Memphis zoo’s butterfly exhibit), Jeff would have been hard-pressed to maintain a subsistent income—let alone pay down his debt to Columbia—inside or outside the new, less tolerant manifestation of the industry, which would have scoffed derisively and dismissively at his to-date album sales. And he probably would have recoiled from the rising popularity of bubblegum pop and nü-metal buffoonery in disgust.

Kurt Cobain once said he wished he had paced himself better, played more of a long game by holding back some of Nevermind’s material for subsequent albums, and a general feeling persists that Jeff had similarly neglected any thought of the future by putting everything he had into Grace, and there wasn’t enough left to create something new to match its grandeur, at least not within his unsustainable paradigm. It seems as though he was done, that his music’s true moment in the sun could only begin after he had disappeared somehow. Amassing cachet would have to rely on his premature-demise-as-career-move absence, the removal of his chronic perfectionism that allowed Sony to put out whatever was in the vaults without his opposition (albeit in full, duly diligent cooperation with next-of-kin trustee, supposed legacy preserver / promoter, and posthumous stage mother Mary), and amassing fin de siècle malaise that would find solace in Grace. But Jeff’s death feels wrong as well, redolent of the same sense of tragedy as JFK’s assassination, as if we had truly lost one of the good ones, and the subsequent sensation of all hope for a fair and just future having been annihilated in a flash, regardless of whether or not either of them actually deserved that idolization.

The grief-sourced application of culpability gets complicated when someone who has deeply affected strangers and loved ones alike is directly responsible for their own death, but it can’t exactly be called a suicide. And though we have plenty of lyrical and anecdotal evidence that could easily be construed as self-fulfilling prophecy (like Cobain, Jeff had consistently and insistently telegraphed his denouement), it is otherwise difficult to substantiate rumors that Jeff had been dreaming of his demise just weeks—if not longer—beforehand. But as with the cinematic portrayal of Mozart obsessively composing what would become his own requiem in Amadeus, if someone persistently gives thought and voice to fatal intent, walks that fine line long enough, the border between this world and the next will begin to blur and smudge until it finally wears thin enough for one to cross over without even noticing. Freud may have said it best: “Until you make the subconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”

Unlike influencee Rufus Wainwright, whose songs are also emotive but restrained in comparison, Jeff never developed the necessary filters to mitigate the harmful aspects of his heightened sensitivity and permeability, preferring instead to empty his emotional ballast onstage night after night to the adulation of interchangeable, undemanding strangers (though some of them often clamored annoyingly for renditions of Tim’s songs), as if each show were his last (which he had hypocritically accused Tim of in a 1993 interview). In all of Jeff’s 30 years, he had never learned the kind of self-love that would awaken and bolster the basic long-term survival instincts to enable him to throw off the chains of his deeply ingrained fatalism. With his pallid, fey appearance, alluring gender-balanced charisma, heart-rending empathy, unregulated outflow of emotional energy, and foolhardily unshielded vulnerability, he seemed to many as though he was marked for an early end no matter what evasive action he might’ve taken.

Though Jeff had been exhibiting unstable, borderline bipolar behavior in the weeks prior to his drowning, he didn’t consciously intend to die that night (a nearby witness apparently heard a single cry for help), but his willful ignorance of the dangers of his impulsive and fatalistic nature and the whimsical flouting of the perils of his immediate surroundings would be the co-conspirators of his mortal undoing.

Fully clothed at twilight, Jeff waded backward into a notoriously dangerous river despite a lifetime aversion to water—and in denial of all the overt signals his subconscious and conscious had sent him. Doing the recently learned backstroke to the braggadocio boom-box strains of Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” in a roiling river all but universally avoided for its severe, passing-boat-generated undercurrents was supposed to be a spontaneous trip to and from the edge to take his mind off of life’s untenable pressures for a short while. But instead, and to his torch-carrying fans’, friends’, and family’s ongoing bereavement, it lasted forever.

**************

England’s annual Meltdown Festival consists of a series of concerts given over several days by contemporary artists and is curated by a celebrity participant with an ear toward the high-minded performance of unconventional repertoire. Jeff was invited by 1995’s chosen Master of Ceremonies—Elvis Costello—to take part on July 1, which serendipitously coincided with that year’s European tour in support of Grace, though it was inconveniently sandwiched between concert dates across the channel.

Along with collaborations in mixed ensembles comprised of co-billed artists, Jeff did a four-song solo set that featured the apropos “Corpus Christi Carol” (the song that had originally piqued Costello’s interest), Nina Simone’s “The Other Woman,” and “Grace.”

He began with an absolutely devastating rendition of “Dido’s Lament,” which Costello had personally requested from the setting of Dido and Aeneas by 16th century British composer Henry Purcell. Jeff was indistinguishable from a fully trained, operatic countertenor as he delivered the moribund lines with innate familiarity:

Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me On thy bosom let me rest More I would, but Death invades me Death is now a welcome guest

When I am laid in earth May my wrongs create No trouble in thy breast Remember me, but oh, forget my fate

Costello came out after the last of the four songs and accompanying ovation had died down and following some gracious comments recognizing the young artist’s overflowing docket, he essentially summed up Jeff’s contribution—and the debt of gratitude music owes him—with his closing salutation that now stands as a fitting epitaph:

“He gave everything. Thanks, Jeff.”

[petrichoravellichor]

I’ve had a couple of people request this, so here ya go: my masterlist for the SPN Deserved Better 31 Days Creative Challenge hosted by the wonderful @foundfamily4eva ​, in which I basically tried to fix canon for as many of the characters as I could, not just Team Free Will 2.0 + Eileen (although those five all definitely got the endings they deserved, too!). 

Romance-wise, the following ships got at least one work featuring that ship as the sole/primary one: Destiel, Saileen, Midam, Dreamhunter, Dodio, AU Charlie/Stevie, Amara/Rowena. 

Individual character/platonic pair-wise, here are the characters who got at least one work featuring them as the primary character(s): Alex Jones, Bela Talbot, Becky Rosen, Benny Lafitte & Emma Winchester, Bobby Singer & Rufus Turner, Cas & Claire Novak, Cas & Jack Kline, Jack Kline & Amara, Jack & Kelly Kline, Donatello Redfield, Gabriel & Meg, Gadreel, Kaia Nieves, Kevin & Linda Tran, Miracle the Dog. 

(Crowley is also getting his happy ending, but what was supposed to be a short fic is currently at about 10k, so I’ve split that off into a separate project that will be up within a few weeks.) 

Lastly, some honorable mentions/characters that got their happy endings in minor roles in other fics: Alicia & Max Banes, Aaron Bass, AU Bobby Singer, Ellen & Jo Harvelle & Ash, Jenny the Vampire (well...not happy for her: I managed to kill her off twice in two separate fics and in ways that were infinitely more satisfying than in canon and was very happy about it 😄).

All fics are canonverse fix-its and are listed below the cut, grouped roughly by primary ship/featured character(s) and with summaries, approximate word counts, and links to Ao3 when cross-posting occurred. 

I hope these bring as much closure to those who read them as they did to me while I wrote them, and if they make you feel any sort of way, I’d love to hear about it via likes/comments/reblogs/asks! 💙

Begin and End There [T, ~5.5k words, Cas & Jack, Destiel]

After the Empty takes him, Castiel wakes up in the last place he expected, with a second chance at happiness when he reunites with Dean and the latter finally gets to speak his truth. (read on Ao3 or tumblr [part 1] [part 2])

Let’s Misbehave [G, ~600 words, Destiel]

They finally listen to the mixtape and dance. That’s it, that’s the fic. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

Cas, Not Castiel [G, ~225 words, Destiel]

Another angel, Hester, had once bitterly remarked that Castiel was lost the moment he laid a hand on Dean in Hell. Years later, after all was said and done, Cas found that he agreed. (read on tumblr)

The Dead Man Lives, Carry On [T, ~1.3k words, Dean Winchester & Dean Winchester, background implied Destiel]

It’s one thing to tell yourself you’re bi. It’s a whole other thing to involve time travel. Then again, when has Dean Winchester ever done things the easy way? OR, the one in which a certain side character from season 1 gets dead a whole heck of a lot sooner. You’re welcome. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

From Heaven With Love [G, ~500 words, Cas & Claire]

During the first Christmas following Chuck's defeat, Castiel surprises Claire with a letter from her parents.  (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

Home Is Where the Love Is [G, ~350 words, background Destiel, background Saileen]

Miracle POV, in which Miracle reflects on his new home/family. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

Namesake [G, ~600 words, Destiel, background Saileen]

When Sam and Eileen first tell Dean they want to name their unborn son after him, Dean's reaction is one of shock. He plays it off with a joke, though. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

Clear As Day [T, ~700 words, Saileen]

Newly returned to existence thanks to Jack, Eileen reunites with Sam; OR, the Saileen reunion we were denied in 15x20. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

It Takes a Village [G, ~300 words, Saileen]

Expecting their first child, Sam and Eileen talk about becoming parents. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

Of Love and Loss (and Love) [T, ~350 words, Sam/every canon relationship he’s had w/ endgame Saileen]

For a long time, Sam thought he was done with love. (read on tumblr)

Mother of God [G, ~225 words, Jack & Kelly Kline]

After reuniting his angel dad with his two human dads and rebuilding Heaven, the first thing Jack did was visit his mom. (read on tumblr)

The Happiest Place on Earth [G, ~150 words, Jack & Amara]

In which Amara finally gets to bond with her great-nephew...at Disneyland! :D (read on tumblr)

Good Tidings We Bring [G, ~450 words, Donatello, Jack & Amara]

In which Amara returns Donatello's soul...for Christmas! :D (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

Et Nos Cedamus Amori [M, ~550 words, Amara/Rowena]

Rowena wore the crown like she was born to it, and Amara had to admit, it looked good on her. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

What We Deserve [T, ~2.6k words, Midam]

After helping the Winchesters defeat Chuck, Michael avoids Adam until one day, Adam seeks him out; OR, the soft epilogue these two deserved, damn it. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

With Every Fiber of My Being [T, ~900 words, Midam]

After defeating Chuck, Michael and Adam choose each other. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

Tender Loving Care [G, ~250 words, Dreamhunter]

Kaia's flu is nothing serious, but that doesn't stop Claire from doting on her.  (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

An Angel and a Demon Walk Into a Bar [T, ~2.1k, Gabriel & Meg]

After escaping from the Empty, Gabriel wanders into a bar, where it turns out he’s not the only one back from the dead. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

Rebar Not Included [T, ~1.5k words, Dodio, background Destiel]

Jody and Donna help out the Winchesters by looking into an Ohio case involving masked vampires, and what do you know: not only do they manage to kill a certain side character from season 1 but they ALSO make it through without dying! Oh, and they kiss, just because they can. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

Heal [T, ~1.1k words, Charlie/Stevie]

Charlie’s being distant, and Stevie doesn’t understand why. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

Homecoming [T, ~500 words, Kevin & Linda Tran]

In which Kevin Tran gets the happy ending he deserved. (read on tumblr)

When Life Imitates Art [G, ~500 words, Becky Rosen]

Becky starts a new job as a staff writer for HBO's upcoming adaptation of the Supernatural book series. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

Family Don’t End in Blood [T, ~300 words, Alex & Wayward Sisters]

A decade ago, if someone had asked Alex what family meant, she would have said blood and believed it. (read on tumblr)

Home [T, ~300 words, Kaia & Wayward Sisters]

In which Kaia finally has a home. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

The Golden Years [G, ~600 words, Bobby & Rufus, implied Bobby/Ellen]

In which, now that Bobby’s finally enjoying retirement in the new Heaven, he’d really like to just forget about that one time he kissed Crowley. Unfortunately for him, Rufus has other plans. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

Be at Peace [G, ~600 words, Gadreel, background Gadreel/OFC]

In which Gadreel escapes the Empty and gets a soft epilogue. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

Well Met [G, ~200 words, Benny & Emma]

In hindsight, faking his own death is the best thing Benny’s ever done. (read on tumblr)

The Right Hand [T, ~175 words, Bela Talbot]

Some closure for Bela Talbot, anyone? (read on tumblr)

Screw Sad Finales: Here’s to Victory Parties! [G, ~350 words, Gen with a few non-TFW background ships hinted]

After defeating Chuck, Sam and Dean throw a party! With appearances by Cas, Eileen, Jack, the Wayward Sisters, Adam and Michael, Charlie and Stevie, Kevin and Linda Tran, Rowena, Amara, Garth and his family, Bobby, Max and Alicia Banes, and Aaron Bass. (read on Ao3 or tumblr)

[steelandsalt]

PSD SOURCE

⸻  the heralds are announcing the arrival of ELENEI BARATHEON, known as the LADY of STORM’S END. you may have heard some tales of this TWENTY SIX year old, but the more well - informed tongues speak of them being COURAGEOUS & CAPABLE though sadly, they also passed on rumours of them being TEMPERMENTAL & SHORT SIGHTED. according to their mun, the bards are requested to play DON’T KILL MY VIBE by SIGRID when they enter the room. may the gods protect them in the years to come.

Quick Stats

Name: Elenei Baratheon Place of birth: Storm’s End Residence: Storm’s End Marital Status: Widowed Siblings: 3 brothers, 1 sister  Children: 1 son, Giovan, aged 4 Religion: Faith of the Seven

489 - 507 birth - aged 18

tw - premature birth

Elenei was born on the night of the worst storm of the year, two moons earlier than expected. As she came into the world, the wind howled, and the sea crashed into the rock that Storm’s End perched on. The severity of the storm recalled tales of the origin of the keep, of the sea and wind deities hammering The Stormlands for the return of their wayward daughter, whose blood flowed through Baratheon veins, and so she was named for Elenei, the mythical first storm queen. 

Few expected her to survive. She was premature and far smaller than a normal babe, but her cry was strong. It was early in life that she began defying expectations, and that would continue throughout her life. She was a noisy baby; even when she was content, she yelled and gurgled and made herself known. They should have realised that was an omen of things to come, for Elenei Baratheon had a will as unyielding as valyrian steel, and would never learn to be silent. 

Shrieking babe became wild toddler, wild toddler became feral child. The fourth of five eventual children, and a younger daughter, she was fortunate that her elder siblings born the burden of responsibility when it came to the furtherment of their house. There were expectations on her, to be sure, but for the most part, she was afforded a sense of leniency - and for every inch of freedom they granted her, Elenei took a mile. To anybody who worked in Storm’s End, Elenei was the bane of their existence. She terrorised the servants, the gardeners, the cooks, the squires. Nobody was safe from her unique brand of mischief, and though some were as fond of her as her father was, others would curse her name to delighted laughs from the noble brat.

The worst of her behaviour was reserved for the Septas who came to educate her. it was to their frustration that they realised that Elenei was not an incompetent student - she had a head for figures and a remarkable memory for history, having memorised a great number of houses, sigils and words before her seventh name day, though she didn’t have the patience for needlepoint, and her musical talents left a lot to be desired. However, it became very clear that her lessons bored her, and even attempts to introduce her to more advanced concepts were met with utter disinterest. 

Where she her attention lay was in all things physical. She was always short for her age, growing to stand at five foot two in her adulthood, but she was lithe and nimble, and she moved with a fluid grace that one would not expect from a girl with so much chaos in her soul. She could dance better than anyone, and rode a horse like she was half-centaur. She can hunt, she can climb, and she is fast, and of that she is most proud. Whether because of her strong will, or because her father found it necessary for his children to learn to defend themselves, she was allowed to hone her skill with a blade. She has trained hard at weaponry, can throw a knife with great accuracy at 100 paces and has grown used to the weight of a sword in her hand. She fights with two now, light, but sharp blades clutched in either hand. Though she has never tasted battle, she is good, more than capable of holding her own. She knows that, though strong for her size, she cannot win a fight on strength and force alone, and so relies on her agility and speed to win, a tactic that serves her well. 

507 - 510 aged 18 - 21

tw - slut shaming

It was perhaps her boisterous nature that led her to seek out the company of the various boys who visited Strom’s End, be they knights or the sons of visiting lords who made regular appearances. She had become incredibly hedonistic, stoked by the wildness in her nature. She’d grown to be a drinker, and a gambler, and intensely passionate in her relationships with others. Her choice of company led to her developing a certain reputation unbefitting of a girl of her stature in the world. It became imperative to marry her off, lest her chances be ruined - either by hearsay and gossip, or because the prospect of an indiscrete birth of a bastard was a real concern. 

What didn’t help was that she had grown to ask questions. Despite her upbringing, Elenei had become a rather informal woman, somebody who thought little of taking time to speak with everyone, whether they be an esteemed member of a great house or a member of the small folk. It was only then that her shrewd mind began to think critically about the way her family ruled. Under the veneer of her vivacity lay a compassionate soul, and so she returned to the Ruling Lord, confronting him with the hard truth of how his people felt. A few weeks after that, on her twenty-first name day, her betrothal was announced - she was to marry into a powerful magister family in Lys, the furthest place she could possible be sent. 

510 - 513

aged 21 to 24

tw - death, parent and child separation

Vehemently opposed to her marriage at first, Elenei was surprised to find a friend of her husband. A progressive man, he was more than willing to give her an insight into politics, and allow her to help him in his duties. Far away from the problems growing in the Stormlands, Elenei grew happy in her role, and within a year of her marriage, had given birth to a son, Giovan. Whilst she and her husband were not in love, they were content together, but their relative peace did not last long. Less than two years after the wedding, a short, unexpected illness saw her husband dead, and Elenei a widow. 

She intended to stay in Lys, to be close to her son and help to raise him, but unfortunately, her plans were not to come to be. Her husband’s family were wary of how much influence she may come to wield over the boy, wanting to mould him in their own image as a future representative of their will. And so, kicking and screaming, she was returned to The Stormlands, to her ancestral home, where she could be remarried once more. 

513 - 515 (present day)

aged 24 to 26

For the first few weeks she was returned home, Elenei was even wilder than anybody remembered, determined to return to Lys, or have her son brought to her. whispers of madness began to circulate, however, before they could fully take root and spread, a startling realisation rocked her to her core, jolting her back to her senses. Things in The Stormlands were even worse than when she left - and despite her deep longing to be reunited with her child, there were matters at home that needed her attention more. 

Despite her concerns earlier in life, Elenei had always been proud of her family and lineage, and despite her own critique of their methods, unwaveringly loyal. With the rebellion, that loyalty could continue no longer. Even though it failed, she found that she could not bring herself to side with her brother, not with so many suffering. Whilst yet to voice her opinions out loud to her family, she’s quietly made enquiries behind the scenes. With the recent assassination attempt, she’s been further split between her beliefs and her family - but if she’s involved, surely she can help prevent further attempts on his life, whilst wielding whatever influence she could behind the scenes. 

Misc

The fire in her can be a beautiful thing, warm and bright and leaving her humming with an energy that comes from deep within her, a passion and a zest for life that can’t be touched. She makes a warm and loving friend, but behind that is a danger. She can scorch hot enough to burn, and is prone to jealousy and quick to anger. The temper of Elenei Baratheon is legendary, and once you have fallen out of your favour, she will hold a grudge that she may never relinquish, her stubborn nature leaving her unforgiving, even long after she has forgotten why she was ever angry. 

Many who knew her before Lys recall a wild, passionate and carefree girl, but the tragedy of losing her son, and the stress of the prospect of losing the rest of her family weighs on her heavily. Those who know her best will note how her smile does not reach her eyes any longer, how the lines of a permanent frown seem etched between her brows, and how melancholy seems to hang over her when it seems that nobody is looking. 

The only place that provides calm to her soul any longer is the ocean. Something about the water soothes her, and the spray on her face and the water lapping at her ankles grounds her when things get overwhelming. In times of trouble, she can most often be found roaming along the shore, utterly alone. 

Wanted connections

Former Lovers - From the ages of 18 to 21, Elenei was more indiscrete than she should have been, and had taken more than one man to bed. I would imagine they would be on friendly terms still, but this is totally up for negotiation [0/3]

Close confidant - the one person who truly knows everything that is plaguing her, that she shares everything with without fear of repercussion [0/1]

Rival - For whatever reason, they’ve never gotten along, and this person knows the brunt of Elenei’s temper better than anybody [0/1]

Potential Betrothed - whether by her family’s devising, or her own political moves, they are in the early stages of negotiating a betrothal contract. I would imagine there’s no real emotion here, but whether there’s an attraction or anything develops for good or bad in the future can be plotted [0/1]