#bedmate era

[stitched-mouth-vs-the-world]

Edge You To Death

Pairing: Undertaker x AFAB! Reader or Undertaker x Fem! Reader.

Summary: Undertaker loves ruining your orgasms.

Warnings: NSFW, Smut, Casual sex, Undertaker and Reader have a weird ‘situationship’, Age gap relationship, Mention of pedophila (not in reference to Undertaker! UT is not a pedo!), Reader is unaware Undertaker is a reaper or of what he does for Ciel, Reader has MY personal thoughts on pedophila (I don’t think they are controversial but just in case you don’t wanna here it skip the introduction), Oral sex (fem receiving), Edging, Daddy kink.

Writing Time: 1 hour.

Word Count: 1,317.

Format: Kinktober Fic, Day 20.

A/N:

I kinda forgot wtf I was doing here.

Most of my Kinktober works were written well in advance, but this wasn’t one of them. I wrote this 2 days before it was due. My requests are pilling up but I should start prioritising these now. I doubt I’ve gotten that Matthew Patel request done yet, I planned to do that when I got the requester’s first message about it, sent the same day I got the request, but not anymore. Sounds a lot like a request got ages ago on my previous account but deleted when I started feeling harassed by the requester. This is more for the Matthew Patel requester than anyone else but yeah… don’t harass people about requests especially if it hasn’t been that long since you sent it. Everyone, harass me over a request and I’ll just delete it. You can send one reminder after a week and that’s it. Anymore and I delete. I usually have requests done in a week or two and those kinds of messages just destroy my motivation.

Anyway! Please enjoy this Undertaker smut.

Here are my other Kinktober 2023 works.

—-///—-

You had been feeling dam good since you started sleeping with the Undertaker.

You had new relationship jitters, even if it wasn’t really a relationship. He was what you had fantasied about for years. An older gentleman who was kind and treated you like a Queen, but also open about wanting to ravishing you. With his age also came along a lot of life and sexual experience, a lot more than you had. He never mocked you for knowing less than him, he was just happy you wanted to know and happily taught you a lot.

Whilst age gap relationships have always been common and considered normal prior to the Victorian era, it was slowly becoming distasteful. Something many were unhappy with but also many other who were happy. Undertaker, years ago, would have been in favour this but with you now… he was in the middle and uncomfortable with it. Surely you and his relationship was ok because you was definitely an adult.

You were pretty set in stone on the matter. To you, age gap relationships were bad, unless it was you. You were a young woman who would never say no to an older man, even when you was a girl. You knew your exes were absolutely pedos, but you didn’t care as long as it was just you they were after. And no you didn’t consider yourself a victim.

You didn’t think of Undertaker in the same way though. You was an adult when you met him therefore wasn’t bad for perusing you. Well, you perused him but it didn’t matter.

Right know you was doing some dusting in the front of Undertaker’s shop, he was in the back. The first thing you took notice of when you first met your lover… was how nasty his shop is. It’s always covered in dirt and stinked of death. Obviously it would smell of death, it’s a funeral home, but the dirt was unnecessary and you was surprised that Undertaker had tried to do something about the smell. You figured he’s probably gotten used to it now and gone nose blind.

Once you had cleaned to a satisfying amount, you heard the bell go. You looked up and saw the familiar Earl Phantomhive and his butler. The young boy always looked so dam miserable, it depressed you. You didn’t like interacting with either of them and they never seemed to want your help, so you called your bedmate.

Undertaker came into the room, happy to deal with the Phantomhive and his butler. You was aware the two engaged in a different kind of business than coffins or funeral services, but it was none of your business what their business was. So you wasn’t going to ask…

Instead you headed out of the room and upstairs to bed, it was late and you knew Undertaker would join you after he was done with his ‘business’.

—-///—-

“Sort out the Earl?” You asked.

“Yes, Dear.” Undertaker smiled as he climbed into his bed, next you.

You sat up immediately and glared at him, “How many times have I told you Undie?! No sleeping in your day clothes!”

He laughed as you pushed him out of his own bed. Yeah, Undertaker had a bad habit of sleeping in his day clothes. He didn’t own PJs until you came into his life, nearly a year ago now.

“Ok! Ok!” Undertaker walked over to his drawers to fish out his sleepwear.

Once he did, he placed them on the end of the bed and looked down at you. You gave him a small smile, suddenly remembering this was his home and his bed and who are you say anything about how he sleeps? After all, you’re not even dating.

Undertaker grinned widely at you and slowly started removing his cloak. Ah, he was trying to indicate something.

He slowly stripped completely in front of you before getting back on the bed and crawling onto you. You kissed his lip gently and took hold of his arms, but Undertaker shook your hold off his arms and grabbed your face to pull you even closer to him, deeping your kiss. He quickly slipped his tongue into your mouth, desperate for a makeout session.

You moaned in between the kisses, you were started to feel a growing sensation in between your legs. If not dealt with quickly, it would become uncomfortable. Luckily for you, Undertaker could sense your arousal and was more than willing to help.

He let go of your lips and before you could even whine or complain, he was pulling the duvet and sleep shorts down and licking your lower regions. You made your hands comfortable, pulling on the pillow under your head and proped up your legs and planted your feet into the bed.

Undertaker ate you out like a mad mad. Sucking, licking, spitting and groaning like crazy. Your pussy and it’s sweet smell made him act unusual, way less calm and in control than usual. This was something you was proud of. You had the power (or pussy) to make Undertaker lose all composure.

You started to feel less prideful about your achievement as you started to feel yourself losing to Undertaker’s tongue. Your whimpered had become cries and moans, you begged him for release but you should of known better. It would be a long while before you got that.

Undertaker grinned evily against your cunt then looked up you, just go get a glimpse of your flustered expression. Having wait himself for release was a sacrifice he was willing to make if he got to see you cry and beg him for climax. He absolutely got a weird power trip from it.

“Oh please… oh please Daddy, I need to cum now!”

“Nu uh uh! You don’t get to cum until I say so, Dearie!”

You were still staring up at the ceiling and unable to look down, but you didn’t need to look down to know Undertaker was wearing his usual evil wicked grin. He always had that look when he was planning to edge you to death.

[calchexxis]

40k Femslash Appreciation Post

There isn't nearly enough good wlw in Warhammer 40k, and don't get me wrong, I understand why. Considering the majority of the narratives consist of manly men doing manly things while wearing a buick on their torso and a refrigerator on each arm, there's going to be an obvious skew, and that's okay!

But today, I want to highlight some of the ladies of the 40k universe, as well as the other ladies that those ladies like to kiss. For the record, all of these will be on Archive of Our Own.

In my own corner, I've contributed:

Ennui: A longform about a Dark Eldar Wych and a Sororitas who find unlikely love on a world plagued by Orks, and in the process, discover a much darker plot that will threaten the fabric of the galaxy.

From Afar: Local Eldar Pathfinder pines after a pretty PDF guardswoman from the distance in the months while the Great Devourer approaches.

Saintsbride: A series rather than a single fic, that creatively reinterprets Saint Celestine and Inquisitor Greyfax's relationship in the audio drama Our Martyred Lady as being very gay.

His Fury, Our Hearts: Three Sisters Militant of the Adeptus Sororitas Heavy Armor division do battle against cult elements of the Alpha Legion while defending an irradiated hellhole, and also they kiss each other.

More excellent femslash can be found in the hands of user OnTheHuh.

The Iron Tower: An unflinching look at the darker side of the 40k universe on the smaller scale through the eyes of the 'bedmate' of the Planetary Governor of a Feudal world. Absolutely mind the tags, but you're in the mood for some angst and Regency-era style lesbian pining, this is your jam.

Sister Militant: Some of the best Adeptus Sororitas work out there, follows the trials and tribulations of a haunted Sister Militant as she struggles with her worth, her faith, and the demons in her mind. Very much mind the tags, again, but also again, Lesbian Angst and Pining. Also some really top notch action.

Finally, some more excellence from user AncillaThings!

Nemain's Bellum: A story that follows the ascension of a Sister Novitiate by her mentor, Palatine Caddel, through her first war and onward, when I said 'Sister Militant' is some of the best, this would be the rest of the best. Great sci-fi action and more girls kissing. Also trauma, but that's what we're here for, right?

Pigeons and Eagles: For fans of the truly excellent Rogue Trader game by OwlCat studios, and who maybe wants to see Sister Argenta being cute and gay with the God-Emperor's weirdest perfect princess, Cassia Orsellio, this one is for you.

[princesssarisa]

The opera Rigoletto is based on Victor Hugo's play Le roi s'amuse.

The character in the play who became the opera's Duke of Mantua is King Francis I of France. (The opera had to change the setting to Mantua and demote the king to a duke because the censors of the era wouldn't allow such a negative portrayal of a king, or a nearly successful attempt to assassinate him, to be shown onstage.)

King Francis I is also the king in the movie Ever After: A Cinderella Story – the father of Prince Henry, the future King Henry II. Obviously, by the time Ever After takes place, his days as the handsome womanizer Hugo's play depicts were behind him.

Ever After's heroine Danielle de Barbarac is a fictional character, but apparently she's loosely inspired by Diane de Poitiers, the real Henry II's beloved mistress. She was known as a highly intelligent woman and as Henry's unofficial advisor as well as his bedmate. The movie just sanitizes the situation and makes it fit the Cinderella story by removing Henry's arranged marriage to Catherine de Medici and having him marry Danielle instead.

And who was Diane de Poitiers's father? Jean de Poitiers, Seigneur de Saint-Vallier. In Hugo's play, he's the character who corresponds to Rigoletto's Monterone.

Of course Victor Hugo had entirely different goals in writing Le roi s'amuse than the screenwriters of Ever After did fort their "realistic fairy tale." It's hard to imagine the hot-tempered yet ultimately good-hearted old king in Ever After as having once been the charming yet ruthless young rake from Hugo's play and Verdi's opera, and whether either of them resembles the real Francis I or not I don't know.

I just think it's funny that this connection exists between Rigoletto and Ever After, of all things.

(P.S. I wonder what King Francis would think of the fact that not only does Verdi's opera demote a character who was meant to be him to a mere duke, but that so many modern productions of that opera have demoted him even further, portraying him as a Mafia boss, a movie studio mogul, a Frank Sinatra-style singer, etc.)

@leporellian

[yr-obedt-cicero]

Platonic communal sleeping in the American colonies

Platonic bed-sharing was actually quite common custom in the colonies, especially during time's of need, after all, space and privacy were a luxury of the wealthy. It didn't necessarily have to be intimate either, it was not uncommon for sometimes even complete strangers - often travelers or soldiers - of the same sex to share a bed together at an Inn if there was little space, and needed room. Samuel Pepys, an 18th century diarist, often slept with male friends and wrote about the conversations they would have at night. [x]

Rotundo also explains that; “It is not too much to suggest that in an era before central heating, the body warmth of an already beloved bedmate may have been so welcome as to be a source of emotional as well as physical pleasure.” And implies that while it was most of the time done out of necessity, it was also oftentimes simply a warming act of affection, romantic or platonic; “This was, after all, a culture that fervently contrasted the secure and cozy warmth of home with the coldness of a cruel and heartless world outside… A bed, when shared with a special person, could become a nest of intimacy, a place of casual touch and confidential talk.” [x]

Additionally, during the days before central heating was truly a common thing (Especially if you weren't royal or wealthy), bedmates were also seen as warmth. Oftentimes servants even slept alongside their mistresses. This was also how many sicknesses would spread, as bedbugs and lice were transported from person to person in the colonial period usually when sharing bunks or close quarters.

Even notable figures took part in this custom, like Robert Troup and Alexander Hamilton, as Chernow writes how the two shared beds while studying law together at King's College; “At King's, Troup wrote, ‘...they occupied the same room and slept in the same bed’” [x]

Which also leads to a humourous story about when John Adams slept with Benjamin Franklin in a New Jersey tavern during the fall of 1776. Just ten days prior, Washington and his men had barely escaped capture on Long Island after a suffering defeat to the British. The Continental Congress had debated for days about what was to be done. The British had captured General John Sullivan during the Battle, Earl Howe and his brother William Howe paroled Sullivan so he could take a message to Congress, as they wanted a talk peace. Eventually, Sullivan went to Philadelphia and spoke to Congress about the peace talks, to which the Congress decided that they would send a three-man committee to Staten Island. Which was composed of; Benjamin Franklin, Edward Rutledge, and Adams. The men represented the northern, middle and southern colonies. The three had set out on September 9th, Franklin and Rutledge each in a two-wheeled chaise, Adams on horseback. Later, the three men arrived in New Brunswick, and unfortunately had found the Inns all too crowded. Which led to Franklin and Adams having to share a tiny room, barely bigger than the bed, without a chimney, in the Indian Queen Tavern. Which then began an interesting debate, as they prepared to retire;

The window was open, and I, who was an invalid and afraid of the air in the night, shut it close. “Oh!” says Franklin, “don't shut the window, we shall be suffocated.” I answered, I was afraid of the evening air. Dr. Franklin replied, “The air within this chamber will soon be, and indeed is now, worse than that without doors. Come, open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you. I believe you are not acquainted with my theory of colds.” Opening the window, and leaping into bed, I said I had read his letters to Dr. Cooper, in which he had advanced, that nobody ever got cold by going into a cold church or any other cold air, but the theory was so little consistent with my experience, that I thought it a paradox. However, I had so much curiosity to hear his reasons that I would run the risk of a cold. The Doctor then began a harangue upon air and cold, and respiration and perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his philosophy together, but I believe they were equally sound and insensible within a few minutes after me, for the last words I heard were pronounced as if he was more than half asleep. I remember little of the lecture...

Source — The Works of John Adams, Volume 3, by John Adams

Especially during time of war, when the revolution was rough, and means were low. Or as some day; “These are the times that try men's souls”. If the army was running low on space, or even beds, many - if not most - men resorted to sharing the same bed. Although this particular custom was not as accepted by many European visitors who came to the colonies, this cultural difference was often completely condemned by them. Pierre Du Ponceau - an aide of Baron von Steuben's - wrote of a particular dispute between a Virginian and a Frenchman about the subject in his autobiography;

One evening at an Inn in Virginia, a Frenchman and a Virginian were discussing about the manners of their respective countries. The American exclaimed violently against the horrid custom of the French of kissing one another at meeting and parting. The Frenchman made no answer, but as it was late, he took his candle and went up to bed. He was soon followed by the Virginian who after undressing came to take his place in the same bed with his companion “Stop, Sir,” said the Frenchman, “that won't do—I shall kiss you as much as you please, but by Jupiter, I'll not sleep with you.”

Source — Autobiographical Letters Of Peter S. Duponceau

It seems like this custom was almost exclusively English/Colonial, as David Montagu Erskine wrote to his father in 1799 of the living arrangements he and his companions encountered among the transient inhabitants of Washington, DC;

Each of us have a bed room to ourselves, if we chuse, but people in this country seem to think so lightly of such an indispensable comfort as I consider it, that I believe there are but three of us, who have rooms to ourselves.

Source — Menk, Patricia Holbert. “D. M. Erskine: Letters from America, 1798-1799.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Volume 6.

Edward Thornton, secretary to the new British minister to the United States, wrote to his former employer in 1792;

Mr. Hammond's rank may possibly secure him from some of the inconveniences, which others, rendered fastidious by the style of travelling in England, are loud in their complaints of, such as [...] fellow lodgers in the same room and not infrequently in the same bed.

Source — Jackman, S. W. “A Young Englishman Reports on the New Nation: Edward Thornton to James Bland Burges, 1791-1793.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Volume 18

This custom was even common after the revolution and the war of 1812—As Lieutenant John Le Couteur, a British army officer from the Isle of Jersey, traveled through New York in 1816 accompanied by Captain George Thew Burke. Le Couteur and Burke arrived at an Inn one day after dinner had been served and cleared, and they were hard-pressed to convince the hostess to bring out more food, “But this was not the last grievance.” Le Couteur recorded in his diary and concluded;

There was only one spare bed, a small one, which of course I insisted Burke should take. The Yankee Landlord wished me to take half of it as a matter of course but I said: “we Britishers were particular on that pint.’ “Then,” said mine host, “I guess if you don’t chuse to take half a bed with some one, you’ll jist sleep in a cheer [chair] or by the kitchen fire’

Source — Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships, by William E Benemann

[fallen-in-dreams]

Morning After.

Also on AO3. Pairing: Gaara/Sakura. Summary: After a night of debauchery, he fell asleep with her in his arms, slept tangled with her in the sheets, and woke with a stupid grin on his face. Gaara was not a morning person, but this, he could get used to. Prompt: Day 22 | Morning After Rated: Explicit Words: 4,433. Status: Complete. Author note: A bit late for the day prompt, but it was a last-minute whim of a one-shot. The title's a bit on the nose but honestly, it is the only thing that stuck when I tried to change it. Heads up: the Gaara in here is my version of a cheeky AU Modern Gaara. And to be honest, my favourite version - beating out the canon-divergent AU (canon-like personality) by a smidgeon. So be warned: he's not in character to any level of expectation. Enjoy. ^_^ Tags on AO3: Gaara is Bad at Feelings (Naruto), Denial of Feelings, Gaara is in denial, Out of Character, OOCness, POV Gaara (Naruto), Pillow Talk, Smut, Smut for the sake of smut, but feelings too, Fluff, but it’s the in denial kind, Romance, Romance if you squint, Gaara is a pervert, Sakura is just as horny, Sex Positive, Alcohol references, Mentions of Birth Control, Gaara is a little shit, thoughts of non-consensual somnophilia, Limited Sakura POV, Gaara (Naruto)-centric, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, AU Modern, Modern Era, Cheeky Gaara, Cheeky Sakura.

For GaaSaku-Fanfests Month 2023. @gaasaku-fanfests

.

Morning After.

⏰7 A.M.⏰

Hmm. Mmm. Wazza…

Her head was pounding. Her body was unusually warm. And there was an ache between her legs that would’ve set alarm bells blaring had she been aware enough to care. A weight had settled on her but she was too comfortable to shove whatever was cuddling her from her person and instead snuggled into the extraneous heat. Her brain was trying to wake her up.

Noooo. Bad brain. Too comfy. Go back to sleep.

.

⏰8.10 A.M.⏰

She was dreaming of flowers and hot red sand melting her juicy, succulent buds. A wave of pleasure wracked her body as she almost started awake; strong arms tied her down and she relaxed into the invasive hold. A strange noise she hadn’t noticed the last time she almost woke up was shrill in her ear. She frowned in her sleep, huffing and wriggling until it stopped.

Uhhh…

Then everything went black and the buds started to bloom.

.

⏰9 A.M.⏰

Someone kill that sound. It’s too early. Fuck me.

He groaned, his sleep-hazed mind barely registering the end of his dream. It blurred and zoomed back into focus before he became aware of the warm, feminine curves that were pressed against his side. Their legs were entangled. And his morning wood was achingly tucked between hers. He blinked heavily. Had it been a dream or did he really… His body wasn’t normally this sore after sex. It must’ve been rough…

Need more sleep.

He drifted off with a smirk on his face.

.

⏰10.05 A.M.⏰

Sunlight poured in through a nearby window, and when he tried to open his eyes, it felt like he’d fallen asleep with his face planted on the surface of the sun. His eyelids were still too heavy and his body too exhausted.

Fuck this. Fuck the sun. And fuck whoever left the curtains open.

He needed to sleep. His bedmate sighed and he instinctively gripped her tighter, shifting his hips to press himself further into the curve of her. The open window had one silver lining; the cool breeze made it (barely) comfortable enough to spoon. His body ached for more of what it received the night before.

Right after I take another nap.

.:.

⏰11.55 A.M.⏰

Gaara let out a soft gasp as he woke quickly, his eyes opening before he was aware of what he was doing. The clock on the wall told him it was a more reasonable hour to be waking than his last attempts. He sighed and rolled away from the window, even though the sun that had been trying to blind him before had diffused, moving away from the glass panels and fluttering curtains. He’d slept through all four alarms set on his phone, and so had, it appeared, his bedmate. The feminine curves previously pressed against him had extricated themselves from his person and rolled over inelegantly in the opposite direction, though she was clearly still very fast asleep. The sheets had fallen far enough that he got a good view of her arse.

Nice.

Yawning, Gaara wiped the sleep from his eyes as moved to sit against the headboard of the bed, stretching out his aches and pains, very aware of his own nakedness. Now free of the night’s entanglements, he could admire the slender form of the woman he’d slept with. He’d been pining over her for some time (not his wording), trying to worm himself into her life. It wasn’t altruistic or even innocent. He’d wanted to fuck her. But Sakura had a temper to go with her charming personality so once he’d gotten to know her more a niggling voice had begun to form in the back of his head.

“Is this even worth it?”

Then she’d smile at him and yes , he’d decided, she was worth it. He’d learned pretty quickly that she wasn’t the type for a simple tussle in the sheets, so he’d had some serious cajoling to do. Now, of course, his friends’ predictions had come true: he wanted to keep her. The previous night’s activities had solidified it. He hadn’t fucked her. No, it wasn’t as harsh as that. If he didn’t know himself better, Gaara would call it making love .

But he did know himself.

He shifted onto his side, contemplating sliding into a spooning position and attempting to cajole her body into reliving their intimate excursions. It couldn’t hurt to touch her at least, though he was wary of that temper of hers and how she might react if he just started picking up where they left off.

Remembering the first and only slap she once gave him for his inappropriate behaviour, Gaara decided to remain upright and just revel in the memories of what she felt like (not to mention her adorable flirtations the night before) while he waited for her to wake up. His eyes raking in her form, his fingers twitching.

It had all begun with a celebration for their mutual friend; an engagement announcement and a few shots of his favourite alcoholic fruit juice (shōchū) later and Sakura Haruno was putty in his hands. She wasn’t drunk when she shoved her tongue down his throat the first time, claiming she was just so happy for their friends and kissing Gaara was definitely the best way to showcase that. Apparently. She’d started drinking right after that first kiss, but then he’d matched her for every cocktail so he didn’t feel too bad about letting her continue her groping of his person as the night wore on.

And he gave as much as he got.

Gaara remembered, quite vividly, every dirty word she’d whispered into his ear, clearly thinking she needed extra, but salacious, reasoning to get him into bed. Fate , she’d said, had decided . He’d scoffed at that. The fact that they ended up in his hotel room while the party was still raging downstairs, in the newly legal casino, was an inevitability, not fate. They left the Tokyo nightlife behind and partook in each other, instead. Drunk but not sloshed. Buzzed but not inebriated. Yet still so unrestrained and juvenile in their antics that sober would never be a synonym.

The question now was, how much did his little minx remember?

Hands clasped together and cushioning the back of his head, back slouched against the headboard and legs crossed (under the sheets), Gaara watched with both fascination and wariness as Sakura Haruno began twitching. Was she waking up, finally?

She moaned into the other pillow, slumping onto her stomach, uncovering herself completely to his eyes. Before this, the sheet had been tangled around her legs and waist, offering tantalising snippets of her bare arse, but now she was fully on display. Just face down. She seemed very adept at both hogging blankets and giving a good show. He himself still had a modicum of modesty left.

For now.

Perhaps out of respect but more likely out of concern about being caught staring if she were to wake suddenly, Gaara tried in vain to ignore the sway of her bum as she groaned. It reminded him of her playful side from the night before. She was both a tease and sexually dominant once she got going. A flushed Sakura wiggling her bum at him was ingrained in his memory for all time. Part of him wanted to lean over and poke her. She’d likely give him another slap if he tried that, though.

The wiggling stopped, another groan; Sakura seemed to be coming to with her face planted in the pillow. But when she rolled onto her side it was to face away from him. Her arms stretched over the left side of the bed, pushing her body closer to him.

“Hm.”

Her voice was soft and mildly hoarse; he guessed from all the crooning and screaming of his name she’d done hours earlier. Gaara couldn’t help but grin as she started suddenly and fumbled her way into a semi-seated position.

“Huh?”

He waited. Eventually, she looked over at him, her green eyes widening as they found his.

“G-Gaara?”

She looked confused. There was no hours-long remembrance of sexual misconduct realisation on her face. No knowing glint in her eye because of what they’d done and how eager she’d been. Granted, his own memory was a little fuzzy on some details, but her confusion implied she was drawing a complete and total blank.

“You don’t remember last night?” He asked.

Sakura pulled away quickly. “Huh?” Her voice was high-pitched. “What the hell ?”

He watched her closely as her expression turned from confusion to ire rather quickly, wondering if she was debating on slapping him again. She sat up straight quickly, then groaned, grasping her head with her hands, clearly ignorant of her nakedness. Not one to ignore an opportunity, Gaara smiled as his eyes raked the full length of her bare body. Everything was exactly as he remembered.

“How much did I drink last night?” She moaned.

“No more than I did.”

He shifted his bum on the bed, tugging on the edge of the sheets as if to remind the pinkette that they were both very naked. She didn’t seem to notice at first but then a flush of red spread over her face and neck, she let out a weird “eep” and then pulled both sheets up to cover her breasts. Unfortunately for her, that left him exposed. She turned her eyes away when she realised, the flush on her face and neck darkening against her fair skin.

Well, she wasn’t trying to slap him so Gaara decided to use the same tactic he’d employed the night before.

“I’ve already seen everything you have, love,” he purred.

His body hummed with appreciation; the breeze from the open window did nothing to tamp down the heat building in his core. He trailed a hand up her arm and was pleasantly surprised when she didn’t pull away. She kept her face hidden in her hands and a scrunched-up section of the sheets, fisted in her hands as he became more adventurous. He turned to face her better, tracing his fingers along her sides, spurred on by her shiver as she continued to let him touch her. She stiffened when his hand found her hip and then splayed his fingers over her lower abdomen. Drawing circles on her skin with this thumb, he returned her stare as she regarded him warily, the corner of her eye twitching. On the plus side, her grip on the sheets loosened.

Emboldened, Gaara smirked at her, still stroking her gently. “What? Turnabout’s fair. My turn to come onto you this time.”

“You came onto me last night,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him.

“No. You came onto me, first.”

“I did not ,” she snapped.

“You did so.”

“Did not!”

He gave her a condescending look.

“I didn’t.” She sounded less sure this time.

Sakura turned away from him and closed her eyes like she was trying to dig deep into her memories to find something buried and vague but palpable. He watched as she scrunched up her face in concentration before letting out a huff and opening her eyes again. She looked defeated.

“So, was it good for you too?”

Okay, that wasn’t conducive to his desire to get her underneath him again but her reaction was funny. She snarled and tugged harder on the sheets. She seemed too angry to speak. Gaara laughed. Okay, he was done teasing.

“I’m joking. Well, kind of. It really was good for me.”

She sighed releasing her death grip on the sheets. “Don’t you get tired of being such a dick all the time?”

He shrugged. “Depends on what I’m doing with it.”

She didn’t rise to the bait this time. Disappointing. Instead, Sakura shoved the sheets toward him while trying to maintain her dignity. He didn’t help, lifting his knees and letting the linen fall back onto the bed. She glared at him. For all her indignation, he wondered why she wasn’t trying to leave .

Gaara decided that Sakura wanted to be in bed but stopped himself from saying it out loud.

“Okay,” she said softly, more to herself than to her new lover. “I can be mature about this.”

She was psyching herself up for something, inhaling deeply through her nose then letting the breath slowly through the same cavity. Her mouth was a little too busy pressing into a thin line to be helpful. But on the plus side, all her frustration seemed to have floated away on a cloud of rainbows by the time she opened her mouth to speak again.

“Last night was–”

“Amazing,” he interrupted.

She rolled her eyes. “I mean–”

“So, bad then?”

Sakura flushed. “No! I–”

“Loved every minute and want to do it all over again?”

He really should have stopped trying to annoy her but she was so cute, flustered. However, she didn’t get riled up again and instead, the corner of her mouth twitched in what could only be called amusement.

“Were you going to say something different?” He fake-pouted. “Because if so, then I–”

“It was, uh… lovely?”

Lovely ? Just lovely ? Even if she didn’t remember every sordid moment of the most exquisitely delicious sex he’d ever had, the least she could do was be polite about it. Not shatter his manhood. It was his turn to frown in annoyance. He grabbed the pillow from behind his back and hit her in the shoulder with it. Not too hard but not gentle either.

Just the way I like it.

Ignoring their nakedness ( when had she stopped caring about that? ), Sakura let the sheets fall from her hands, turned to grasp the only other pillow on the bed and (with both hands) slapped him upside the head with it.

She’s back to slapping again.

But this version was enjoyable.

He returned her challenging grin and pounced. Sakura giggled as she threw her hands up to ward him off. He came at her with his pillow and she tried to slap him again. He got her on the arm again then grabbed her pillow with his free hand, pulling her upwards and toward him so he could hit her on the bum. She wrenched her weapon from him and giggled again as they exchanged blows with pillows again. He found himself laughing out loud and almost fell over when Sakura tried to push him. On her knees, she was fully exposed and his body hummed as he used the momentum of her attack to get a peek under the flailing pillows. Between her legs, up and down her body… those tits.

He groaned, feeling himself hardening with every second. Gaara grabbed both their pillows and shoved at Sakura, pushing her onto her back, and straddling her. He had no idea what this was supposed to be, between the giggling, heavy breathing, the mutual shit-eating grins and her sudden change in demeanour.

But I like it.

The wild, irrepressible sex kitten from the night before was making herself known.

Gaara found himself, quite suddenly, looking down at the flustered woman, his knee between her legs, their breaths intermingling, their lips less than an inch apart. Heavy breathing, parted lips, dry mouth; yes, it seemed like she was as attracted to him as he was to her. Last night had not been an accident.

He lowered his forehead to her as they stared wide-eyed at each other. The throbbing pain between his legs was demanding attention and Gaara didn’t want to disappoint his favourite part of his anatomy. But… Sakura returning his attraction was not permission. He waited, licking his lips and swallowing hard.

She said nothing, her body trembling like she was still trying to grasp what had happened.

We partook in the rather childish antics of a pillow fight then I won by pinning you to the bed and now we’re so close I could just… slide right inside of you, if I were so inclined.

Oh, he was definitely inclined. But how to move things along?

Gaara sighed, his eyes darting to the side as he contemplated this. Moving quickly, Sakura took advantage of his hesitation and pushed at him. She yanked on him, using the pillows squashed between their chests for leverage, to get him flat on his back. He didn’t fight her, eager to see what she was planning to do with this faux position of power.

He just raised an eyebrow at her, smirking again.

“It’s my turn on top,” she said.

“To do what?” His voice was croaky. He sensed this was a do or don’t moment between them.

Sakura lowered her face to his, the pillows on his chest the only barricade to her going any further. She was straddling him, breathing heavily and clearly as aroused as he was. Her lower half pressed against his. He groaned as she shifted her pelvis… likely on purpose, the fucking minx.

She pulled back, leaving the pillows on his chest and flushing with clear excitement as she left herself uncovered for his perusal. “Your move, Sabaku.”

Cheeky woman.

His eyes inevitably dropped from hers, soaking in the familiar sight of her bare breasts. He remembered cupping them on more than one occasion the night before, pleasantly surprised by how well they fit in his hands. How quickly and easily the nipples hardened under his teasing. Perky and pointy , if memory served, were his slightly inebriated thoughts at the time.

Slowly, as if he were afraid of startling a wild animal, Gaara removed pillows as a barrier to her. Then he slipped his right arm under her armpit to pull her down far enough to capture her left breast in his mouth. The nipple pebbled between his lips. Sakura moaned, wriggling her bum against him and pushing her chest further into his face.

“Gaara…”

Her voice was honeysuckle and sultry. After a minute, he switched to the other breast and she half-slumped, her body shuddering. It might’ve also had something to do with the delicious friction building between their legs.

“Hm.”Sakura let out weird noise after nonsensical word as she unconsciously ground against his erection. She was already so slick and primed to go.

He hissed at the strained stiffness she was grinding over and murmured, “fuck, yes,” against her pert nipple.

Uncertainty seemed to have returned her, however, and she let out a frustrated sigh before pulling away from him, her legs remaining blissfully in place even as she stopped moving her hips. It was a disappointing turn of events, but he took the opportunity to move his hands to cup her breasts, thumbs tracing circles over both areola. She closed her eyes. Whatever reservations she’d had a moment ago did not extend to this at least, or so it seemed.

Sakura only allowed him a few more moments of this before grabbing his wrists and pushing his arms away. He groaned and a light smirk played at the corner of her mouth, but she didn’t address his frustration. When he let his arms slack under her grip, she released him. He didn’t dare return to her breasts for fear of retaliation, though he so wanted to, and instead rested his hands on her hips.

They stared at each other, silently. So much of this interaction had been silent. Or at least, without words.

He reached up and stroked the side of her face. “You really can’t remember last night?”

She hadn’t been drunk, right? No, she had been. Well, as much as he’d been drunk. And she had a reputation for drinking others under the table. The previous night hadn’t seemed any different as her equilibrium had been tested to its limits but she’d definitely been a more than capable lover the night before. He’d always known she was feisty but, for some reason, Gaara had gotten it into his head, in all the time he’d known her, that she’d be more submissive in bed. Her morning-after, domineering personality seemed to match the confident, beautiful woman who’d sucked him off so casually in an alcove mere meters from where their friends were still partying before suggesting they take “this fun” upstairs to his hotel room.

I’m loving every facet of her.

Gaara watched her face morph from intense scrutiny of his person to startled coyness and felt himself growling again, in realisation. “You minx! You remember!”

Unable to keep a straight face any longer, Sakura burst out laughing, falling forward to bury her laughter into the crook of his neck. The vibrations of her body against his were welcomed, but not the focus of his attention right now.

Right up until the moment the damn broke she’d been a really good actress. Gaara was both impressed and annoyed by how thorough this deception was. She continued to laugh, albeit softer, into his neck.

“You were already awake when I woke, weren’t you?” he asked softly. Dangerously.

“No,” she said weakly, letting out a soft hiccup as the last of the bulk of her laughter.

“I don’t believe you.”

Sakura sat up quickly, almost knocking the wind out of him. The look on her face was one of mock terror, ruined a second later as she started giggling again. But before he could properly admonish her, she leaned down and pressed her lips against his softly, pressing their mouths deeper immediately. He blinked and she was gone, sliding off him and lying back on her side of the bed. She looked much happier now though. It deflated his indignation.

“I really didn’t remember,” she said after a moment. He hummed and closed his eyes. “It was fuzzy until you groped me. Things slowly started coming back after that.”

He grinned but didn’t reply, self-satisfied.

A minute later, Sakura rolled over to face him and tentatively tapped her fingers along his chest. “Are you still very, very tired?”

They weren’t going to talk about how they ended up in bed together, it seemed. He glanced at her and turned to face her. His hand danced along her hip.

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether or not that was your attempt at seduction.”

She snorted, obviously now remembering her bumbling efforts the night before. “Last night was amazing,” she said seriously. “I’m not sorry I seduced your sorry arse.”

He smiled lightly.

They stared at each other silently. This could be the beginning of something truly amazing if he didn’t screw it up. She blinked owlishly at him. Was that permission?

Ah, screw it.

Gaara flipped Sakura onto her back and wedged his knee between her legs again. She laughed in delight, the grin on her face was challenging as she smirked up at him. Not waiting for further approval, he slid his hand down her body, rubbing between her thighs, finding that sweet nub and pressing gently against it. He knew from last night that she didn’t like it too hard there; he swallowed her moans with his mouth, nipping her bottom lip to demand entrance. Between his stimulation and the friction at the apex of their thighs, Sakura very quickly began writhing in blissful agony beneath him. She eagerly latched onto his hip with her leg, begging him without words to just bury himself between her thighs already.

Obeying the silent, almost-command he grasped himself, pumped a few times, and rubbed the end of his length against her folds. Sakura was panting and gasping, having broken their kiss.

“Fuck me,” she said, having found her voice. “Now, please!”

Gaara grinned and returned to kissing her as he tucked himself snugly in the gap between her thighs. More teasing. More anticipation. She was wet and sticky and beyond ready for him. It was enough lubrication for him to slide right into her. He had not been expecting that giggle-moan from her as he started moving immediately, pushing and pulling against her, inside her.

“Gaara…”

His name her sultry lips spurred him on, and he thrust faster into her trembling body. The rest of the world disappeared. His rhythm was demanding and coaxing. He wanted her to scream underneath him. To shriek and squawk and make all manner of nonsensical noises because the feel of him moving inside of her was really that powerful. Call him an egotist but when she was too fucked to even articulate his name or the name of whatever kami she believed in, that was when he knew nobody would ever compare to him. Ever again. The thought of her wanting anyone else was too much. He had to show her that this was it for her. With him.

She cried and moaned, holding him tightly as she tried desperately to move with his thrusts. His movements were too erratic by the time she managed some kind of success and Sakura fell into the abyss that was Gaara Sabaku, once again.

His arms were like jelly, his body shaking with the effort of remaining taut above her. The bed groaned beneath them. And eventually, something had to give.

Gods, fuck.

His body was on fire. She felt so god damned fucking good clutching and spasming around him. He was distantly aware that Sakura hadn’t been the only one making nonsensical noises when he felt his end fast approaching. If he’d had the mind to count, Gaara would’ve lost count of how many times she came around him.

I’m done.

Feeling confident in his memory of Sakura claiming to have a birth control implant (she called it Eton… something) Gaara shuddered one last time, emptying himself inside of her. The energy damn broke and he was suddenly very exhausted.

Happy but exhausted.

He stayed on top of her as Sakura kept her legs locked around his waist. She seemed unwilling to let him go. But eventually, she released him and Gaara tried to roll of without bumbling, he really did. But he was like a rubber chicken. He flopped and went limp, having to unwrap her right leg from his after he’d fallen onto his back.

Sakura didn’t laugh at him but couldn’t hide her smirk. Maybe she hadn’t caught her breath yet. Yeah, maybe. He wanted to cuddle. Gods, he wanted to hold her and never let her go. He wasn’t going to admit these things out loud though.

I need to sort myself out.

Oblivious to his internal struggle, Sakura glanced over at him, still smirking. “We should meet like this more often, Mr Sabaku.”

She burst out laughing again and after a moment’s hesitation, he joined her.

[kamreadsandrecs]

by Adam Kirsch

In Elif Batuman’s 2022 novel Either/Or, the narrator, Selin, goes to her college library to look for Prozac Nation, the 1994 memoir by Elizabeth Wurtzel. Both of Harvard’s copies are checked out, so instead she reads reviews of the book, including Michiko Kakutani’s in the New York Times, which Batuman quotes:

“Ms. Wurtzel’s self-important whining” made Ms. Kakutani “want to shake the author, and remind her that there are far worse fates than growing up during the 70’s in New York and going to Harvard.”

It’s a typically canny moment in a novel that strives to seem artless. Batuman clearly recognizes that every criticism of Wurtzel’s bestseller—narcissism, privilege, triviality—could be applied to Either/Or and its predecessor, The Idiot, right down to the authors’ shared Harvard pedigree. Yet her protagonist resists the identification, in large part because she doesn’t see herself as Wurtzel’s contemporary. Wurtzel was born in 1967 and Batuman in 1977. This makes both of them members of Generation X, which includes those born between 1965 and 1980. But Selin insists that the ten-year gap matters: “Generation X: that was the people who were going around being alternative when I was in middle school.”

I was born in 1976, and the closer we products of the Seventies get to fifty, the clearer it becomes to me that Batuman is right about the divide—especially when it comes to literature. In pop culture, the Gen X canon had been firmly established by the mid-Nineties: Nirvana’s Nevermind appeared in 1991, the movie Reality Bites in 1994, Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill in 1995. Douglas Coupland’s book Generation X, which popularized the term, was published in 1991. And the novel that defined the literary generation, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996, when David Foster Wallace was about to turn thirty-four—technically making him a baby boomer.

Batuman was a college sophomore in 1996, presumably experiencing many of the things that happen to Selin in Either/Or. But by the time she began to fictionalize those events twenty years later, she joined a group of writers who defined themselves, ethically and aesthetically, in opposition to the older representatives of Generation X. For all their literary and biographical differences, writers like Nicole Krauss, Teju Cole, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Tao Lin share some basic assumptions and aversions—including a deep skepticism toward anyone who claims to speak for a generation, or for any entity larger than the self.

That skepticism is apparent in the title of Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud. Smith’s precocious success—her first book, White Teeth, was published in 2000, when she was twenty-four—can make it easy to think of her as a contemporary of Wallace and Wurtzel. In fact she was born in 1975, two years before Batuman, and her sensibility as a writer is connected to her generational predicament.

Smith’s latest book is, most obviously, a response to the paradoxical populism of the late 2010s, in which the grievances of “ordinary people” found champions in elite figures such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Rather than write about current events, however, Smith has elected to refract them into a story about the Tichborne case, a now-forgotten episode that convulsed Victorian England in the 1870s.

In particular, Smith is interested in how the case challenges the views of her protagonist, Eliza Touchet. Eliza is a woman with the sharp judgment and keen perceptions of a novelist, though her era has deprived her of the opportunity to exercise those gifts. Her surname—pronounced in the French style, touché—evokes her taste for intellectual combat. But she has spent her life in a supportive role, serving variously as housekeeper and bedmate to her cousin William Harrison Ainsworth, a man of letters who churns out mediocre historical romances by the yard. (Like most of the novel’s characters, Ainsworth and Touchet are based on real-life historical figures.)

Now middle-aged, Eliza finds herself drawn into public life by the Tichborne saga, which has divided the nation and her household as bitterly as any of today’s political controversies. Like all good celebrity trials, the case had many supporting players and intricate subplots, but at heart it was a question of identity: Was the man known as “the Claimant” really Roger Tichborne, an aristocrat believed to have died in a shipwreck some fifteen years earlier? Or was he Arthur Orton, a cockney butcher who had emigrated to Australia, caught wind of the reward on offer from Roger’s grief-stricken mother, and seized the chance of a lifetime? In the end, a jury decided that he was Orton, and instead of inheriting a country estate he wound up in a jail cell. What fascinates Smith, though, is the way the Tichborne case became a political cause, energizing a movement that took justice for “Sir Roger” to be in some way related to justice for the common man.

Eliza is a right-minded progressive who was active in the abolitionist movement in the 1830s. Proud of her judgment, she sees many problems with the Claimant’s story and finds it incredible that anyone could believe him. To her dismay, however, she lives with someone who does. William’s new wife, Sarah, formerly his servant, sees the Claimant as a victim of the same establishment that lorded over her own working-class family. The more she is informed of the problems with the Claimant’s argument, the more obdurate she becomes: “HE AIN’T CALLED ARTHUR ORTON IS HE,” she yells, “THEM WHO SAY HE’S ORTON ARE LYING.”

What Smith is dramatizing, of course, is the experience of so many liberal intellectuals over the past decade who had believed themselves to be on the side of “the people” only to find that, whether the issue was Brexit or Trump or COVID-19 protocols, the people were unwilling to heed their guidance, and in fact loathed them for it. It is in order to get to the bottom of this phenomenon that Eliza keeps attending the Tichborne trial, in much the same spirit that many liberal journalists reported from Trump rallies. Things get even more complicated when she befriends a witness for the defense, Mr. Bogle, who is among the Claimant’s main supporters even though he began his life as a slave on a Jamaica plantation managed by Edward Tichborne, the Claimant’s supposed father.

Though much of the novel deals with the case and the history of slavery in Britain’s Caribbean colonies, it is first and foremost the story of Eliza Touchet, and how her exposure to the trial alters her sense of the world and of herself. “The purpose of life was to keep one’s mind open,” she reflects, and it is this ability to see things from another perspective that makes her a novelist manqué.

Open-mindedness, even to the point of moral ambiguity, is one of the chief values Smith shares with her literary contemporaries. These writers grew up during a period of heightened tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, then took their first steps toward adult consciousness just as the Cold War concluded. They came of age in the brief period that Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history.”

Fukuyama’s description, famously premature though it was, still captures something crucial about the context in which the children of the Seventies began to think and write. While the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe is sometimes remembered as the “Revolutions of 1989,” the mood it created in the West was hardly revolutionary. After 1989, there was little of the “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” sentiment that had animated Wordsworth during the French Revolution. Instead, the ambient sense that history was moving steadily in the right direction encouraged writers to see politics as less urgent, and less morally serious, than inward experience.

In the fiction that defined the pre-9/11 era, political phenomena tended to assume cartoon form. Wallace’s Infinite Jest features an organization of Quebecois separatists called Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents—that is, the Wheelchair Assassins. In Smith’s White Teeth, one of the main characters joins a militant group named KEVIN, for Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the war on terror would put an end to jokes like these, but for a decade or so it was possible to see ideological extremism as a relic fit for spoofing—as with KGB Bar, a popular New York literary venue that opened in 1993.

For the young writers of that era, the most important battles were not being fought abroad but at home, and within themselves. Their enemies were the forces of cynicism and indifference that Wallace depicted in Infinite Jest, set in a near-future America stupefied by consumerism, mass entertainment, and addictive substances. The great balancing act of Wallace’s fiction was to truthfully represent this stupor while holding open the possibility that one could recover from it, the way the residents of the novel’s Ennet House manage to recover from their addictions. This dialectical mission is responsible for the spiraling self-consciousness that is the most distinctive (and, to some readers, the most annoying) aspect of his writing.

Dave Eggers set himself an analogous challenge in his 2000 memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Writing about a childhood tragedy—the nearly simultaneous deaths from cancer of his mother and father, which left the young Eggers with custody of his eight-year-old brother—he aimed to do full justice to his despair while still insisting on the validity of hope. “This did not happen to us for naught, I can assure you,” he writes,

there is no logic to that, there is logic only in assuming that we suffered for a reason. Just give us our due. I am bursting with the hopes of a generation, their hopes surge through me, threaten to burst my hardened heart!

By the end of the millennium, this was the familiar voice of Generation X. Loquacious and self-involved, its ironic grandiosity barely concealed a sincere grandiosity about its moral mission, which was to defeat despair and foster genuine human connection. Jonathan Franzen, Wallace’s realist rival, titled a book of essays How to Be Alone, and for these writers, loneliness was the great problem that literature was created to solve. “If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness,” Franzen wrote in his much-discussed essay “Perchance to Dream,” published in these pages in 1996. Eggers seems to have taken this idea literally, creating a nonprofit, 826 Valencia, that advertises writing mentorship for underserved students as a way of “building community” and rectifying inequality.

If sincerity and connection were the greatest virtues for these writers, the greatest sin was “snark.” That word gained literary currency thanks to a manifesto by Heidi Julavits in the first issue of The Believer, the magazine she co-founded in 2003 with the novelist Vendela Vida (Eggers’s wife) and the writer Ed Park. The title of the essay—“Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!”—like the title of the magazine, insisted that literature was an essentially moral enterprise, a matter of goodness, courage, and love. To demur from this vision was to reveal a smallness of soul that Julavits called snark: “wit for wit’s sake—or, hostility for hostility’s sake,” a “hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt.” For Kafka, a book was an axe for the frozen sea within; for the older cohort of Gen X writers, it was more like a hacksaw to cut through the barred cell of cynicism.

This was the environment—quiescent in politics, self-consciously sincere in literature—in which Smith and her contemporaries came of age. Just as they started to publish their first books, however, the stopped clock of history resumed with a vengeance. It is unnecessary to list the series of political and geopolitical shocks that have occurred since 2000. For the millennial generation, adulthood has been defined by apocalyptic fears, political frenzy, and glimpses of utopia, whether in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008 or in New York’s Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street in 2011.

The children of the Seventies tend to feel out of place in this new world. It’s not that they naïvely looked forward to a future of peace and harmony and are offended to find that it has not materialized. It is rather that their literary gaze was fixed within at an early age, and they continue to believe that the most authentic way to write about history is as the deteriorating climate through which the self moves.

The self, meanwhile, they approach with mistrust—a reaction against the heart-on-sleeve sincerity of their elders. Many of them have turned to autofiction, a genre which is often criticized as narcissistic—a way of shrinking the world to fit into the four walls of the writer’s room. In fact, it has served these writers as an antidote to the grandiosity of memoir, which tends to falsify in the direction of self-flattery—as this generation learned from the spectacular implosion of James Frey’s 2003 bestseller, A Million Little Pieces. By admitting from the outset that it is not telling the truth about the author’s life, autofiction makes it possible to emphasize the moral ambiguities that memoir has to apologize for or hide. That makes it useful for writers who are not in search of goodness, neither within themselves nor in political movements.

For Sheila Heti, this resistance to goodness takes the form of artistic introspection, which busier people tend to judge as selfish and idle. In How Should a Person Be?, from 2010, a character named Sheila has dinner with a young theater director named Ben, who has just returned with a friend from South Africa. “It was just such a crushing awakening of the colossal injustice of the way our world works economically,” he says of their trip, that he now wonders whether his work as a theater director—“a very narcissistic activity”—is morally justifiable. Yet nothing could be more narcissistic, in Heti’s telling, than such moral preening, and Sheila instinctively resists it. “They are so serious. They lectured me about my lack of morality,” she complains. She loathes the idea of having “to wear on the outside one’s curiosity, one’s pity, one’s guilt,” when art is concerned with what happens inside, which can only be observed with effort and in private. “It’s time to stop asking questions of other people,” she tells herself. “It is time to just go into a cocoon and spin your soul.”

Teju Cole’s 2011 novel Open City offers a more ambivalent version of the same idea. Julius, the narrator, can’t justify his aesthetic self-absorption on the grounds that he is an artist, as Sheila does, since he is a psychiatrist. It’s an ironic choice of profession for a man we come to know as guarded and aloof. Cole builds a portrait of Julius through his daily interactions with other people, like the taxi driver whose cab he enters gruffly. “The way you came into my car without saying hello, that was bad,” the driver rebukes him. “Hey, I’m African just like you, why you do this?” Julius apologizes for this small breach of solidarity, but insincerely: “I wasn’t sorry at all. I was in no mood for people who tried to lay claims on me.”

Indeed, for most of the novel he is alone, meditating in Sebaldian fashion on the atrocities of history as he takes long walks through Manhattan. When, during a trip to Brussels, he meets a man who wants to intervene in history—Farouq, a young Moroccan intellectual who declares that “America is a version of Al-Qaeda”—Julius is decidedly unimpressed:

There was something powerful about him, a seething intelligence, something that wanted to believe itself indomitable. But he was one of the thwarted ones. His script would stay in proportion.

Open City can’t be said to endorse Julius’s aesthetic solipsism. On the contrary, the last chapter finds him trapped on a fire escape outside Carnegie Hall in the rain, a striking symbol of a man isolated by culture. Just moments before, he had been united with the rest of the audience in Mahlerian rapture; now, he reflects, “my fellow concertgoers went about their lives oblivious to my plight,” as he tries to avoid slipping and falling to his death. The scene is Cole’s acknowledgment that aesthetic consciousness remains passive and solipsistic even when experienced in common, and that danger demands a different kind of solidarity—one that is active, ethical, even political. Yet Cole conjures Julius’s aristocratic fatalism in such intimate detail that the “Rejoice! Believe!” approach—to literature, and to life—can only appear childish.

Writers of this cohort do sometimes try to imagine a better world, but they tend to do so in terms that are metaphysical rather than political, moving at one bound from the fallen present to some kind of messianic future. In her 2022 novel Pure Colour, Heti tells the story of a woman named Mira whose grief over her father’s death prompts her to speculate about what Judaism calls the world to come. In Heti’s vision, this is not a place to which the soul repairs after death, nor is it some kind of revolutionary political arrangement; rather, it is an entirely new world that God will one day create to replace the one we live in, which she calls “the first draft of existence.”

The hardest thing to accept, for Heti’s protagonist, is that the end of our world will mean the disappearance of art. “Art would never leave us like a father dying,” Mira says. “In a way, it would always remain.” But over the course of Pure Colour, she comes to accept that even art is transitory. In a profoundly self-accusing passage, she concludes that a better world might even require the disappearance of art, since

art is preserved on hearts of ice. It is only those with icebox hearts and icebox hands who have the coldness of soul equal to the task of keeping art fresh for the centuries, preserved in the freezer of their hearts and minds.

Tao Lin’s unnerving, affectless autofiction leaves a rather different impression than Heti’s, and he has sometimes been identified as a voice from the next generation, the millennials. But his 2021 novel Leave Society shows him thinking along similar lines as the children of the Seventies. In Taipei, from 2013, Lin’s alter ego is named Paul, and he spends most of the novel joylessly eating in restaurants and taking mood-altering drugs. In Leave Society he is named Li, but he is recognizably the same person, perched on a knife-edge between extreme sensitivity and neurotic withdrawal. In the interim, he has decided that the cure for his troubles, and the world’s, lies in purging the body of the toxins that infiltrate it from every direction.

Like Heti, Lin anticipates a great erasure. All of recorded history, he writes, has been merely a “brief, fallible transition . . . from matter into the imagination.” Sometime soon we will emerge into a universe that bears no resemblance to the one we know. Writers, Lin concludes, participate in this process not by working for social change but by reforming the self. “Li disliked trying to change others,” Lin writes, and believed that “people who are concerned about evil and injustice in the world should begin the campaign against those things at their nearest source—themselves.”

One way or another, writers in this cohort all acknowledge the same injunction—even the ones who struggle against it. In his new book of poems, The Lights, Ben Lerner strives to elaborate an idea of redemption that is both private and social:

I don’t know any songs, but won’t withdraw. I am dreaming the pathetic dream of a pathos capable of redescription, so that corporate personhood becomes more than legal fiction. A dream in prose of poetry, a long dream of waking.

The dream of uniting the sophistication of art with the straightforwardness of justice also animates Lerner’s fiction, where it often takes the form of rueful comedy. In 10:04, the narrator cooks dinner for an Occupy Wall Street protester, but when asked how often he has been to Zuccotti Park, he dodges the question. His activism is limited to cooking, which he pompously describes as a way of being “a producer and not a consumer alone of those substances necessary for sustenance and growth within my immediate community.” That the dream never becomes more than a dream betrays Lerner’s similarity to Lin, Heti, and Cole, who frankly acknowledge the hiatus between art and justice, though without celebrating it.

Zadie Smith has always been too deeply rooted in the social comedy of the English novel to embrace autofiction, yet she also registers this disconnect, as can be seen in the way her influences have shifted over time. When it was first published, White Teeth was compared to Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo’s Underworld as a work of what James Wood called “hysterical realism.” The book’s arch humor, proliferating plot, and penchant for exaggeration owe much to the author Wood identified as the “parent” of that genre: Charles Dickens.

When Smith says that a woman “needed no bra—she was independent, even of gravity,” she is borrowing Dickens’s technique of making characters so intensely themselves that their essence saturates everything around them—as when he writes of the nouveau riche Veneerings, in Our Mutual Friend, that “their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new.” Dickens is a guest star in The Fraud, appearing at several of William Ainsworth’s dinner parties, and the news of his death prompts Eliza Touchet to offer an apt tribute: “She knew she lived in an age of things . . . and Charles had been the poet of things.”

But Dickens, who at another point in the novel is gently disparaged for his moralizing “sermons,” is no longer the presiding genius of Smith’s fiction. (Smith wrote in a recent essay that her first principle in taking up the historical novel was “no Dickens,” and she expressed a wry disappointment that he had forced his way into the proceedings.) Her 2005 novel, On Beauty, was a reimagining of E. M. Forster’s Howards End, and while her style has continued to evolve from book to book, Forster’s influence has been clear ever since, in everything from her preference for short chapters to her belief in “keep[ing] one’s mind open.”

Smith’s affinity for Forster owes something to their analogous historical situations. An Edwardian liberal who lived into the age of fascism and communism, Forster defended his values—“tolerance, good temper and sympathy,” as he put it in the 1939 essay “What I Believe”—with something of a guilty conscience, recognizing that the militant younger generation regarded them as “bourgeois luxuries.”

At the end of The Fraud, Eliza encounters Mr. Bogle’s son Henry, who has grown disgusted with his father’s quietism and become a political radical. He reproaches her for being more interested in understanding injustice than in doing something about it, proclaiming:

By God, don’t you see that what young men hunger for today is not “improvement” or “charity” or any of the watchwords of your Ladies’ Societies. They hunger for truth! For truth itself! For justice!

This certainty and urgency is the opposite of keeping one’s mind open, and while Mrs. Touchet—and Smith—aren’t prepared to say that it is wrong, they are certain that it’s not for them: “This essential and daily battle of life he had described was one she could no more envisage living herself than she could imagine crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a hot air balloon.”

Whether they style themselves as humanists or aesthetes, realists or visionaries, the most powerful writers who were born in the Seventies share this basic aloofness. To the next generation, the millennials, their disengagement from the collective struggle may seem reprehensible. For me, as I suspect is the case for many readers my age, it is part of what makes them such reliable guides to understanding, if not the times we live in, then at least the disjunction between the times and the self that must try to negotiate them.

[kammartinez]

by Adam Kirsch

In Elif Batuman’s 2022 novel Either/Or, the narrator, Selin, goes to her college library to look for Prozac Nation, the 1994 memoir by Elizabeth Wurtzel. Both of Harvard’s copies are checked out, so instead she reads reviews of the book, including Michiko Kakutani’s in the New York Times, which Batuman quotes:

“Ms. Wurtzel’s self-important whining” made Ms. Kakutani “want to shake the author, and remind her that there are far worse fates than growing up during the 70’s in New York and going to Harvard.”

It’s a typically canny moment in a novel that strives to seem artless. Batuman clearly recognizes that every criticism of Wurtzel’s bestseller—narcissism, privilege, triviality—could be applied to Either/Or and its predecessor, The Idiot, right down to the authors’ shared Harvard pedigree. Yet her protagonist resists the identification, in large part because she doesn’t see herself as Wurtzel’s contemporary. Wurtzel was born in 1967 and Batuman in 1977. This makes both of them members of Generation X, which includes those born between 1965 and 1980. But Selin insists that the ten-year gap matters: “Generation X: that was the people who were going around being alternative when I was in middle school.”

I was born in 1976, and the closer we products of the Seventies get to fifty, the clearer it becomes to me that Batuman is right about the divide—especially when it comes to literature. In pop culture, the Gen X canon had been firmly established by the mid-Nineties: Nirvana’s Nevermind appeared in 1991, the movie Reality Bites in 1994, Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill in 1995. Douglas Coupland’s book Generation X, which popularized the term, was published in 1991. And the novel that defined the literary generation, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996, when David Foster Wallace was about to turn thirty-four—technically making him a baby boomer.

Batuman was a college sophomore in 1996, presumably experiencing many of the things that happen to Selin in Either/Or. But by the time she began to fictionalize those events twenty years later, she joined a group of writers who defined themselves, ethically and aesthetically, in opposition to the older representatives of Generation X. For all their literary and biographical differences, writers like Nicole Krauss, Teju Cole, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Tao Lin share some basic assumptions and aversions—including a deep skepticism toward anyone who claims to speak for a generation, or for any entity larger than the self.

That skepticism is apparent in the title of Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud. Smith’s precocious success—her first book, White Teeth, was published in 2000, when she was twenty-four—can make it easy to think of her as a contemporary of Wallace and Wurtzel. In fact she was born in 1975, two years before Batuman, and her sensibility as a writer is connected to her generational predicament.

Smith’s latest book is, most obviously, a response to the paradoxical populism of the late 2010s, in which the grievances of “ordinary people” found champions in elite figures such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Rather than write about current events, however, Smith has elected to refract them into a story about the Tichborne case, a now-forgotten episode that convulsed Victorian England in the 1870s.

In particular, Smith is interested in how the case challenges the views of her protagonist, Eliza Touchet. Eliza is a woman with the sharp judgment and keen perceptions of a novelist, though her era has deprived her of the opportunity to exercise those gifts. Her surname—pronounced in the French style, touché—evokes her taste for intellectual combat. But she has spent her life in a supportive role, serving variously as housekeeper and bedmate to her cousin William Harrison Ainsworth, a man of letters who churns out mediocre historical romances by the yard. (Like most of the novel’s characters, Ainsworth and Touchet are based on real-life historical figures.)

Now middle-aged, Eliza finds herself drawn into public life by the Tichborne saga, which has divided the nation and her household as bitterly as any of today’s political controversies. Like all good celebrity trials, the case had many supporting players and intricate subplots, but at heart it was a question of identity: Was the man known as “the Claimant” really Roger Tichborne, an aristocrat believed to have died in a shipwreck some fifteen years earlier? Or was he Arthur Orton, a cockney butcher who had emigrated to Australia, caught wind of the reward on offer from Roger’s grief-stricken mother, and seized the chance of a lifetime? In the end, a jury decided that he was Orton, and instead of inheriting a country estate he wound up in a jail cell. What fascinates Smith, though, is the way the Tichborne case became a political cause, energizing a movement that took justice for “Sir Roger” to be in some way related to justice for the common man.

Eliza is a right-minded progressive who was active in the abolitionist movement in the 1830s. Proud of her judgment, she sees many problems with the Claimant’s story and finds it incredible that anyone could believe him. To her dismay, however, she lives with someone who does. William’s new wife, Sarah, formerly his servant, sees the Claimant as a victim of the same establishment that lorded over her own working-class family. The more she is informed of the problems with the Claimant’s argument, the more obdurate she becomes: “HE AIN’T CALLED ARTHUR ORTON IS HE,” she yells, “THEM WHO SAY HE’S ORTON ARE LYING.”

What Smith is dramatizing, of course, is the experience of so many liberal intellectuals over the past decade who had believed themselves to be on the side of “the people” only to find that, whether the issue was Brexit or Trump or COVID-19 protocols, the people were unwilling to heed their guidance, and in fact loathed them for it. It is in order to get to the bottom of this phenomenon that Eliza keeps attending the Tichborne trial, in much the same spirit that many liberal journalists reported from Trump rallies. Things get even more complicated when she befriends a witness for the defense, Mr. Bogle, who is among the Claimant’s main supporters even though he began his life as a slave on a Jamaica plantation managed by Edward Tichborne, the Claimant’s supposed father.

Though much of the novel deals with the case and the history of slavery in Britain’s Caribbean colonies, it is first and foremost the story of Eliza Touchet, and how her exposure to the trial alters her sense of the world and of herself. “The purpose of life was to keep one’s mind open,” she reflects, and it is this ability to see things from another perspective that makes her a novelist manqué.

Open-mindedness, even to the point of moral ambiguity, is one of the chief values Smith shares with her literary contemporaries. These writers grew up during a period of heightened tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, then took their first steps toward adult consciousness just as the Cold War concluded. They came of age in the brief period that Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history.”

Fukuyama’s description, famously premature though it was, still captures something crucial about the context in which the children of the Seventies began to think and write. While the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe is sometimes remembered as the “Revolutions of 1989,” the mood it created in the West was hardly revolutionary. After 1989, there was little of the “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” sentiment that had animated Wordsworth during the French Revolution. Instead, the ambient sense that history was moving steadily in the right direction encouraged writers to see politics as less urgent, and less morally serious, than inward experience.

In the fiction that defined the pre-9/11 era, political phenomena tended to assume cartoon form. Wallace’s Infinite Jest features an organization of Quebecois separatists called Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents—that is, the Wheelchair Assassins. In Smith’s White Teeth, one of the main characters joins a militant group named KEVIN, for Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the war on terror would put an end to jokes like these, but for a decade or so it was possible to see ideological extremism as a relic fit for spoofing—as with KGB Bar, a popular New York literary venue that opened in 1993.

For the young writers of that era, the most important battles were not being fought abroad but at home, and within themselves. Their enemies were the forces of cynicism and indifference that Wallace depicted in Infinite Jest, set in a near-future America stupefied by consumerism, mass entertainment, and addictive substances. The great balancing act of Wallace’s fiction was to truthfully represent this stupor while holding open the possibility that one could recover from it, the way the residents of the novel’s Ennet House manage to recover from their addictions. This dialectical mission is responsible for the spiraling self-consciousness that is the most distinctive (and, to some readers, the most annoying) aspect of his writing.

Dave Eggers set himself an analogous challenge in his 2000 memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Writing about a childhood tragedy—the nearly simultaneous deaths from cancer of his mother and father, which left the young Eggers with custody of his eight-year-old brother—he aimed to do full justice to his despair while still insisting on the validity of hope. “This did not happen to us for naught, I can assure you,” he writes,

there is no logic to that, there is logic only in assuming that we suffered for a reason. Just give us our due. I am bursting with the hopes of a generation, their hopes surge through me, threaten to burst my hardened heart!

By the end of the millennium, this was the familiar voice of Generation X. Loquacious and self-involved, its ironic grandiosity barely concealed a sincere grandiosity about its moral mission, which was to defeat despair and foster genuine human connection. Jonathan Franzen, Wallace’s realist rival, titled a book of essays How to Be Alone, and for these writers, loneliness was the great problem that literature was created to solve. “If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness,” Franzen wrote in his much-discussed essay “Perchance to Dream,” published in these pages in 1996. Eggers seems to have taken this idea literally, creating a nonprofit, 826 Valencia, that advertises writing mentorship for underserved students as a way of “building community” and rectifying inequality.

If sincerity and connection were the greatest virtues for these writers, the greatest sin was “snark.” That word gained literary currency thanks to a manifesto by Heidi Julavits in the first issue of The Believer, the magazine she co-founded in 2003 with the novelist Vendela Vida (Eggers’s wife) and the writer Ed Park. The title of the essay—“Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!”—like the title of the magazine, insisted that literature was an essentially moral enterprise, a matter of goodness, courage, and love. To demur from this vision was to reveal a smallness of soul that Julavits called snark: “wit for wit’s sake—or, hostility for hostility’s sake,” a “hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt.” For Kafka, a book was an axe for the frozen sea within; for the older cohort of Gen X writers, it was more like a hacksaw to cut through the barred cell of cynicism.

This was the environment—quiescent in politics, self-consciously sincere in literature—in which Smith and her contemporaries came of age. Just as they started to publish their first books, however, the stopped clock of history resumed with a vengeance. It is unnecessary to list the series of political and geopolitical shocks that have occurred since 2000. For the millennial generation, adulthood has been defined by apocalyptic fears, political frenzy, and glimpses of utopia, whether in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008 or in New York’s Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street in 2011.

The children of the Seventies tend to feel out of place in this new world. It’s not that they naïvely looked forward to a future of peace and harmony and are offended to find that it has not materialized. It is rather that their literary gaze was fixed within at an early age, and they continue to believe that the most authentic way to write about history is as the deteriorating climate through which the self moves.

The self, meanwhile, they approach with mistrust—a reaction against the heart-on-sleeve sincerity of their elders. Many of them have turned to autofiction, a genre which is often criticized as narcissistic—a way of shrinking the world to fit into the four walls of the writer’s room. In fact, it has served these writers as an antidote to the grandiosity of memoir, which tends to falsify in the direction of self-flattery—as this generation learned from the spectacular implosion of James Frey’s 2003 bestseller, A Million Little Pieces. By admitting from the outset that it is not telling the truth about the author’s life, autofiction makes it possible to emphasize the moral ambiguities that memoir has to apologize for or hide. That makes it useful for writers who are not in search of goodness, neither within themselves nor in political movements.

For Sheila Heti, this resistance to goodness takes the form of artistic introspection, which busier people tend to judge as selfish and idle. In How Should a Person Be?, from 2010, a character named Sheila has dinner with a young theater director named Ben, who has just returned with a friend from South Africa. “It was just such a crushing awakening of the colossal injustice of the way our world works economically,” he says of their trip, that he now wonders whether his work as a theater director—“a very narcissistic activity”—is morally justifiable. Yet nothing could be more narcissistic, in Heti’s telling, than such moral preening, and Sheila instinctively resists it. “They are so serious. They lectured me about my lack of morality,” she complains. She loathes the idea of having “to wear on the outside one’s curiosity, one’s pity, one’s guilt,” when art is concerned with what happens inside, which can only be observed with effort and in private. “It’s time to stop asking questions of other people,” she tells herself. “It is time to just go into a cocoon and spin your soul.”

Teju Cole’s 2011 novel Open City offers a more ambivalent version of the same idea. Julius, the narrator, can’t justify his aesthetic self-absorption on the grounds that he is an artist, as Sheila does, since he is a psychiatrist. It’s an ironic choice of profession for a man we come to know as guarded and aloof. Cole builds a portrait of Julius through his daily interactions with other people, like the taxi driver whose cab he enters gruffly. “The way you came into my car without saying hello, that was bad,” the driver rebukes him. “Hey, I’m African just like you, why you do this?” Julius apologizes for this small breach of solidarity, but insincerely: “I wasn’t sorry at all. I was in no mood for people who tried to lay claims on me.”

Indeed, for most of the novel he is alone, meditating in Sebaldian fashion on the atrocities of history as he takes long walks through Manhattan. When, during a trip to Brussels, he meets a man who wants to intervene in history—Farouq, a young Moroccan intellectual who declares that “America is a version of Al-Qaeda”—Julius is decidedly unimpressed:

There was something powerful about him, a seething intelligence, something that wanted to believe itself indomitable. But he was one of the thwarted ones. His script would stay in proportion.

Open City can’t be said to endorse Julius’s aesthetic solipsism. On the contrary, the last chapter finds him trapped on a fire escape outside Carnegie Hall in the rain, a striking symbol of a man isolated by culture. Just moments before, he had been united with the rest of the audience in Mahlerian rapture; now, he reflects, “my fellow concertgoers went about their lives oblivious to my plight,” as he tries to avoid slipping and falling to his death. The scene is Cole’s acknowledgment that aesthetic consciousness remains passive and solipsistic even when experienced in common, and that danger demands a different kind of solidarity—one that is active, ethical, even political. Yet Cole conjures Julius’s aristocratic fatalism in such intimate detail that the “Rejoice! Believe!” approach—to literature, and to life—can only appear childish.

Writers of this cohort do sometimes try to imagine a better world, but they tend to do so in terms that are metaphysical rather than political, moving at one bound from the fallen present to some kind of messianic future. In her 2022 novel Pure Colour, Heti tells the story of a woman named Mira whose grief over her father’s death prompts her to speculate about what Judaism calls the world to come. In Heti’s vision, this is not a place to which the soul repairs after death, nor is it some kind of revolutionary political arrangement; rather, it is an entirely new world that God will one day create to replace the one we live in, which she calls “the first draft of existence.”

The hardest thing to accept, for Heti’s protagonist, is that the end of our world will mean the disappearance of art. “Art would never leave us like a father dying,” Mira says. “In a way, it would always remain.” But over the course of Pure Colour, she comes to accept that even art is transitory. In a profoundly self-accusing passage, she concludes that a better world might even require the disappearance of art, since

art is preserved on hearts of ice. It is only those with icebox hearts and icebox hands who have the coldness of soul equal to the task of keeping art fresh for the centuries, preserved in the freezer of their hearts and minds.

Tao Lin’s unnerving, affectless autofiction leaves a rather different impression than Heti’s, and he has sometimes been identified as a voice from the next generation, the millennials. But his 2021 novel Leave Society shows him thinking along similar lines as the children of the Seventies. In Taipei, from 2013, Lin’s alter ego is named Paul, and he spends most of the novel joylessly eating in restaurants and taking mood-altering drugs. In Leave Society he is named Li, but he is recognizably the same person, perched on a knife-edge between extreme sensitivity and neurotic withdrawal. In the interim, he has decided that the cure for his troubles, and the world’s, lies in purging the body of the toxins that infiltrate it from every direction.

Like Heti, Lin anticipates a great erasure. All of recorded history, he writes, has been merely a “brief, fallible transition . . . from matter into the imagination.” Sometime soon we will emerge into a universe that bears no resemblance to the one we know. Writers, Lin concludes, participate in this process not by working for social change but by reforming the self. “Li disliked trying to change others,” Lin writes, and believed that “people who are concerned about evil and injustice in the world should begin the campaign against those things at their nearest source—themselves.”

One way or another, writers in this cohort all acknowledge the same injunction—even the ones who struggle against it. In his new book of poems, The Lights, Ben Lerner strives to elaborate an idea of redemption that is both private and social:

I don’t know any songs, but won’t withdraw. I am dreaming the pathetic dream of a pathos capable of redescription, so that corporate personhood becomes more than legal fiction. A dream in prose of poetry, a long dream of waking.

The dream of uniting the sophistication of art with the straightforwardness of justice also animates Lerner’s fiction, where it often takes the form of rueful comedy. In 10:04, the narrator cooks dinner for an Occupy Wall Street protester, but when asked how often he has been to Zuccotti Park, he dodges the question. His activism is limited to cooking, which he pompously describes as a way of being “a producer and not a consumer alone of those substances necessary for sustenance and growth within my immediate community.” That the dream never becomes more than a dream betrays Lerner’s similarity to Lin, Heti, and Cole, who frankly acknowledge the hiatus between art and justice, though without celebrating it.

Zadie Smith has always been too deeply rooted in the social comedy of the English novel to embrace autofiction, yet she also registers this disconnect, as can be seen in the way her influences have shifted over time. When it was first published, White Teeth was compared to Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo’s Underworld as a work of what James Wood called “hysterical realism.” The book’s arch humor, proliferating plot, and penchant for exaggeration owe much to the author Wood identified as the “parent” of that genre: Charles Dickens.

When Smith says that a woman “needed no bra—she was independent, even of gravity,” she is borrowing Dickens’s technique of making characters so intensely themselves that their essence saturates everything around them—as when he writes of the nouveau riche Veneerings, in Our Mutual Friend, that “their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new.” Dickens is a guest star in The Fraud, appearing at several of William Ainsworth’s dinner parties, and the news of his death prompts Eliza Touchet to offer an apt tribute: “She knew she lived in an age of things . . . and Charles had been the poet of things.”

But Dickens, who at another point in the novel is gently disparaged for his moralizing “sermons,” is no longer the presiding genius of Smith’s fiction. (Smith wrote in a recent essay that her first principle in taking up the historical novel was “no Dickens,” and she expressed a wry disappointment that he had forced his way into the proceedings.) Her 2005 novel, On Beauty, was a reimagining of E. M. Forster’s Howards End, and while her style has continued to evolve from book to book, Forster’s influence has been clear ever since, in everything from her preference for short chapters to her belief in “keep[ing] one’s mind open.”

Smith’s affinity for Forster owes something to their analogous historical situations. An Edwardian liberal who lived into the age of fascism and communism, Forster defended his values—“tolerance, good temper and sympathy,” as he put it in the 1939 essay “What I Believe”—with something of a guilty conscience, recognizing that the militant younger generation regarded them as “bourgeois luxuries.”

At the end of The Fraud, Eliza encounters Mr. Bogle’s son Henry, who has grown disgusted with his father’s quietism and become a political radical. He reproaches her for being more interested in understanding injustice than in doing something about it, proclaiming:

By God, don’t you see that what young men hunger for today is not “improvement” or “charity” or any of the watchwords of your Ladies’ Societies. They hunger for truth! For truth itself! For justice!

This certainty and urgency is the opposite of keeping one’s mind open, and while Mrs. Touchet—and Smith—aren’t prepared to say that it is wrong, they are certain that it’s not for them: “This essential and daily battle of life he had described was one she could no more envisage living herself than she could imagine crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a hot air balloon.”

Whether they style themselves as humanists or aesthetes, realists or visionaries, the most powerful writers who were born in the Seventies share this basic aloofness. To the next generation, the millennials, their disengagement from the collective struggle may seem reprehensible. For me, as I suspect is the case for many readers my age, it is part of what makes them such reliable guides to understanding, if not the times we live in, then at least the disjunction between the times and the self that must try to negotiate them.

[ask-the-clergy-bc]

how do the papas and ghouls like to cuddle?

CUTE!! I went with Era IV ghouls, if that's ok!

Papas + Ghouls Favorite Way to Cuddle

Papa Nihil: You know this man expects nothing less than cuddling together when there's a marathon of 'The Omen' on TV! There will always be one of those handmade knitted blankets he keeps for the occasion! Nihil loves the classic way of both of you facing the TV and resting your head on each other's, OR having you rest your head on his shoulder while he rests his cheek on top of your noggin. So long as no one is blocking the TV, he is fine!

Papa I: It's not the most COMFORTABLE way to cuddle, but Papa LOVES having you in his lap while he works. He likes to do this a couple of ways, depending on what you find better. Either having you on one of his thighs with your lags across his lap OR sitting between his thighs while he works around you. There is something sensory wise that makes this so lovely for him. But he won't say not to moving to the bed or couch. After all, staying like that for too long might mean getting cramped or having his leg fall asleep!

Papa II: Is not one to want to cuddle often, so when he does it feels very special. Papa typically will lay on his back and have you tucked under his arm. He likes to keep you close to his side while he rubs your back or arm. While he typically waits for you to initiate cuddling most times, the only time he is vocal is WHERE you cuddle. If it's not on his lavish bed or chase longue he will be grumpy about it. There are some positions that just aren't comfortable and he wants this time to be relaxing.

Papa III: Prefers to cuddle in a way that allows you both to face each other! That way it's easier for the two of you to talk or gaze into one another's eyes (romantic cliches are mandatory!) Papa, however, is very sneaky when it comes to snuggle time. You will never cuddle in a way where you physically CAN'T play with his hair. Papa loves all forms of this gentle contact, but if he had to pick a favorite it would be nestled under your chin, face in your neck, and you playing with his hair.

Papa IV/Cardinal Copia: Absolutely LOVES to be the little spoon, if he can! Preferably if you have your face in his hair or chin resting on his head or shoulder. Admittedly, Copia can be a bit selfish when it comes to cuddles as he wants to be the one who is spoiled. Play or kiss his hair, hold him from behind, and whisper sweet nothings to him. You will have the new Papa eating out of your hands!

Ember: Many people always assume Ember would be unwilling to admit that he loves cuddles and soft intimacy, but it couldn't be farther from the truth! The guitarist LOVES to cuddle and will take every opportunity he can to get them! Even if it means being a huge brat! Ember doesn't mind most cuddle positions so long as you are planning to play with his hair or give him horn scritches. He's like a very demanding cat that constantly needs pets!

Swiss: The King of Snuggles and Cuddles, if he were to say so himself! Like Papa III, Swiss prefers most cuddling positions where you two are facing each other. Yes, because it's easier to talk and just relax with one another. But, it's also easier to do other small intimate gestures that he likes. Swiss is all about to touch and relishes any chance he has to show you affection. He's all about caressing and cupping one of your cheeks, kissing your forehead, or even booping your nose as a joke!

Aether: Nothing makes the guitarist happier than him comfortably on his back and you laid on top of him. The weight of his bedmate on top of him relaxing has always been a huge comfort to him. Aether has jokingly referred to you as his teddy bear on more than one occasion! This is usually accompanied by his arms securely around you as you listen to his heart beat.

Cirrus: Will be big spoon EVERY time. Cirrus has just never been as comfortable being the one being held. She prefers being the one 'protecting' her lover during snuggle time. Especially during sleep. The keyboardist will usually have her arms wrapped around your middle, or one arm draped around your shoulders. What's really cute is sometimes her tail will wrap around you too, for extra protection!

Cumulus: Loves cuddling when you are propped up by some pillows, first. Cumulus prefers being between your legs when you both cuddle, so she can use you as her favorite pillow! This can be one of two ways with her. One, she has her back to your chest so she can lean back and you can both do something like watch TV. or Two, she's turned to face you so she can nuzzle into your neck or chest.

Mountain: Because of his size he's used to being the bigger spoon, so he doesn't mind if that's the default. But Mountain always appreciate when you want to cuddle in a way that you are both level with each other. Loves when you mutually have your arms wrapped around each other in a tangle of limbs. He sleeps best when you are there to hold- even if it's just bear hugging your arm or leg while he sleeps.

Rain: The absolutely cuddliest ghoul you will ever meet. He simply can't pick a favorite way to snuggle because they are ALL amazing. I think as long as you are with him he won't be disappointed. But if he absolutely had to pick one position it would definitely be the two of you koala clinging to each other. So having your arms AND legs wrapped around one another. Not practical, but Rain loves getting so close! Bonus if it's under giant fluffy blankets.

[kettlequills]

C2: waking dreams: master of fate

Obligatory Miraak In Pain chapter! A classic for every Miraak-Lives fanfic. Lots of vomiting, graphic injury, some hallucinations, blood and gore, paralysis, paranoia, and other fun stuff in this one, bear in mind. On A03.

A high, anxious dragon-creel jarred Miraak from total unconsciousness. A pause. Then, again. That awful, hair-raising screech, the kind of sound that flaked chalk, cracked glass and shattered eardrums.

Miraak had never felt worse in his life. He was not even sure he was alive. If he wanted to be.

His body was numbness and agony. He tried to open his eyes, but they were glued shut. His mouth, too, reducing his breath to a whistling wheeze past the turgid coagulant of thick, thick ink. Even his gasping little sob was stoppered in his blocked tear-ducts. His mask was sucked tightly against his skin. It felt like being choked. Stars burst in the dizzy darkness behind his eyes when he tried to breathe. His ribs ached familiarly. Broken? Something sharp jutted against the grind of his flesh. It felt like metal. It felt like death.

The dragon creeled again. The primordial terror of that sound. It was afraid. It was hurting. It was animal.

It was the sort of sound that summoned hurrying priests. It was the sort of sound that echoed off mountainsides and resounded down valleys, and woke even children wise enough not to scream. It was the sort of sound that came before the gristly snap of jaws and bone and viscera, and a new, bloody mask to press onto the quick-forgotten face of a new servant.

Names, traded like currency. But he was Mir-Aak.He was the mightiest Dragon Priest of them all, and everything he had won had been with fire and fury and strength no dragon could deny. That no dragon could replace.

Wherever he was, whatever cry the dragon made, he would face it, he would conquer it. As fate foretold, their power would meet the thunder of Miraak’s soul, and be subsumed.

Miraak fumbled at his limbs, trying to push off his mask in the vain hope it would help him see, struggling against the rubbery tentacles he was only half-sure he didn’t feel looping like a leash around his neck. He wouldn’t be sure he had hands any longer, if it wasn’t for the fact that one of them hurt.

Hurt like the word pain had been invented for this moment alone.

His glove was unwieldy and stiff, and it was only when the wreck of his hand struck the ground and it squished that he realised that it was because it was full of blood. His blood. Filling his glove, because his hand had been carved open as if by a great serrated knife, and air kissed scarred bone and his fingers hung uselessly and he wanted to vomit.

It was that one, naturally, that finally caught at the lip of the golden mask, because the gods had never loved Miraak.

The pain nearly topped him into darkness again, but he managed a blind scrape at the congealed ink on its face. It tore like skin, and bubbling, acid wetness sleeted down his cheek and jaw. It was like a Seeker’s bite.

But his eyes opened, and he could make out dim, blurry shapes. Light was needles in his eyes, but Miraak was a Dragon Priest, and his destiny had had him conquer every pain set before him and make himself its master. He needed no god. He had himself. He did have himself, didn’t he? It hurt, it hurt, it hurt. He must be in his own body.

Stone floor, stone walls. Thick with dust, made him cough. The slumbering serpent of a dragon’s tail. Dirty, foul-smelling, dull; no loving priest had tended it with warm water and oil, the scalebeds were so dry he could see the ink-ridden cracks. Armour gleamed like a rusty hill under the slump of Miraak’s broken body, old steel warped and rent tellingly down the middle where a sword might slide home. A bloodless wound here, in Nirn, but a lightning scar across the stone like the spiderweb scarring of their face. The mask watching Miraak dully even now, centimetres from his hand where he must have dropped it.

Laat Dovahkiin’s armour and their flesh-stripped bones, his bedmate and bed both for his first night on Tamriel. When he coughed, wetly, ink stained their armour – oh, oh, that wasn’t rust, that was Miraak, bleeding all over the corpse of his foe.

Time – he could feel it, a silent rasp on his spine – passing, how dreadful, how glorious, to count it under his heartbeats like grains of sand in a gear, how long had it been? A night?

Not time enough for Laataazin’s bones to bleach. Their supplies to gather dust. Their potions. Large bottles of glowing red and blue and green, set carefully just below the plinth where the Black Book awaited. Closed, for now, but he could hear it whisper, could see Mora’s eyes on him through the susurrus of the pages. But the Prince did not reach out to reclaim his plaything, only watched.

Miraak could feel his oily laughter, could imagine the words that would drip from his wretched darkness, mourning how far his Champion had fallen – on his belly like a snake, hand over grim hand, straining towards Laataazin’s castoffs.

Not victorious, after all, but a strong name still for a worthy fight.

Never had a journey across a simple stone floor seemed so desperate and so humiliating. He crawled on the ground like a child, sweating profusely and unable to hold back his pained moans. Even his voice, his pain, sounded whispery and faint, barely an echo of its true self. It did not reverberate like it should, and the stone did not quake and tremble at its touch. He felt wrung out, limp, like a colourless ghost.

And Mora watched, watched. Miraak felt the eyes all over him, like ants. Or was it air? He felt every thread in his robes grating his skin like being dragged up the back of dragon. The fastest, bloodiest way to flay a man. Their scales could cut like diamonds. Only Miraak had made the euphemism ‘riding the dragon’ anything other than a painful death sentence.

He was the mightiest Dragon Priest that ever lived.

His shaking hands knocked the first potion over and it rolled out of his reach. The wetness on his face was warm as tears, sharp as acid. The blood and ink that wept from his watering eyes, his nose, that drowned the dragon’s scream in his ears, forbade that notion of ghostliness. No snowiness for Miraak, no, Apocrypha’s reek was all over him, dripped in him, made sodden and heavy as weights his robes.

The second bottle cooperated, but the cork wrestled with him a moment too long. That first sip stuck to his throat and teeth and tongue like paper. He hacked out some mulchy mess he didn’t bother to examine and managed two mouthfuls of crimson potion. Ancient nerves awoke protesting in his tongue – he could not tell what he tasted, only that it was foul, and thick, and felt like rot and ash.

His stomach’s revolt was instant. He knuckled his fist against his mouth, forcing the potion to stay down. But Miraak was already coughing around the first swallow, the second had him retching. Miserable bile stung his lips and splattered blue-green ink down his chin. Cold sweat sprung out on his forehead. Laataazin’s mask’s empty eyes watched him hauntingly.

Breathing dragged fishhooks through the soft tissue of his throat. To distract himself from the weak clenches of his exhausted stomach trying to empty itself, Miraak stared forbiddingly at the neat row of potions, scattered now by his clumsiness, and tried to memorise their colours. There were green ones, red ones. Blue ones. Sahrotaar, he thought dimly, the colour was like its scales. Where was he? The dragon had gone quiet. More colours than Miraak had seen in thousands of years. Of eras of human history he had been forced to read about, with no hand on Tamriel to rewrite the passage of events.

No longer.

A glint caught his weary eye, deeper red than the rest. Wine-red, rather than blood-red. The stony glimmer tantalised him, teased some exhausted part of Miraak that still craved to know. What secret was hidden here, among Laataazin’s healing potions? Miraak’s, now, by right of conquest, whatever it was.

The first person to speak to him in a thousand years, whose bones had held Miraak’s bleeding, unconscious body.

He retched again when he tried to move, but his stomach only cramped warningly around nothing. Miraak fumbled ungently through the stock of potions, his blurring eyes more hindrance than help. Eventually, he drew out a necklace, simple wood set with the ruby that had caught his eye, nothing more. Crudely-carved dragons squirmed around that red sun, chasing triangular shapes that might have been birds, and tattered feathers frayed around the cord. It was shoddy, no masterpiece to Miraak’s discerning eye.

Disappointment was sharp and quick, but chased quickly on the heel of intrigue as he sensed the enchantment that laid over the piece. A strong sacrifice had been made over this little scrap of wood and feather, so strong that it hummed and burned. But why waste such powerful enchantment on so fragile a material?

Wood burnt, and cracked, and rotted. Dragon Priests built in stone, for the servants of generations that would come after them and convince their master they had never died at all. No change, no loss, stubborn to time. Enduring, immortal, unfleshed.

It did not feel detrimental, so he looped it over his head. His, now. Laataazin was dead, and their world, their life, their soul, it was all Miraak’s, as it always should have been. The necklace itched like a secret, but he would decipher its enchantment. For now, it served as challenge and trophy both to Miraak’s strength. Such arrogance, from Laataazin, leaving behind even a scrap of power when they went to face their death.

The dragon shrieked, lower and louder. Miraak jerked, torn from his contemplation, and his back seized into a hard knot of painful muscle. Through watering eyes, he saw the long whipping neck, the flutelike snout, the leafblade tail – Relonikiv, craning shrilly towards dimness that swallowed the world twenty feet from Miraak in all directions. Relonikiv’s jade head dipped and danced, its yellow eyes ringed with apocryphal ooze that splattered the ground.

“Relonikiv,” he tried to say. It creaked out weakly. “Rel-“

It heard him that time, and Relonikiv’s cringing head dropped low to the ground, neck arched up like a snake, wings fluttering with anxiety. It groaned at Miraak, yellow eyes bright as lamps in the darkness, snarling teeth barrelled with putrid breath that warped and smoked the air of the darkness they shared.

He could not see what disturbed it, what horror above had it so transfixed, nor did he know why it did not simply fly to escape it. Relonikiv had not been brave when it had met Miraak, and the centuries hence had only sharpened its instinct to flee when faced with something it did not understand.

“Come,” he whispered to it, but Relonikiv cowered away with a low whine. Miraak hissed out a breath between his teeth. He had no patience for Relonikiv’s timidity today, not in this much pain. “What do you think I’ll do, fool? … Find me Sahrotaar. Relonikiv? Sahrotaar.”

Relonikiv blinked at him. It reared its head out of sight into the lumpy darkness, those dizzying swirls of venomous yellow leaving a glowing trail, like a sparkler through the night. There was the telltale snap of dragon jaws, and then Sahrotaar’s brassy, confused bellow as it was jerked abruptly from slumber. Miraak’s eyesight was blurry, and Sahrotaar’s great head rearing out of the darkness looked like nothing so much as a vast, terrible serpent. Relonikiv screamed back, and now the darkness was pierced by the dusty light coming from – somewhere, and four luminous dragon-eyes, moon-pale blue and acid yellow.

“What is this place?” Sahrotaar snarled, “I do not believe what my nose tells me.”

Relonikiv rustled its wings and snapped its jaws. It groaned again, quiet and low and distressed.

“Sahrotaar,” Miraak wheezed, and at once the blunt blue head was nudging at his side, Sahrotaar’s eyes already thoughtfully lidded, so that their soft glow was muted. Though Sahrotaar’s searching snout was gentle, the contact nearly knocked Miraak over, weak as he was.

“Thuri.”

“Up,” Miraak fumbled at the dragon’s nose with his uninjured – his less injured – hand, but thankfully, Sahrotaar understood his meaning swiftly. Sahrotaar nudged its nose underneath his arm and took Miraak’s weight with it as it carefully lifted him to his feet. He clung on to the fringe of webbed scales beneath its protruding jaw and tried very hard not to faint.

It took more effort than Miraak would ever admit.

The ridges of Sahrotaar’s scales felt harsh against his bared forehead. Miraak was aware of the lank locks of hair that fell across Sahrotaar’s snout as his own, the same way he knew that the hand that throbbed with blood and pain was his – distantly, without full recognition. He missed his mask. But the ink was still leaking out of him, his mouth, his eyes, his ears and nose, in irregular, acidic spurts that made him choke and his skin burn.

He could just see one crystalline blue eye, the colour of the bright ice of his homeland, watching him underneath the protective inner lid. Sahrotaar’s breath gusted his robes about his body, felt like standing in a tempest, though the ancient, soaked fabric barely stirred.

Miraak panted wetly against Sahrotaar’s head, spangles of pain jarring from his much-abused body with every breath, every second he forced his muscles to lock and his legs to bear a portion of his weight. Apocrypha had preserved him, so he knew his body was more than strong enough to stand tall, but theory had never felt so far from reality.

“Where is… where is Kruziikrel?”

Relonikiv uttered a mournful warble. Its wings pressed tight against its back, it sniffed at what Miraak had taken to be fallen rock, or some other masonry. Something heaped and grey, utterly still. But not dead, or else Miraak would have taken its soul, and likely feel far better than he did now.

“I smell blood, thuri,” Sahrotaar rumbled. Its voice jarred Miraak’s bones all the way up to the elbow, and he bit back a bitter curse of pain.

“Take me,” he commanded, and ignored how thin his voice was.

Sahrotaar helped him limp over to the prone form of Kruziikrel, who slumped like a dragon dead and bled steadily. Thin grooves had worn where it had lain as its acidic blood bit into the ancient stone. At first, Miraak mistook its neck for its mouth, several mouths, all open and staring red red tongue – then he understood that Kruziikrel had been grievously wounded indeed.

Ragged tears had ripped all the way up its neck to its shoulders, where now loose skin flapped like lips, scales peeled back like a gutted trout. As they got closer, Miraak could smell the blood himself, brittle and violent.

Miraak collapsed next to Kruziikrel. His slump against the dragon’s mostly-intact chest was graceless, but if Kruziikrel felt any pain it was not enough to jar it from slumber. Blood soaked his glove and stung his skin. Kruziikrel had covered their retreat, he ascertained – last through the portal, it had been the one to bear the brunt of Mora’s teeth.

Tracing one of the wounds, Miraak considered – briefly – the spell that had slain the Last Dragonborn. Kruziikrel was weak, but his soul was old and strong.

Relonikiv whined behind him. Miraak could feel Sahrotaar’s presence hunkered at his side, ice-bright eyes watching its master carefully. He felt, at once, the strength of Relonikiv where he was weak, the steadiness of Sahrotaar where he faltered. Some emotion touched Miraak then as he reached for the tired spring of magicka within him, something that was uncomfortable but hid from his examination. Thousands of years they had been his only companions in servitude, and yet, when he was weak and in pain, all his body told him was that each one had teeth longer than his forearm, and years to fester vengeance.

“Laas, Kruziikrel,” Miraak bade, and felt the dragon stir as his magicka reached it golden and bright.

It was the last light he saw.

---

Miraak snapped into awareness. His head throbbed. His chest felt like it was being crushed. He was paralysed. Miraak panicked. He was a prisoner – he was trapped – he was not alone. He could feel breathing, massive, muscular breathing, the whistling snore of a predator so much larger than he was. He could feel soul-shredding pain in his chest. His entire body felt shrunken and small, stuck as sandbags.

“Miraak,” a voice murmured. He knew that voice.

I killed you, Miraak wanted to shout, but his lips were stiff as marble. His heart thundered in his chest, and a cold sweat sprung out on his skin. The air felt wrong – weird. His body was limp, folded against something horribly soft. It was warm, wet. Like a corpse, Miraak thought wildly. Like Laat’s blood soaking his robes. Their body, soft and warm and still in his arms, eyes glossy, dark, dead.

Laataazin. Laat Dovahkiin. Niid, niid – hi los dilon. You are dead!

“Miraak,” Laat called again. Their voice was quiet as always, but close, as if they were standing right by his ear. He could feel the shivery vibrations of it across his skin. Could feel Laat’s wheeze in their voice, the gurgling of the blood they hadn’t managed to cough out in time to speak, before he killed them. “Do you feel mighty now, Miraak?”

Miraak screamed.

The piercing sound shocked him. He gasped suddenly for breath, choked on the vomit heaving out of his mouth. He tried to sit up, tried to roll, but his body was unresponsive and instead he panted between retches, feeling the warmth of his vomit trapped against his face against his chin, his neck, dripping into the neckline of his robes. It reeked of ink, the sour smell of sweat. His tongue was swollen and dry in his mouth, like a gag. The bile stung his lips, burned in two hundred small wounds that split his skin, dry as a draugr.

There was a collar of fire around his neck, blistering with the strength of the sun.

Shuddering sobs took over him after the worst of the retching passed. Tearless, dry, hurting more than it helped. The world rocked and spun underneath him, like he was in flight. Like he was falling. His hands wanted to twitch and curl into claws, wrinkle his robes – the robes, not Laat’s corpse, soft and warm – beneath his punishing grip. The agony of his destroyed hand almost failed to register.

Robes. Not books. Not bodies.

Tamriel. Miraak was free. He was floating somewhere above and below the word, like it dragged him in orbit. Someone was watching him. Mora. Mora was watching him.

He cried, made some horrible mix of sounds that made his aching gut cramp and groan. His body felt like a bruise. He had sweated through his robes, and his skin itched and ached, and everything was too loud, and he was free. So then, why did it feel like he was trapped?

Miraak’s head pulsed in time to his heartbeat, quivering and irregular. His mind felt swampy and confused, reality sliding away from him like softened soap whenever he tried to grasp it. Twice, he commanded himself to move and rose all the way to his feet before he realised his body had not shifted an inch with a deep, internal tug that had his heart hammering in fear. Thrice, he tried to open his eyes, and saw only darkness. He had no eyes, his body told him, there was nothing to open. But he knew – he knew it lied…

Someone was watching him. He could feel its presence, tall and eternal, its greedy hands reaching to grasp him. To take him.

He could hear its breathing, deep and huge.

Mora?

Some part of Miraak knew, vaguely, that he was probably dying. Dehydration, if not shock. It had been so long since he had to worry about these things, but a body was only an animal, and it knew when it hurt. It shouldn’t be like this. The power of Laataazin’s soul should have been enough to sustain him until he could heal the wreck of his body.

Mora’s eyes were tangible as feathers brushing along his skin. Miraak was so cold. So hot. Each thought made his temples pound. And the world spun, spun, spun underneath him, and mocked his attempts to move and breathe. Even when he tried to lie still, there came the sharp, brutal yanks in his sternum, as if he was constantly floating free of his body, some animal part of him so desperate to move it wanted to scrape free of his unmoving flesh altogether.

Something cold and wet, rubbery and strong, licked over the back of his neck. It tickled the shell of his ear, dragging strokes of damp slime and slick ooze of oil. Miraak’s thick tongue stopped his scream. Mora? Mora?! The Prince’s gaze pierced his skin like needles, saw the fetid creature within. Saw him struggling, panicking, against a limp form that had become his new prison. There was never anywhere to hide from Mora’s allseeing eye.

He wanted to get up. He wanted to look over his shoulder. He wanted to check that there was no ghost, no Laataazin. He wanted to slap his hands against his ear, rip away the thing that teased there, flirting with the idea of squirming right the way down into his brain. It would hurt so much.

One final betrayal by Mora? Had the Prince done something? Freed him, just to watch him die slowly inches from three dragonsouls that could save him? … Was this always how it was going to end?

Miraak wanted to cry. Shame warred with his terror, his disgust for himself. How revolted the Miraak of centuries ago, bold and proud in his prime, would be by this shivering, fearful wreck that had stolen his name. And where was Sahrotaar, Relonikiv, Kruziikrel? The repositories of power where Miraak might steal a few more heartbeats of life… He could feel them, the pulse of their souls, not far from him, but they might as well have been far as sundered Atmora for all he could reach them.

He thought about water. About the endless seas of ink that ebbed and flowed within Apocrypha. Thought about wrenching his mask off and gulping desperate, some critical creature inside him so fearful of thirst that he’d taken Mora’s bitter sap willingly down his throat, the Prince’s deep laughter and the solicitous curl of the tentacles that had pulled Miraak’s seizing body from the inky waters. He tried to remember what it was like to cup his hands in pure sweet lakewater, good to drink and fresh, but the memory was faded and grey – more like an awareness it was something he must have done at least once than it was personal.

He thought about water, and he thought about moving, and he thought about dying.

Sounds brushed by, and when he heard the cultists, he thought at first it was another trick of his mind. Their voices were varied and muttering, scuffed by their robes and the wet slap of bare feet on stone. Creaking hinges, rasp of wood-bristles.

“-hearing things,” he heard – his mind parsed the language vaguely, understanding it more as a dreamlike awareness than any cognisance – “I am not of course you are. Temple sealed shrine. Dream-demons … You see demons everywhere. They are everywhere. I was in Vvardenfell … dreamwoken and then slain Blight ash – Lord – how would a dragon get underground, then, you damn fool?”

“Well, it could not be that, sounds like a squealing netch,” there were two voices, Miraak suddenly ascertained, and they were speaking Dunmeris. Did he speak Dunmeris? He must.

“Or a cliff racer,” the other intoned dourly. “They nest in caves.”

“Blessed Jiub, I hope not,” came the reply, then, “Help me with this buggering door.”

The ancient iron doors had been sealed for a long time – longer than Miraak could remember, in fact. They shrieked awfully, ground like glass over the stone. A growl, deep as rocks muttering under the weight of waterfalls. A dragon. Restless, dream-slunk, exhausted. Reflexive.

“… fucking heard that!?”

“What …” A flurry of words that were too quick to grasp. “- heal! I think it’s…”

Something wrenched his shoulder in a fierce grip. Miraak’s body moved limply under the touch, and he heard a sudden clatter – a lamp, perhaps a blade. An icy touch on his neck, fingers, fingers – someone was touching him and he couldn’t see who –

“-still alive, go-!”

The hand on him moving then – silence –

“… Master?”

[dearestones]

Demons in the Night (Yandere! Agatsuma Zenitsu x Reader)

Warning: Nonconsensual touching/cuddling, yandere behavior.

.

.

.

The futon was almost unbearable. It was nearing summer and even though the cover of night was always cooler than in the waking hours, you were overcome with heat. However, perhaps it wasn’t the covers that were keeping you awake—the heat of which had you panting in slight panic.

Perhaps it was your bedmate that slumbered carelessly right next to you.

Ahem, but that’s a misconception isn’t it?

You weren’t so much bedmates as you were being held against your will while sleeping. It wasn’t your idea to stay with Agatsuma, but Kamado and Hashibira were insistent. The trio had insisted that demons existed and that it was best to have someone stay behind lest demons were to scavenge the areas within your home.

Upon asking them why they were insistent on such safety measures, they had declared that you fit the criteria of the victims that this so-called demon liked to feast upon. Confused and somewhat tired after all the harassment that those three had engaged in for quite some time, you had uneasily agreed.

They thanked you.

Agatsuma, with a particularly bright gleam in his eyes, had nearly bowled you over in his attempt to hug you in gratitude. You had dodged him—barely—but something told you that if he could, he would have definitely gotten a hold of you.

That was unsettling.

And so, over the past two days, the trio of these so-called Demon Slayers had protected you and your home. During the day, they rested and helped you with your everyday chores. During the night, that was when one of them stayed behind.

At first, it was somewhat awkward, but nothing untoward happened.

Kamado had taken the first night with you. He had regaled you with stories of his youth and his training with his sensei. You had laughed when he had told you about the exploits he and his younger siblings would get into whenever they thought their mother wasn’t looking. You had cried when he told you about his last days with his father. And you had grown concerned when he told you about the existence of demons.

Despite his words, you didn’t actually believe him.

It was the Taisho era! What he was speaking of was nothing more than hogwash and tales from parents who wanted to keep their children safe from harm.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

And then you had fallen asleep.

The next night, you were accompanied by Hashibira. He only spoke of grand adventures, of heart palpitating fights between his comrades and a vast variety of demons. Although his words were harsh and guttural, his movements as rough and animalistic like a common boar, he was kind and somewhat attentive to your needs.

You thought him kind and when you had said so, he had stuttered and you could almost feel the embarrassment that was surely coming off from him in waves.

And then you had fallen asleep.

But it was the third night that alarmed you.

You tried not to pay too much attention over the past few days and nights, but Agatsuma didn’t sit well with you. He was always… there. If you weren’t paying attention to him, he was always whining and begging for your attention. If you were listening to him, he would grasp your arm and grovel at your feet to spare him the time of day.

During the day, his friends were there to hold him back. However, it was nighttime and his friends were Demon Slayers.

They had to go out and patrol the area lest the demon think they were slacking.

You, of course, had thought that they were supposed to be done with their mission before the third night, but the demon had sadly eluded them. You couldn’t find fault with them. If the people in your village were more skilled and knowledgable about the demons, perhaps you wouldn’t have this problem in the fist place. Plus, they had said that they were still in the lower ranks.

It couldn’t be helped.

Agatsuma, rather, couldn’t be helped.

Once dusk had settled into the countryside and the Demon Slayers had bid their farewells, you had expected the clinginess. You even prepared for it by readying a series of excuses for the blond to consider before he had the idea to do… other things.

Things that you would rather not think about.

And yet, despite your protests and your carefully worded responses, somehow, some way you managed to get into this sort of situation.

Underneath the moonlight, his blond hair seemingly glowed. His eyes, usually so bright and brimming with a joy that was almost always directed at you were blissfully closed. Snores filled the area between you—an area that had been swiftly filled when he grasped you close to him. If it were not for your unwillingness, the unease that you felt concerning him, you would have thought that this situation was laughable.

Another part of you thought that it could have been adorable.

But it wasn’t.

The heat was getting to you. Whatever movements you endeavored to get away from the blond Demon Slayer was all for naught. In fact, his grip had been somewhat loose and firm at the beginning of your night together, but now… Now, it seemed like there were thick ropes winding about your waist, his legs trapping and intertwining with yours. He was cuddled so close to you, you weren’t quite sure where you started and where he began.

He kept his face close to your neck, his breaths tickling the sensitive skin. Below, you could feel your night clothes become loose from every move that he made (be it from his unconscious imaginings or if there was something more sinister at play, you didn’t know). His face was far too close to your chest for your liking, but you couldn’t move your arms, couldn’t nudge him away.

Underneath his uniform, you hadn’t quite realized that he was strong. Unlike Kamado who showcased his strength through his calloused fingers or Hashibira with his toned muscles, Agatsuma’s strength was unknown to you until now.

“M-Mr. Agatsuam,” you tried to whisper in the dark. Your voice was low and rough, the heat was depriving you of your body’s moisture. You wouldn’t be surprised that if you slept now, you would surely awaken in the morning with a dry mouth and a sweaty body. “Mr. Agatsuma,” you tried again.

He cradled you closer, his hands like manacles as they gripped you around the waist and tugged you deeper into his hold. It was no use.

There was no way out of this.

You wanted to cry, to curse the gods who sent you this-this-this—

This stupid young man from coming into your life.

You should have known better than to let these Demon Slayers into your life.

Should have known better than to let them take refuge into your home, into convincing you that they were there to rid the world of demons.

But most of all, you should have known better than to believe that demons only roamed around during the night.

There was one coiling his arms and legs around you, trapping you like prey within a trap.

For what was more demonic?

A demon that needlessly killed others or a human that continued taking without consent?

.

.

.

DISCLAIMER: I do not condone yandere behavior outside of fictional settings. Please don’t mistake the actions of fictional characters displayed in works of fiction to be considered harmless in real life.

If you want to donate a Ko-Fi, feel free https://ko-fi.com/devintrinidad.

KIMETSU NO YAIBA (DEMON SLAYER) MASTERLIST

[jeannereames]

In an earlier post you mentioned that the Pages would always be in the King's room, even during sex. Hypothetically, if Alexander and Hephaistion were still having sex (which I know is a far from concrete assumption), would the Pages still have been in the room with them? Would sending them out have been suspicious? Is a reason that the sexual side of their relationship probably diminished with time due not only to social conventions but to the logistical complications of avoiding them?

No, I said the Somatophylakes would be in the inner chamber. The Pages guarded outside the king’s chambers or tent. This is an important distinction.

There were 100+ Pages but only seven Somatophylakes. Much highly classified information was discussed in the king’s presence, so a relatively small number of guards would be privy to that. The Page’s function was more subservient and honorary. They wouldn’t have been present at classified briefings, etc. (“Classified” is modern terminology, but the concept is not.)

My chief point was simply that our modern world has a level of privacy that didn’t apply to earlier eras. Nor was sex hemmed in shame. That’s Victorian. Earlier periods of even Christian European history had earthier views of sex. And until quite recently, houses were small, rooms (and beds) shared, sometimes by many. No sex assumed. A cheap bed at an inn might mean sharing with a stranger. (Not unlike modern youth hostels where not the bed, but the room is shared.) “Hello, here’s your bedmate for the night, hope they took a bath sometime in the last week.”

No really, that was normal. A private bed in a private room (with a private bath) is SUPER modern.

(My poor introverted soul would be crushed by such constant in-your-face company!)

My father, born in 1924 to a very poor family in Jackson County, Illinois, grew up first in a house with two rooms, then one with four. He was one of 13 children. Not born all at once, obviously (spread from ’24 to ’45), but while he obviously never said so to me, you can assume those kids knew (and probably heard) where the new siblings came from!

The ancient Greeks had supper parties where sex was the aperitif at the night’s end, “hidden” only by a blanket (according to pottery). And sometimes it wasn’t hidden at all, but a group activity. “Public” sex wasn’t uncommon, and not as an orgy or “naughty” display. It was just off in a corner over there. Private time and space was the privilege of wealth and status, so selective blindness/deafness was important.

Also, this was a world in which “the help” (either slaves or servants) were furniture. Their presence (and opinion) don’t count. Especially the upper classes might not even notice them any more than you care if your cat or dog or fish is watching you have fun with your S.O.

In Dancing with the Lion, I specifically state that Alexander and Hephaistion are regarded as weird for sending out the slaves and doing slaves’ work themselves for the privilege of privacy. I did that partly to avoid trying to explain the above for a modern audience who’d find it alien and possibly offensive. Or wouldn’t get the nuances. But it’s important to underscore that such behavior would be unusual. (And I’ve established it for future novels.)

Once Alexander became king, that sort of peculiarity would be harder to maintain. The constant presence of guards might, very well, have curtailed his relationship with Hephaistion (even with Somatophylakes, not Pages). Although one of the requirements of intimate guards in any era is a Code of Silence. That, again, is another reason for keeping down the number of intimates. In addition, the inner chambers may have had both “outer” inner chambers and true inner chambers. The Somatophylakes may not have been welcome in the latter. They likely still knew who was in there, but perhaps not the particulars. (Especially once Alexander acquired Darius’s Really Big Tent, post Issos.)

[its-sixxers]

OC Interview - Tandreth

name ➔ “Who’s asking?” he grins. “Indoril Tandreth, if you’re Velothi. If you’re one of the jarl’s men, I’m no one.”

are you single ➔ “Quite. Why, are you looking to change that? I’m a hard man to tie down.”

are you happy ➔  “My coinpurse is full, I have a collection of various artifacts and treasures, someone to warm my bed every night - I suppose I can’t complain.” The smile leaves his eyes, however.

are you angry ➔ “I’m Velothi. It’s in the blood, so they say.” You can’t imagine the aloof man in front of you furious by any means, but there’s a bite of challenge to his tone.

are your parents still married ➔ “Hah!” he laughs. “They never were. Everyone calling me a bastard is right in more ways than one.”

NINE FACTS

birthplace ➔ “The Ashlands. Northwestern Vvardenfell, back in the day - now the entire island’s ash.”

hair color ➔ “Black, but I’m told the sun turns strands brown if it’s bright enough.” Tandreth combs his fingers through his curls. “I bleached it white, once upon a time. Didn’t want to look my sister, you see.”

eye color ➔ He flutters his eyelashes. “Red as Azura cursed them.”

birthday ➔  “The tenth of Sun’s Dawn. Year 430, of the Third Era.” Tandreth waits for the math to be done, eyes twinkling playfully. “I look good for my age, don’t I?”

mood ➔ “They change like the weather. Now? Or most often? The answer to both is bored.” He tries to look at the sheet of paper and the notes upon it. “Tell me you have something better to ask.”

gender ➔ It’s not the interesting question he wanted. “I’m a man. Not that the local Nords seem to believe me.” His smile grows wicked. “Their wives do.”

summer or winter ➔ “They’re the same thing, here in Skyrim.” He sighs. “Summer. I like to be able to feel most of my fingers.” You note his left pinky is missing.

morning or afternoon ➔ “Morning. I like to watch the sunrise before I turn in for the night.”

EIGHT THINGS ABOUT YOUR LOVE LIFE

are you in love ➔ “Always am.” he sighs dramatically, lounging further back in his chair. “How can anyone not be? Tamriel is filled with the beautiful.”

do you believe in love at first sight ➔ “Now we’re at the interesting questions.” Tandreth kicks his feet up on the table. “Of course I do. Love at first sight, hate at last sight - isn’t that how it tends to go?”

who ended your last relationship ➔ It catches him off guard - he’s leaning his chair back on two legs, and nearly falls over. The front feet of the chair connect with the floor loudly as he settles himself. “The law.” he answers simply. “And gold.”

have you ever broken someone’s heart ➔ The next question quickly repairs his high spirits. “Dozens, I’m sure. Don’t mistake me for cruel - I’ve never been dishonest about what I am. I can’t prevent others from lying to themselves.”

are you afraid of commitments ➔ He rolls his eyes. “You sound like Raansi.” he mutters. “I’ve spent the last fifty years in Skyrim, I think that’s commitment enough.”

have you hugged someone within the last week? ➔ Tandreth opens his mouth then frowns. “... you know, I haven’t.” he realizes aloud, and is clearly troubled by it. “Maybe I should give that great dragonborn ox a hug. I’ve gotten good at dodging her hammer, you know.”

have you ever had a secret admirer ➔ “I like to collect the letters.” he grins from ear to ear. “They don’t stay secret for long, if I can help it.”

have you ever broken your own heart? ➔ Those red eyes of his drop to his nails, where he makes a display of picking at his cuticles. “Don’t be foolish.”

SIX CHOICES

love or lust ➔ “Lust is simpler. There’s less tears involved, much more fun for all parties. I don’t need someone simpering over me to feel like a whole person.” he answers, perhaps a tad defensively.

lemonade or iced tea ➔ “Iced tea offers much more variety in flavor. That’s a drink for Hammerfell or Elsweyr, not this frozen tundra.”

cats or dogs ➔ His mouth twists. “I don’t keep pets. Humans live short enough lives, animals are asking for heartbreak.”

a few best friends or many regular friends ➔ “I have a very large circle of acquaintances and paramours. Does that count?”

wild night out or romantic night in ➔ “A wild night out, of course. It helps one feel alive.”

day or night ➔ “As much as I hate the cold, night. Have you seen a full moon over the snow on a clear night? As bright as day, and clear as crystal.” There’s a dreamy expression on his face.

FIVE HAVE YOU EVERS

been caught sneaking out ➔ “Several times. Not all for troublesome reasons, I assure you.”

fallen down/up the stairs ➔ “I am the pinnacle of grace.” Tandreth looks almost offended to be asked.

wanted something/someone so badly it hurt? ➔ “There was this necklace I tried to steal from a sleeping beast of a woman, and I nearly had my nose broken for the trouble.” You think it’s a joke, but the grave quality to his tone suggests that Tandreth takes any threat to his nose very seriously.

wanted to disappear ➔ “Wanted to? I can.” Perhaps he is dodging the questions.

FOUR PREFERENCES

smile or eyes ➔ “They’re intertwined. Part of a smile is in the eyes, you know - and they’re at their best when smiling.”

shorter or taller ➔ “Taller.” he answers first, then wrinkles his nose - his reflexive response has brought up something uncomfortable. “I don’t mind either way.” he adds hastily. “I’ve been very happy with people of all sizes.”

intelligence or attractive ➔ “You must think me vain indeed.” He tilts his chin upward. “But aye, I’ll say it - beauty. Not all can find tomes to pore over or tutors from the imperial province. Beauty isn’t just in the face, or the form, it’s an energy all its own.” He gestures vaguely with his hands. “A school of magic, perhaps. Difficult to define. It’s why I love it so dearly.”

hook-up or relationship ➔ “I’m a hard man to love.” he says with a dramatic shrug and an affected sheepish smile. “But I don’t leave my bedmates wanting.”

FAMILY

do you and your family get along ➔ Tandreth exhales shortly. “I liked the other questions.” he mumbles. “Presently? Only my sister’s left of it, and we’re not on speaking terms.”

would you say you have a “messed up life” ➔ His smile is entirely without humor, a grim thing that ages him by decades. “Don’t worry, dearest. I live my life to the fullest.”

have you ever run away from home ➔ “I think every young lad does, at some point.” He’s picking at his nails again.

have you ever gotten kicked out ➔ “By my family? No. But there’s a few cities I’m not allowed to set foot in - do you have the time to listen? ... no? Pity.”

FRIENDS

do you secretly hate one of your friends ➔ “What intrigue!” Tandreth’s good humor returns. “I’d have to have them to bear some secret distaste. The people I hate in my circle I make no secret of.”

do you consider all of your friends good friends ➔ “I’ll stretch the definition of friend to play along with your questions. No. You don’t live as long as I have by trusting anyone but yourself.”

who is your best friend ➔ For a moment you think he’s about to say ‘no one’, and you’re correct - but the pause before he says so is notable indeed.

who knows everything about you ➔ “My sister, I suspect. We’re twins, you know - she’s an hour older. Will never let me forget it.” He snorts. “You’d think she had decades on me, the way she carries on. She knows everything - so she might was well know everything about me.” You sense he’s a little bitter.

He offers to take you to a play in town after your work day is complete. You respectfully decline, and he respects your professionalism - but he still winks on his way out.

[dwellordream]

Do you think that boys also had bedmates? Like girls have in the books? To share a bed with (for sleeping btw)

Well in the medieval era normal commoner families would all just sleep together. So there would be nothing unusual about sharing a bed with your brothers or cousins.

As for the nobility, to quote Katherine Harvey:

“For many modern readers, the fact that the two men shared a bed can mean only one thing: they were having a sexual relationship.

But, as historians such as John Gillingham and Stephen Jaeger have pointed out, such an interpretation rests heavily on the projection of modern practices and perceptions onto the distant past.

For high-status medieval men, sharing a meal and a bed had more to do with politics than sex, and the same was true of other intimate gestures such as kissing and handholding. Such behaviours served as tokens of peace or reconciliation, and as demonstrations of alliance and favour.

So when Henry II learnt of his son’s attachment to the French king, he was shocked not because he thought Richard was homosexual, but because he had formed an alliance with his father’s worst enemy.”

Noblemen would share beds and it was not automatically taken as proof that they were homosexual and/or in a relationship with one another.

It was a sign of royal favor and trust for example if the king was willing to let you sleep in his actual bed with him. It was also not unusual for men to hold hands, embrace, kiss one another in greeting, etc.

We have a lot of modern day ideas about masculinity and sexuality that we like to project back onto the past and act as if men were just these emotionless warriors who wouldn’t dare do more than grunt at each other.

[khiita]

🍓 *hands eratos a strawberry* *hands eratos a strawberry* *hands eratos a strawberry*

era's family tree is gigantic and it has roots in various south american and european countries! her family group chat is a mess and if she doesn't mute it her phone chimes nonstop

she worked as a stripper while she was in college to both pay for it + her rent (don't tell her grandma)

although she's had many bedmates, she's never been in a relationship before! love is scary

Give me a: 🍓 and one of my OCs, and i’ll tell you some random facts about said OC !!

[aladygrieve]

Merlin/Arthur Fic Rec

** - Favourite

FANDOM CLASSICS

Castle (The Rules by Which We Live) by kickflaw Word count: 16,200 Summary: Merlin knows that getting off fastest when he’s got some BDSM porno playing loud on the computer doesn’t mean he’d really like to be that bloke, gagged and bent over and bound. Right? Notes: Modern AU and the best BDSM I’ve ever read.

Destiny That Darkly Hides Us by Nympha_Alba Word count: 63,000 Summary: It’s 1913, the practice of homosexuality is unlawful, so is the practice of magic. When Arthur Pendragon and Merlin Emrys meet as Cambridge undergrads, they’re both hungry for a real and true connection without secrets. For a short time they believe they may have found it. But war breaks out and separates them, and it seems unlikely that they will meet again. After all, what are the odds? Notes: Includes reincarnation!

Drastically Redefining Protocol by rageprufrock Word count: 46,000 WIP Summary:In which Prince Arthur meets Merlin and all hell promptly breaks loose. Notes: Modern AU in which Merlin is a chain-smoking med student and Arthur is the womanizing Prince of Wales. Includes several companion stories.

**The Student Prince by FayJay Word count: 145,200 Summary: A modern day Merlin AU set at the University of St Andrews, featuring teetotal kickboxers, secret wizards, magnificent bodyguards of various genders, irate fairies, imprisoned dragons, crumbling gothic architecture, arrogant princes, adorable engineering students, stolen gold, magical doorways, attempted assassination, drunken students, shaving foam fights, embarrassing mornings after, The Hammer Dance, duty, responsibility, friendship and true love… Notes: Because really, no rec list is complete without the novel-length jewel of the Merlin fandom. It’s plotty, beautifully written and perfectly in-character, and is especially dear to my heart now that I’ve actually visited St. Andrews. I highly recommend the podfic, as FayJay is an incredible reader.

REINCARNATION/FINALE-COMPLIANT

Hold My Heart Until it Beats by ingberry Word count: 1920 Summary: Arthur dies and waits for Albion to need him again. But most of all he waits for Merlin. Notes: Great use of the Arthur waits trope.

**Hopeless Wanderer by Magnolia822 Word count: 18,500 Summary: Merlin has been wandering the world for hundreds of years alone; one day a young blond man moves into the flat upstairs. But does Arthur remember? Notes: Still my all-time favourite reincarnation fic.

I Keep Going Over the World We Knew (Over and Over) by Mellacita Word count: 51,100 Summary: When Merlin Emrys is sent on a ‘round-the-world assignment, he begins remembering a life of magic, dragons, and kings. To make matters worse, a strange woman starts stalking him along the way. And that’s before he even meets Arthur Pendragon, whose answer to climate change is going to save the world. Because apparently just saving Britain won’t be enough this time around. Notes: Plotty and intricate and very, very cool.

Let Your Heart Hold Fast by Acavall Word count: 3000 Summary: Merlin waits for Arthur’s return, and the only way to hold on to his memories is to write them down. Over and over, again and again, as history marches by. Notes: Works interesting historical references into the reincarnation deal.

Never Let Me Go by LadyVader Word count: 3500 Summary: Merlin has walked the world for a long time waiting for his friends return. Notes: Great use of the rest of the characters.

Now I Will Unsettle the Ground Beneath You by nu_breed Word count: 42,300 Summary: Merlin’s dreams have always fuelled his art, but they’ve always been abstract and removed from reality. Soon after he meets Gwaine, he starts to see vivid images of a past full of death and magic and love for a King who was ripped from him. Things only escalate further when he spends a weekend in the country with Gwaine and meets his group of friends, which includes aristocrat and It Boy, Arthur Pendragon. Merlin soon realises that no matter how hard you try, one thing is certain, you can’t fuck with destiny. Notes: Merlin’s dating Gwaine but he and Arthur can’t keep their hands off each other. I love it.

Old Love, But in Shapes That Renew and Renew Forever by leopardwrites Word count: 3500 Summary: People accept that an old man might live alone. People understand that he might have lost the greatest love he has ever known. Notes: Fics that deal with old!Merlin are never not going to be gut-wrenching.

CANON ERA

A Bet by juxtapose Word count: 1100 Summary: In which the Knights stumble upon a private moment between the Prince and his manservant, Leon is uncomfortable, and Gwaine decides to make a bet. Notes: All the knights are fantastic in this one.

The Accidental Seduction by Ras Elased Word count: 9000 Summary: Arthur’s a bit dim and a prank goes horribly awry, but in the end this works out to the benefit of all involved. Notes: Almost unbearably adorable.

**Finding Home by riventhorn Word count: 7860 Summary: When Gaius retires, a new physician takes over, one that quickly kicks Merlin out of his room and takes it for himself, Arthur finds Merlin sleeping in the stables..and it’s winter. Notes: Good old-fashioned hurt/comfort with a dash of fluff. Probably my favourite canon-era fic.

**Fools of Us All by adelagia Word count: 11,100 Summary: Merlin accidentally makes everybody in Camelot fall in love with him. Everybody except Arthur, that is. Notes: Cute, funny and very in-character.

Freedom Hangs Like Heaven by derryere Word count: 9000 Summary: It’s happened five times and they don’t talk about it. Notes: The unresolved romantic tension will end you.

The Greater Bond by ravenflight21 Word count: 15,500 Summary: When Arthur is kidnapped by slavetraders, Merlin has only one option: to buy him. Playing Arthur’s master has its drawbacks – but it also has extraordinary compensations. Notes: Fabulous trope that also includes fancy dress. What more do you want?

**A Heavy Heart to Carry by ThursdayNext Word count: 12,561 Summary: When Merlin is captured and injured, Arthur must face up to his own feelings for his manservant as well as the many secrets he discovers are being kept from him. Notes: I think this might have been the first merthur fic I ever read. It’s Cold Outside by ionionie Word count: 2500 Summary: Merlin and Arthur get trapped in a cave on a freezing cold night. How do they stay warm? Notes: I’m such a sucker for this trope it’s actually sad.

**Meteorology by fayhe Word count: 4600 Summary: Character study with spot-on cameos from Uther, Morgana, Gaius and even Kilgarrah. Notes: Best Gen.

So That I Might Be Where You Areby cherrybina Word count: 4600 Summary: When a spell goes wrong, Merlin and Arthur are linked together in an unusual way, which leads to lots and lots of UST. Notes: Not kidding about the UST, which works surprisingly well. **Stars Above, Stones Below by Destina Word count: 46,800 Summary: After the disastrous end of his betrothal to Gwen and the regret of his offer to Princess Mithian, Arthur swears off finding a wife until he’s ready to wed. When Merlin offers himself to Arthur as bedmate, Arthur suggests they hand-fast in secret for a single year of mutual pleasure without obligation. As their year together unfolds, and secrets and betrayals unravel around them, Arthur and Merlin learn there is no such thing as uncomplicated pleasure. Everything they thought they knew can change in the span of a single year. Notes: Another one of my absolute favourites. Winterbloom by Shinybug Word count: 6200 Summary: Deep in the woods in the frozen heart of winter, a careless comment leads to a redefinition of Arthur’s relationship with his manservant. Notes: Emotionally-constipated boys shivering in the cold will always be one of my favourite things.

MODERN AU

A Change of Pace by kianspo Word count: 54,600 Summary: The one in which Arthur works in finances and his suits are various (two) shades of grey, Merlin works in advertisement and has no boundaries whatsoever, Morgana drinks rum, Mithian stages a coup, Agravaine is aggravating, and Elena’s house is amazing. Also, Andy Warhol is mentioned in vain, and Arthur and Merlin fall in love in Victorian era style. Notes: In which Arthur has a structured, ordered, boring life, until Merlin comes along.

This Silly ol’ Dance is Perfect for Two by SlantedKnitting Word count: 80,500 Summary: Arthur is young, gorgeous, talented, and captain of one of the best football teams in England; his life should be perfect. But he can’t keep a girlfriend for more than a few months, and it’s not just because he isn’t ready to settle down. When his most recent girlfriend dumps him, he has a rough night at the pub and has to be dragged home by his neighbour, Merlin. Merlin is an archivist, a Ph.D student, and he hates football almost as much as he hates Arthur. They both have their own reasons for not wanting to spend time with each other, but after that disastrous night, remaining silent neighbors doesn’t seem like much of an option anymore. Notes: Plotty and original. Wicked Game by winterstorm Word count: 42,400 Summary: Arthur’s the King of Camelot…nightclub. He can pick and choose who he wants, and he does – often – no promises and absolutely no repeats. The night he chooses Merlin might just be his undoing. Notes: Slight age difference.

[merlindeservedbetter]

<a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/476254"><strong>Stars Above, Stones Below</strong></a> (46843 words) by <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Destina"><strong>Destina</strong></a><br />Chapters: 1/1<br />Fandom: <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Merlin%20(TV)">Merlin (TV)</a><br />Rating: Explicit<br />Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply<br />Relationships: Merlin/Arthur Pendragon, Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)<br />Characters: Merlin (Merlin), Arthur Pendragon, Gaius (Merlin), Gwaine (Merlin), Guinevere (Arthurian), Percival (Arthurian), Elyan (Merlin), Agravaine, Leon (Merlin), Mithian<br />Additional Tags: Happy Ending, Canon-Era, Community: paperlegends, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Magic Revealed<br />Summary: <p>After the disastrous end of his betrothal to Gwen and the regret of his offer to Princess Mithian, Arthur swears off finding a wife until he's ready to wed. When Merlin offers himself to Arthur as bedmate, Arthur suggests they hand-fast in secret for a single year of mutual pleasure without obligation. As their year together unfolds, and secrets and betrayals unravel around them, Arthur and Merlin learn there is no such thing as uncomplicated pleasure. Everything they thought they knew can change in the span of a single year.</p>