#either way. it ruined my life at a tender age so thanks for that writers

[angeltannis]

Thinking about the wax ritual scene in House of Wax 2005. Why was it so Like That.

[emerald-amidst-gold]

WIP Wednesday

It’s Wednesday?! *scoffs* Preposterous! 

Thank you @noire-pandora and @rosella-writes for the tags! I send you hugs and flowers and LOVE! >:3

Seriously though, this week has felt long to me, as have the last several weeks to be exact, and despite those long, long days, I haven’t really been able to write beyond this ongoing monster of a ‘short’ story. I wouldn’t really say I have writer’s block. I have ideas, I can write little bits and pieces, but I lose momentum from a lack of energy. *shrugs* If anything, I’m treating this story as an exercise to help me cement some of Fane’s inner workings and practice more intimate events. *waggles eyebrows*

So! Have a bit of a long snippet of Solas and Fane being sappy. They’re so fucking sappy, I swear. No shame.

“...What I’m trying to say is, titles have no bearing if you don’t let them. It’s easier said than done, I know, and that’s why I constantly need the reaffirmation of my name. The spiral is deep, and one syllable is all it takes to slow the fall.” Another sigh, this one far heavier, far more aged. “I know what it means, what it feels to have your identity shredded to ribbons, Solas. I know that so much it hurts. And that’s why I’ll say two syllables for you, so you don’t forget the first title; yourself.”, he stated, tone serious, but warm. “And no matter the other artificial titles, the good and the bad, you are you. Furthermore, you are my sky. Endless. Enduring. Unbending. Eternal. You were all of that to me before you were Fen’harel, or even Solas, or anything else. It may be just another title, but I hope, I hope, it’s one that matters to you because a sky matters more than anything to a dragon. Anything, and I won’t let the expanse that is you be taken from me as surely as the actual sky has been.”

Solas blinked at that waterfall of tender words, entranced by the look of earnestness on Fane’s ivory, but inked visage, the faded green lines almost seeming transparent due to how the setting sun filtering into their quarters bathed them in gold. He was lost, he was reeling, he was grappling between wanting to argue and wanting to relinquish his own stubbornness before letting out an airy laugh, shaking his head as the latter won out. How much more could his heart take before it burst? Such devotion, such pure, unwavering devotion was meant for better people than he, and yet, he couldn’t balk at it, usher it away. It would seem he was not the only one to have come so far. 

“...I do not deserve that. I do not deserve such a...christening as that.”, he said, despite his thoughts. He may have come far, but some habits were hard to break. “It baffles me how you can be so certain that your feelings will not change when you know what is to come, when you know what I will be called upon to do.”

“We, Solas. You’re not alone anymore because I won’t let you be alone. No amount of words or deeds will change that either. You know that.”, Fane said, voice harsh, deep, but caring in its timbre.

Solas chuckled quietly. “I know that you are stubborn. Almost infuriatingly so.”, he tried to joke and it had a bit of the desired effect as Fane rolled his eyes, a ghost of a smile on his lips.

“You walked into my domain centuries ago, elf.”, Fane growled, but it held no disgust or anger. “You poked a dragon and earned its heart, so suffer.”

Solas couldn’t help but let out a small laugh at that. “I suppose I have no choice in the matter?”, he asked, but he felt lighter, calmer. How easily the dread and the ice melted away. How such a thing could happen was beyond him, but he would be lying if he said that he despised this heat, this warmth of souls.

Fane smirked. “None at all.”, he retorted casually before leaning in to nudge at one of Solas’ cheeks, growl slipping into a quiet, but deep purr as their eyes connected, gazed into each other’s sunlit souls. “So, let me show you how I can be so certain, how you can be so deserving of what I feel.”, he said next within a heartbeat, eager, but even harsher with conviction before it dropped to a baritone whisper. “Let me show you how much I love you, Solas.”

Solas barely had time to fully process those tender words before Fane took all thought away, lips connecting with his own, warm and velvet, but somehow cool to the touch. The gentle suddenness of that connection had him startling a bit, so unused to the reserved man before him to be the one to initiate, but he relaxed soon enough, eyes falling shut and allowing tenderness and certainty to soak into him. 

Their lips moved slowly, languidly, but there was an ember to be awoken in their movements, to be sparked and set ablaze. However, there was no rush, no hurry to meet that bonfire. There was only gentle tending as one of Fane’s hands came up to loosely grip his jaw, tilting it just so to dive in deeper, etching his message of affirmation with tender kissing and soft, cool huffs through his nose. The other was busy kneading into one of his hips, a sturdy arm wrapped around to keep them close together. Solas weaved both of his hands into Fane’s head of slightly messy hair, drawing him closer, deeper into a spiral bliss, and humming deep in his chest as a velvet sweep of his dragon’s tongue against his bottom lip had his mind growing foggy.  

However, despite the fog of his mind, Solas kept his mouth shut, halting his movements of the kiss, and smirked against Fane’s lips when a resounding growl sounded. His dragon should know good things came to those who waited.

...Or rather, continued to push. He wanted to see how heavy a dragon’s passion could be, but first things first.

Solas pulled away a bit and smirked more when Fane attempted to chase, curling his fingers in snowy strands to keep him still. Another, deeper growl left those enticing lips at that, nearly making him let go and give in from his made his whole tremble with desire, but he remained steadfast, gazing calmly into smoldering, gold-emerald orbs with a hum.

“You may growl all you wish, ma’isenatha, but I will not relent that easily.” He chuckled softly when Fane almost appeared to be pouting. His heart truly could not take much more of this endearing, stubborn man. “Even so, you are becoming a force to be reckoned with. It won’t be long until I do relent to your will.”, he purred, chuckling a bit when Fane’s visage turned pink yet again from his praise, pout turning into a slight grimace of sheepishness. “Before that, however, I wish to continue where we left off, but you stated the endeavor of mindful connection tires you out. Extremely. Will it do so in this case?”, he asked, common concern threatening to ruin the moment and making his smile falter. He wanted to let the mood take the reins, but his dragon’s comfort came first and foremost.

Always.

Fane shrugged, clearing his throat of embarrassment and his own momentary excitement. “In the past, yeah, but that’s because I would try and force the link. Since I can’t even do that anymore, it’s not so terrible.”, he stated simply, leaning in to nuzzle just below Solas’ ear slowly. “It’s no different than sex, to be fair. Intense, and then an afterglow. I’ll feel tired afterwards, but not bone achingly so.” A growling purr, a mixture of thunder and a babbling creek followed after those words, housing more. “Other...actions will make that happen. We’ll make sure of that.” 

Solas hummed contentedly at the nuzzle, feeling how his chest began to quicken in its breaths at the heated words. “Mm, indeed we will.”, he murmured, a warmth able to be detected along his neck, cheeks, and ears. He was blushing. Lovely. It always threw him off when Fane would utter seduction. “But, I am curious as to how this ability of yours replicates sex.”

It was Solas’ turn to be pleasantly pleased with himself as Fane’s face flushed, pink shifting deeper to where his freckles were washed out and eyes were a titillating shade of ochre. Two could utter seduction, and after Halamshiral, he had pinpointed that Fane nearly dissolved if the word ‘sex’ was uttered from his lips. A dragon’s beauty had many layers, and while they were rare to be witnessed, his dragon was an open book during such carnal pursuits. The memory of the few times they had engaged physically and deeply nearly had Solas crumbling from shudders and soft pants, but the way Fane was now kissing just under his ear, face still flushed, but more from excitement now than a flustered disposition, was doing that also. How easily the mask fell and shattered from just a brush of lips, a glint of gold as two-toned orbs glanced up at him, a roll of thunder housed in a body so different, but so very much the same.

How easily the game could be tilted towards the other at any given moment.

“It’s a dance of thoughts, a waltz of wills.” The Elvhen dragon halted his kisses to whisper against the sensitive skin below his ear, breathless and husky, before giving it a firmer kiss. “You felt it after our sparring match, and that was just a dying connection - whisper of an afterglow. Rage had drowned out most of the euphoric intensity. But here, with us so close to each other, calm and willing...”, he trailed off, pulling back to level Solas with a solid amber gaze, abilities flaring to life with the emotions swarming around them. “...you’ll feel how deep the line runs, and so will I. After all, what’s more revealing and intimate than piercing each other’s thoughts? The connection of bodies is simple, but the mind... That’s more complicated and all creatures yearn for the depth of understanding.”

Solas let out an airy sigh, reaching up with a hand to stroke a deeply flushed cheek of freckles, ink and ivory. “So, it is a combination of thoughts, a glimpse into the inner when the outer offers no clear answer.”, he said, Fane responding with a tiny nod and pleased smirk due to being understood. “Is it like that if you were to connect with others, or..?”, he asked, a question born of more curiosity, not jealousy. He knew better than to harbor that type of nasty feeling with Fane. Devotion ran deep, as deep as the scar upon his heart’s face as well the scars upon his body. He was just once again fascinated to hear these thoughts and complexities of a being he had only been able to speculate on.

Fane shook his head, laying another kiss against his neck. “No. Most people’s minds don’t bend, their emotions locked up in fear and their minds cordoned off in their own ways. Mages, especially those like you, are easier to link up with, though.”, he murmured against the skin before running the flat of his tongue along his pulse. 

Solas let out a quiet gasp, clawing at a broad shoulder as the wet and warm sensation of Fane’s tongue nearly had him melting. That action always made him react violently, and his dragon knew it, chuckling against the column before continuing. 

“...Your emotions are potent, despite what you want people to believe. They’re attuned to being flexible and it was why during the duel I could begin the link. You were already reaching out, so I...exploited it.”, Fane admitted with a flash of shame in his eyes before sighing. “But, the sensation we’re about to experience is..” He pulled away from his neck slowly to practically gaze at him with a blazing smolder. “...only available when love is at the forefront. Your mind is willing before it even knows. You want me to enter. You want to share in the pain, the sorrow, the madness, and the passion, and I want you to, too. So, you allow me in. It’s an act of trust, and there is no one, other than maybe my sister, who I trust more than I trust you. And hopefully, you feel the same in regards to me.” A bit of uncertainty shuffled into dual colored eyes and a wry smirk, but they both dispersed as Fane shook his head a bit. “So again, no. It’s not the same for anyone else and it never will be.” 

Solas stared at the man before him with slightly wide eyes before a tender smile graced his lips. Leave it to his dragon to word such a serious matter so affectionately, so beautifully. Sometimes, it was hard to see anything but the beautiful creature he had met so long ago when such things were uttered.

It was easy to forget how much suffering and sorrow had laced a mind with crimson poison.

Despite those weighty thoughts, Solas brought his hands up to cup Fane’s face once again, stroking his cheekbones reverently as they gazed into each other. Amber orbs shone slightly from both the slowly descending sun just outside and abilities that were slowly regaining their full power with time, observing him with so much silent love that it made his heart squeeze and a small, warm smile form on his face.  

“Ar lath ma.”, Solas said, smiling more when the words of affection had Fane’s eyes darting away sheepishly, but there was a tiny smile upon his own lips. “And I do trust you as you trust me. Implicitly. Trust is a dangerous gambit, but in this instance, I will roll the dice. For you have already bet enough, my dragon.”, he whispered out tenderly before leaning to seal their lips together again gently, wishing to connect physically as well as mentally and emotionally. 

Yes, a connection. That is what he deeply yearned for. To understand and to be understood. To bond and be bound to in turn. To know every inch of the one who had seen him at his lowest and greatest, who worshiped him as the sky and nothing of the past that had thus far defined him.

A bit lengthy, but that’s what I’m good at! >:D I just like words. Woooords~ :D

Tagging (*sends cookies* :3): @oxygenforthewicked @little-lightning-lavellan @dungeons-and-dragon-age @the-dreadful-canine @varric-tethras-editor @drag-on-age @cartadwarfwithaheartofgold @dreadfutures @whataboutbugs and anyone else that’d like to share their endeavors! :D 

[birds-punch]

Archie! Sonadow AU: Spectrum (issue 222) Part 2

“Summary: Sonic and Shadow goes out on their first public date in New Mobotropolis, but ran into some trouble while on their date.

Characters: Sonic the Hedgehog, Shadow the Hedgehog, Sally Acorn.

Pairings: Sonadow, Sonally (Past.)

Words: 1778

Warning: Implied Homophobia.

A/N: Sorry if this looks like shit compared to the first part, but I actually was typing this while having writer’s block. But I hope you all enjoy reading this

“Shadow, please chill! Let’s just go!” said a frazzled Sonic.

The blue hedgehog was currently occupied with holding back an extremely pissed off Shadow from going back into the restaurant, so he can literally skewer any of the customers and staff with a Chaos Spear.

Sonic then gently took his boyfriend’s chin into his hand, so he can make the angry hedgehog face him.

“You don’t have to get so worked up over a bunch of stupid jerks’ opinions, Shadow. I’m sure they’ll get to used to it. Please just calm down.” he said in a soft tone, before placing a slow kiss on the black hedgehog’s cheek. 

The soft smooch on his cheek and the comforting touch on his chin helped the hybrid calm down to a more controllable amount but his expression did not change, however as he simply let out an irritated “Hmph!” before folding his arms, slightly blushing.

Sonic could smile sadly at the irritated hedgehog before gently snaking his arm around his boyfriend’s waist and speaking up: “Since our dinner was a complete flop thanks to a couple of idiots, why don’t we go somewhere more private like the Lake of Rings?”

Before Shadow could respond to his boyfriend’s offer or the arm around his waist, the restaurant doors burst open and out came the same waiter and some of the customers who were part of the argument. 

“Wait! What does the rest of the Freedom Fighters think of this?”

“Yeah! Your friends should have some doubts about your new boyfriend and that you’re no longer straight!”

The blue hedgehog couldn’t help but actually growl in annoyance, their secret dates in Capital City was much more pleasing than this! 

“Look guys could you all please just...”

As Sonic was busy trying to sort out the group, by then; the GUN agent had enough of this. He may no longer have in it in himself to throw it all away and instantly murder everyone outside and in the restaurant, there has been enough inaction for one night and he would no longer stand by and listen to these...dickheaded people insulting his relationship with Sonic. Now is the time to give them a piece of his mind. 

He started to build up Chaos energy into his body as he stepped in front of his already annoyed and irritated boyfriend.

“THAT’S ENOUGH!” screamed Shadow, as he lets out a Chaos Blast.

The Chaos Blast was strong enough to knock many people off their feet, but also weak enough to avoid seriously injuring anyone or damage any nearby property. The entire group went completely silent, as they all looked up in fear of a certain glowering and chaos energy glowing hedgehog who was glaring a glare that meant all hell and unspeakable pain. Sonic who was behind Shadow, didn’t get knocked off his feet, but also looked rather surprised at what his boyfriend just did.

“Now all of you listen here and very carefully! Whether Sonic is straight, bi or even gay is not any of your choices or something you can change! He may be your hero and you all possibly worship him, but he is not some kind of object, you all can shape into some kind of delusion you all have!” He shot an extremely hateful glare at the waiter, who flinched and actually looked as if he pissed himself. “And. It’s also none of your Chaos-damned business to judge my relationship with Sonic!” 

Shadow then walked over and took Sonic’s hand, “Now then, the two of us are going to continue our date even after all of you are responsible for ruining our dinner together and don’t ever show any of your presence to us again because if I hear one more word from any of you, I won’t hesitate the next time to destroy any of you so thoroughly it will be impossible to prove any of you even existed!”

The two then disappeared in a flash of light, thanks to Shadow’s Chaos Control. After the two hedgehogs had reappeared at the Lake of Rings in a huge flash of light, Sonic placed a hand on his head, still feeling a little dizzy despite the fact the two had done this before in the past.

Once the dizziness had finally passed, the blue hedgehog spoke up. “Wow, Shadow! That was so awesome how you put those stupid jerks in their place, you should be proud of yourself.” he praised. 

Shadow only stayed quiet. Looking down at the ground, hiding his features from his boyfriend. Sonic’s proud smirk faded as concern washed over his frame before gently placing a hand on his shoulder.

“Shadow...are you okay?”

Hearing his boyfriend’s concerned tone in his voice, made the hybrid look up at him, his expression unchanging. It actually looked like the Ultimate Lifeform was going to cry right here, right now. 

Seeing his boyfriend’s state made the blue blur’s heart break a good amount. But having known the black hedgehog very well, because of all those past special moments they both shared; he knew what he should say. 

Placing his other hand on the distressed hedgehog’s other shoulder, Sonic began talking.

“Hey Shadow, it’ll be okay I promise. I’m very proud of you for standing up to those idiots and defending our relationship. What they said back there is not true. They either are too closeminded or not used to it yet but, it doesn’t matter. Okay?”

He then placed one of his hands against the GUN agent’s cheek. Gently caressing it with his thumb. 

“Shadow, you’re the most precious guy to me, ever since that night you were there for me. I don’t even care if my parents, my friends or even the whole world is against us. All that really matters is what we have between us and nothing else. I don’t even want to imagine what it would be like without you here or letting you go.”

Just like earlier tonight, Shadow found himself completely amazed and overwhelmed by what his lover has just proclaimed to him. A huge blush filled his entire muzzle along with a growing warmth in his chest and his heart beating rapidly. He fought the urge to grasp his chest fur like the last time he felt like this when... he discovered his feelings for the blue hedgehog after the Metal Sonic Troopers. 

He then spoke up again, "But then again, I guess I could also thank Sally for slapping and breaking up with me that night too."

The look his boyfriend gave him was the definition of "What the hell, Hedgehog?". He looked like he just heard that the doctor had somehow given birth if that's even possible. Sonic only laughed at the GUN agent's predicted reaction.

"Think about it Shadow. If Sally and I never broke up in the first place, we wouldn't be here right now talking like this. It's very possible the two of us would've stayed as rivals."

Shadow let himself think over what the blue hedgehog's words. He did not want to believe it but it seemed true! If Sonic and the princess never ended their relationship together, making the blue blur run away from his friends and into the forest; the black hedgehog never would have followed his instincts and went after the Freedom Fighter. Both of them would probably would've never discovered their feelings for each other if he said "Yes." or if Shadow did discover his feelings, then it may stay one-sided forever, which is something Shadow never wants to imagine since he's been with the blue runner for several months which only felts like years to him. Even the thought of it actually made his chest feel cold and empty like that time when Sonic got lost in space for a year while everyone believed he was dead. It felt like fate or something much more, it made him realise just how lucky he is, to even have Sonic here with him despite the speedster's strong Chaos Energy that kept him from aging.

The blue hedgehog gave an expression of concern when he noticed how quiet Shadow has gotten, when he stated the fact. "Shadow, is something wrong?"

Before Sonic could speak or even react, he suddenly found himself being held around the waist and the feel of his boyfriend’s lips over his. The blue hedgehog’s eyes went wide open the moment he felt Shadow’s lips kissing him, but allowed himself to melt into the kiss and in his arms as he gently wrapped his arms around the hybrid’s neck.

After what felt like for all eternity; the two hedgehogs pulled away from the kiss. Sonic panted slightly from a lack of oxygen and the intense passionate feeling he felt from the kiss. Letting a tender smile grow across his muzzle, he then placed his forehead against Shadow’s. Besides that protective nature that the blue blur loves so much, it’s also how real and true those kisses felt. Like he can just take off and fly with the need of the Chaos Emeralds to turn into Super Sonic. He never felt this way with Sally and her kisses or with anyone else he dated.

“Feel better?” Sonic asked, which sounded nothing more than a whisper.

Shadow did not say anything except for sitting down on the grass, gently pulling his lover onto his lap. He then lets out a small “Hmph!” which didn’t have any form of irritation or annoyance and started to pet and caress the blue hedgehog. How on Mobius did he deserve someone as loving and kind as this faker? Everything that had happened in the past between them. Their first meeting, that night, the confession and the fact Sonic can never age, thanks to his strong Chaos Energy; it must all be written in fate for both of them or maybe someone of a greater existence had something to do with this. But the Ultimate Lifeform never felt more content in his life; while the first half of their night went wrong, now? This is possibly the most precious and treasured moment for him

Sonic curled up in the Ultimate Lifeform’s lap, purring loudly from the loving caress. Yeah, this is also definitely another thing he can add to the list. He and Sally had never done this together before and thanks to his strong Chaos Energy, he and Shadow have all eternity to cuddle like this. 

Out from the corner of his eye however, he noticed a blur of brown and light running away from behind some trees. The blue hedgehog did nothing but scowl from what just seen.

‘Sally...’

END...

[artistic-writer]

Fragments of Home :: CS AU :: E :: Chapter 2

Title: Fragments of Home by @artistic-writer

Summary: Emma Swan must return home to her childhood town of Storybrooke when her mother dies and stays in the house left to her and her brother, David Nolan. Emma must juggle a temporary job at the hospital with her loss, something that has made her feel smaller than she ever was. When a tall, dark, handsome stranger comes into her life in the most unexpected way, and she begins to fall in love, will she stay in Storybrooke, or return to her new life back in New York?

Rating: E

Also on: AO3 - FF

A/N: Many thanks to my lovely beta, @kmomof4 who persuaded me that this would work as a CS fic in the first place.  It’s all her fault.

——————————————————————————————

The hospital entrance was always busy, something Emma had found out early on in her short-lived time there. Storybrooke weather also never held up much of its end of the deal. All year it was unpredictable. One minute it might be raining and the streets flooding with the soft definitions of watery footsteps as people darted for cover and then the next it would be so hot you would rather walk around naked than be wearing any clothes. May was like the middle of the tumultuous weather’s reign and the afternoon sunshine shone onto the puddles of rain in the ambulance bay.

Killian had made a deal with the good Dr. Swan. In exchange for his freedom, he was required to sit on his bed for half of the day so she could keep him under observation. Apparently a blow to the head that severe must have warranted some kind of worry to seep into Emma’s mind because she wouldn’t even let him use the bathroom without supervision. Not that Killian minded; Emma had underseen his bathroom privileges personally and Killian had made sure he needed the toilet every thirty minutes, just so he could see her.

“You don’t have a jacket,” Emma told him matter of factly as they stepped through the huge, gliding, double-glazed automatic doors. The doors were made of glass and had the hospital’s name etched into them by laser cutting and they were activated by a sensor in a doormat of either side of the doorway.

“It’s fine, love,” Killian smiled at her, pushing his hands into his pockets as they strolled through the emergency section of the parking lot. The damp floor was potentially a danger in itself because each one of the yellow chevron lines became slippery when wet and no cars were allowed to park over it and cover the hazard. “I didn’t leave the office with a jacket this morning anyway,” he shrugged.

“Why’s that?” Emma enquired casually, gripping her paper cup full of cafeteria coffee that she could swear could melt steel. It was bitter to the point of repulsion and she would rather use it as a hand warmer than a thirst-quenching beverage.

“I was a little angry with something this morning. A little crazy,” he paused when she shot him a glance. “But not in the literal sense, don’t worry.” He smiled and Emma laughed a little, puffing condensed breath out in front of her.

“So how did you go from angry to ER?” Emma asked him, lifting her cup to her lips and taking a sip of the stagnant brown liquid.

“Ah that would have been Derek,” Killian chimed, taking a hand from his pocket as they walked and pointing to the air, waving his hand as he talked. “We don’t get along,” he finished simply. Emma chuckled through her nose and motioned to his head with a black gloved finger.

“You don’t say,” she teased. “What did he hit you with?” Emma asked with a more serious tone that made Killian a little suspicious of her questions.

Killian sucked in a breath and looked at her with a wry smile. “I’m not going to get the police involved, if that’s what you're asking me in your oh-so-subtle way doctor,” he quipped, watching his feet on the sidewalk as tiny splashes of rainwater splattered the front of his expensive black shoes. He turned his dipped head and caught her gazing at him with a worried expression. “It was my fault,” he assured her with a nod.

“So, you tripped and fell into his two by four?” Emma joked sarcastically with a frown. She was having a hard time understanding how twelve stitches, a blood encrusted scalp and a clearly expensive suit that was now ruined was Killian’s fault.

“Let’s just say I am a very difficult person to get along with,” Killian sighed, avoiding the glares from passing pedestrians that were staring at his blood spattered shirt and deep crimson collar. “And it was an iron bar,” he laughed. Emma erupted in a similar nervous laugh but she was unsure if he was joking and making light of the situation, or he was telling the truth. A silence fell between them but it wasn’t uncomfortable and was broken when they rounded a corner and entered the local park.

The park was almost empty this time of day. Children were heading home from school but they had missed the rush of teenage bodies and now only a few stragglers littered the damp, green grass. Old, heavy branches hung over the path as they walked through the well-kept grounds, shielding them from the sunshine and cooling their bodies with its shaded protection. In the cooler space, the path was free from the darkened patches of rain stains but there was a cold wind blowing through the tree and shaking some large droplets to the ground below. One freezing cold liquid drop slid from its leafy prison and hit Killian on the back of the neck, making him shiver and instantly wipe the water from his skin.

“So,” Killian began, shaking the excess fluid from his hand with a flick of his wrist. “How come I haven’t seen you around before?” He smiled as he turned to her and steered her gently by the elbow to take a seat next to him on a wooden, park bench. His grip was gentle and soft and Emma’s body complied with his request.

“How do you know you haven’t?” Emma quipped with a kinked eyebrow. Her mouth twitched as she tried to hide her smile and her coffee still radiated heat to her hands through her cup. She held it higher, closer to her mouth and inhaled the ghastly smell in an attempt to warm her lungs.

“I’d remember, love,” Killian beamed, turning sideways on the bench and resting his crooked arm over the backrest lazily.

“Is that a compliment?” Emma smiled at her cup, unable to look him in the eyes. She could feel him smiling at her, his eyes burning into her skin with an intensity she had only been able to imagine from reading romance novels. In an attempt to hide her own wistful smirk, Emma slurped her coffee and her face twisted with disgust at the liquid.

Killian didn’t answer her question but instead reached for her coffee and she relinquished it to him with little protest. He pulled it from her, a soft, wispy cloud of steam wafting from its rim as he moved it through the air and lifted it to his own face for a sniff. Emma giggled when Killian’s nose crinkled and he turned his head away from the coffee in repugnance, moving it away from his features and dropping it into the trash basket beside them with a rustle and a clatter.

“Hey!” Emma sang, elongating the word with a breathy laugh. “That was my coffee,” she told him.

“That was coffee?” Killian joked with a dramatic tone, his voice jumping to a higher pitch and his body lurching forward towards her with wide eyes and open smile. Emma’s body shook with laughter and Killian relished the sight of it. Her hair swished across her face and Emma quickly swiped a glove across her forehead and tucked it back behind her ear.

“I make do with what I can get,” Emma said when her laughter subsided. There was an implication in her voice and her eyes lingered on Killian’s face for what seemed like an age. When he lifted his head and his blue pools invaded hers, she didn’t look away and she didn’t lose her smile.

“I meant what I said earlier,” Killian said softly, shuffling across the bench so he was a little closer to Emma. Their knees bumped together and Killian inhaled hard.

“Good, you owe me a coffee,” Emma returned in a passive whisper. Killian let out a chuckle that Emma joined in with.

“No, not that,” Killian spoke low and his smile faded. He reached up with his arm that hung limp of the back of the bench and brushed a missed hair from Emma’s face. Her hair was soft and warm and had a shine, even in the dull shade of the trees. Killian’s skin was cool on Emma’s forehead and in the most comfortable of circumstances, Emma drifted away from where they sat, lost in his tenderness. “You are beautiful,” Killian breathed seriously, finally tucking the stray strand of golden curls behind her ear and brushing Emma’s skin to life.

Emma blushed and looked away to her hands that sat obediently in her lap. Killian withdrew his hand and cleared his throat with a nervous cough, shifting his position on the bench and rubbing his hands down his thighs in an attempt to warm his skin. He swallowed hard. He didn’t want to apologise for possibly overstepping a mark; Killian couldn’t find fault in what he had done. Emma was beautiful, perfectly constructed and as aesthetically pleasing as anything he had ever laid his eyes on.

“You’re right,” Killian said suddenly, sucking in a breath, slapping his knees and pushing himself to his feet. Emma looked up at him with surprise, her reddened cheeks now just a shimmer of pink across her face that could have easily been from the cold wind.

“About what?” Emma asked him with a frown, her head tilting back to take in his chilled figure standing before her.

“I owe you a coffee.” He smiled and offered her an outstretched palm. “Come on,” Killian urged her to take his hand with a gentle drone that was inviting. Emma smiled weakly, her embarrassment fading away as she reached out and took Killian’s hand and let him pull her to stand in front of him. Even though she was wearing gloves, when Killian’s long, slender fingers curled around hers, Emma felt a spark shooting through her body. She tingled everywhere, and she flushed hot in her thick, black, full-length jacket that was buttoned to the green scarf at her neck.

“Where are we going?” Emma enquired with a tilted head as she fell into step beside Killian. He pulled her along for a few seconds before letting her hand fall to their side, his hand sliding from hers slowly and tentatively. Emma glanced between them and Killian’s hand lingered between them, hovering millimeters from hers and Emma wished her gloves were gone so she could feel Killian’s skin brushing hers. When her eyes returned to his profile, he was looking at her with a cocksure smile.

“It’s a surprise!” He grinned, seized her hand in his with a tight grip and broke into a sprint as they headed for the entrance to the park.

Emma had never felt so relaxed and strangely happy as Killian dragged her along the sidewalk, much to the frustration of many upper classed business people walking against them. Emma neglected to see where they were, just assuming Killian was taking her to a corner shop cafe where they would talk over a chipped cup and saucer, laugh and act like two people who had known each other for years. For some reason, Emma felt like that with Killian. She had only known him a day, and they hadn’t met under the best circumstances, but now he was calmer and Emma was physically melted by his smile. She felt like she had known him all her life.

Killian’s feet pounded the pavement as he tried to stop himself at the edge of a street corner. Emma gasped for breath and her skin itched, hot and slightly sweaty in her winter jacket. Killian panted hard and his lungs burned. Tiny beads of sweat began to roll down his neck and were stained pink by the dried blood on his skin by the time they reached his shirt. He doubled over, clutching his knees as he breathed in deeply and grabbed at his diaphragm that threatened to explode in his abdomen.

“What now?” Emma panted, intrigued as to why he had stopped so suddenly.

“We’re here,” Killian said triumphantly, standing and expanding his arms out like wings before turning to face the establishment. Emma followed his gaze and her mouth dropped agape with shock.

“This is Chez Rogue…” Emma breathed with a questioning tone to herself, unsure if she believed where she was. Emma took two steps back and her wide stare took in the front of the restaurant. Huge, black iron bars that were cemented into a cobblestone wall separated the restaurant from the empty lot of one side and an alleyway on the other. Petite, neatly pruned hedges sat in another brickwork flower box and an A-frame chalkboard stood outside the door with a printed message on it, clearly displaying a welcome message to its patrons. Well, Emma assumed it was a welcome message; it was in another language.

As Emma lifted her head to take in the massive American flag that hung on a long, shiny golden pole she didn’t notice two executives exit the restaurant. They headed towards her and surprised her, making her stumble sideways and into Killian. He offered the two men in three thousand dollar suits an excited, childlike smile and pulled Emma aside.

“Killian, this is Chez Rogue,” Emma repeated, not quite believing how she had ended up in this part of town. It was the part she only dreamed of going to, where there was nothing but limousines nose to tail on the roads and a gaggle of personal assistants followed every businessman or woman down the sidewalk with a quick step. Emma’s eyes met Killian’s again when he took her hand and shook her from her daydream.

“I know,” he said as he beamed and pulled her towards the restaurant. Emma slipped her hand from Killian’s and he froze, turned to look at her without his wide smile and frowned. “Emma?” he asked.

“We can’t go in there,” Emma laughed nervously.

“Why not?” Killian asked seriously. Emma looked at him dumbfounded and he looked back at her with utter confusion. “It’s just a restaurant,” Killian chuckled and grabbed for her hand once more. Emma let him take her hand but resisted his efforts to pull her nearer to the door.

“It’s not just a restaurant Killian. It is the restaurant. Famous people eat here!” Emma exclaimed and Killian rolled his head towards the door as she looked around nervously. He turned back towards her and scrunched his face up playfully.

“They do?” he teased with a smile and a gentle tug on her arm. Emma’s shoulders slumped and she sighed audibly at him. For all his charm and finesse, Killian Jones was an ass. “Trust me, love, it will be fine,” he said softly, stroking his thumb across her knuckles and inching her forward with tentative steps. “If anything happens that makes you feel weird…” he started but Emma cut him off, eager for his response.

“Yes?” Emma quipped quickly.

“If anything happens we can leave,” Killian told her but Emma looked unconvinced they would even get past the door. “And I’ll never bring you here again,” he promised, his voice low and sultry as he eyed her innocently.

“What makes you think I will go out with you again?” Emma said with a twisted grin. Killian pulled her a little more so they were nearly touching, body to body, ridiculously thick winter jacket to hardly clothed man.

“You will,” he whispered confidently. “Now come on.” Killian pulled away from her, taking the protection Emma wished for back immediately and leading them into the restaurant.

Inside, the restaurant was almost empty. It wasn’t silent, there was some sort of music playing throughout the lavishly decorated restaurant that reminded Emma how lost she was in the place. Her footsteps were silent underfoot, easily disguised by the thick fibers of the brass trimmed, ruby carpet that led up to the reception. A tall, slender man with dark hair that was combed to one side and had abnormally perfect, straight white teeth watched the desk.

“Mr. Jones, how may we help you today?” The man said in a high-pitched voice with a lisp, clearly addressing Killian but taking in Emma’s appearance and deciding against offering Killian his usual table for one. Emma’s head whipped up and focused on Killian who gave her a pure, innocent look and a small squeeze to her hand.

“Good afternoon James,” Killian said smoothly, addressing the name tag lacking maître d′ as if he was a seasoned friend. “Table for two, if you’d be so kind.” Killian smiled and nodded his head at the smiling employee.

“Certainly Mr. Jones, right this way,” James said calmly and lifted two red leather-bound menus from a rack behind him as he breezed past and motioned for Killian and Emma to follow him with a flat palm. James showed them to a table in the corner of the restaurant that was well lit but private, with little way for foot traffic to interrupt them. Killian pulled Emma’s chair out from under the round, heavy mahogany table and she sat, crossing her legs and allowing Killian to shuffle her chair forward again. James offered her a menu and she took it with a smile and a courteous thank you.

Killian hurriedly took up the seat opposite her and ignored the menu James had left at his side. Emma let her own menu fall open to the crisp, white tablecloth that pooled over her knees. She unbuttoned her coat and slid it down her arms, hooking it over the back of the wooden chair that was probably older than she was and cost more then she made in a month. She pulled her scarf from her neck, loosening it and hanging it over the top of her coat. She finally sat forward in her chair, and shook a few strands of her hair from her milky features, tucking them neatly behind her ear. Killian watched her entire display; fascinated by how she moved and adding her little quirks to a mental list he had been compiling all day.

For example, Dr. Swan always made sure her name tag was turned around at work so that problem patients couldn’t pick her out for misconduct, even where there had been none. She was right handed but always used her left hand to steady the paper when she wrote, which she did with a tilt of her head and a squint in her eyes. When she felt cold, Killian had noticed that Emma used a hot beverage to warm her hands, rarely even drinking it unless it was a welcome distraction. And now, her last act of self-preservation was a quick flick of her neck and a smoothing of yellow locks from her face, which she finished off with a smile each time.

“What?” Emma asked Killian, smoothing the top of her head flat when she caught him staring at her. Killian blinked and shook his head from side to side in short bursts of motion.

“Nothing, love,” he lied with a smile. “You’re just…” he inhaled deeply and could have sworn she used apple scented shower gel.

“I’m what?” Emma pried, leaning back in her chair and resting her hands to the white tablecloth in front of her.

“You’re so beautiful when you’re nervous,” Killian’s voice was low and almost husky in the corner of the empty restaurant. Emma snorted with laughter but had no time to respond as James returned with an electronic notepad in one hand and a thin, silver touch screen stylus in the other.

“Are you ready to order Mr. Jones?” he enquired politely, tapping in some details onto the screen with the pen like implement. Killian moistened his lips and sat forward, catching Emma’s attention.

“Yeah, um…” Killian paused and looked at Emma whose smile almost disintegrated his heart. “I owe this lovely lady a coffee,” Killian told the waiter without tearing his eyes from Emma’s. Emma smiled softly, unable to stop, but she was forced to look away when James interrupted their gazing match.

“Of course,” he chimed on a burst of breath. “Would madam like a short black, long black, Latte, Ristretto, Doppio, Cappuccino, Macchiato, Flat white or Mocha?” James said quickly, knowing the list from memory, and not missing a single beat as he almost sang the list.

“I uh…I don’t know,” Emma stuttered and stared at him, mystified and amazed by his ability to remember such a complex list of coffees, the only one of which she had heard of being a Cappuccino. Emma glanced at Killian for help but he just smiled.

“Bring her one of everything,” Killian ordered and James nodded, tapped on his screen a few times and them scurried away. Emma’s eyes fell onto the menu before her and her entire body flushed hot and her palms began to sweat.

“Killian, the cheapest coffee on this menu is twenty-five dollars,” Emma whispered, her eyes wide and jittery in their sockets. Killian smiled at her softly and leaned forward, taking one of her hands in his.

“Don’t worry about it,” Killian assured her. “I owe you,” he added simply, tracing his index finger over the back of her hand. Emma’s skin was smooth and unblemished and Killian couldn’t resist turning it over in his own and continuing his playful line tracing over her more sensitive palm.

“Yeah, a cheap, machine made coffee, Killian,” Emma insisted. “One, cheap machine made coffee. Not nine, expensive, foreign coffees! I can’t afford these prices,” she fretted, her voice low and breathy on the tablecloth that was inches from her face as she tried to hide from the staff. Killian leaned forward so their noses were almost touching, mimicking her.

“I don’t expect you to pay for anything,” Killian whispered, shooting a glance over Emma’s shoulder as James approached them. “Emma, do you think I could walk into any restaurant covered in blood with my head stapled shut? I am a valued customer,” he added proudly, sitting back upright and greeting the tray of coffees as they arrived balanced on the hand of James.

Killian insisted Emma try every single coffee they had ordered, not that Emma didn’t feel inclined to. Three hundred and ten dollars later, Emma had discovered that her favourite kind of coffee was called Macchiato. Served in a white, porcelain demitasse cup, it was essentially an espresso shot dashed with hot milk. Its creamy bitterness slid down Emma’s throat and left a remarkably enjoyable taste on her tongue. Killian didn’t touch anything in the restaurant that afternoon, choosing to simply sit across from Emma, reclined in his chair with a loosely balled fist resting on the table and a permanent smile on his face.

Emma couldn’t believe that with Killian’s appearance they had even been let in, let alone served. When Killian walked Emma home in the Storybrooke darkness, they laughed and joked all the way to her mother’s house. The air had fallen heavy with a cold snap, instantly falling in atmospheric pressure and making it a little harder for Emma to catch her breath when laughing. How Killian managed to get her to laugh so much was beyond her; she was usually so reserved, professional and certainly didn’t allow men she had met at work, as a patient no less, to walk her home.

“Are you joking?” Killian laughed, rounding the rickety gate behind Emma, finishing his converse. “I could walk into that restaurant naked and I’d get served,” he chimed and Emma couldn’t help but wonder if he ever had. “Wow,” Killian breathed, his damp condensed breath taking its time to evaporate from the air. His jaw shook slightly and made his teeth chatter as the brisk, nighttime chill seeped into his bones. “You live here?” he asked, his tone obviously that of surprise as she scaled the concrete steps.

“I do,” Emma told him proudly. “I inherited it from my mother recently,” Emma said with a sad tone. She hung her head slightly and fiddled idly with the door key pressed into her palm. Killian stepped forward, reached out and hooked a bent finger under her chin. Lifting Emma’s head slightly he offered her a weak smile.

“I’m sorry,” Killian told her with sincerity. His hand slid from her chin to cup the side of her face and he brushed his thumb over her cheekbone. Emma’s hand gripped at his and she leaned her head into his touch.

“It’s okay,” Emma said with a nod, fighting back the tears that threatened to fall at the mere mention of her mother. She sighed and a silence fell upon them where neither knew what to say. Killian was the first to speak, returning the mood to a lighter tone of flirting and playfulness.

“So, I’ll pick you up tomorrow then, at nine,” he smiled wickedly, pulling his hand from Emma’s skin and resting it back inside his pocket as he bobbed on his feet to keep warm. Emma looked at him quizzically with a frown.

“You will? What for?” she barely managed to ask through her smile.

“Our date, love,” Killian said with blatant, unashamed forwardness. “Wear something sexy,” he almost growled.

“Sexy, eh? Where are we going?” Emma enquired casually as he stepped away from her to stand on the step below hers. Killian turned and looked up at her like an expectant child.

“My place. I’m cooking,” Killian told her, swallowing as she stepped forward and peered down at him.

“So why sexy?” Emma breathed through her smile.

“It goes with my décor.” Killian grinned and Emma cupped his face in her warm hands and leaned forward to plant a soft, lingering closed mouth kiss to his cool lips. Killian’s hands slid from inside his pockets and rested gently on Emma’s elbows, making her skin prickle to life. He pulled away first and waited for Emma’s heavy lidded eyes to flutter open before he smiled at her again. “What was that for?” he asked her, surprised.

“For today,” Emma said, sliding her hands down his neck, across his shoulders and bringing them to rest on his blood stained shirt covering his chest. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, giving him a little push and a coy smile as she turned and walked to her front door, leaving him standing on the steps that had begun to glisten with the tiniest traces of a springtime frost.

[queencatherynerhys]

When I Look At You - TRR AU Part 7

A/N: Here it is, you guys, I can’t believe what a ride this has been. Only a week and a half ago I was so scared to post my work, afraid of being scrutinized for being a bad writer, but you have surprised me time and time again. From the deepest pit of my heart, I thank each and one of you! I love you all and your wonderful self. This will be the last chapter, and I might post an epilogue later. I was gonna do this chapter with an NSFW ending, but I just couldn’t it didn’t feel right. Their love is so innocent and tender. The song inspiration for this ending is from the movie The Last Song with Liam Hemsworth and Miley Cyrus, and it’s so significant that I end it with this song title because this movie is my inspiration for this series. This isn’t very long, I am so sorry. I’ve never been good at endings either so please forgive me.

Song Inspiration: When I Look at You by Miley Cyrus

Summary: Liam and Catheryne finally know each other’s feelings. Will they finally get the happy ending they deserve?

Tag List: @captainkingliam @decisso @devineinterventions2 @madaraism @theroyalweisme @drakewalkerwhipped @laniquelove @drakesfiance @hhiggs @hellospunkiebrewster @alicars @mrswalkerreynolds @mfackenthal @simplyaiden-blog @hopefulmoonobject @blackcatkita @cocomaxley @boneandfur @lizeboredom @crayziimaginations @umccall71 @zarina-x-zig

Previous Parts:

Ruin the Friendship – Part 1

Delicate – Part 2

Tell Me You Love Me – Part 3

Maybe This Time – Part 4

Almost Lover – Part 5

The Scientist – Part 6

Catheryne looks at Drake one last time before she walks out of the door. “Thanks, Drake, for everything,” she claims before disappearing through the front entrance. She means every word. She couldn’t have survived these 2 months without his help, his presence and his friendship. Friends, she feels terrible for treating Drake this way, and she knows personally how heartbreaking and painful it is when the person you love doesn’t reciprocate the same feelings. At least he handled it better than I did with Liam. I’m so sorry Drake. I’m so sorry I couldn’t love you the way you wanted me to. Maybe in another lifetime. A life without Liam.

She thinks of Liam waiting for her at their meeting place, and she practically sprints to her car. Liam! He loves me. He really loves me. What the hell happened with him these 2 months? She rushes towards her house, being fueled by her excitement of what the future holds for her and him.

She doesn’t bother parking her car in the garage. She has waited 6 years for this moment to come and she’s not going to delay it any second longer. She runs up to the path that leads her to the beach. She sees Liam sitting down on the same spot that’s become a memory to her. Oh gosh there he is. Alright, Catheryne, you can do this. It’s just simple talk. Don’t blow it all now. She calms her racing heart as she walks towards him.

“Hey,” she announces herself, touching his shoulder before she sits down beside him. She glances at his ocean blue eyes before averting and looking down at his swollen, bruised hands, “Oh my god, Liam, your hand. Let me get some ice.” She begins to stand up, but Liam stops her by grabbing her hand, “No, stay, please.”

“Okay,” she hesitates before agreeing. He stays quiet for a while just looking out into the horizon where the sea meets the sky. Finally, he breaks the silence, “I’ve always loved this view, but I didn’t realize how much or why until now,” looking at her with the most endearing look she has ever seen from him. She cocks her head in confusion at his sentence.

He flashes a smile before continuing, “I just realized the reason why this view means so much to me is because of you. In every memory I have of this place your beautiful face is there.”

Her heart melts at his words. Is he serious right now? Oh my god. She smiles at him, lost for words. “Liam, I…” she begins to say.

“Ryne, please, just let me finish what I have to say before you say anything else,” he sincerely asks. She nods and looks at him intently as he speaks.

“I really want to apologize for seeing me that way at Drake’s house. I really don’t know what came over me, and don’t worry I’ll apologize to him later,” he begins, nibbling his bottom lip nervously before continuing.

“Look, Ryne, I am really sorry. I am so sorry for how I have treated you over the years. I took advantage of you and it drove you away out of my life. I hope that one day you can find it in yourself to forgive me,” he says, regret resonating in his voice. “Liam, I…” again he stops her. “Ryne, please, be patient with me, I am almost done I promise,” he begs.

“You have an amazing friend in Hana. I can see why you like her so much. That woman is wiser than any person of her age. These two months, I… I was a mess, Ryne. I was drinking my life away. I wasn’t eating anything. It’s like I was in darkness when you left. I got a job at a Russian bar to keep me busy, but it didn’t work. She stopped at the apartment to pick up your stuff and scolded me for not eating. Then, we got to talking while we were packing your belongings. I told her about our senior prom because she saw the picture in your room. She’s the one that slapped some sense into me and made me realize what I was feeling wasn’t because I was being an overprotective friend or brother or that  because of the responsibility given to me from a promise I made with your dad that I would look out for you. She made me see the truth. That I…I…I love you, Ryne,” he admits.

Her breath is caught in her lungs. Her tears well up in her eyes, threatening to spill. Oh, those words, those beautiful words I have been waiting 6 years to hear from his lips. I never thought I would hear him say he loves me too.

“I love you, Ryne. I am head over heels in love with you, and when I look back now, I know I have always loved you, I think ever since the first time I saw you the day we met in this very same place. I am so sorry it took me so long to realize it. And I see now, that I am too late and that’s ok. You deserve happiness, so much joy that Drake can give you. I know he can treat you better, better than I have, and I ever could. I just…I’m not telling you this to change your mind and pick me. I just need you to know. I desperately need you to know that I…

She cuts him off by pressing her lips against his. At first, he is shocked by the sudden display of affection, but he reclaims his composure and smiles against her lips as he deeply kisses her back. She wraps her arms around his neck, tangling her hands in his beautiful golden locks. One of his hands traces circles on her cheek while the other pulls her closer, frantic and desperate for the warmth she is emanating. He tries to pour all his love for her in that simple kiss, a kiss marking the beginning of an entire lifetime of happiness.

They pull away, foreheads touching as they look at each other with the same widespread smile. “You’ve always talked too much for your own good,” Catheryne jokes. He laughs at her words. I don’t think I can ever get tired hearing his laugh. I want to spend the rest of my life making him laugh. “Well, I welcome your interruption as long as it’s always with a kiss.” He reaches for her hands as he speaks, planting the softest kiss on them.

Is this what those princesses feel like in the end of fairytales? I think I just fell in love with this man more than I have before. She lifts his chin, making him look at her. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing those blue eyes. “I love you, Liam Rhys,” she whispers at him, staring at the windows of his soul hoping to reach it with her words.

He stands up and brings her closer to him as he affectionately says, “I love you, too, my beautiful Ryne.” He smiles as he takes her face and kisses her forehead down to her cheeks and finally giving her the most loving, lingering kiss he could muster. Their world is finally complete now that they are together.

She giggles when they pull away from each other. “What’s so funny?” Liam asks her, placing his hands on her waist bringing her closer to him. “Nothing, I just…this is…unbelievable. Here you are after 2 months. Here we are. I have waited for this moment for 6 years. Imagining how it would be like in my head a million times,” she confesses with amusement in her eyes. “And did it live up to your expectations, my love?” My love? Really? How much more loving can this man be? Her face hurts from the biggest smile she’s ever had on her face. “Yeah, that and so much more,” she nods.

They stand there close together, holding each other close as they catch up with their lives. He holds her hand so tenderly while watching the firmament turn from sky blue to an orange hue touched with pink and purple colors. This is all I ever could want and ever need. She turns her head and looks up at the handsome face of her boyfriend. My boyfriend, heh, that sounds so weird! My boyfriend. This is Liam, my boyfriend. She smiles again at the thought. He catches her staring at him and holds her closer.

She squeezes his hand getting his attention, “We should really head inside so I can fix your hand and your handsome face.” He smirks at her, “So you think I’m handsome, hmm?” She shakes her head, “Liam, even you know that you’re handsome!” She squeals as he picks her up threshold style. “Well come on then, gorgeous,” as he carries to her house. They laugh and joke at all the memories, looking forward to the many more they will make together. The happiness in their hearts couldn’t be contained, now that their happy ever after has finally arrived. 

[diveronarpg]

Congratulations, KAITLIN! You’ve been accepted for the role of JULIANA with an FC change to ZOE BARNARD. Admin Rosey: I think we all know how much I treasure Juliana. She’s my little principessa and my heart. Which is why choosing between the applications literally had me sweating because they all represented such distinct aspects of her. But Kaitlin you provided something that I don’t often think of when looking at Juliana: a spine of steel. I thought it was one made of flowery vines, but you’ve convinced me that it is a spine of metal, capable of producing thorns while glinting with jewls. It’s because of this, I have entrusted my daughter to you.. Please read over the checklist and send in your blog within 24 hours.

WELCOME TO THE MOB.

Out of Character

Alias | Kaitlin.

Age | 21.

Preferred Pronouns | She/her.

Activity Level | I am currently in Florida on holiday, but usually I spend a great deal of my free time online so I’m around and writing all the time! I won’t be able to much (if at all) while I’m down here since I’m moving my sister into college, but in general I can usually squeeze out a reply every day, though sometime I go a few days without posting and then post 6 replies on a single day, so. Do with that what you will.

Timezone | EST.

Current/Past RP Accounts | This is my most recently used account. This one is from around 6 months ago.

Also; Either I’m blind or I can’t find the additional questions section, but long story short I’d wondered if I could use Zoë Barnard as Juliana’s FC? Thanks babes!! Have a wonderful rest of your day reading and stay hydrated!!! Drink water u beautiful, dehydrated bitches!!!

In Character

Character | Juliet; Juliana Rosetta Capulet.

What drew you to this character? | I’m not exactly sure what caught my eye about Juliana two years ago, I could probably find my old application and try and figure it out again, but without doing so, what first broke my heart were the choice of words bolded, the words that you saw fit to emphasize. The words that make Juliana who she is. Thrive. Ghost. Onlooker. Helplessness. Obsession. Lamented. Saint. Blood. Symbol. Succumbing. Love. These words are a patchwork quilt of heartbreak and home building, of a life simultaneously ruined and still being built.  She is built from ghosts, trying to stand on her own two feet while trying to balance who she was as a girl with who she feels she must now be as a woman. An onlooker to her own life, she’s both in control and out of it, toying with this feeling of helplessness, and wondering if the control she’s taken to get her father’s attention, to get her freedom, is all worth it. She’s a saint with blood in her future, a symbol of love and loss and light, and all the ways the dark threatens those things.

I’ve never favored girls who are put together. Call me a cliché if you like, but my female muses are an assortment of messes, girls who bear their teeth so they might hide their heart without the world realizing, girls who hide behind a string of lovers because they are terrified of love, girls who burn so brightly they threaten to consume–I’ve never been a fan of the sort of muses who are prim and proper and expect the world to lay itself at her feet without even having to ask.

So at first glance, I’m sometimes surprised that I adore Juliana the way that I do. Or at the very least, that I gave her the time of day to sit and think about her. But I did, and boy is she a mess in her Chanel.

(I actually think she favors the likes of Gucci or Dolce & Gabbana, all bold prints and daring colors with crisp lines, but that’s besides the point).

At first glance, Juliana is every inch the perfect princess that one might expect from Juliet, at least the Juliet from the beginning of the play. As a child she is spoiled, both with material objects and with love. But she was young when her mother died, and for all that her father loved his daughter, he employed his grief tenfold when it came to protecting her. He caged her away, kept her hidden and protected and I think in many ways, this has ruined her.

Juliana is a collection of fatal flaws.

Her love for her father, her desperate, unending love for him, has made her unable to fully recognize that the darkness she was afraid might taint him has already dragged him down. Not even that it dragged him down, that rather he stepped into the abyss without so much as a look back to check on his daughter. She loves her cousin, her darling Tibby, who is cruel and violent and knew the taste of ruin before he’d learned how to walk, who spit on the Montague name before he’d even heard that he was supposed to–she loves him, with a fervor equal to that anger which he directs at the world. The Tiger of Verona, they call him, but she still sees the boy who rode his bike behind her down to the river, groaning and grumbling the whole way, but protecting her all the same. She loves all her people, would die for each and every one of them if there was a call to action that required such a sacrifice.

But love and loyalty are not her only sins–that same father that built her a gilded cage taught her pride, taught her to believe in herself even when he didn’t speak to her. Even when she felt like she wasn’t enough for him, her pride turned itself into a deadly thing. Double edged and sharp as the tip of a blade, her pride is simultaneously unshakeable and unfound. A creature that thrives on attention and love, she can sometimes crumble into herself with a lack of it.

She is loyal, and it has made her blind. She’s been put on a pedestal and it’s made her pride deadly, a corrosive thing that threatens to turn her blood from ichor to mere iron. She is curious, and it is going to put her 10 feet under.

She is an innocent in a world where innocence does not fare well.

I’m curious to see which hamartia, if any of them, will prove her downfall. After all, the best fatal flaws are the ones that are good in moderation. Loyalty with clarity of vision. Pride without hubris. Curiosity with care.

In Juliana, there’s something tragic. In Juliana, there is something magic. And that’s the kind of character any writer would be fascinated with, at least in my book.

Does she have the ability to find balance? Here’s hoping.

(Or not–we need to keep things interesting, after all).

What is a future plot idea you have in mind for the character? | For starters, I think Juliana is one of those wonderful characters that’s caught in an in-between. She’s in a transitory stage, with her fate hanging so precariously in the balance. She’s been afforded the opportunity to break from the chains of her innocence, but she’s also beginning to wonder if perhaps her lily-white hands were not so much a chain but a blessing. And she is wondering that about a great deal of her life, and I am watching and wondering myself which branch of her fate she will choose to walk down.

Here are some paths for her to choose, though I am certainly someone who thrives better when I have other characters to plot with.

(Which, coincidentally, will be another interesting concept to consider with Juliana. Lovely, lonely Juliana, who has been caged and sheltered and only recently brought into the fold of violence that bedecks her father’s hallowed halls, does not know so intimately the men who populate her father’s ranks. She is not overly privy to their personalities, and she is less than friends with a great deal of them. They respect her, to a degree, being the boss’s daughter they must, but she does not know them. She is coming to, slowly but surely understanding her people, and I’m interested to see how someone so isolated will fare in this sea of people).

Okay, tangents aside, some plots. (Sidenote: These are all fairly independent, and some can happen simultaneously where others are branches that, once started down, mean she wouldn’t be able to go down others. It really depends on fellow muns).

FOR KING & COUNTRY. One of Juliana’s guiding lights has always been fidelity, almost as much as love has been; for those whom she loves are those who inspire loyalty within her. It’s said right there in her biography, that she adhered to the commandments her father set forth the way any disciple ought to. It’s a hard line to draw though, where she ought to direct her loyalty and her love. I think this is one of the things about Juliana that appeals to me, that she is such a slave to her love, and at the moment her love for her father and for her country are in line. At the moment, she believes that her father is leading their people the way he ought to (or, at the very least, the best and only way he knows how), and that the blood and ichor spilled are ruinous but have not ruined them yet. But what happens when she reaches that limit? What happens if she comes to the conclusion that Verona is ruled by a gilded elite, one that needs to spill the blood of those lower than them just so she might continue to sit upon a poisoned throne? What happens when a king is not ruling the country, but killing it? What, pray tell, is a princess to do then?

THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Juliana has let the iron into her soul, has tasted darkness and been left hungry; there’s no doubt about that any longer. She shadows the Great Cosimo Capulet, striding through the halls of the Cathedral, and she finds herself intimately familiar with the coppery taste of air tainted by spilled blood, knows what it is to feel the buck of a glock 19 in her hands, and yet. Juliana is bedecked in innocence painted red, a tender-hearted girl with violence at her fingertips, but for all that the violence has been exposed to her, so has her father. It’s a hard thing, reconciling the man who once tucked her into bed at night, a soft kiss pressed to her temple, with the man whispered about among the masses. And those whispers? They speak of the death of innocence. They speak of the cold-blooded, hard-hearted murder of an underboss across the bridge. They speak of a son taking his place as leader of the family too soon and a daughter with pearls in her eyes and kindness woven with steel in her spine. They speak of an unjust loss, and they say it was her father who dared pull the trigger, if not by his own hand then by his order. Juliana is under no illusions; she sees the darkness in her father, sees it leaking into her own heart and threatening to turn her body towards rot, but to think of her father as someone who would underhandedly cross the border into Montague territory to have Alvise Vernon murdered is different from recognizing her father as someone engaged in a battle for power, as someone who kills those who dare cross the Castelvecchio into Capulet territory. She’s not sure though either way if the whispers are true, and that scares her.

ROMAN HOLIDAY. I find the potential connection between Roman and Juliana quite fascinating. You may call me a cliche all that you like, but it’s not even a romantic connection that I seek between the two. It���s a strange thing, but I honestly couldn’t care less about romance when it comes to Juliana’s future–if anything, I’d prefer to see her learn how to love herself, darkness and all, before she falls in love. But quick tangent aside, Roman and Juliana have been left broken and wanting in their lives, and then were taught to fill the void in completely different ways. Both, though, still have that ache sitting in their chest, turning their hearts towards ruin. Roman turned his towards the mob, allowed the wild, brutal thing to be equally as brutal in its hurt as it was in its nobility, as it was in its power. Juliana wasn’t afforded that same freedom, and instead of turning her heart to steel it turned itself to gold, soft and pliable and equally as loyal. Equally, she burned. Their loss turned them honor-bound, turned them fervent, turned them holy. I’m not sure exactly how they might come together (imagine: they meet, masks drawn, in the flashing lights of the Tempest lounge, each knowing exactly who they other is but wanting just for a moment to pretend they don’t), but I can’t help but think about the ways in which Roman might change Juliana–most of them entirely for the better. Roman is someone who has always known his fate, born into glory and taught how to harness it, and I think he could do a great deal to teach Juliana how to lead her people. He is wracked with his own grief, a grief that could fill him with prejudice against her simply for the sake of her name, but if they were to overcome their differences, the pair of them together could turn Juliana into the kind of woman she could only dream of being: daunting, exceptional, inspiring. Apart they are formidable, even if many can’t see that in Juliana yet. Together they threaten to raze Verona to ash and build her back into something golden.

THE LADY VANISHES. Another potential path would be Juliana falls into the iron, consumed by that which she vowed to protect her father from. In some ways, Juliana has traded in one golden cage for another made of silver and bronze, of tougher and more formidable things. Before her father brought her into the fold, she lived a lonely life, to be sure, but it was also lovely and left her sun-haloed and her blood tasting of honey. She attended private school and came home after classes were over, lounging in the backyard gardens, a book by Emily Brontë or some other romanticist cracked open and a bowl of peaches (or cherries or apricots or whatever else she could have possibly desired) on the table next to her. She’d sit before her canvas in a linen shirt and nothing else, paint streaked across the canvas and her cheeks while she poured her heart into the brush strokes. She’d sit at the dinner table with her father and smile and laugh and tell him about her day until he’d quietly excuse herself. Eventually she’d go on to expect it, this quiet departure, and eventually she’d stop minding the quiet. Yes, she led a quiet life, one full of care and peace, and she didn’t mind so much until Vivianne convinced her father to pull her from her cage for a night and show her all of the darkness that she’d been missing. And with the dark came the love of the moon, and the stars, and the cosmos gave Juliana the same love that the sun had formerly shown her. It’s intoxicating, the darkness, the flecks of light that dance across the sky as an evening wears on, the atrocities that men and women will commit in her name, the ones that taste uncomfortably like a drug she never intended to get addicted to. What if she were to give in? I think it’d be a fascinating thing, to see Juliana fall.

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE. It’s no small secret, Juliana’s innocence. It shapes her every breath, lets each and every member of both mobs form their own opinions about who she is and what she is capable of–all without ever actually meeting her. Boss’s daughter, the delicate flower, the soldiers sometimes whisper when she enters a room. She is the blessed daughter, no matter the grime that’s started to taint her manicure, no matter the blood she spills on her Manolo Blahniks. I’d be curious to see how this innocence of hers fares, and whether or not it will lead to her untimely end. I think this is possibly the least likely of my plot ideas; I find it hard to believe that the prodigal daughter would allow herself to be chained to her innocence, no matter how much she might resent the darkness, but it could be an interesting thought to consider, this kind of oxymoronic concept of fatal innocence. She’s let the darkness is, but will the light burn it from her soul, taking her body down with it? Time will tell.

LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON. There’s something terribly haunting about Juliana being forced into a marriage for which she has no passion, into a relationship with a man whom she… respects? Priam Taravella is an honorable man, and she is fiercely loyal and guilty in her innocence, and she would never want to intentionally go out of her way to make a move against this union arranged for her by her father, but this is Juliana. Juliana, who would die for love. Juliana, who would die just to be in love, for some fleeting moment where she could taste love’s tender kiss, for a shared night with a lover who put their mouth to her collarbone and whispered her a new religion. She wants someone to stare into her eyes and show her what it is to go mad for love. Juliana, she loves and she loves and she loves and she has so few directions to direct her love. She has her father, and she has her cousins, and she has her Vivianne, but none are the love she so desperately might desire. The love she so earnestly deserves. It’s no small thing that the last line of her bio is “Icarus and the sun? That was love.” That is what Juliana seeks in life–a love that is all consuming, a love that threatens to burn, a love that she’d be willing to cast the world into flame just to get a taste of. Priam Taravella might be a partner, a brother in arms in this war that she doesn’t want to be fighting, but he’s no sun, and she doesn’t turn to Icarus when he comes near. I want so desperately for her to say this, to speak out against her arranged marriage, to step into the ranks of the Capulets and come out stronger, with a louder voice and with hands that no longer shake, and be unashamed of her hungry heart. She’s a girl born to a bloodied throne–should she not be worthy of it herself? Should she not have a mate to match her hunger?

Are you comfortable with killing off your character? | Always. I’m so that bitch.

In Depth

In-Character Interview:

What is your favorite place in Verona?

She knows what she would have said, once upon a dream.

She thinks of the before, when the sunlight tasted like honey and her smile was effortless. When she could walk through the garden behind their villa and not remember the sight of a dark haired woman sitting on the stone bench beneath the olive tree there, spine cracked and a smile on her face as Emma Woodhouse did something to make her laugh. When she spent each summer biking outside of her hometown to the small lake just south of the city, Tibby trailing along behind her at the request of his father. We can’t let the princess get lost, she can still remember him saying, the echo of a mother’s soft laughter still ringing in her head.

She remembers slipping through massive dark wood doors, her little sister in tow, shutting the heavy thing behind her and standing among all of the things that made her mother who she was. A baby-faced Juliana, pulling open drawers and running small hands over the fine silks there, or slipping into the wardrobe at the back of the room where all of her mother’s biggest, warmest coats hung up. She’d bury herself on the floor there and whisper stories to Siena, tall tales of romance and intrigue that she’s read about in the novels she’d found among her mother’s things. She remembers putting on a pair of velvet red stilettos, six sizes too big for her adolescent feet, and wrapping a silken scarf around her slender neck, giggling and laughing as her dark-haired counterpart donned a wide-brimmed hat she’d only seen her mother wear once.

But that life feels like a dream now.

A life lived, surely, but not by Juliana. Not as the woman she is today.

Instead, she thinks of the places she loves now, the places that are privy to the woman she’s becoming rather than the one she’s been forced to leave behind. She thinks of the cathedral and every moment where her father has looked upon her with newfound approval, but must then also think of the blood she knows has been spilt there, the ichor she can’t see but knows is under her cousins fingernails. She thinks of her bedroom, the bed with the white linen bedspread she insisted on even though her father said he’d buy her a silk set, the window with the bench below it where she likes to sit and read the stories her mother once told her before putting her to bed. She thinks of the abandoned easel in the corner of the room, paint dried and the image only half-completed. We learn to love our cages, they say.  

She thinks of the Castelvecchio, and the many times she’s sat on the edge of the bridge and stared into the sunset, the colors of the sky daring her to pick up a paintbrush she put down two years ago. But if she must think of the bridge then she must also think of the crimes that have befallen both sides of this conflict that has left the two families broken and wanting.

And then, she thinks of the inbetween.

“The Twelfth Night,” she says suddenly, as though pulled from a trance. “I’ve always loved art, though it wasn’t until recently that I spent much time there.”

How embarrassing, she thinks. Vivianne taught me better; never let them see you blink.

“They have a Rembrandt that just–” she pauses for a moment, inhaling deeply and shaking her head, the image coming to the forefront of her mind. “It’s just absolutely phenomenal. Have you ever been? Their Baroque collection is simply to die for. They have a Velásquez that I promise will steal the breath right out from your throat.”

She pauses, another half beat of her heart where she remembers a cage she sometimes wishes she wasn’t free of.

“Then again, of course, his best works are in Spain. Las Meninas is at the Museo del Prado, if I’m not mistaken.” She’s not, but she knows better than to be impolite. So she smiles, and goes on, her eyes mischievous when she continues, as though she’s letting him in on a secret.

(She pretends she doesn’t feel a pang in her heart when she mentions Spain. When she thinks of a summer spent walking through Madrid while she and her mother visit her aunt, the air warm and full of music that makes her heart sing. When she thinks of a freedom she never got to taste again).

“Everyone always expects me to favor florals, you know. When I say I love art, they expect me to love the impressionists, to say that Renoir and Monet are who I’d lay my heart bare for, or that Degas Dancers in Blue hangs over my bed, but they’re wrong. It’s not that they aren’t beautiful, of course they are, but stand in front of a Rembrandt or a Velásquez for half an hour and it’s just… it’s transcendent. It’s real, but it’s also more than. Monet is beautiful, but Rembrandt…”

She shakes her head again, her chest heavy.

“Rembrandt is sublime.”

What does your typical day look like?

She can’t help it when she lets out a laugh, her eyes glinting like sunlight on the water. She doesn’t blame her interviewer when the breath catches in his throat.

“Is this the part where I demurely evade the question? Bat my lashes and act like my days are top secret?” She is all soft lines when she leans forward in the plush velvet armchair, shoulders curling in on themselves while she twists her mouth into a smile. “None of my days are typical,” she purrs in mock amusement.

He responds, says something he probably thinks is witty. Juliana smiles, but she’s not really listening to him and for a moment her heart isn’t in it.

The truth is that her days scare her sometimes, and sometimes they make her heart sing, and she’s not sure exactly which is worse anymore, or what causes which reaction on what occasion. There are days where the thought of leaving her bedroom terrifies her, where the thought of walking through the streets of Verona will mean having Tiberius at her heels, eyes and teeth hungry for spilt blood. Days where she’s not sure if she hates him or loves him more for it in equal measure. You don’t hate him, she thinks quickly. You hate what this city’s done to him. (She knows better, knows that violence is embedded in her cousin’s heart, the same way she knows the darkness was always in her fathers and it was simply grief that brought it forth–she lies to herself all the same). Then there are days where staying in her cage seems equally as dangerous, equally as terrifying. What was she missing, out there in the world? A world where all was not sunlight and starry nights? The days where her father bids her stay in the house she will stare at the half-finished canvas in her bedroom and wonder–those haunt her the same way her days at the Cathedral do.

She’s caught somewhere in the middle of them, these two lives of hers, and the more time she spends in the in-between the more she begins to see that the pair of them are both light and dark. That they are cages in equal measure, and she loves them both.

(And what, pray tell, would be better to die for? One could say she’s caught between a rock and a hard place, her gilded cage and her blood-soaked title, but she’d call herself lucky, to have a life so full of love, practically brimming over the edge with it).

“It’s changed, recently,” she finally says in response to whatever it was he had said last. “My definition of typical.”

She purses her lips just so, pausing only the bat of an eye before deciding what she may actually be able to tell her companion.

“I used to wake when I pleased, but I’ve begun rising with the sun. I desperately need an espresso in the mornings though–you really don’t want to meet me early morning if I haven’t had a healthy dose of caffeine. I wish I were someone who enjoyed running. They say it’s a good thing to do in the mornings, a way to kickstart your day. Do you run?” Her companion shakes his head, but she’s not convinced he’s really listening to her. His mouth is parted and his eyes are trained on her full mouth; it makes her smile. “No? Well, I wish I did. Perhaps we ought to take it up together. Be each other’s motivators.”

A half-pause. Another moment for her to bask in his staring. She’d always fared well with attention.

“Sometimes I have errands to run, for my father or otherwise. More often lately it’s been something for him, but I can’t always be sure there’s something he wants for me to do, so I’m not sure I’d call it typical.” Her mouth twists, half smile half grimace, as though she must be apologetic for not having a more direct answer. “Someone once told me that each plan is a house of cards, and when a single variable shifts, the whole thing comes tumbling down. I suppose that’s the approach I take when planning my days, what I must consider on any given week, that having a plan for my ‘typical day’ will always falter, that the unpredictability is what’s most predictable now.”

What has been your biggest mistake thus far?

For a half second, just a single moment, she nearly says the unthinkable.

It comes like the whip of leather, a shock lash through her system that she can’t deny, the kind of insecurity she’s never allowed herself to so much as feel, much less voice aloud to a near stranger, no matter how delicious his gaze had made her feel a moment before. I thought I would be enough. It’s a dangerous thought; not exactly sacrilegious, but something close. Something equally as desperate, something equally as ruinous. She’d remember, through no will of her own, the moments between cage and what she’d thought would be freedom, the night where her father announced to her over dinner that he’d like for her to start shadowing him.

(Shadowing. It was a funny word. A dark word for dark work.)

Nonetheless, she took her sun-hungry bones and turned herself into a half-moon girl, a goddess who could live in both the light and the dark of the world, and she’d done it all for the love of a father, for a love she’d been nearly bereft of for years. She’d tasted it in doses, in gifts left out for her the morning after a dinner spent alone, a pair of diamond earrings here or that pair of Gucci loafers she’d been eyeing there. She’d thought, somehow, desperately, inevitably, that this darkness she’d let into her soul would turn her into a girl her father might finally pay genuine attention to, no matter how that darkness might terrify her. We’re all drawn to that which scares us, Vivianne had said to her once, on a dark night with storm clouds on the horizon. Juliana had opened her windows to the rain, had leaned on her casement ledge and wanted in a strange and hungry way to stick her hand out the window, better still to rush through her backyard directly into the thunder and lightning. We feel safest when we know our fears, just as we do when we know our enemies. And if the darkness did bury itself in her heart, then she might know it, might better understand it, might use that darkness to show her father the dangers of such a thing. She would show him that it would suck her in like a drug and spit her back out just as rotten, just as ruined.

For her father, for her family, this was a weight she could bear.

This loss of light.

She should have known that to know the darkness would teach her to love it. Hadn’t that been what Vivianne was trying to tell her? That fears could intoxicate? She’d watched her father fall into the dark violence of the mob for years, sat alone at home in her bathrobe until late in the evenings, staying up until all hours for her father to finally come through their front door. She’d scurry up the steps to her bedroom before he could see her, but she saw it all the same—that way he loved the darkness, that way he welcomed it into his bones with arms open. She should have known; she thought she was conquering the darkness, but it had every ability to conquer her, too.

But she knows beyond doubt that she can say no such thing, that to admit weakness would go against everything that her father and his merry band of murdering men had taught her, and none would ever respect her if she answered as such. But she’s never been very good with dishonesty, and so when she speaks it’s an uncomfortable truth, but a truth all the same.

“Thinking myself invulnerable.”

She will offer no insight, no further explanation to this boy’s question.

What has been the most difficult task asked of you?

It surprises Juliana, the fact that she knows the answer to her companion’s question without much thought.

My name, she wants to say. For my name I may bear the world.

Instead she gives a soft hum, her head tilting to the side slightly while her eyes cast their gaze downwards. There’s a soft smile playing on her cheeks when she studies the lines formed by dark wood on the floor beneath her chair. When the boy had called and asked if they might conduct this little interview in the comfort of her own home, she’d at first been hesitant. The walls of the Capulet villa were hallowed if not hollowed, a private place, a place she’d once been caged and could be again. She couldn’t imagine her father would be pleased she’d allowed a near stranger into their home, but allowed it she had, and she couldn’t be more glad for the comforts of home.

On the mantle above the fireplace she sees a photo of her and her mother, Juliana looking like she was ten, perhaps twelve. There’s a book open on her mother’s lap, and neither seems to notice the camera trained on their moment. Beside the antique lamp on the side table, there’s a photo of Juliana and Siena, faces cracked wide by smiles. Just there, on the frame of the door leading outside, she can still see the scorch mark left behind from a lifetime ago, when she’d sat in the open doorway with Siena while lightning crackled outside, a candle flickering in the early night while the rain beat down on the patio and splashed up onto their outstretched toes. If she’d done this in a coffee shop, like she’d originally wanted, or in the park that overlooked the Adige, she thinks she wouldn’t have been so… real, neither with her interviewer nor with herself. Here her ghosts would keep her honest.

Lips of a rose and a gaze like sunshine, it shouldn’t be a surprise when it’s her title that is her greatest hardship.

The things we love hurt us the most.

“Do you know the story of Peter Pan?” Juliana asks the boy across the coffee table, lifting her gaze from the floor. Her eyes are steady and her hands don’t shake, but she almost wishes that they would, that she would feel some discomfort at the possibility of bearing such weight, at bearing such self-awareness.

“Sure,” he responds, brow furrowed in obvious confusion. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“Well, sometimes I can’t help but think myself Tinkerbell,” she goes on, a laugh threatening to bubble from her throat. She’d never actually voiced this thought of hers, this strange connection to a fictional fairy that she feels. She hopes he might understand. “At the very end of the novel, Peter can’t remember her, but we know that she died–she isn’t even afforded a death scene, you know? And she dies because people ceased to believe in her.”

She can see the boy’s confusion still plain as day, oblivious to how she might relate.

She laughs finally, a high and lovely thing, but she understands. She doesn’t quite understand it herself yet.

“I think what I relate to, or at least what I’m scared of most, is that I’m like her, that I’m going to… run the business and no one will believe in me, no one will want to follow me, and I’ll be destined to fail because of it, all before I’ve even really begun.”

What are your thoughts on the war between the Capulets and the Montagues?

“My thoughts?” She begins, eyes wide and carefully curious. Somehow she cannot deny her amusement.

The arch of her eyebrows rise up, all of her edges turned to sharp and her hair on end. She should have expected the question, surely, but a part of her hadn’t thought this milky soft boy bold enough to cross such lines.

She keeps her heartbeat level and her eyebrows raised, a kind of careful nonchalance.

Her thoughts flash though, for a moment, to all of those many people that this war threatens to ruin, for a moment to all of the many people that Juliana wants to save, wants to love. She thinks of brutal-hearted Rafaella and the girl she had been when she walked into the Capulet daughter life, thinks of all the ways that she loves her newest family, thinks of the cruel words she’s heard were spit at the girls shoulders and how she came out the other side stronger. She thinks of Donatello’s masterpieces and knows her cousin to be something more, something better, something wonderful. She thinks of all her soldiers, those souls who have pledged themselves at her family’s feet, the hands and hearts that will one day be her responsibility, the hungry hands and hearts that she will need to feed. She loves Verona though, and who could blame her when it is not just her soldiers that she considers, her soldiers that she wishes to love. She thinks of a boy across the bridge, with the weight of a world on his shoulders, and the daughter bereft of a father.

She thinks of a man with two children, a body decaying as it lies in a red pool of its own making.

Mutually assured destruction, is her first instinct.

Instead, she responds with a question.

“You know that phrase–’the things we do for love’?” She looking at the photo of her mother and father on the fireplace mantle, can’t help it when her brows draw together slightly. Slowly, she draws a breath and brings her gaze down from the mantle, making sure hazel eyes been blue. “The things we do for war.”

The honey-haired boy across the way looks at her with a question clear in his light eyes.

She supposes not everyone can see the way love and war intertwine.

“I think it’s about time it came to an end.”

Extras:

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Mockblog

An unorganized collection of headcanons–some of them from my perspective, some flashes of Juliana’s memory, some otherwise.

i. She is not an early riser by nature, but she’s made herself one by design. While she was still caged, she’d sleep away the morning, slip off her eye mask at near mid-day and stretch herself awake. Since she’s joined her father, she’s changed her habits. She’ll slip out her back door to sip at a cup of espresso while the sun leaks purple and pink all over the horizon, bleeds an orange so bright that sometimes she just wants to reach out into the sky and lick it.

ii. She had given herself to God once, but somewhere along the way it was like religion just slipped out of her pocket. She remembers the nights after her mother and Siena died, remembers the way she tried to crawl into the heart of that darkness to find her belief in Him, but she was met with only shadows; most days she’s okay with that, but sometimes in the dead of night, with nothing there but the darkness, she craves the light that she abandoned. Sometimes, she thinks that maybe she’s better off, that maybe there are pieces to her God that are better off left forgotten. She thinks, if she is to go back to God, then she’d like to go back to Emmanuel, the name some give Jesus at Christmastime. God with us, it says, and it’s a light in the darkness. A beacon of hope. God is with us, in us, always. In things big and small, in our hopes and our dreams, the people that we love. Some days it’s easier to think about someone in the cosmos making the decisions, that idea she would always have a destiny set forth, but for a girl whose blood pumps for love, it’s not hard to imagine that it’s those she loves who set her fate.

iii. You wet your pointer finger and run it around the rim of a crystal glass. It’s like angels, you whisper. Your mother smiles.

iv. Vivianne is staring at a slammed door when it truly hits her. You can never be her, Juliana had hissed, tears in her eyes and fists clenched at her side. It’s then that Vivianne realizes Juliana is glass and steel woven together, and she can’t tell anymore if she’s looking at courage emerging from the fragile, or the vulnerable giving way to strength.

v. She looks at her hands sometimes and sees doll parts, porcelain hands attached to marionette strings.

(She should know better, really. Doesn’t she know what dolls always do in the movies? They come to life. And come to life Juliana will.)

vi. She is an unexpected academic, not for want of knowledge particularly, but more for the sheer fact that a quiet life left her with a great deal of free time on her hands. She filled her time with other things, to be sure, painted a canvas the colors of sunset, read novels that made her heart sing in wonder and light, but she is fourteen when her mother dies and school is finally starting to get interesting when it happens. So, she gives herself to it. Languages don’t come naturally, but she spends hours studying tenses and spelling and starts watching Spanish telenovelas to teach herself. When she learns that, she moves onto harder languages like Russian, all harsh and brass noise but beautiful in it’s savagery. She teaches herself to slip between tongues the way others change their tops, letting Spanish roll of her tongue one moment and French in the next breath. She finds history fascinating, how empires rise and fall, and her bedroom is littered with stacks of books with notes in the margins, and The Art of War sits atop her collection of Brontë novels.

vii. She opens every window that she can. I need to be able to breathe, she’ll say when she casts the windows wide during a thunderstorm.

viii. Things go back to normal.

(Read: Juliana continues reading, continues sitting her mother’s closet and touching clothes that still smell of her mother’s perfume. Read: Cosimo bedecks his elder daughter in gifts, and spends all his waking hours (in truth, he sees her in his sleep as well) worrying about how he’s possibly going to keep her safe. Read: Juliana eats peaches in the fading afternoon light and they still taste like sunshine.)

Things don’t really go back to normal.

(Read: Juliana wakes up in a cold sweat for 6 months straight, an image of milky skin turned sour, purple shadows beneath tired eyes. Read: Cosimo’s gifts his daughter the Tower of Babel and teaches her that she is a saint, that she needs to be protected, that a caged bird is a safe bird. Read: Juliana doesn’t ever want to touch silk again.)

Things go back to normal.

ix. She is not a child, but she is childlike in her wonder, and sometimes her train of thought or her actions can reveal as such. She will hold a particular attachment to her objects, will wonder aloud about something that most people wouldn’t think to question, and has a peculiar preference for human contact that some people can find uncomfortable. She is tactile, still, in nature. Like a child reaches out to touch everything so as to understand, Juliana crosses barriers often and without much thought. She will give hugs in situations where they may not be warranted, touch forearms during conversations, put her hand on a person’s shoulder when she comes up quietly behind them. She will tuck a strand of hair behind a stranger’s ear if they allow her, put her palm to a friend’s cheek when they are in distress.

x. She cannot drink too much champagne, anything more than half a glass really and her stomach will roll–she thinks about the one and only time she stole from her father’s liquor cabinet, a rosy-lipped and doe-eyed little girl trying to impress her golden-haired counterpart. They’d both downed an entire bottle each and then spent the rest of the evening puking in Juliana’s bathroom, but the next morning her house had been quiet and empty and no one ever noticed.

xi. There has been more than one occasion where she was discovered on her casement ledge, sitting precariously on the edge, feet dangling free a bedroom window where the scent of an apricot tree lingers in the air, drifting up from the garden below.

xii. Juliana has exactly four weapons in her current arsenal, though she’s been considering expanding recently, perhaps going to Lucrezia for some training in other methods. The first is a Glock-19 that she was given about a year ago, which feels weighty and foreign in her hands. The second is a balisong, which scares her and exhilarates her in the same breath. Spinning it between her fingers, it looks like dancing. The third is an antique revolver, which while impractical for it’s less accurate, is her favorite. It has a marbled handle and along the metals are intricate etching that make the piece look more like a work of art than a weapon. Her father gave it to her for her 21st birthday. The last is the one that scares her the most: her smile.

[liesandlibations]

Fear and Loathing in Los Santos

*tape recorder clicks on*

"It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child..."

Laughter, cough, cough, spit. Cursing.

No, no, goddammit. That is the intro to Steve Martin's "The Jerk" you asshole, what the fuck are you doing man? Don't come at these people with this kind of weirdness right out of the gate, Jesus Christ. Fuck. Start over.

*tape recorder clicks off*

*tape recorder clicks on, high-pitch rewind squeal*

"Okay, okay, I've got it now, okay. Second take."

Deep breath.

"Tonight on assholes interviewing themselves in the mirror, some fat douchebag failed writer turned clichéd alcoholic talks about himself for hours."

Laughter.

"Fuck. Okay, okay, everything is fine. It's fine. Just get into it already."

So, hey, about me. Uh. I'm a Leo, an INTJ, a Fire Rooster, I've got an IQ that is just shy of about one-sixty depending on how fucked up I am when I take the test, and my favorite color is, believe it or not, Seafoam Green. Not that any of that matters, of course. Is it cool if I have another drink? Thanks. Yes, I realize that was a frightening amount of alcohol but you want to talk about my past, right? That's what it takes then, and here it is.

I was born to an unwed drug-addicted teenage mother in the bad part of the South in about 1980. Before she gave me up, though, she scribbled my name on the birth certificate.

"Memphis."

No idea what she meant by that. Was I conceived there, was she from there? Dunno, to this day the answer eludes me but whatever, the name stuck. I was put up for adoption immediately and really I can't blame her, shit, who could? Stuffed into the state orphanage system as an infant and shuffled around from place to place for a while. Never really stuck anywhere for long, as I was riddled with physical illness and undiagnosed mental problems and generally considered too difficult. One family, according to the records which I unearthed years later, reported me as "possibly demon-possessed" at the tender age of three. Life in the Southern Baptist South, right? Whatever. I bounced from foster home to foster home until I finally just ran from the whole system at about the age of fourteen. Spent some time on the streets and a lot of time on other people's couches. I was too smart for my own good by then, angry at everything, hated the world, and in the very beginnings of a life of mental and emotional issues.

That was when I met the Professor.

I'd made it to Memphis, Tennessee. City of my namesake. The home of Elvis, the Blues, the birthplace of Rock and Roll, and the final stop for Dr. Martin Luther King. A place almost as fucked up as I was at the time. I was broke and homeless when I stumbled into a coffee shop somewhere in the art district, hungry and hoping for a handout.

I saw him for the first time, sitting in the back at a table with a chess board full of pieces laid upon it, wisps of grey hair catching sunlight through the dirty windows, staring at me over thick-rimmed black glasses. He introduced himself, "My name's Robert, but everyone just calls me the Professor," he said. Bought me a sandwich and a cup of java. He had a kind voice and an easy demeanor, was keen to know where I was from and where I was going. I, of course, young and impressionable, consumed both the sandwich and the attention with equal gusto. We talked through the day and into the night, and when he found out I was homeless he offered me a place to crash for a while. We walked down the worn sidewalks of the Midtown neighborhood past homes gently lit from within, on a warm evening, and it felt like things were going to be okay.

When we got back to his house, I was introduced for the first time to methamphetamine and sodomy, both with a startling swiftness.

I stayed with him for three years.

I hated it but what else could I do? No hope, no friends, no prospects. The meth almost made it worth it, but not really. It's an old story but at least I had a place to sleep and regular food, and I think he did care about me in his own fucked up way. His house was full of books, floor to ceiling, and I devoured every word I could get my hands on. All the greats, man: Keats, Hemingway, Bukowski, Thoreau, Kerouac, and finally the king, Hunter S. Thompson. I even started writing a bit, here and there, which the Professor was super critical of, naturally. But I found an outlet in some of the anarchist 'zines from the coffee shop and for the first time I got to experience that totally orgasmic feel that a writer  has when he sees his words in black and white print. Seemed some other folks liked those words too, so I struck up a friendship with the local punks and anarchs, which he did not approve of either. Yeah.

Eventually this led to me taking a bunch of his shit and moving out of his place in the middle of the night, into a communal house owned by a punk band who liked my writings. He showed up pounding on the door and demanding to see me, saying he'd ruin me, turn me in to the cops, out me as some kind of whore, the whole nine yards worth of emotional manipulation, sure. But I'd begun to emulate my heroes of the Word by then, so I opened the door and pressed both barrels of a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun to his head and told him that if he ever tried to talk to me again I would turn his skull into a fucking canoe.

When I clicked the hammer back, he got the point, and that was the end of that chapter, yes."

Shit. Okay. Need another drink after that. Yes. That's better, it burns going down, right? Where were we?

"So anyway, I started writing in earnest. Throwing words at paper as if my life depended on it, and maybe it did. I had a pretty serious meth problem by that time and the Words helped to keep the wolf from the door. Luckily the anarchists I'd fallen in with were all straight edge, which I have to admit was annoying as fuck but honestly had it not been for them I might not have made it. They were good kids, at the end of the day, and I am forever grateful for their support. This ragtag group of weirdoes with Mohawks and piercings was probably the best family I'd ever had. Good times in the commune, too, writing and reading, crazy concerts every weekend, just thrashing and bashing and letting the anger out. I even had a girlfriend, for a time, and she, being much better organized than myself, managed to get me to a GED and then enrolled at a local college in some writing courses, specifically Journalism. The girlfriend didn't last, of course, I was still pretty much a mess as a human, but the journalism thing stuck with me and I actually accidentally graduated with honors and a metric fuckton of student loan debt. I was writing more and better than ever before and it was glorious, but I needed credit within the industry, and this led to the next, unfortunately darker chapter.

Jesus Cinnamon-Titties Christ, I need another drink.

*tape recorder clicks off*

*tape recorder clicks on*

"HEY THERE BOYS AND GIRLS IT'S TIME FOR WHIPPY THE SQUIRREL!"

 Goddammit. I still hate that voice. It's sort of what you would get if you let the Chipmunks smoke crack and then stuffed them in a blender.

 Sometimes we do things we regret when we are young, I guess. I was in my early twenties when I snagged my first legal job, a bullshit internship at a local TV Station. Jesus. I showed up all bright-eyed for my four in the AM shift and was handed a threadbare squirrel costume, complete with giant horrifying cartoon head. It reeked of booze and ass. "Morning kids show mascot," they said, "Whippy the Squirrel, beloved icon of local marketable children everywhere," they said, "Learn how to do the voice or you're fired." they said, and that last bit was the important bit. So I spent three hours in a cramped video closet watching reruns of the previous holder of the title, trying to get it right.

 Twenty years that poor bastard was the furred whipping boy for this station, and over the time lapse of the video tapes you could see his spirit wither away, slowly crushed by the awful mundanity of his chosen occupation. I found out later he'd showed up to work one morning, taken a little break to go to the dressing room, put the barrel of a .357 revolver in his mouth, and fucking BLAMMO. Cut to "Technical Difficulties" slate, call the cleaning crew, so it goes.

 But I really needed the job and the industry credit, so I lit a joint, got really fucking high, nailed the voice, and became the ultimate personification of local televised capitalism and commercial broadcasting. It wasn't really hard. Put on the giant stinking head, trot out in front of a bunch of bored children, try to get them excited about the next magician, clown, or Hannah-Barbara cartoon rerun. It didn't take long for me to fall into the bad habits again, smoking out and drinking heavily every shift just to get through it.

 The morning anchor's name was Jane Childes. A forty-something former beauty queen she was, with an older doctor husband, a very expensive set of fake breasts, and a predilection for cocaine. Before the news she would spend thirty minutes on her hair alone and then spend commercials doing bumps off the news desk. During the break between Sunrise News and Morning News, she'd do, well...

 Me.

 You ever hoover coke off a magnificent pair of middle-aged titties and have hot, sweaty, furry, squirrel sex in a video closet? And then have to go in front of thirty children and their parents and introduce a bunch of goddamned bullshit while reeking of pussy and weed? Of course not, and it went downhill really quickly.

 This whole horrible debacle led to a breakdown on television and a general brawl that got me fired. You wouldn't think eight-year-olds could throw down like that, but those little bastards will swarm you. They will climb right up your furry legs and punch you in the balls with all the skill and anger a disgruntled Taekwondo yellow-belt can muster.

 I was, of course, quickly and obviously fired. Barely avoided charges on that one, but luckily Mr. and Mrs. Childes were eager to stay away from any sort of public scandal and paid to have the whole thing hushed up. I suppose you could say that was my first introduction to real Old Southern Politics, where everything was about who you knew and how many people were related to you and little else in the way of reason. So it went.

 I got a letter in the mail from the Liberty City Courier the very next day, the third most popular newspaper in a crime-ridden city the majority of people hadn't heard of outside of the late night news. Seems they loved my work and wanted to make me an offer. So I sold all of my shit and bought a bus ticket.

 "Time for the big time," I thought.

 Goddamn, I was naive.

Let's have another drink, shall we? I'm not drunk, you're drunk, shut up. I'm telling this story, you goddamned reflection. Why don't you lose some weight, too? Fat bitch, I hate you. No, no, I didn't mean that. Finish the story and we can both go to bed.

Okay, bottoms up and here we go.

Oh fuck, oh fuck I have the hiccups, shit. OMG I HATE FUCKING HICCUPS. Okay, okay, wait... I'm good. Whew.

Liberty City in the early 'ought's, right?

Fuck.

I would call it a den of sin and iniquity but that wouldn't do it justice. I rolled into the Greyhound station ragged and jittery, too many days off the drugs and hard up for the next thing to prove myself. I grabbed my bag, walked outside, and saw a car fly through the air. It flipped upside down, murdered two pedestrians, hit a traffic light, righted itself, and sailed off into the night with about a hundred cop cars, lights a-flashing, trailing behind. Nobody called an ambulance for the poor smashed unfortunates, either, they just laid there as my taxi pulled up to take me to the low-rent apartments that the paper was paying for.

I was, at the time, unprepared for that kind of mental clusterfuck and had a bit of a breakdown in the car. My cabbie, who I think was some kind of Russian from his accent, laughed.

"Welcome to Liberty City, my friend," he said, as he wove in and out of traffic at a terrifying pace. I got to the apartment, locked the locks with a trembling hand, and called in to the paper. They wanted me to report at six in the AM. Fortunately I'd had my new cabbie friend stop off at a local liquor store and the fifth of Jack Daniels I'd procured got me through that night.

It wasn't easy, but nothing was easy.

Except maybe dying, in Liberty City.

I started at the Courier the next day. Covering the crime beat and believe me I made waves right out the door, just by having the audacity to actually talk to the criminals and ask them for their viewpoint. Up until me, I guess the Liberty City Courier was most pro-police-law-and-order and then here I come with my anarchist bullshit, the fucking audacious idea that we examine the society that had led to criminals, consider them as people instead of the usual big bad villains. Having the sheer gall to suggest that the cops might be the bad guys too. The old dogs in the bullpen hated me and I don't blame them. Some dumbass kid from the South with a weird haircut and the wrong clothes rolling up in their turf questioning the very fabric of the very normal kind of journalism they practiced? Very much an asshole, no doubt.

But when I broke that story about corruption in the LCPD, and it went national, no one could deny me.

The public, oh the ignorant and so easily distracted public, they ate it up. Bear in mind this was the late nineties, right? Anti-heroes were in full effect and my kind of crude yet poetic narrative was having its day. Sure. I got invited to the best parties by criminals and celebrities, vast displays of decadence on yachts and in underground clubs everywhere. I was a hot ticket, for a minute. I even managed to get a new girlfriend, yeah, a lovely, uh, a perfect, a...

A goddamned angel, and no mistake.

Shut up, shut up. It's okay. Moving on.

Anyhow. I got in pretty good with some local heavies. Not as difficult as you would think, nobody loves to talk about themselves more than criminals. What's the point of being smarter and harder than anyone if you can't somehow tell everyone that you are? All I had to do was listen and write the words I heard, at the end of the day. Sure, a little embellishment, maybe a punch-up here and there. Change the names to protect the innocent (not that anyone was, of course), and then BLAM you have a newspaper article, then a column, and then a book, and then it all kind of went wrong in the worst way.

Shit. Okay, wait. I just need another drink. It's okay, just, ahem, it's okay.

*tape recorder clicks off*

*tape recorder clicks on*

Heavy sigh.

 Okay, let's get into it.

I published my collected articles with a major publishing house and we titled it, "Fear and Loathing in Liberty City."

It went to the top three on the NYT Top Ten Publishing list immediately and stood there proudly for two weeks.

Nobody remembers that now, of course, and there is no reason they should. I wish it hadn't gone as far as it had.

See, it seems that some crime lords, arrogant and narcissistic fucks that they are, don't appreciate it when you publish a book in which they feature heavily (even if names are changed), and they are described in a less than favorable light and maybe with words like: "weak-ass Nancy-boys", "useless mentally-challenged fucknuts", or "punk-ass exploitative shit pimp beta fucks".

Well, sure, they get a bit pissed-off at you. Some of them. Well, okay, one in particular.

Sergio Antoine.

Eh.

So there was this mostly-unheard of gang of criminals on the Southside, right? Second-hand punks, mostly, pseudo-bikers. Garbage white-trash meth-heads, low-level drug dealers, pimps, and so forth. Called themselves the "Southside Desperadoes" and owned a three-story warehouse they'd converted into a sketchy strip club named "The Platinum Pony", which was basically a front for their meth and prostitution rackets. Their leader was an ugly bastard that fancied himself as some kind of made man with the local Mafia (none of which, mind you, knew who the fuck he was). Sergio Antoine. He wore expensive clothes and watches, drove Italian sports cars, and wore ridiculous hair pieces.

I swear to God, every time I saw him he had a new look. Short hair, long hair, dreadlocks, shaggy bush, high and tight, loosey-goosey, everything. Couldn't really make up his mind and he ran his gang about the same way. They were drug-lords one week, pimps the next, an MC biker club the week after. Pure chaos. But I managed to ingratiate myself just enough to get access to the inner circle and after that it was a real awakening as to the ways and means of the Liberty City underground crime scene. That formed the basis of "Fear and Loathing" and most of my articles thereafter. I told the club what I was doing, of course, transparency in journalism and all that, but when the book hit, well, they took exception.

Especially Sergio.

Look, I will acknowledge that I didn't exactly describe him in flattering terms, okay, but everything I said was a hundred percent accurate. That probably made it worse. Don't poke the ego-driven narcissistic bear, right? But look here; these people were not good people, they were psychopaths almost to a man, exploiters of everything around them, murderers when they found it convenient and  just overall terrible, terrible shitlord human beings. Bad as it was, every single word I wrote about them was true. I just wish it hadn't...

Well, I mean I should have known it would...

I...

Fuck.

I need another drink. Standby.

*tape recorder clicks off*

*tape recorder clicks on*

Her name was Sarah.

Yeah. Before all this really hit its stride, I'd gotten just well enough known at the Courier that I'd been assigned an assistant. Some young, plucky, college intern, much like I'd been once upon a time. We hit it off, she was amazingly competent at all the things I was not and for my part I was a hopeless wreck of a human being. We bonded over drinks and a predilection for old punk bands and one thing led to another and then my book hit (which never would have happened without her help) and we got engaged and the local press made a big deal of it and we were in love and that should have been the part of the story where the fucking narrator says, "they lived happily ever after" and the end of it.

*extended silence*

Goddammit.

*cough*

Sorry, sorry. We were walking out of a trendy downtown restaurant when a car rolled up on us and gunfire erupted from the windows. I found out later that Sergio had ordered the hit because he felt I'd made him look weak in the book. I took one bullet in the shoulder and one in the knee. Sarah took three in the chest.

I held her, um, hmm. Sorry.

I held her while she died.                                    

Um. I need a minute, okay?

*tape recorder clicks off*

...

*tape recorder clicks on*

So, yeah. Okay.

When I got out of the hospital I went on a bit of a bender.

I mean, like, some epic Greek-hero level shit. Total blackout. I dropped a ton of money on coke, meth, booze, pills, everything. Whatever I could shove into my stupid brain to make it forget the pain, right? Still don't remember anything, and that's probably for the best because I woke up in a cornfield in Iowa three weeks later, wearing a powder-blue dress and one sock. Drug my hungover ass out of the field and down the road until I could hitch-hike into the nearest town, get some breakfast and check the feeds. Iowa locals don't even blink about this shit, too many years in the middle of America and everybody's cousin has a meth problem. Your weirdness doesn't even make a dent.

But it seemed the Platinum Pony had mysteriously burned to the ground in the time I'd been out. Multiple dead, all members of the gang. Sergio himself had been found in the back, in a safe room, almost untouched except for a hole in his head the size of a train tunnel. What survivors there were reported an attack by a demon, a figure dressed in a squirrel costume with a high-pitched voice that terrified them as it hunted them one by one, relentlessly murdering everything it encountered with a sawn-off shotgun.

I've no memory of any of that time, of course.

But I did wonder.

So I got my shit together, such as it was, and sold it off to pay for my ticket home. Went back to the Tennessee hills and got me a little cabin up on the top of an Appalachian mountain. Spent my time collecting royalty checks from book sales, drinking moonshine, smoking meth, and hitting on local moonshiner's nubile daughters who might have read one of my books on the down low. I had my reasons, of course, I'd promised my publisher two more books and they'd already tried lawyers to no avail. I feared they would try hitmen next, ditto for the gang scene in Liberty City, who have large egos and long memories.

So I went to ground, grubbing it out on the top of a mountain. No contact with the outside world, just me and the booze and the meth and the occasional young lady with a passion for literature.

It was not the best life, but it was good enough for me at the time, yes.

Fast forward to now, though.

Two things happened, really, that got me off that mountain. Firstly, I couldn't write. It's fucked up, but too much clean air, too much sunshine, trees, grass, squirrels and whatever the fuck, it broke me. It was too easy goddammit. My brain could not deal, and thus no words. I was hamstrung by bliss, I think. Secondly, the money ran out. Surprisingly enough, moonshiners and meth heads don't give credit. So I drug my dumb blissful ass off the mountain and down to the city, made some phone calls to some contacts in the newspaper world, checked the feeds, and found out that Los Santos was the newest hottest criminal hotspot in the world. I felt it too, that vibe, when I stepped off the bus. That feeling that you could die at any time, strike sparks anywhere, and hammer the fiery words of the gods onto paper.

Los Santos smells like gunpowder, diesel fumes, and blood.

And somewhere in my soul, the old Muse stirs.

I'm here to write words. I'm older now, the reflexes aren't what they used to be, but I think I still have some stories left in me. This is the last ride for this old dog journalist, and I aim to make it count, to leave a legacy, whatever it may be, written in the stars of the universe and hopefully at least two books worth of shit because the publishing house is still after my ass for that contract. It's okay though, I know this music and I remember the steps to the dance. The next chapter of chapters starts here, and words are coming easy in Los Santos.

But if I've learned anything, it's that nothing is ever easy.

*tape recorder clicks off*

[eirinizp-blog]

The Best Movies of 2019 (So Far)

The cinematic dry season (post–awards season, but before the good spring months have arrived) has officially ended, and the summer blockbusters are upon us. Will we remember any of them by the end of the year? Hard to say, but we can point to a few gems among the more conventional genre releases of 2019 so far: a politicized zombie slasher, a documentary about two nights at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, a Mary Kay Place vehicle, two Swintons for the price of one. Here are the best movies of the year that Vulture has reviewed, according to critics David Edelstein and Emily Yoshida, and frequent contributor Bilge Ebiri.

Arctic

Enjoyable and excruciating. In Joe Penna’s survival drama, the riveting Mads Mikkelsen plays a man whose plane has gone down in the frozen wilderness. That’s all we know about him and all we really need to — it’s what he does and keeps doing that defines him. Thrown together with a grievously wounded, non–compos mentis woman, he tugs her well-swaddled form on a sled into the unknown, trudging and grunting and falling and trudging and heeeaving and trudging and heeeaving — and just when we think it can’t get more horrible, we realize that up until then he’d had it easy. The movie really takes your mind off your own troubles. —D.E.

Birds of Passage Set in the north of Colombia among the indigenous Wayuu, Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego’s knockout film is part ethnographic documentary, part The Godfather. Over 20 years (from 1960 to 1980), people whose ways first seem strange metamorphose into a familiar breed of narcos, moving tons of marijuana and become avid materialists. As in Guerra’s last film, Embrace of the Serpent, the disjunction between ancient ways and modern, ephemeral fashions and technology, is not just jarring but toxic, a shock to the system that will almost certainly kill the host. The drive toward revenge kills the characters long before anyone dies — it kills their souls. —D.E.

Escape Room Escape Room didn’t need to be good, and its release during the very first week of the year seemed destined to make it a 2019 B-movie footnote. But the ensemble thriller from Insidious and Paranormal Activity vet Adam Robitel is a whole lot of fun, throwing a group of strangers together into a hyperbolically lethal version of the titular team-building game. It’s much more of a puzzler than it is a horror film, and Robitel doesn’t need gore or jump scares to keep the whole thing tightly wound. The grand finale is so audacious that you’ll be ready to buy a ticket for the sequel before the lights come up. —E.Y.

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Fighting With My Family The unlikely collaboration between writer-director Stephen Merchant and executive producer the Rock is an unexpected joy — a true story that skips along its inspirational sports-movie template while finding real pathos and tough truths under all that sparkly spandex. As WWE champion Paige, Florence Pugh is equal parts ferocious and tender, a misfit struggling to find the right way to share her talents with the world. It’s a WWE production, but if it’s propaganda for the sport, it’s the kind you’ll gladly let win you over to the joyful absurdities of the sport. —E.Y.

Transit Director Christian Petzold (Barbara, Phoenix) changes the time of Anna Seghers’s 1944 novel, in which refugees from the Nazis stuck in Lyons wait for ships to North America: It’s still Lyons, but the period trappings are gone and they’re now fleeing all-purpose “fascists.” At the heart of the story is a slow-motion mistaken-identity farce in which a concentration-camp escapee, Georg (the charismatic Franz Rogowski, who bears a resemblance to Joaquin Phoenix), assumes the identity of a famous writer whom only Georg knows committed suicide — and then falls madly for the writer’s discombobulated wife (Paula Beer). The physical, temporal, and emotional geography is very confusing, but the film is still potent. Petzold is part acrid realist, part romantic: His protagonists lose everything but their passion, emotion being the last refuge. 

Climax It’s Step Up crossed with Battle Royale, a house-music Suspiria, and exactly as fun and harrowing as that description would suggest. French adulte terrible Gaspar Noé (Enter the Void, Love) brings together a vibrant ensemble of dancers led by dynamo Sofia Boutella for a party gone horribly awry thanks to some no-good sangria. In what feels like more or less real time, we watch a cohesive, unified group of very-much-alive young people devolve into screaming, hallucinatory chaos, all set to an incredible disco-techno soundtrack. Noé’s desire to shock is still ever-present, and all trigger warnings still apply. But the dizzying, acrobatic camerawork and the impressive physical and emotional work of Boutella and the rest of the cast make this his most crowd-pleasing — dare I say, even sentimental? — work yet.

Diane A stunning platform for Mary Kay Place as a compulsive do-gooder out to expiate her sins as everyone around her is either dying (a first cousin with end-stage cervical cancer) or on the brink (her addict son and a slew of elderly friends and relatives). Kent Jones’s drama—mostly naturalistic, but with the odd expressionist flourish — is generally regarded as one of the most depressing ever made, but once you accept its un-transcendent, death-centric baseline the movie is strangely exhilarating. In between scenes are shots through a windshield of rural landscapes passing in every season, with soft, haunting music by Jeremiah Bornfield, the film’s protagonist (like all of us) going from someplace to someplace on the road to who-knows-where. In its mundane way, Diane shows you glimmers of the sublime. —D.E.

The Brink Alison Klayman’s On the Road With Steve Bannon doc is essential, sad to say, given that Bannon is not a fringe hate-monger but a man with the ears of protofascist, xenophobic movement leaders in the U.S., France, Belgium, Hungary, Germany, and the U.K., as well as sundry billionaires. Why would Bannon let Klayman be a fly on his wall — or in his ointment? He has faith in his message. He already has “a solid enough minority that’s immoveable.” He just needs to sway an increasingly susceptible 15 percent of the rest, and he’s excellent at making people feel as if they’re being marginalized by a dark (in all senses) cabal — while he denies and denies and denies that he’s saying what he in fact is. Klayman doesn’t have to editorialize to make the point that Bannon is one of the most dangerous people alive.

Ash Is Purest White Jia Zhangke’s epic revisits many of the themes he’s explored throughout his past few films (Mountains May Depart, A Touch of Sin) particularly the near-absurdities of a rapidly changing modern China, and its as profoundly wrought as ever. With Ash, however, there’s a genre twist; a sort of pulp gangster romance shot through Jia’s patient, wide lens. A deceptively steely Zhao Tao stars as a woman separated from the man who, for better or worse, is the love of her life, and sets out to find her way back to him over two and half decades. It’s as much a story of a country rebuilding itself as it is of one woman doing the same, and by its gutting resolution you’ll feel as if you’ve walked those miles and years in Zhao’s shoes. 

Us A politicized zombie-slasher film in which subterranean doppelgängers — separate but mystically “tethered” to their aboveground analogs — swarm our world with scissors and the message, “We exist.” Once you get over the disappointment that Jordan Peele’s second feature isn’t as trim or impish in its satire as his marvelous debut, Get Out, you can settle back and salute what it is: the most inspiring kind of miss. It’s what you want an artist of Peele’s sensibility and stature to attempt — to broaden his canvas, deepen his psychological insight, and add new cinematic tools to his kit. Fans will rewatch the film to savor the fillips, the purposeful echoes, and the “Easter eggs,” as well as a dual performance by Lupita Nyong’o that’s otherworldly in its brilliance. As the double, “Red,” her voice is the whistle of someone whose throat has been cut, with a gap between the start of a word in the diaphragm and its finish in the head. It’s like a rush of acrid air from a tomb.

Amazing Grace Over two nights in 1972, Aretha Franklin, then at the height of her fame, came to Los Angeles’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church to record a selection of gospel classics. The resulting album, Amazing Grace, was one of the most acclaimed of her career. Director Sydney Pollack documented both nights with a small array of 16 mm cameras, but the footage languished for decades until producer Alan Elliott bought it and put together this concert documentary, which was then further delayed by Franklin’s own, somewhat surprising refusal to let it be shown. But now it’s here, and it is transcendent. Resplendent in her caftans but otherwise humble, Franklin gives off no diva or rock-star airs. But as soon as she starts singing, she’s in — eyes closed, head up, half-grins turning into flights of ecstatic joy. So is her audience, shouting their support, cheering her along, dancing in the aisles. And so are we. The movie itself feels like a church service, and it’s enough to make you get religion. —Bilge Ebiri

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote Terry Gilliam’s notorious film maudit, three decades in the unmaking and already the subject of a 17-year-old documentary about the collapse of its production, is, uh, here. And it’s surprisingly light on its feet. The story follows a slick commercial director (played by Adam Driver, an inspired choice) who returns to the Spanish village where he made his thesis film ten years ago, an adaptation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and discovers that the lives there were ruined by his production. Reuniting with the aging cobbler who played his Quixote (Jonathan Pryce), he discovers that the man still imagines himself to be the 17th-century knight-errant. Their ensuing journey mixes medieval gallantry, contemporary topicality, and typically Gilliamesque chaos — a swirling vortex of disguises, dream visions, broad humor, and a delightfully disorienting look at both the creative and destructive power of imagination. —B.E.

Trial by Fire Murderously hard to sit through, which is not something you’ll see on top of an ad. Maybe that’s why the film had been a commercial bust. But this portrait of Cameron Todd Willingham (Jack O’Connell), a Texas ne’er-do-well executed for burning his three little girls to death, is painstakingly well-made and important. The director, Ed Zwick, isn’t cynical about the motives of the investigators who allegedly screwed up so badly in interpreting the evidence. The lie of most police dramas isn’t that they’re on the side of the angels — it’s that they’re always competent at what they do and that there are fail-safe mechanisms to keep innocent people from the death chamber. Laura Dern plays the divorced mother who volunteers to be a pen pal to someone on death row and gets sucked in when she reads the trial transcript. Dern is a great detective actress — she externalizes thought. 

Souvenir A coolly intelligent autobiographical film by the British writer-director Joanna Hogg, who doesn’t often give you your narrative bearings — and spoils you for over-shapers, the spoon-feeders. Her protagonist (Honor Swinton Byrne, daughter of Tilda, who plays her mother onscreen) is a well-off, socially conscious 24-year-old film student who wants to make a movie about a boy growing up by the grotty docks near Newcastle but is thrown off course by her foppish, madly pretentious, and (as it turns out) heroin-addicted boyfriend (Tom Burke). At times the film seems too distanced, but it’s never obvious or banal. Hogg convinces you that incoherence is the only honest way to tell a story with any emotional complexity.