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norahastuff · 3 years

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penny for your thoughts on salmondean codependency ?

Sure. Fair warning it’s long (was longer but I stopped myself.)

I think it’s complicated in a show that’s had so many different showrunners because they’ve all handled Sam and Dean’s relationship very differently. In Kripke’s era (s1-5) there was a romanticization of the bond. Sure there was a lot of in-depth exploration of how they wound up at the place they were at, spoiler alert: it was all because of John and his obsessive crusade to find the demon that killed his wife. That’s all he cared about and as a result, Sam and Dean had to be everything to each other. But Kripke had no intention of dismantling that at any point because he was (and always had been) writing a tragedy. Gamble continued that too. There was no room for anyone else in their lives and it would always just be the two of them against the world. So Cas had to go. Bobby had to go.

(Actually, it's funny because Gamble didn't intend this at the time, her plan was to kill Cas off, but by Edlund creating the masterpiece that is The Man Who Would Be King, he not only saved Cas from being seen as a villain, but he also deepened Dean and Cas' relationship in such a profound way and inextricably linked the two of them emotionally. And since Cas was eventually brought back, that laid the foundation for a lot of what their relationship would become.)

Up until this point, there hadn’t really been any significant dismantling of perhaps the more unhealthy parts of Sam and Dean’s relationship. Enter Carver. He stripped things down and started to explore what drove these characters. What they wanted and why they couldn’t have it. It starts with Dean being mad at Sam for not looking for him in purgatory, which sets up the whole speech in the s8 finale of Sam’s guilt about letting Dean down, but the thing is, Dean was never honest with Sam about his year away either. He never told Sam he could have gotten out much sooner if he hadn’t stayed to find Cas. I mean Dean had assumed Sam was up there alone doing God knows what to try to bring him back, and yet still he stayed in Purgatory because things were clear there. He needed Cas. Anyway, I just find that interesting, but Cas isn’t a victim of Sam and Dean’s relationship in s8.

Who gets the honour of being cast aside? That would be Benny and Amelia, two characters they introduced in s8 specifically to highlight that Sam and Dean’s relationship doesn’t allow for anyone else to be a significant part of their life. I mean that’s nothing new, we’ve watched that happen many times before. Lisa even said as much to Dean. The thing is this time? It’s framed as a truly sad thing. That moment at the end of 8x10 when Dean has just ended things with Benny and Sam leaves Amelia, and they’re sitting alone drinking beer and watching tv is such a hollow empty moment. This is not what they want. But it’s the way things have to be.

I’m actually fascinated by Sam and Dean’s conversation in the church in the s8 finale. Not so much Dean’s assertion that there is no one else he would put before Sam, but more so what provokes it, which is Sam saying “who are you going to turn to instead of me. Another angel? Another vampire?” See the thing is Dean saying he would always put Sam first is not news. We know this and it’s not really an unhealthy statement in itself either. A lot of people would put their sibling above anything else, not less a sibling who you raised and is the most important person to you. But in this context? After what Sam said? It just highlights how unhealthy they are if Sam believes that Dean having other people in his life means he doesn’t love him enough. That he’s a disappointment to him. That’s so profoundly fucked up.

(Note, Dean tells Sam that he killed Benny for him but he doesn’t say anything about Cas. I think like I said before, this is because Cas and Dean’s relationship has largely existed out of the Sam and Dean stuff up to this point - Sam and Cas don’t even really have much of a relationship yet besides both of their connections to Dean.)

And then from here, things start getting steadily worse. But we also keep being shown how bad they are. Dean lying to Sam, taking away his free will by letting Gadreel possess him. Dean sending Cas away, Kevin dying. It’s all awful. The whole “there ain’t no me if there ain’t no you line” from 9x01 isn’t really said by Dean, it’s Gadreel, but that is how Dean feels. He does think that’s all he’s good for. And over the season we’re shown how much of himself and what he truly wants he’s had to give up because of his ingrained “Save Sammy” and “Sammy comes first” mentality. It’s always been this way for him. In 9x07 we see that he had found a happy home, a good father figure, and his first love, a first love might I add that he had to leave behind with no real explanation because Sam needed him, and Sam comes first.

I mean just one episode earlier we had him rushing out the door elated about seeing Cas and spending time with him, only for their time together to come to sad and melancholic end when Dean once again leaves Cas behind without any real explanation, because despite what he wants Sammy comes first. What he wants doesn’t matter.

See I think after the Gadreel stuff comes out is where the narrative starts to get a little wonky for me. You can clearly see that this was intended to be a shorter story that they ended up stretching out to a much longer one because of renewals. There’s also the fact that this is a formula show so they can’t necessarily be separated for longer than an episode or two. S10 is a rough one to get through at times, I think the themes still mostly hold up but it’s a rough one to get through.

S10 highlights all the connections that Dean has, Cas, Charlie, Crowley even, but Sam doesn’t really have those bonds in the same way. For Sam it’s just Dean, so he goes down a reckless destructive “do anything to save Dean!” path and so many innocents pay the price, and ultimately with the release of The Darkness, the whole world.

They skirted right up to the edge of exploring just how toxic and dangerous their relationship had become in the season 10 finale.

DEAN: I let Rudy die. How was that not evil? I know what I am, Sam. But who were you when you drove that man to sell his soul... Or when you bullied Charlie into getting herself killed? And to what end? A..a good end? A just end? To remove the Mark no matter what the consequences? Sam, how is that not evil? I have this thing on my arm, and you're willing to let the Darkness into the world.

I can’t say evil is the right word, they were never evil, but they were wilfully blind to everything and everyone else when it came to saving each other. S10 tested my love for the show because after watching it, because there was certainly a feeling that the two of them had become the villains of this story. And don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have a problem with that, it’s just after 2 seasons of this I can’t say I had a lot of faith that this was going to be properly addressed or if we were going to keep going in circles around it. Keep being shown, it’s bad and then nothing much being done to fix it. Your mileage may vary on how it was handled, but I think s11 did a relatively ok job considering it wasn’t the end of the story, and the show needed to keep going.

See from Dean’s side a lot of the codependency rests on 1. His father’s orders to always save Sammy 2. His low self-esteem where he sees himself as nothing but a blunt instrument. 3. His guilt at not being able to perfectly fulfil every familial role in Sam’s life 4. His belief that no one could choose to love him but family has to love you. 5. The unhealthy example of what it should look like to love someone that he got from John. You give up everything but them.

For Sam (and honestly it’s not as clear for me as Dean’s side is so feel free to correct me/disagree on this) 1. Everytime he’s tried to leave and create his own life it’s never ended well. 2. His guilt over wanting freedom and a normal life when he was younger (I’m referring specifically to Stanford era here) 3. His guilt over everything Dean has given up for him. 4. John. 5. Jess.

Ultimately it all comes down to isolation. They both had to be everything to each other, and the deeper they got into this fight, the more people that they lost, the tighter they clung to this notion of family and brothers. I think s11 (and 11x23 in particular) was an important turning point, both for Sam and Dean’s relationship, as well as for them as individuals. Because they weren’t alone there anymore. Cas was there. Sam let Dean walk to his death. Of course, it would devastate him, but he knew it was what had to be done. And he didn’t walk out of that bar and go back to the bunker alone. He had Cas, he had someone who cared about him and wanted to help him and talk to him. Sure Dean asked Cas to take care of Sam for him (you know after Cas offered to walk to his death with him) but Sam let him. He let him be there for him. We didn’t get to see much before the BMOL showed up and blasted Cas away, but still, we saw enough.

I think that’s a significant difference to note why their relationship was different in the Dabb era. It wasn’t just them anymore. Cas was an important member of their family and given a level of importance he’d never been given before and couldn’t have been when the story they were telling was of the dangers of their codependency. Mary was back. Eventually, Jack would become a part of their unit too. Just the two of them wasn’t enough for them anymore. This is made abundantly clear with all of Dean’s desperate attempts to get Cas to stay in s12, followed by his inability to keep going when they lose Cas and Mary in s13. Similarly, Sam really struggles when they lose Jack and fail to get Mary back later in the season.

Another big moment is Dean letting Sam go alone to lead the hunters against the BMOL in 12x22 while he stays back to try and reach Mary. Like he tells Mary, he’s had to be a brother, a father and a mother to Sam and he never stopped seeing him as his kid, but in that moment he makes a choice. He lets Sam take charge and he shows that he trusts him and believes in him. He knows he can handle it.

Sometimes it’s not even a character growth thing. Sometimes having other people there stops you from making destructive choices even though that’s still your first instinct. I’m thinking specifically of 13x21 after Sam was killed. Dean would have run headlong into that nest of vampires and got himself torn apart, but Cas was there to stop him. He was able to make him see reason.

Basically, I think that for a long time, they thought the only relationship they could have was each other, which then became a self-fulfilling prophecy because their desperate attempts to keep each other around led to them losing the people around them. They eventually started to learn that that wasn’t true, they could have more, they were allowed to want more, and that it wasn’t an either-or situation. Dean didn’t have to choose between Sam and Cas. They didn’t have to choose between each other or Jack. The same goes for Mary. Different relationships can coexist without threatening each other, and not say that their relationship in s12-15 was all smooth sailing, but it was certainly so very different from everything that came before.

(There’s maybe a point to be made about how they didn’t have anyone or anything in the finale and how that relates to the story we got, but honestly I have no idea what the intention was with any of the choices made in that episode so I’ll leave it at that for now.)

#asks #winchester brothers #my spn thoughts #long post for ts #Anonymous #spn meta

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findingjoynweirdstuff · 3 years

Text

Dream SMP Recap (March 29/2021) - Drista and the Second Shulker

For the first time since August, Dream streamed on the SMP! Or more specifically, with Drista taking over.

And as usual when Drista visits, things get interesting: The server now has a second shulker box. Ranboo and Foolish make some negotiations over the ownership of it.

Hannah and Sam threaten to blow up the cat cafe where Niki, HBomb and Antfrost work, and Hannah gets officially hired as Sam’s bank manager.

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VOD LINKS:

Ponk

Dream

Hannah

Connor

Ranboo

Captain Puffy

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- Dream (with Drista) runs around on the SMP. He sees the new Nether Hub and then the giant Kinoko Kingdom poster and is surprised at how nice everything looks.

- They VC Ranboo and Dream/Drista start fighting an Enderman (”Ranboo”)

- The Enderman kills them and they respawn in the prison. L

- Dream fills Drista in on Ranboo and Tubbo’s marriage

- Dream teleports himself to Ranboo, who is outside next to Bee ’n’ Boo. This is definitely how he canonically gets out of prison

- Ranboo tells him to not blow up too many things and then leaves

- Dream explores the hotel

- Jack joins the came and comes to the hotel. Dream hides behind a wall.

- Quackity joins the call

- Jack finds him and welcomes him to his hotel

- Dream/Drista breaks the window and jumps out

- They go back up the hotel and teleport Quackity over

- Then they /kill Jack and /tp him back

- Then Jack gets banned (and unbanned)

- Jack points out that Dream should be in prison. Drista says no and gives Quackity creative mode for three seconds

- Quackity asks for creative back, they start hitting Dream to send him back to prison, then Jack gets banned again and Quackity tries to start an offline hype train

- Quackity gets /killed

- Quackity says to get Dream back to jail again. Drista doesn’t know what Dream did, so Quackity fills her in on the fact that he tortures Dream every day (he pulls out the shears)

- Drista /kills both of them

Quackity: “I don’t even know where my moral compass on stands right now, because you’re not reassuring me if the things I’m doing are right or wrong, so.”

Drista: “Well, you’re naked, so you’re doing something wrong.”

- Foolish comes over, Quackity and Jack leave. Dream says hi to Foolish and George joins the call

- Foolish tells Drista that he’s working on a mansion, and she looks homeless, so if she just gives him a shulker box…

- George gets /tp’d over and whispers to give him stuff

- George says he has nothing but a seed and a plank. Drista gives him a diamond, a piece of honeycomb, some dirt, two pieces of leather, a block of dried kelp

- Drista offers Foolish that she flips a coin. Either he loses everything on him, or gets a shulker box. If Foolish loses his things, George gets it all but isn’t allowed to give it back to Foolish

- Dream gets a coin and asks if Foolish is sure about this. Foolish agrees.

- Dream flips the coin.

- Foolish gets the shulker box!

It’s lime green.

- George wants to make a deal as well, 50/50.

He’s got, from his Ender Chest, a trident, an enchanted golden apple, three mending books, Netherite boots, a Netherite shovel, gold, a whole stack of golden apples, emeralds, a Netherite ingot, a creeper head, a speed potion, several music discs and “Taco Bell” by Dream, the Fundy Finisher and the bathwater offered up 50/50 for maxed-out full Netherite with tools

- Dream agrees to the deal and flips the coin.

- George loses.

Dream: “He made a deal with the devil and he lost!”

- George runs away into Ninja’s house and stares sadly at the bed, then logs out

- Dream gives a little speech thanking everyone for 20 million subscribers!

- Hannah and Sam see the cat cafe and agree that it’s worse than George’s house. Sam hands Hannah some TNT

- Hannah tries to spare UwU from Sam’s wrath as he rigs the place with TNT and asks HBomb for permission to blow it up

- Hannah tries to rescue the other cats

- Niki logs on and Sam tries to frame Hannah

- Hbomb logs on too and the two destroy the TNT. He says as prison warden, Sam should be a better role model

- Hannah tries to convince them that it wasn’t her

- Sam suggests they blow up Hannah’s house

- Hannah tries to negotiate for a cut of the bank’s earnings. Sam says no. Hannah then asks if she could work at the bank. Sam agrees to employ her.

- Hannah asks for a wage but Sam doesn’t agree. He says he’s just giving her a place to work.

- Hannah asks for a manager position. Sam agrees to make her Bank Manager.

- They start chasing HBomb around. HBomb threatens the skeleton horses, then says that if anything happens to the cat cafe, Hannah’s house is going down. Sam says he would fire her.

- HBomb leaves and Sam and Hannah try to heal the skeleton horse

- Ranboo has a plan to fill a chest with emerald blocks.

- Foolish asks Ranboo to speak for a bit

- Foolish tells him that he needs to sell Ranboo the shulker box, and then have Ranboo permanently rent it out to him

- Foolish says he’ll give Ranboo two Netherite blocks for it. Whenever anyone asks who the owner is, the owner will be Ranboo. Foolish is worried.

- Foolish arrives at Ranboo’s house.

- They draft up a book of negotiations transferring ownership of the lime-green shulker box to Ranboo

- Ranboo points out that this will put him in danger, so the payment has to be substantial, for dealing with the amount of danger. He knows, because of the document, people might try and get him to hand it over when war starts to go around.

- He tells Foolish that he’s already very rich, and Foolish is already building a house for him.

Ranboo: “That’s the thing, Foolish, is that...what is worth security, you know? What is worth giving up a small potential sense of security in order to be able to be able to have your -- of course you -- have the shulker box and everything, and me being the fall guy for it, of course, ‘cause that means that I’m gonna have to get involved in stuff that I’m probably not gonna get involved in at all, that I probably wouldn’t have gotten involved with at all if I wanted to.”

- Ranboo points out all his riches

- Ranboo wants two things: one, to not quit the building project anymore.

- The second...

Ranboo: “When stuff happens on this server, people always...choose sides, they always try to figure out their own morality and everything, they try to figure out ‘oh, I should be on this side, I should be on that side.’

The one thing that I ask from you, Foolish, is that if that ever happens...if you are ever doing something in which there are clear-cut sides...it’s gonna basically be...let’s just say a war favor."

- If something, not even necessarily involving Ranboo, happens, then Foolish has to do something for him, but it wouldn’t have to do with the shulker box.

- Foolish asks that it not be murder. Ranboo says it won’t be.

- It could even just be delivering a message for Ranboo where it would look bad if he delivered it himself. In any case, it wouldn’t put Foolish in danger.

- Foolish is glad that it would never involve killing somebody else. He can’t do that anymore, can’t go back to that path...

- Ranboo tells Foolish to take a break from the mansion if he needs.

- Ranboo writes in the contract that he is the rightful owner of the box, but agrees to rent out the shulker box indefinitely in exchange for favors agreed upon off the record.

Ranboo: “Foolish, Foolish, Foolish, Foolish, Foolish...I am someone that -- I can’t be scammed, alright. But I have a way -- I have a sort of way to...be able to get my way most of the time based on, well, the ability of me speaking. So if somebody did come and try to get the shulker box...then...they’re gonna be giving me things and not even realize it.”

“I just know emotions, Foolish, and I know how to...deal with them.”

- Foolish reviews the terms

- Ranboo tells Foolish that there are certain things on the server that he cares deeply about, so...there may be a situation. But Foolish has his word that Foolish will have the shulker box in his possession. Just, if push comes to shove, Foolish may need to give it up, but Ranboo will return it.

- Ranboo signs the book, but Foolish gets to keep it

- Ranboo says in order for it to be a thing, they do have to also do a transfer of funds. Ranboo tells Foolish to grab something from his Ender Chest, anything.

- Ranboo throws Foolish the shulker and in return Foolish throws him lapis.

- Ranboo holds a grass block and says goodbye to Foolish at the door.

Foolish: “Sweet dreams -- if Endermen dream, I don’t know...”

- Foolish leaves and Ranboo returns to his goal of getting tons of emeralds.

---

Upcoming events remain the same.

#dream smp #dream smp recaps #long posts

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obiwanobi · 3 years

Text

I was asked to write angst with a happy ending for the Sith Senator Kenobi AU where Obi-Wan believes Anakin has been killed during a mission, so here’s 2.6k of sadness featuring Obi-Wan and Ahsoka before I finish the happy ending part:

Ahsoka can only remember a few details from the funeral of her master.

In her mind, the memory has the fuzziness of an unpleasant dream, and not the sharpness of an event that happened only yesterday.

Surprisingly, it was Master Windu who led the ceremony with a gentle voice. Master Yoda gave a speech, but she can't recall a word of it. She remembers Senator Amidala trying to blink away her tears. She remembers Master Jinn's heavy hand on her shoulder when the heat of the flames started to warm her face. She remembers Rex, still as a statue from beginning to end. She remembers Senator Kenobi being the first to leave without a word.

It took four hours for the pyre to burn to ashes.

___________________________________

"Oh. Hello, young one."

Senator Kenobi's tone is surprised, but his face is as impassive as ever.

It reminds her of that one time her master said that he would have made an excellent Jedi, and Kenobi immediately proved him wrong, dramatically grimacing at the thought and making Anakin burst into laughter.

There's no grimace on Kenobi's face right now. His hair and beard are perfectly combed and trimmed, and there isn't one wrinkle on his pristine clothes.

It makes the deep shadows under his eyes stand out even more.

"Senator," Ahsoka greets him with a polite bow. "Would you mind if I come in?"

Kenobi blinks twice before taking a step back. "Please."

She walks into his apartment a bit rigidly, hands clutched around the box she brought, and seats on the couch he points at her.

If he knew she was here, Master Jinn would disapprove. Her grandmaster has never liked the senator, partially due to his charming public persona which only echoes in a bizarre void in the Force —"some plants are easier to detect that him", she once heard Master Jinn say,— and partially because of his close relationship with her master.

Ahsoka herself has never known what to make of Senator Kenobi.

Stuck between pretending to ignore the looks he used to share with her master and making sarcastic remarks about it to fluster them both, it now leaves her in an awkward relationship she can't define without mourning for the missing link between them.

Anxiety starts nagging at her as she looks at the box in her hands. Maybe she should have waited. Maybe this was a bad idea.

"Caf? Tea?" Kenobi asks from the kitchen.

"Whatever you're having is fine, thanks."

She hears the cabinet doors opening and closing, water boiling for a few seconds, and then the senator comes back with a teapot and cups on a tray. "I hope you like black tea, then. I never drink caf."

Ahsoka isn't sure if she's more surprised by a senator not having any personal employee to assist him, or the fact that she can clearly see what looks like a very expansive caf machine on the kitchen counter.

"How did you know where to find me?"

"I commed your office first," she admits, refocusing her attention on him. "Your assistant said you were working from home lately, and gave me your address."

Kenobi raises his eyebrows. "She did? Well, that's a surprise. She usually bites people who try to see me without an appointment or a life-or-death crisis. Preferably one with multiple dead people already."

"Hum, yes, she— She almost brushed me off, but then I told her that I needed to give you something. From my master."

To his credit, Kenobi, teapot in hand, freezes for only half a second. Then, pointedly not looking at her, starts pouring tea again.

On the comm, Kenobi's assistant also paused when Ahsoka told her that, before grumbling 'it can't make it worse anyway' and then giving strict instructions about when was the best time to come see him.

"I see."

She puts the box next to her steaming cup, and stops her hand just before opening it. "There were some... important chips and datapads from previous and ongoing missions that he had in his room, and I was the one who looked for it. So I cleaned a few drawers."

Letting someone else disturbs Anakin's bedroom has felt wrong. Even if she knows that it was only selfishness that pushed her to volunteer to look through his room, she's still glad she did.

No one needs to know how long she spent seating in the middle of Anakin's bedroom, trying to wrap his lingering Force signature around her. Or that it took three hours before she could touch anything in it without feeling like she was breaking one last invisible connection to her master.

"And I found this box." she taps on it lightly. "This is... I think— I think you should have it."

"What’s in the box, Padawan Tano?" Kenobi asks behind his cup.

The proof of my master's complete disregard for the Jedi Code, she wants to say. Ahsoka bites her lip.

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter anymore.

"Mostly datachips with holos on it, a few old tickets for a race, a password-protected datapad and some personal belongings."

"And what that has to do with me?"

Ahsoka frowns.

Kenobi doesn't sound like the conversation interests him. His hand moves, and for a second Ahsoka thinks he's going for the box, but instead, he takes the recipient filled with honey and put a small spoon of it in his cup before leaning back on the couch.

His indifferent expression is starting to grate on her nerves.

"I took a look at the holos. My master is on it, but you're also there. With him sometimes. Most of them are holoimages, but there are a few longer recordings with sound." Ahsoka has only watched one, but it's still hard to reconcile the man fondly rolling his eyes and telling Anakin behind the holocamera to please, dear, don't waste it on me, with the impassive man with the blank stare in front of her. "I didn't watch all of them, but I think it's safe to say that he wouldn't have wanted anyone else to find them."

"I see," Kenobi says distractingly, stirring his tea.

Ahsoka's hand is starting to turn into a fist in her lap.

"Do you? Do you really? Do you know about the Jedi Code, Senator Kenobi?" She asks, suddenly opening the box herself and getting one of the datachips and a small holoprojector out.

"I know enough."

"Because this," she continues, pushing the chip in it and opening the first holos, "this isn't really approved by the Code. Do you know what the Code recommends, regarding attachment, Senator? To material things? To people?"

Did you love him? she wants to ask, as a holo of Anakin, dressed in light civilian clothes, smiles and makes a rapid 'come one' hand gesture to the person behind the camera. Did you love him as much as he did?

She presses the next button rapidly, going through a few holos of sunbathed landscapes and olive trees, and then Anakin is holding a glass of wine in one, tasting it in a second, and making a ridiculous face in the third. There's a lot of Kenobi after that, also dressed in lighter clothes than usual, with shades on. Him trying to read a sign in a foreign language but clearly failing, him looking at some old and decrepit ruins in wonder, him with a face covered in sunscreen, sending an unamused look above his glasses at the camera.

Ahsoka's irritation makes her forget to be embarrassed when she goes through some of the holos where they're pressed against each other in such an intimate way that it feels like she's holding their honeymoon holoalbum, but it doesn't stop her from wanting to cry when she catches the tenderness in Anakin's eyes in every holo where he's looking at Kenobi.

It's only when she reaches the one taken at a weird angle where Anakin is lying in the shades of a tree, asleep, his face nuzzled against a red beard, that a hand stops her before she can keep pressing next.

She turns her head toward Kenobi, ready to push him again to get a reaction, but he’s not looking at her. His gaze is fixed on the holo and his face is making a bizarre expression she doesn't recognise. Then, he says, softly, "I told him not to keep any of it."

And then she gasps for air.

The Force... the Force feels like a void.

Not a blank space, or the faint static she's used to next to Kenobi, but a true void. She chokes a bit on the emptiness of it all, almost sick to her stomach by the vertigo effect. It feels like she's standing near the edge of a hungry precipice, just like what she felt when Master Jinn told her that her master was dead, after she's stopped saying that it wasn't possible and he was wrong wrong wrong. She felt like falling then, endlessly falling and never hitting the ground, and she feels like falling now. Headfirst into the void. A long, endless fall through nothingness.

The void feels like it could swallow her whole and leaves nothing behind. No memory or emotion or connection.

The void is lonely, and aching, and lonely.

And lonely.

Then the sound of shattered porcelain resonates in a disturbing echo in her ears and everything stops.

Ahsoka gasps again —did she stop breathing at one point?— and pants heavily, hands shaking on her thighs.

She violently throws herself against the couch, as if the void is still here at her feet, ready to devour her.

"That's quite enough of that for now."

Disoriented, it takes a moment before she remembers where she is. Kenobi has already turned off the holoprojector and put it back in the box when she feels capable of forming coherent sentences again. A cup of tea is pushed under her nose, and she automatically takes it. It burns her tongue a bit. She's so glad to feel something so simple and physical that she keeps drinking it anyway.

Kenobi is standing up now, napkins in hand but not moving. He's looking down at something, stuck still in an aborted move, and Ahsoka realises that there is an ugly stain on his tunic, right on his chest, and that fragments of porcelain are lying all over the floor around him.

She didn't see how Kenobi broke the teapot, but it must have been quite a fall to scatter all these hundreds of tiny little pieces around him. On the white rug at his feet, a large brown stain is expanding slowly but surely through the intricate design of the textile.

He couldn't have made a bigger mess on purpose.

"You shouldn't stay here," he tells her, but his eyes stay locked on the liquid still dripping from the edge of the table. "You could hurt yourself."

"I— yes. Sorry."

She doesn't know what she's apologising for. She's tense, unsettled, and doesn't dare reach through the Force to find any kind of balance. She doesn't understand what the kriff just happened, but she's not in the mood to look for answers right now.

She just wants to be home. She just wants her master. She just wants to sleep.

Box under her arm, she takes a breath and stands up, careful not to walk on any fragments of broken porcelain.

"I should go anyway."

"Would you mind letting me see one last thing before you leave?"

She blinks, surprised. "From... the box?"

"Yes."

She hesitates a second, still not sure if this was a mistake or not. But who else could she share it with?

Kenobi seems like he's giving up on cleaning for now, and dries his hands with a napkin as he watches her put the box on the counter. He takes a moment to look inside this time, before grabbing the datapad and turning it on.

"It's password-protected," she says, just to break the tense silence. "I've tried a few things to bypass it but nothing works."

"Why do you think it's about me, then?"

"If you try enough wrong words, a message will pop up to give you a hint." Kenobi sends her a questioning look, but she just shrugs. "Try something. Anything."

"Oh," he says, voice suddenly soft, after putting Anakin's name and surname. "It says it's for my birthday."

"Yep."

"'Something that could make a politician cry'?", he reads out loud, intrigued. "What is he talking about? I told him enough times that politicians don't have souls, or—"

His mouth opens in a silent 'oh'. He turns to look at her pensively, and right when she's about to ask him if he's thinking of something, starts tapping on the keyboard.

The pad beeps happily.

"Of course," he whispers. "Of course."

Ahsoka can see his fingers swiping on the pad a few times but she's not at the right angle to see what he's actually looking at.

It would have bothered earlier. Now, her head feels heavy and her mind clouded, and she just wants to go home. The only reason she's not leaving right now is the glint of something in Kenobi's eyes.

Maybe it's just the reflection of the blue light on the screen. Maybe he's trying not to laugh in front of her at whatever her master had planned for his birthday.

Maybe he's trying not to cry.

He turns off the datapad suddenly, straightening up and offering a polite smile that doesn't reach his eyes. The glint is gone.

"If this is alright with you, Padawan Tano, I would like to keep that box."

You don’t deserve it, a voice in her mind says.

But she knows that the box isn't for her. She's a Jedi, and these are just material possessions. Holoimages and a few useless trinkets.

Her master isn't in that box. Her master is in the Force, with her, always.

She's not certain she should trust Kenobi, but her master did. So she chooses to believe.

"Okay," she murmurs. "Just... just keep it safe."

"I will."

There is no way to know if he means it, but she's definitely not in the mood to reach through the Force and check right now.

"I should go." She turns towards the door, ready to go home and sleep for fourteen hours.

"Ahsoka."

The surprise of hearing her name in his mouth for the first time stops her hand on the door handle. She's so tired that she barely turns her head sideways, waiting for whatever insipid parting words he will offer her.

"Anakin was very proud of you. He couldn't stop talking about how great you were going to be as a knight."

Her heart misses a beat. Or three.

Don't say his name, she wants to say, we managed to ignore it the entire time, why did you have to say his name? But her throat only seems to be able to produce an uncontrollable choked up sound. She can't blink fast enough to see through her tears.

After so long looking for a hint of human feelings in Kenobi, she almost wishes his voice wasn't so gentle right now.

"Please make sure to do all you can to make it true."

She only allows herself to cry once the door slams shut behind her.

#feelings are hard for ssk okay #he has zero idea what to do with them #obikin #sith senator kenobi au #clem's aus #also kudos for you if you've read enough ssk posts to know what the password was!#fic i did write

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fortunatelyfresco · 3 years

Text

A Holistic Integration of Type 1 Narcolepsy into the Reading of Moist von Lipwig

Literary Interpretation, Disability, and Finding Yourself Between the Lines

As it goes, "I wrote this for me, but you can read it if you want." It might be a fun ride for anyone who is very interested in Moist von Lipwig, or narcolepsy, or both, and/or anyone who enjoys collecting small details from within a body of work and arranging them into threads that are supportable by the text, without being actually suggested by it.

Personally, I find it very interesting to read the meta behind different headcanons, and see how creators can unintentionally write a character who fits certain criteria. There are only so many traits, after all, and some of them tend to travel in groups! Humans are pattern seekers, etc etc.

The first step of reading Moist von Lipwig as narcoleptic is wanting to read Moist von Lipwig as narcoleptic. Being narcoleptic myself and relating heavily to Moist, this step was very easy. I invite you to take my hand and come along, at least briefly, if you were interested enough to click the readmore.

Once you have taken that step, things start falling into place. At least they do if you're intimately familiar with narcolepsy, or if you first learn about it in detail through, for instance, a Tumblr post with an agenda :)

I'll break this down symptom by symptom, citing only the ones I both have personal experience with and see textual support for.

I'll be using OverDrive's search function to catalogue "evidence" in (the American editions of) Going Postal, Making Money, and Raising Steam, so I might miss passages that don't use certain keywords.

Please take any statements along the lines of "being narcoleptic means X" with a huge grain of salt. Sometimes it's just more succinct. Narcolepsy can manifest in many different ways, and is still being actively studied. Don't base your entire understanding of it on a fandom essay I wrote to cope with the crushing pressures of capitalism. I have not even fully read the scientific studies linked here as sources.

Here we go! Spoilers abound.

I. Excessive Daytime Sleepiness (EDS) and sleep attacks.

Being narcoleptic means (salt now, please) that your brain does not get adequate rest while you sleep, no matter how much you sleep. This is because of a disturbance in the order and length of REM and NREM sleep phases. This leads to constant exhaustion. Some sources describe narcoleptic EDS as "comparable to [the sleepiness] experienced by a healthy individual who has been sleep-deprived continuously for 48–72 hours."

(Source.)

Sleep attacks can come on gradually or suddenly. In my case, I become irritable and easily overwhelmed, and nothing matters except finding a place to lie down. A more severe attack, under the right circumstances, can put me to sleep while I'm actively trying to stay awake and engaged.

Moist refers to 6:45 am as "still nighttime." He is "allergic to the concept of two seven o'clocks in one day" and is "not good at early mornings," and the narration even cites this as "one of the advantages of a life of crime; you didn't have to get up until other people had got the streets aired."

In Going Postal, he repeatedly falls asleep at his desk. I can only find two instances, but the first one describes it as having happened "again," so it happens at least three times over the course of one week. Both of the times I found were after Mr. Pump cleared his apartment, giving him access to a bed, and I can't find any reference to the fire destroying it—just that his office is "missing the whole of one wall." His presumably wooden desk is still intact, even, just "charred."

There's also no build-up either time. No direct narration of the time right before he falls asleep, just retroactive accounting for it.

Which is primarily a function of stories not showing us every boring second, and secondarily one of the smaller ways we're shown Moist being overwhelmed and racing to keep up with himself, but tertiarily it's a great set dressing if you've already decided he's narcoleptic. Sometimes sleep is just a thing that happens, without any deliberate transition. Sometimes you sit down to catch your breath or get some paperwork done, and wake up several hours later.

I've found only one example in GP of Moist waking up in his actual bed at the post office: the morning after being possessed by all the undelivered letters. Presumably either they put him there, or Mr. Pump did.

There are two points in Making Money where Moist, in an effort to be a comforting and/or guiding hand, advises people to get some sleep. First Owlswick Jenkins, and then one of the clerks (Robert) who is worried about Mr. Bent.

I take the optimistic view that this is Moist genuinely caring about these people, not just trying to get them to do what he wants. He has always done some combination of those things (GP opens with him having befriended his jailers, after all), but there's definitely a thread of him learning to treat both himself and those around him more like real people. (See also.)

Looking at this thread through narcolepsy-colored lenses, you get Moist perhaps drawing from his own experiences in an effort to be helpful. In Owlswick or Robert's position, what is something he would want to hear from the man currently in charge of his fate, or at least his job? "Get some sleep."

If we accept this as a pattern, it culminates in Raising Steam, when Moist starts to worry about "Dick Simnel and his band of overworked engineers," fixating particularly on their lack of sleep.

What sleep they got was in sleeping bags, curled up on carriage seats, eating but not eating well, just driven by their watches and their desire to keep the train going.

[...]

"People are going to die if we push them any further," he said to Dick. "You lot would rather work than sleep!"

[...]

The young man swayed in front of him and Moist's tone became gentle. "And I see now that part of my job is to tell you that you need some rest. You've run out of steam, Dick. Look, we're well on the way to Uberwald now, and while it's daylight and we're out of the mountains it's going to be the least risky time to run with minimum crew. We're all going to need our wits about us when we get near the pass. Surely you can take some rest?"

Simnel blinked as if he'd not seen Moist the first time, and said, "Yes, you're right."

And Moist could hear the slurring in the young man's speech, caught him before he fell and dragged him into a sleeping compartment, put him to bed, and noted that the engineer didn't so much fall asleep as somehow flow into it.

Moist then recruits Vimes to help him talk the rest of the engineers into getting some rest. The two of them briefly commiserate about people not realizing how important it is.

"I have to teach that to young coppers. Treasure a night's rest, I always say. Take a nap whenever you can."

"Very good."

II. Insomnia.

This is a lesser-known but very common symptom of narcolepsy. Or a comorbidity, depending on how you look at it. It seems counterintuitive if narcolepsy has been presented to you as "sleeping all the time," but it makes sense once you know it's really a matter of disruption in the brain's ability to regulate sleep cycles.

The case for this symptom is flimsier, and I fully admit I'm just reading my own experience into it. But here are two excerpts from Going Postal that I find quite suitable for my sleepy agenda:

1. "A man of affairs such as he had to learn to sleep in all kinds of situations, often while mobs were looking for him a wall's thickness away."

I latched hard onto this detail the first time I read GP.

At my worst, I could not get more than a couple hours of sleep in my bed. I kept taking naps in the bath because it was one of the few places I could sleep. It seemed to fulfill some of the criteria (isolation, temperature control, etc) that my brain demanded in exchange for playing nice.

We're told over and over again, throughout Moist's books, that he functions best under pressure.

(Brief aside: This is often cited as a reason to interpret Moist as having ADHD, which I'm also fully on board with. Not coincidentally, narcolepsy and ADHD share a few symptoms, have a notable comorbidity rate, and are treated with some of the same medications. Source.)

So again, if you're already inclined to read Moist as narcoleptic, the following is an easy jump:

"Moist thinks he's good at sleeping in strange places under strange circumstances. This is because A) his basis for comparison is a disordered attempt to sleep in normal places under normal circumstances, B) something about danger satisfies his brain into running more smoothly, and C) he's a resourceful person who is 'not given to introspection,' and so is less likely to wonder why his body demands sleep at strange times and more likely to focus on finding a place for that sleep to happen, and chalk this up later as a skill."

And returning briefly to EDS: Why would someone like Moist waste time finding a safe place to sleep while people are actively trying to kill him? At the beginning of GP, he leaves Vetinari's office and immediately goes on the run. In multiple books, when he feels threatened, his brain instinctively launches into complex escape plans. We see him successfully blend into an Ankh-Morpork crowd at least once after becoming a public figure.

So why bother? After all, a safe place to sleep is also a safe place to change clothes, or at least remove whatever distinguishing features he's given himself. Why wouldn't he just become someone else and leave town immediately?

The obvious answer is that sometimes things just happen, and an author doesn't need to know or explain every single detail of a character's past.

I would suggest, though, that one of those things might be Moist reaching a point where sleep is just not optional. A point where he not only doesn't, but can't, care about anything else. Where he is too tired to think straight, too tired to talk his way out of trouble, too tired to even contemplate the long journey from one town to the next.

2. "Moist knew he ought to get some sleep, but he had to be there, too, alive and sparkling."

Sometimes (especially in combination with underlying mental health issues) narcoleptic sleep deprivation can bypass everything I've described so far, and lead straight into a manic state. You won't necessarily find that on Google, but it's been my experience.

That's obviously not what the text is implying. "Alive and sparkling" is just a very relatable description. And we do often see Moist getting away from himself, speaking without thinking, making absurd promises that he justifies immediately afterwards as Just Part Of Being Him, always raising the stakes.

And here are a couple of excerpts from Raising Steam that could be interpreted as Moist being a light sleeper, AKA struggling to get deep sleep:

1. "And slowly Moist shut down, although a part of him was always listening to the rhythm of the rails, listening in his sleep, like a sailor listening to the sounds of the sea."

2. "All Moist's life he'd managed to find a way of sleeping in just about every circumstance and, besides, the guard's van was somehow the hub of the train; and although he didn't know how he did it, he always managed to sleep with half of one ear open."

Moist is exactly the kind of opportunist to see that as a useful tool, isn't he?

III. Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations.

These are hallucinations that come on as you're falling asleep or waking up. They can also happen during REM intrusions while you're awake. My most memorable ones include piano notes, someone calling my name, being trapped in the waves of a large body of water, and a huge truck going over a guard rail and tumbling down a hill. These are often, but not always, accompanied by sleep paralysis (and sleep paralysis is often, but not always, accompanied by hallucinations).

In GP, Moist casually cites his own hallucinations as proof that what is happening at the post office is not one.

"They're all alive! And angry! They talk! It was not a hallucination! I've had hallucinations and they don't hurt!"

Obviously that's not true for everyone, but it's true for Moist, and he has enough experience that he immediately recognizes the difference.

At one point while awake, Moist "[snaps] out of a dream of chandeliers" to realize someone has approached him to talk, while he was busy having visions of what the post office used to look like/could look like again.

Now, that's cheating, because we're probably supposed to assume it's a side effect of being possessed, but... I'm putting it here anyway.

There is also perhaps a case to be made for the tendency of Moist's internal monologue to lapse into extremely specific and prolonged hypotheticals. The lines between hallucinations, waking dreams, and "regular" daydreams have always been very blurry to me. I'm especially curious about the example at the end of Going Postal, which goes like this:

"Look, I know what I'm like," he said. "I'm not the person everyone thinks I am. I just wanted to prove to myself I'm not like Gilt. More than a hammer, you understand? But I'm still a fraud by trade. I thought you knew that. I can fake sincerity so well that even I can't tell. I mess with people's heads—"

"You're fooling no one but yourself," said Miss Dearheart, and reached for his hand.

Moist shook her off, and ran out of the building, out of the city, and back to his old life, or lives, always moving on, selling glass as diamond, but somehow it just didn't seem to work anymore, the flair wasn't there, the fun had dropped out of it, even the cards didn't seem to work for him, the money ran out, and one winter in some inn that was no more than a slum he turned his face to the wall—

And an angel appeared.

"What just happened?" said Miss Dearheart.

Perhaps you do get two...

"Only a passing thought," said Moist.

In-universe... what is Adora reacting to? What did just happen? The fact that these incidents are not isolated to Going Postal is a point against it being some sort of literal timeline divergence caused by The Spirit Of The Post.

So maybe Moist visibly zoned out. Maybe he had some kind of minor but noticeable cataplexy attack (more on those later) as part of a REM intrusion, brought on by the intense emotions he's currently struggling with.

IV. Vivid Dreams.

Again, at least some of this is probably supposed to be part of the possession, but I've been professionally projecting myself onto the surreal dreams of magically afflicted characters for years. Do try this at home.

1. "Moist dreamed of bottled wizards, all shouting his name. In the best tradition of awaking from a nightmare, the voices gradually became one voice, which turned out to be the voice of Mr. Pump, who was shaking him."

2. Moist is uneasy about the Smoking Gnu's plan, and then he has an extremely detailed dream about the Grand Trunk burning down.

This culminates in "Moist awoke, the Grand Trunk burning in his head," followed by a paragraph of him thinking things through and starting to form his own alternative plan, followed immediately by "Moist awoke. He was at his desk, and someone had put a pillow under his head."

So he fell asleep at his desk, woke up from a vivid nightmare, was awake just long enough for a coherent train of thought, and then passed back out. Which once again is not "proof" of anything, but fits the predetermined interpretation like a glove.

V. Cataplexy.

Cataplexy is a sudden loss of muscle control, usually triggered by strong emotions. This is thought to be a facet of REM intrusion—waking instances of the atonia that is meant to stop us from acting out our dreams.

The most well-known manifestation is laughter making your knees buckle, but it's not always that severe. My own attacks range from facial twitching, usually when I'm angry or otherwise extremely upset, to all-over weakness/immobilization and near-collapse when I laugh. My knees have fully buckled once or twice.

This is the biggest stretch. This is the one that is absolutely only there if you've already decided to read entire novels between the lines. It's also not even necessary for the broader headcanon; plenty of people have narcolepsy without cataplexy (or such mild cataplexy that it's never noticeable, or very delayed onset, etc).

However. I am doing this for fun. So I want him to have it. It's also become a major part of how I imagine Moist engaging with emotion, and I'd like to make a case for that.

There are a few scattered references to Moist's legs shaking, or being unsteady, or outright giving way, but there's usually an external physical reason, and/or enough psychological shock to justify it without a medical condition.

The most compelling example I've found so far comes from Moist and Adora's conversation about people expecting Moist to deliver letters to the gods.

"I never promised to—"

"You promised to when you sold them the stamps!"

Moist almost fell off his chair. She'd wielded the sentence like a fist.

"And it'll give them hope," she added, rather more quietly.

"False hope," said Moist, struggling upright.

"Almost fell off his chair" at first sounds like casual hyperbole, but then "struggling upright" implies it was a bit more literal. It's also an accurate description of me recovering from my more severe attacks, supporting myself on a wall or my spouse, or pushing myself up if I've fallen over in bed.

That happens to me multiple times per day, by the way. It doesn't bother me, and I didn't realize there was anything unusual about it for a long time. I barely think about it, except to fondly note that my spouse is good at making me laugh.

Which is to say, even severe cataplexy is not always noticeable or debilitating. Sometimes it absolutely is! It can be downright dangerous, depending on where you are, what you're doing, and whether you have any other conditions it might exacerbate. I don't want to undermine that.

I am just hell-bent on justifying the idea that this fictional character could have repeated attacks throughout the canonical narrative that are so routine they don't merit an explanation, or even a description. Especially for someone who is used to hiding his few distinguishing features behind false ones that are much more memorable. (See also.)

(That link goes to my own fanfic. Sorry.)

On the milder side, between Going Postal and Making Money, there are three instances of Moist's mouth "dropping open" when he's shocked, upset, confused, or some combination of the three. This is the kind of thing that shows up a lot in fiction, but rarely happens so literally in real life.

(There's technically a fourth instance, but I'm not counting it because it seems to be a deliberate choice on his part to convey surprise.)

And then there's laughter. Or rather, there isn't. I could be missing something, but I've searched all three books for instances of laughter and various synonyms (not counting spoken "Ha!"s), and what I've come up with is:

Moist laughs once in Going Postal, when he receives the assignment for the race to Genua.

Two packages were handed over. Moist undid his, and burst out laughing.

There's also an instance earlier in the book where Moist nearly "burst[s] out laughing."

I find the specifics here interesting, and, for our purposes, fortuitous. Cataplexy is complicated and presents differently for everyone. In my case, when laughter triggers an attack, one of the effects (which is sometimes also a cause) is that I laugh very hard, with little or no control. "Burst out laughing" is quite apt.

Let's move on to Making Money, and start with a quick tangent:

Mr. Bent explains that he has no sense of humor due to a medical condition, and that he isn't upset about this and doesn't understand why people feel sorry for him.

Moist immediately starts in with "Have you tried—" before getting cut off by the frustrated Bent.

Out-of-universe, "Have you tried" is such a well-known refrain to anyone with an incurable condition, I'm not at all surprised to find it in a book written by someone who had at least begun the process that would lead to a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's. And Pratchett has certainly never shied away from portraying ignorance in his protagonists.

In-universe, it feels a little odd. Moist's tongue runs away from him all the time, but usually in the form of making ridiculous claims or impossible promises. Moist's entire stock-in-trade is People Skills, and it feels strange for him to make this kind of mistake immediately after being told Mr. Bent is not looking for solutions.

But if one were reading with, for instance, the idea in mind that Moist himself has an incurable condition related to laughter and is enthusiastic about, but still relatively new to, the practice of drawing on his own experiences to help people... it is easy to imagine the gears in his head turning the wrong way, superimposing those experiences over the tail end of Mr. Bent's explanation. Disabled people are not immune to these well-meaning pitfalls.

There is another Mr. Bent moment that I want to discuss, but we'll circle back around to it later.

I found two instances of Moist himself laughing in MM.

1. "He said it with a laugh, to lighten the mood a little."

This is deliberate laughter, employed as a social tactic. A polite chuckle, probably. Not the sort of thing that generally triggers cataplexy.

2. "Moist started to laugh, and stopped at the sight of her grave expression."

The first and only involuntary laugh in MM. It doesn't always trigger attacks...

Which brings us to Raising Steam. Compared to the first two books, Moist laughs a lot here. I count nine instances. Two of them are "burst out laughing"s, a couple include him as part of a group, some of it comes off as deliberate, and some of it doesn't.

I've always seen a lot of... rage in Raising Steam. Combing through it for laughter, I realized Moist's emotions in general are much closer to the surface here, and he's much less concerned about letting people see them. He laughs with friends and acquaintances, he cries in front of strangers, he shouts at Harry King, he has that entire conversation with Dick that boils down to "I'm very worried about you," etc.

Opinions vary wildly and sharply on Raising Steam. I have my own hangups with it, as I do with most books in the series. (Every time I make a new Discworld post, Tumblr passive-aggressively suggests the tag "my kingdom for a discworld character who is normal about women and other species.")

But I like this particular change in Moist, and I choose to see it as character development. He's trading in the professional detachment of a conman for the ability to grow into himself as a person and make meaningful connections.

So, what does that have to do with cataplexy? A lot.

I don't want to get too maudlin, so I'll just say I have plenty of personal experience with emotional repression masking cataplexy symptoms. And so, I believe, does the version of Moist we've put together over the course of this post.

Which brings us back to Making Money, and Mr. Bent. He says something about Moist that I find very interesting: "I do not trust those who laugh too easily."

Unless I've missed something, at that point in the book, Moist has never actually laughed in front of him. And Mr. Bent is a man who pays very close attention to details.

So, what is the in-universe explanation for this? I'd like to propose that Moist is very skilled at seeming to laugh, without actually laughing. He smiles, he's friendly, and he makes other people laugh, which is another thing Bent dislikes about him. He gives the impression of being someone who laughs a lot. (He certainly left that impression on me; I was very surprised by the lack of examples in the first two books.)

Even staying strictly within the bounds of canon, it's easy to imagine why this might have become part of Moist's camouflage in his previous life. He wasn't looking to get attached to anyone, and he didn't want anyone getting inside his head. Engaging with people genuinely enough to laugh at their jokes would run counter to both of those things, but some of his personas still needed to come off as friendly and sociable.

Still working within the canon, it makes sense to assume he's similarly distanced himself from emotion in general. He sits in a cell for several weeks without truly believing he's going to die. He's bewildered when Mr. Pump points out that his schemes have hurt innocent people. He has no idea what to do with his feelings for Adora. Etc.

Interpreting Moist as having cataplexy adds an extra element of danger. Moist thrives on danger, but there's a difference between the thrill of a con and the threat of sudden, uncontrollable displays of vulnerability. And so it becomes even easier to see him stifling his own emotional capacity.*

We meet Moist at a moment of great upheaval. He is forcibly removed from his cocoon of false identities, and pushed out into the world as himself. And we are shown and told throughout Going Postal that he does not know how to be himself. (See also.)

He is repeatedly stymied by his own emotions. He gets tongue-tied and confused around Adora, he snaps at Mr. Pump, he lashes out at Mr. Groat, he gets lost in school flashbacks when he meets Miss Maccalariat. This thread continues in Making Money, where the sudden reappearance of Cribbins immediately rattles him into making an uncharacteristic mistake.

I called him Cribbins! Just then! I called him Cribbins! Did he tell me his name? Did he notice? He must have noticed!

Later in the same book, Moist misses a crucial opportunity to run damage control on the bank's public image... because he's excited to see Adora.

The Moist of GP and MM is not used to feeling things so deeply. It throws him off his game. I'm not at all suggesting cataplexy is the only (or even primary) reason for that, but I do think there's room for it on both sides of the cause and effect equation.

With or without the cataplexy, I find Moist's relative emotional openness in Raising Steam... really nice. (It's a work in progress. He's still getting a handle on anger.)

Cataplexy just adds another dimension. A physical manifestation of emotional vulnerability, which would have been especially untenable for a teenager on the run. Just one more facet of the real, human, fallible Moist von Lipwig who spent years buried beneath Albert Spangler and all the rest.

Another piece of himself that Moist is growing to understand and accept, as he learns to more comfortably be himself.

The Moist of Going Postal runs into a burning building to save lives without fully understanding why he wants to, and justifies it on the fly as an essential part of the role he's trying to play.

The Moist of Raising Steam mindlessly throws himself under a train to save two children, and then blows up at Harry King about the lack of safety regulations. Freshly traumatized by the murder of several railway workers and his own violent, vengeful response to it, he still offers, in the face of Harry's own grief, to be the one to inform their families. On a long and dangerous journey with plenty of moving parts to think about, he worries about Dick Simnel and the other engineers, and pushes them to take better care of themselves.

He also meets a bunch of kids who nearly derailed a train as part of a childish scheme. His admonishment is startlingly vivid.

"Can you imagine a railway accident? The screaming of the rails and the people inside and the explosion that scythes the countryside around when the boiler bursts? And you, little girl, and your little friends, would have done all that. Killed a trainload of people."

[...]

"I'll square this with the engine driver, but if I was you I'd get my pencil and turn any clever ideas you have like this into a book or two. Those penny dreadfuls are all the rage in the railway bookshops."

Maybe what he is also saying, between the lines, is:

I left home at 14 and began a life of smoke and mirrors. I was empty inside, and I thought everyone else was, too. It was all fun and games, and then a man made of clay told me I was killing people. Nip it in the bud, child. Write books.

------------

*There are studies suggesting that in addition to deliberately employed "tricks," people with cataplexy may experience physiological reactions in the brain meant to inhibit laughter. (Source 1, Source 2.)

Most of the information here is way over my head, but that second link also says "one region of the brain called the zona incerta (meaning 'zone of uncertainty') was only activated during laughter in people with narcolepsy, not in controls. Research on the zona incerta in animals suggests that it also helps to control fear-associated behavior."

The linked article about that (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03581-6) is also over my head, but I would certainly describe Moist von Lipwig as having unusual fear responses.**

**Narcolepsy is a fun roller-coaster ride of constant scientific discoveries about exactly which parts of your brain are paying too much attention, not paying enough attention, or trying to eat each other.

#moist von lipwig #narcolepsy #discworld #disabled headcanons #oh my god this got so out of hand #earned itself a title AND a subtitle #mr. cybulskis i'm sorry i fell asleep in your class every day it was at the exact wrong time and temperature and lighting

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meichenxi · 3 years

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Hey, could I ask you how you do shadowing? Like the different ways you do it? You mentioned in your tag that shadowing is good and I'd love to hear how you do it! I do not attempt shadowing much so I don't really know what helps, etc. ToT (my studyblr is rigelmejo)

Hellooo! Thank you for the interesting question!

Tbh I think I do it fairly basically - I don’t use any particularly fancy software, but software like Language Learning with Netflix has certainly made it easier. There’s a whole video on how to get the most of it here: [on mobile, link didn't work - How to study Chinese with Netflix! by Chinese Zero To Hero] (I’d recommend checking out all of their videos actually, they’ve done a bunch of livestreams recently and they place a lot of emphasis on shadowing + the course they are trying to sell you is…actually phenomenally good)

(Also, I have to preface this by saying that I have been very lucky in terms of pronunciation: I learnt about 80% of my current vocabulary by ear without characters or pinyin. I have been in China for eight months in total, and while I didn’t speak Chinese for all of that, I was constantly soaking in info on natural sentence intonation. I still often don’t know officially what the tone of a vocabulary item is, especially if it changes tone like 教, 为 or 相, but I don’t get yelled at so I have definitely internalised a lot of those changes. I definitely would have more trouble with this if I hadn’t had that experience - my other areas are waaaay weaker because of this though- my reading SUCKS lmao and I can literally handwrite about ten characters)

Anyway. How I shadow:

1) Quite simply by playing the line, and repeating it with all the emotion it has!! I usually use Netflix or Viki for this. I try to do it as fast as possible, and if I can’t do the whole thing, I ‘chunk’ it: if I were doing the sentence 我们还不知道他会不会来, I would start from the end with 他会不会来, then 不知道他会不会来, and then the whole sentence. Notice that this isn’t breaking it down into words or even grammatical phrases, but intonational phrases: it would be perfectly sensible to just do 会不会来 without the 他 but realistically, since this is a question, it’s likely that a strong stress will be placed on the first 会, and you wouldn’t be able to replicate that without also included the more weakly stressed syllable before.

2) I locate (intentionally or subconsciously) the main locus of stress within the sentence, and I focus on that accordingly. Tones may become less extreme if they are not stressed, and may become more exaggerated if stressed. This is always a good exercise. I accompany this with physical actions - I throw my hands down, I sigh, I groan!

3) I put away the text, and don’t look at the tones or even my computer screen - more on this below.

4) Finally, when I think I’ve got it reasonably accurate, I’ll record them speaking the line into my phone with an appropriate pause for copying and play it back to myself at various points throughout the day.

5) I then go and find other words with the same tone contour to slot in, and copy it again. After that, I find words that are slightly different tonally and pop them in too.

6) I finally do fun things like hold a conversation with myself. This can be really simple phrases imbued with some kind of emotion - 这个女子到底是谁呀？为什么不认识我？应该是新手吧。You can do this either really informally, or very formally, or both - trying to speak in the latter way is very fun! So then it’d be idk something more like: 那位姑娘是何人，来自何处？This is fun because you can really slow down your speech and sound as elegant as you like!! (this will sound stilted if you do it for modern speech, but it’s a very fun exercise)

Choosing your media!!

1) Don’t use donghuas. Seriously. The voice actors usually speak at a ridiculous pace and not with the same range of ‘normal’ intonation

2) Your Chinese is definitely good enough to recognise when anyone is quoting poetry or speaking in a paricularly sexy literary way so, uh…don’t do that. That rules dramas like Nirvana in Fire OUT.

3) Modern dramas and reality TV shows CAN be great, but they can also be quite intimidatingly quick and almost too mushy at times. I’d recommend informal speech in guzhuang dramas more, because they have professional voice actors and extensive sound editing, meaning that although it might be fast and the vocabulary harder, it’s actually much more accessible and easier to copy. You don’t want to be stuck with the awfulness of 50% failed foreigner and 50% 12 year old boy who can’t enunciate properly!!

4) CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON WISELY. I try to find characters that speak in a dramatic, whiny or childish way. This is so important! There’s literally no use copying Lan Wangji unless you want to be able to have that particular cadence and tone of voice you get reciting poetry. Childish/whiny/dramatic characters on the other hand stress some words very strongly, and rush others together - this is great for hearing what actual real speech sounds like. Whininess wins. In The Untamed, characters like Wei Wuxian (not yllz!wwx but just…regular wwx), 一问三不知 Nie Huaisang, Jin Ling, and Jingyi are all great. Also Jiggy, who is just very extra constantly and speaks much slower as well, which really helps. In SHL characters like Gu Xiang are good.

5) CHOOSE YOUR VOICE WISELY! If you are really aiming to copy them 100% (which you should try at least sometimes), you want somebody with your pitch range to sound normal. I have a sort of party trick in Chinese that because I’ve spent so much time listening to women in guzhuang dramas I can change my voice and sound like a) a scheming concubine with honeyed words, or b) the voice of the Beijing metro. My teacher found it hysterically funny. But it’s not my natural voice, and if I speak like that for too long it hurts. The women usually are too high for me, and the big burly manly men too low - so I’d recommend finding a man with a higher voice, or an older woman (like some of the female characters in Nirvana in Fire). Again, sorry that this is mostly the Untamed (I’m just most familiar with it) but the voice actors for Wei Wuxian and some of the juniors (+jiggy) has a higher voice. Likewise Chengling in Word of Honour.

On intonation in general:

- The thing is that whilst shadowing is useful it requires prior ability in a whole bunch of other skills that you can train - it relies on your ability to accurately mimic pitch, emotion and other contrasts. Training this in ANY language, including your native one, will help your ability to do this in Chinese - so I’d recommend spending a fair amount of time practicing shadowing (or speaking just after somebody whilst listening to a string of text, like monolingual simultaneous interpreting) in your native language too. Any training copying accents or mimicking other people is going to similarly help, regardless of the language.

So, with that in mind, further tips:

1) Hum / try to copy the intonation without any words. What this does is force you to pay attention to what the intonation actually is, versus what you may think it should be.

2) Don’t look at the text! Do! Not! Look! At! The! Text! If you look at the characters or pinyin you’re telling yourself ‘ok this is a third tone here’ etc, but you want to override the part of your brain that has gotten into bad habits and is supremely self-confident in how you’re pronouncing the third tone, and actually just go straight back to mimicking.

3) Don’t be afraid to do it with vocabulary that is way beyond your level. Actually, I find this can sometimes be helpful, because you don’t have a prior idea about how a particular tone pair should be useful - and you don’t know which tone you should be producing.

4) Learn vocabulary by ear - listen to a vocab podcast or even make one yourself (I often do this; I record my daily Anki and listen back to it through headphones copying throughout the day - if you’re not confident in your pronunciation you can get Google Translate to do it). Similarly, pick unknown vocabulary out of a longer segment and remember it, trying to internalise the tones instead of figuring out which tone it is.

5) Find emotional sentences, and copy them with emotion. This is SO CRUCIAL!!! We remember things when we relate to them, and when we imbue them with emotion - and it also helps in hearing exactly how an angry second tone sounds, for instance.

6) When you’re copying, look up, and imagine you are having an actual conversation. Carry yourself with conviction and poise!! Really try to whine like wwx or slime like jgy. After a couple of turns copying them, try to turn off the audio and keep delivering it in the same manner.

7) Swap individual words out. Once you have a line properly figured out, swap a word or two that has a different tone pair, and focus on delivering it with the same pattern of stress.

8) Finally, practice doing this in your native language too!! It’s a skill that we don’t use often, and it can be trained. Some people are terrible at it at first go even in their native language, but you can work on it!

About intonation in general:

1) I think a lot of pronunciation problems with people sounding unnatural or stiff ultimately come down to a fundamental misunderstanding of what intonation looks like across different languages. In English we mark it by pitch: and we are so used to the rhetoric that Chinese has ‘tone’ and not ‘intonation’ that we try and focus on blindly copying every single word textbook perfect without listening to how it actually sounds.

2) Chinese does have intonation!!! Except that, unlike English, when you stress a word, the pitch doesn’t change, but the tone contour is exaggerated - basically the only time you will ever hear a full third tone is in isolated or very exaggerated speech. If you have a Chinese friend, get them to record a sentence like the English ‘I didn’t ask her to steal his rucksack’, and put stress on the different elements of it - I didn’t ask, I didn’t ask, I didn’t ask, and so on. Notice and copy how the tones change. When shadowing, you should always be paying attention to where the stress is in the sentence: when you speak by yourself, practicing saying a sentence neutrally, and then with stress on one component, the next, and so on. If it feels unnatural, it’s because you might not have practicised like this before - it’ll get better!

Hope that’s somewhat helpful / interesting!

- 梅晨曦

#chinese #chinese langblr #langblr #chinese studyblr #studyblr #learn chinese #study chinese #chinese vocab #lingblr #askies

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sunnyrinusstudies · 3 years

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Going FOSS: An Intro to Open-Source software for studyblr (and also some privacy related bits)

Source for Header Image

Intro & attempt at TLDR

Hey everyone! Today I’d like to tell y’all something about Open Source Software, and also Why this should matter to you! This’ll probably be the first post of a series I intend to do, because I believe the Studyblr community, even the non-nerd folks, could really benefit from switching some things out in their digital environment. Since this is a long post, I attempted to summarise it below, please do read on if you have the spoons tho!

TLDR?

FOSS stands for “Free and Open Source Software” the “free” part doesn’t necessarily mean it’s free as in free pizza, but mostly means free as in freedom.

There’s a humongous amount of variants on this concept, but the core of FOSS specifically is the four freedoms:

1. To run the program however you want and for whatever you want

2. To study how the program works and to change it in whatever way you want

3. To be able to share it with whomever you feel like

4. To be able to share your modified version with whomever you want

There’s a whole host of software licenses built around these concepts, you can check those out at the Open Source Initiative website, or at Choose A License. Both have a good summary of what they all stand for.

Open Source software is used for a lot of products, nearly every single webserver is an Apache Linux server, Google chrome is built on top of their open source chromium (google is still the devil, but y’know, it’s an example), and even deep deep down, Apple computers run on top of a Linux Kernel. Many more can be listed, but I won’t do that otherwise this isn’t a TLDR anymore.

Now, Why is this important for you? The Open Source Initiative summed it up real nicely already, but heres a short paraphrase:

Control & Security. If software is open source then you can check if it really works the way it does, and to make sure it’s not spying on you. Even if you don’t have the skills for it, someone else who does will be able to check. Also if you don’t like how something works in a program, then you’ll be able to change it or find someone else’s changed version that you like more.

Training. People who want to learn programming can use the code to see what makes programs tick, as well as use it as a guide for their own projects.

Stability. Because everything’s out in the open, that means someone else can take up maintaining a project or make a successor of it, in case the original developers suddenly quit working on it. This is especially important when it’s software that’s absolutely critical for certain tasks.

Community. It’s not just one program. It’s a lot of people working together to make, test, use, and promote a project they really love. Lots of projects end up with a dedicated fanbase that helps support the developers in continuing to work on the software.

I’d like to add one more tho: Privacy, which ties in a lot with the security part. Nowadays with protests going on and everything being online due to the pandemic, folks have been and will be confronted much more with the impact of privacy, and lack thereof. Open Source software means that if any company or group tries to spy on you, then you and anyone who feels like checking, will be able to know and take action on it. Here’s the EFF page on privacy and why it should matter to you

If that got your attention then read on past the readmore button! Or, if nothing else maybe check out the Free and Open Source Software portal on Wikipedia? Or maybe the resources page of the Open Source Initiative?

Terminology: Let’s get that out of the way first

Open Source: The source code that a program is made up of is freely accessible, anyone can look at it and check whether it works well enough or to make sure it doesn’t spy on you.

FOSS: Free and Open Source Software. This doesn’t mean that you don’t need to pay for it, it’s free as in freedom and free speech, not free pizza.

There are four freedoms associated with FOSS:

The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).

The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3).

By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

FLOSS: Free and Libre Open Source Software. This time it is “free” as in free pizza. The “libre” is french for “free” as in freedom.

GRATIS: Sometimes people use this word to mean “free” as in free pizza. Usually alongside “FOSS”

Licenses : A license is something that tells others what they can or cannot do with your code. Licenses also apply to art and literature, those are copyright licenses. There are many different software licenses and I’m not going to be able to list them all.

The biggest players however are:

Apache License 2.0

The 3-Clause BSD License

GNU General Public License (also known as GPL)

MIT License

Mozilla Public License 2.0

There’s even more and you can find a list of them Here on the Open Source Initiative site There’s so many licenses that there’s even a Choose A License site, where you can pick a license depending on what you want it to achieve

Who and/or what even uses open source software?

You don’t need to be some nerd to benefit from Open Source software, in fact, you’re using open source software right now! The biggest example is the whole entire internet. Websites are stored on servers, and nearly every single webserver is a Linux server. The second biggest browser Firefox is open source, and even google chrome is built on top of “chromium” an open source base. If you dont use an iPhone, then you’re probably on an Android phone. Guess what? Android is part of the Android Open Source Project, which is then built upon a GNU/Linux base. All Open Source. Chromebooks? Built on top of a Linux kernel (like a non-patented engine you could put into any motor vehicle you’d like). Heck, even Apple computers are, at their core, built on top of a Linux kernel.

Neat apps you may wanna check out!

I’ve made a little list of apps that might be especially useful for studyblr folks, but depending on how well this post does I’ll probably make some more posts for specific apps.

TiddlyWiki, has a bajillion different ways to organise your thoughts, and also a lot of variant builds out there. Check out their table of contents if you feel lost! There’s versions available for most big browsers, as well as windows, linux, mac, android, and iOS.

AnyType, is an app that looks and almost exactly like notion, but is much more decentralised. They’re currently still in development but if you want to support them, sign up for early access and give them some feedback so they know what works and doesn’t! They’re still in closed alpha, but are intending to give beta access to about 100 folks at a time throughout 2021, so please sign up if this looks interesting to you!

Trilium Notes, is slightly more like a “notebook”, however you can arrange your notes in nearly infinitely deep folders. You can use things like Relation Maps & Link Maps to visualise your notes and how they go together. There’s even more they do and I just cant list it all, so go check out their stuff for a more comprehensive overview! Works on windows, linux, and (unsupported) mac

LibreOffice and ONLYOFFICE are two office suites that function just as well as micro$oft office, often Even Better in my experience. I’ve used LibreOffice for years now and honestly? never going back. OnlyOffice is technically free (as in pizza), but it’s a slight hassle to get everything set up, cause you need to set it up on a server. They have a paid and hosted version available with educational discounts, but honestly i’d go with LibreOffice.

OnePile, is an app I haven’t used myself since it only runs on Apple stuff. But I’ve heard a lot of good things about it so that’s why it’s in here. It looks like it works similar to most general “note taking notebook” apps. Looks really pretty too honestly.

EtherPad, is similar to ONLYOFFICE, however this one’s a lot more focused on specifically text documents. Works with real-time collaboration which is really neat.

Anything that FramaSoft has going on. They’re a non-profit organisation, dedicated to promoting digital freedom. A lot of open source cloud related things are not really useful to people who don’t have the time and/or money to set up a whole-ass server. That’s where FramaSoft comes in, they do it for you. Just about everything they offer (here’s a full overview) are free (as in free pizza). They also have a separate site to help you get started!

It’s not free to run it all on their side, so if you find yourself interested in using their services please try to support them any way you monetarily can! (they even have a “minetest” server (not minecraft, deeeefinitely not minecraft))

Joplin!! Which is also what I used to write this post so I wouldn’t have to use The Tumble’s post writing thing. It’s good for taking notes, has a bunch of neat plug-ins, and can also sync with a variety of cloud services!

Nextcloud For if you want to go just that little bit further on the open source and the privacy. Nextcloud has honestly way too many features for me to list, but the important parts are that it’s a nigh perfect replacement for office365, and probably even GSuite. The one caveat is that you either gotta host it yourself, or get someone else to host it for you. Framasoft (mentioned above), has a nextcloud instance. It works on just about every single platform, and can integrate with an absurd amount of services. Here’s a list of providers that work with nextcloud, and what different apps they have installed on their server.

I personally use Disroot, because they’re a local (as in, my country) non-profit that offer about 2gb of free storage, and then for about 15 cents per GB per month you can get more storage if you want. They also have an email service which is hella neat. Their one main rule is Do Not Use For Business Purposes, because they’re here to help the individual folks, not companies.

Neat Links you may also want to look at!

Here are some sources, and also resources that I used for this post. There’s also some stuff here that I think folks may be interested in in general.

General Wikipedia Article on Open Source Software

The Free and Open Source Software portal on Wikipedia

Resources page of the Open Source Initiative

Free Software Foundation definition of “free software”

itsfoss page on what FOSS means

itsfoss page on the history of FOSS

Open Source Software Foundation list of projects and apps they really like

Open Source Initiative on “the open source way”, and how it goes beyond software

Check out literally anything the Electronic Frontier Foundation has going on maybe?

TED talk on privacy and why it’s important

The Surveillance Self Defense project by the EFF

This EFF page on privacy for students

ExpressVPN article on privacy (not necessarily endorsing this company, just a good article)

What’s next?

I’ll probably make some more posts on specific kinds of software that I think folks may like. Or maybe a general overview on the more privacy forcused reasons and solutions for doing all of this.

Future post ideas, none of these are set in stone:

Open source Note taking apps

Replacements for just about Every Single google service I can think of

My personal setup

Open source / privacy conscious social media that studyblr folks may be into

Chatting, Calling, Videocalling: Discord and whatsapp alternatives etc

??? More studyblr apps that could do with a FOSS alternative??

How to support open source when you’re not a big fudgin nerd

How to be better at digital privacy and security, while still maintaining that studyblr aesthetic

Apps, software, other stuff, for specific areas of study maybe?

Feel free to suggest other ideas! Or leave feedback! This is my first big resource post so I wanna know if/how I can do better when I make another one!

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skyeventide · 3 years

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hi, if you are planning on writing the embalmed M.E. post, I'd be extremely interested! amazing topic

oh man okay I'll try to put it together. I'm gonna stick mostly to one single text for this one because, as a topic, memory-embalming is really large and I think you can construct a lot on like, solely the concept of memory and fading and preservation in the legendarium. and I’m not gonna try that lol

the quote where Tolkien uses the "embalming" word is letter 131. I should preface this by saying that more often than not I take great issue with the way jirt talks about his theology-adjacent Goodness and Good Choices, and I think it's pr... pro... pronghhh I don't wanna write that word lmao, please take it as me intending "it has non-straightforward issues that are worth a second look", not as anything else. it’s problematic, there I put it down lol academic gremlin brain won, for anyone who doesn’t wholly align with him philosophically. so I suppose anyone who generally agrees with jirt's own reckons will disagree with my takeaway here, but so are things. anyway, I'll try to explain why I called it a value judgement.

screenshots first:

I know this is a lot of text, but it's needed. so there's kind of a lot to unpack there but to strip it down to the relevant basics:

part of the reason why some of the exiles do not return is that they don't want to return as exiles, but remain where they have power and stand at the top of the hierarchy (this to me feels like, specifically, a very Galadriel motive — but that's yet another post lmao); they also want peace and bliss, and that is another motive, the same peace and bliss that exist in Valinor (and while the first motive I list, I believe, is directly consequential to the status of the first age's survivors, this second motive, having the peace and bliss of Valinor outside of Valinor, has been present and thematic since the speech of Feanor to the Noldor, and likely before that); they can't therefore abide the "fading" of the land, the way it changes with time, and endeavour to preserve it — embalm it (this becomes emblematic in one of the various versions of the creation of the Elessar, or one of the them: a stone that, if someone looks through it, shows things as they would be when healed, whole, and beautiful. in one of said versions, Celebrimbor gives this stone to Galadriel, who is saddened by the change of time. this is Celebrimbor of Gondolin, or perhaps Telerin Celebrimbor, but no matter the origin, the theme persists)(second parenthesis to point out how third-age Lothlórien, preserved by Nenya, is in all effects a land out of time, where ancient things aren't simply echoed but continue living, and where trees literally don't die. leaves change colour during autumn and winter, then fall down in spring when immediately new buds start growing); fourth motive is the healing of the land's hurts and its adornment.

the difference between healing the land and “embalming” it, I suppose, is the acceptance of its change under the sun, so the acceptance of time's passing, while healing and adorning it work in unison with said passing. of course the matter here is, the absence of decay is kind of Valinor’s whole thing. but we know, both from letter 156 and the Akallabêth, that Valinor isn’t inherently a blessed land and it doesn’t give immortality by virtue of being Valinor. in fact: “'for it is not the land of Manwe that makes its people deathless, but the Deathless that dwell therein have hallowed the land; and there you would but wither and grow weary the sooner, as moths in a light too strong and steadfast.” and letter 156: “for as emissaries from the Valar clearly inform him, the Blessed Realm does not confer immortality. The land is blessed because the Blessed live there, not vice versa, and the Valar are immortal by right and nature [...]”

so, really, it’s not the where that counts. jirt, I believe, makes it pretty obvious that it’s the why and how, and through whose counsel. what I think is identified here as the fault isn’t that preservation of the land isn’t possible and therefore should not be attempted (clearly it is), rather it’s the wish to create a paradise of their own, a desire that Sauron identifies and exploits. now, obviously I’m not trying to argue that Sauron is right or anything the like (even at early stages, and despite the partial overlap of motives, Sauron’s goals can’t really be called good, even though you might argue that they gain some form of internal conflict), or that in pursuit of a challenge to the divine harm becomes justifiable — this isn’t really about characters and more about jirt the man himself and his production.

I just generally take issue with the idea that wanting a heaven of sorts, made with your own skills, which is within the realm of possibility, and by no one’s leave but your own, is inherently a bad thing, or that it must come with harm and corruption, and compromised motives. but in the narrative of these books, from an outside-of-text perspective, it doesn’t seem to be possible to issue the challenge that letter 131 talks about without also giving aid to evil (Sauron, earlier Morgoth) willingly ot unwillingly, without getting closer to “magic” and “machinery”, without it being written and interpreted under a lens of “embalming”, of refusal to let the world live its course. it isn’t possible to have that cake and eat it (yeah jirt kind of wrote that saying wrong lmao), which is identified as a corruptible weak point.

it isn’t possible because this discontent, or this wish for independence, is in itself a seed that the story connects to evil and lies (Morgoth’s work in Valinor, and possibly earlier than that his discord); because it’s inherently linked to wanting the top-of-the-hierarchy authority granted by Middle Earth. and because the legendarium doesn’t truly leave room for any gods-challenging story that isn’t some form of taint and mistake, a Fall™ (challenges to Morgoth here don’t count, he is the fall; this is about Eru and the Valar).

(I think here it’s relevant to note that the elves not being in ME is elsewhere called out as a loss for Men, who do not have the “elder siblings” at hand who were supposed to teach them and guide them; as well as the fact that Eru in morgoth’s ring mentions, himself, that the elves have been “removed to Aman from the Middle Earth in which I set them”. so it’s not necessarily so straightforward in all aspects — but I think a discussion on that would be going a little too much beyond the scope of this tbh)

I believe my point is exemplified by a note in this same letter:

“preservation in reverent memory” here is not negatively judged, despite being effectively an antiquarian lore memorial to (”good”) tradition. Elrond also rebukes Sauron, and is not at all subjected to the same Ring-related test as Galadriel in LotR. and I think this is sort of the narrative point of the story, part of the greater (in good measure theological) thesis underlying it. and why I called it a value judgement.

#quenta noldorinwa #ingoblingo #anyway... death of the author or lack thereof #not tagging any of this with them characters cause like #I don't particularly care to catch anyone who'd get offended by it #shrug emoji #answered.#JRR Tolkien

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batboyblog · 2 years

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hello @queerarrow thanks so much for taking the time to comment on my thoughts, it was interesting and I wanted to address some of them here:

Two things I don't think gay media is lacking in hope or joy focused stories? The movie Love, Simon comes to mind, where his coming out is supported by his mom with a lovely speech, it ends with a Ferris wheel romantic moment and the final scene is Simon with his friend group in the car now plus boyfriend getting their morning coffee as an upbeat squad. There for sure is a narrative about gay media being a downer but I think thats a little disingenuous, and feels like again the conversation around Heartstopper is trying to take advantage of that narrative to sell itself as the "only" hopeful and positive gay YA story.

thing two is... I don't think they do deal with problems in a hopeful way? which maybe is different from focusing on hope and joy? The only serious issue they really focus on is bullying and how do they deal with it? Charlie quits, he leaves the Rugby team? something we're shown him enjoying, but once a bully shows up he quits gives up, leaves. He doesn't show that he a skinny gay boy can do rugby even though he's not "supposed to" as gay boy, it doesn't show that the team rallies to support Charlie against a homophobic bully (that'd be hopeful) it should Charlie walking out of Rugby and indeed not even for himself but for Nick. Charlie hasn't learned anything across the show, he's still putting a boy's needs/happiness over his own, just like with Ben. Then Nick also "quits" (or walks out of Sports day, idk how British school works, but the implication was he quit Rugby) so the hopeful and joy filled way they deal with the serious issue of bullying is to... run away? to allow the bully to get what he wants? (no queers in sports) I agree that the visuals and narrative focus on the positive side of the scene, ie that Charlie and Nick are together and Nick picked Charlie over sports.

I think people often frame it as an either or, I don't think anyone is saying Nick and Charlie need to be getting it on. Only the show doesn't do a very good job of showing thats something they might want to do at some point? The kissing is very cautious, demure, and polite, now that might be the actors maybe they were not comfortable really macking on each other, or putting hands on hips or into back pockets etc. But the result is there's a lot of romance without a lot of desire. Which links back to Ben, narratively I think we can all agree Ben going through all the trouble of sneaking around with Charlie and Charlie going through all the trouble for 3 second chased kisses doesn't make a whole lot of sense, particularly as we are shown clearly later that Ben does not respect Charlie in general and his boundaries in particular. And I think it's troubling that the gay character who is the most sexualized, Ben, is also very rapey since a long standing stereotype of gay men is that we're sexually dangerous and untrustworthy.

I mean I hope they do do something, I'm unsure what they could do to turn Ben into a real character rather than a cartoon villain, and given the over all black white morality of the show's thinking I have doubts, plus it does kinda feel like a damage done thing. But yeah they have two more seasons to add a little complexity to his character, maybe explain why Charlie "went out with him" at all since the narrative need to make sure Charlie wasn't "cheating" really destroyed any kind of relationship they. might have had.

So there's a thing in storytelling called "show, don't tell" which is we the readers or viewers should see what we're being told about. Don't have a character say "he was so freaking tall!" have us slowly pan upward along a very tall man. Any ways we're told about Elle's trans experiences, all of which have to do with bullying and abuse for being trans (again not very joyful..) but we don't see them. Indeed a friend of mine missed the line about the transphobic teacher, and picked up the line about her hair when she's talking to the girls. And my friend, being black, assumed the bullying and school switch was about her being a black girl with big natural hair, a common problem black girls face (hair bullying that is). So he thought she was a cis girl for like 4-5 episodes. And indeed if you changed the reason she was bullied, literally turn "transphobe" into "racist" with ADR, nothing would change for Elle's story. I mean it's cool a trans actress got a role on a big show, and I think it's cool in general terms to have a trans friend in a friend group and it be not be a big deal thats cool. But it's pretty clear that the show either didn't want to or didn't know how to tell an explicitly trans story/love story for Elle and Tao and basically avoiding any of the emotional or psychological road blocks either of them feel about falling in love/dating.

#Heartstopper #Ben Hope #meta #gay stuff

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flecks-of-stardust · 3 years

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Everyone’s Favorite Moth God: Dreamless AU

radi post!!!!!! because i couldnt write today but i still wanted to make Something

- the radiance is about average when it comes to age among dream beings. she’s nowhere near the age of the oldest dream beings, but she’s much older than unn. she watched unn establish her domain while her moths had long since settled in, and didn’t really say anything about unn putting her domain this close to hers.

- she chills in the dream realm most of the time, and visits the mortal realm through the dreams of mortal bugs, both her followers and non-followers alike. she Can manifest herself a physical form to move about in the physical world if she really wants to, but it takes a fair bit of sustained focus and effort for her to do it, and it’s a hassle she’s not really interested in.

- more often, she will channel her presence through one of her moths. they allow her to see through their eyes, so she can directly view the mortal world through them, and she can temporarily take control of their body. this is taxing for both god and mortal, though, so she doesn’t do it often, and only uses it in case of emergencies or when she needs her presence to be there, physically, in the mortal realm.

- the few moths that are able to channel their god through them are called the Seers, and it is more innate connection than training. it is possible for one to train to become a Seer, but it is a long process of grasping at the purest threads of godly essence and attuning to the radiance. a few notable moths have achieved this feat regardless.

- the radiance’s domain is over light and to some extent heat. she influences daylight and cycle lengths, and is often described by non-followers when she appears in their dreams as ‘a massive, radiant orb of light and warmth.’ while in the dream realm, she is able to see and touch the dreams of mortals (where their minds brush briefly against the dream realm, spinning and spiraling senselessly due to the mortal mind’s inability to grasp at the dream realm), and can use her light to gently guide them away from the nightmare realm (a subset of the dream realm where nightmares are rife). she isn’t able to stop nightmares completely, and doing so would render the nightmare gods weak, but she can guide certain minds away from the nightmare realm.

- due to the radiance being more connected to the dream realm, it is possible to use light magic to access the minds of creatures, sentient or not. even then it is a difficult feat, and must be carefully used, lest the wielder be stranded in the veil between the dreams of mortals and the lucid world. few moths ever attempted such a feat, and those that did often spoke of feeling a loss of identity after exploring the mind of another.

- as an individual, the radiance generally stays out of mortal matters, watching distantly from the dream realm and receiving information from her moths as they commune with her. however, she is quick to anger about injustice among her moths and followers, but also among other populations if her moths report the information to her. she has a tendency to be brash in her actions, though it is perhaps apt in that she is the embodiment of light and warmth and as such is passionate about what she does.

- the radiance harbors a slight protectiveness over unn, however minor. she is of the opinion that gods should not mingle too much, and is well aware of the results of godly warfare, but she does in part view unn as a sort of younger sister, due to her immensely young age for a god. she keeps her interactions with unn cordial, but is and always will be the first to speak out for her in the event that anything happens to harm her or her people.

- the radiance and her moths have a weak neural linking of sorts, enabling them to somewhat share thoughts and emotions through those links; this neural link does not extend to non-moth followers. it fades with physical distance, and even at close proximity is limited in what information can be shared. in the height of their rule, the moths would utilize the link to send out scouting parties into the lands, and have them send information back through the links, however fractured and garbled, to the moths back at their homeland; the information would later be consolidated through speech.

- the radiance is able to speak, especially if she has a physical presence in the mortal realm, but her voice always has an echo effect to it. it multiplies and layers over itself, and is disconcerting for mortals to listen to. if not careful, the echoing of her voice can cause immense pain to mortals; godly beings are typically spared from this, though the echoing may still be unnerving.

- in her natural state, the radiance emanates a soft, yellow glow, bright but not searing to look at. she also naturally produces warmth, always a comfortable temperature for whoever is basking in it. when in pain, angry, or fearful, her light intensifies and becomes nearly blinding, and the color darkens from yellow to orange. the heat she produces will also get uncomfortably warm, sometimes even burning anyone too close to her. when Seeing through the eyes of one of her moths, she has to be careful with how much of herself she is channeling through them, or she may severely wound them.

- she was irate when she heard of the pale wyrm’s arrival next to her lands, and even more so when she learned that he had set up a kingdom there. she monitored him and his activity with great disgust and wariness, dipping into the dreams of his citizens to check on what was actually going on behind the guise of glamor. when news of unn dying reached her, she forced her way into the mind of the pale wyrm and demanded that he leave. the two sparred briefly in his dreams, but the battle ultimately ended with no winners. after that, the radiance began trying to break his spell on his people by entering their dreams and showing them the truth.

- she was distraught and enraged when the wyrm began killing her moths, and aided them where she could, but her general lack of presence in the mortal realm ultimately limited what she could help with. when they fled deeper into their caverns, she assisted them with her magic in collapsing the tunnels they used.

- a physical form of the radiance was sealed into the mind of the Pure Vessel. few know about this fact. as per the events of dreamless, she is slowly, but surely, dying. even in her death throes, she is still reaching out for the minds she can feel, and inadvertently presses her pain and fear into them. her communication with her moths has been severed due to how close to death she is, though she tries to scream for them anyway.

and as a closing remark, dreamless is solidly radi-sympathetic. that was the whole original basis for this au, actually, so if youre looking to bash on radi, maybe pick a different au to do it sfkjghks

#radiance #hollow knight #dreamless au #i mean dont get me wrong. canon radi has done lots of shitty things #with the most common interpretations of what she did and why she did it anyway #but if the pale king gets positive interpretations of him #and whole redemption arcs #radi should be given that opportunity too i think #i wanted something radi sympathetic when i first got the idea for this #and it snowballed into this gigantic au #so yeah sfgkjhs #also wrt unn and radi's interactions its basically this:#unn: hi im new :)#radi: oh. hello. you are a child. i just met you but if anything happens to you i will kill everyone responsible for it and then myself #to put into perspective the age gap between the two radi is like.#in human years shed be about 60 ish #unn would be like. 20 #its a bit rough since theyre both gods but multiply that by a magnitude of like ten thousand and youll have an approximate of their age gap #its definitely not BARK SNARL GRRR DONT TOUCH MY LITTLE SISTER protectiveness #but it wouldnt be accurate to say radi doesnt have even a tiny soft spot for unn #anyhow yeah i think ive written a long enough essay in the tags

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witching-hour · 3 years

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Street Rat [SAMCRO x Reader]

REQUESTED BY ANON can you do a platonic SOA imagine where the reader (gender neutral or a girl) is a street kid (preferably a teenager) who steals wallets and stuff and they break into the clubhouse to steal money/food and one time they get caught. at first the reader is timid and doesn't really trust anyone but after some time they became part of the family? thank you!

(A/N): i’m so sorry to who requested bc this one is long overdue. beware guys, this is a long one. i made this gender neutral! i did give the reader’s siblings names to make it easier to follow along, so it may not seem as inclusive as i orginally wanted it to be since there is a bit of a background and storyline. the mayans version can be found imagine here and the headcanon here if interested written by the lovely @everyhowlmarksthedead ✨

SUMMARY: teen!reader picks the wrong pocket and instead of earning money or a beat down, they earn something they never had before — a family

TW: shameless (tv show) elements, mentions of drug and alcohol abuse, child abandonment, neglectful parents, mentions of drug dealing and bipolar disorder

HOOD up and hands in the front of your sweatshirt pocket, you traveled down the concrete path that you’ve been down so many times your whole life. You could walk down the same sidewalk blindfolded and still miss the dingy cracks and eroded stones most would trip over, or comment about breaking their mom’s back. Your feet carried you down the lane of the mom-and-pop businesses as you analyzed the ones walking past, by, and in front of you — trying to find your next victim to your pickpocketing skills.

You had about forty-five minutes before you’d have to relieve your elderly next-door neighbor from babysitting your youngest sibling, Zoe, and it was about a fifteen-minute walk to your street from the ice cream parlor you just passed by. You needed to hurry today’s trip up before your other siblings came home from school, not wanting to chance them being left alone in the house with your sperm donor, ahem, father.

Derek was in seventh grade and one of the brightest kids you knew. He might as well be in high school already. Jordan, or Jordi, as she liked to be called, was still in her elementary years and was bound to be voted for ‘the biggest bookworm’ by the time she graduated to middle school. Zoe was still just a baby, and a handful despite being so happy all the time. Overall, she was still a baby and needed the attention babies needed.

Those three were your life. They were all you had in this shitty world.

Your mom had her issues between being bipolar and an addict. Your dad was alcoholic and addict as well. And when those two were put together, it was train wreck bound to happen. Your mom was always in an out of your lives. Always coming back for money or her fix of needing to see her kids on one of her highs, before shooting out of town again. Your dad was an asshole; always trying to sneak his way into the house that was in his name, but never paid the bills you worked so hard to come by.

You worked odd jobs, never able finding a position for a sixteen-year-old drop-out that lands you a pay for more than three weeks. Once you were no longer needed, you were discarded. You have resorted to selling stolen parts, pickpocketing, and dealing on the corner even. But you did it all in the name of your family.

Even if the authorities didn’t see it that way.

The world was a cruel place where even the most innocent were forced to result to cruel and unusual methods to survive. You were still so young, and pretty much a high school dropout considering your disregard for your grades, since the concern and wellbeing of your siblings came first. You were only a junior in high school and wouldn’t be considered a drop out till next year when you can properly inform your counselor that you would not be walking across the stage with the rest of your class to accept your diploma.

A tall figure blocked your vision as you zigzagged through the crowded path walk. He wore one of the infamous kuttes belonging to the MC that resonated in Charming; the Sons of Anarchy. The reaper stared back at you, daring you to play your game. You knew it was risk to even think about stealing from a Son — perhaps even stupid, but you needed money for the mortgage this month or else the threat of a foreclosure looming over your head would soon come true. You watched as the Son sauntered over to the rest of his ‘brothers’ by the bikes lined up on the street.

You knew you could run like you were on the track team if needed, with the agility of cat to climb fences and trees; but was it worth the risk if you got caught?

Fuck it.

You weren’t gonna get caught.

Formulating a plan in your head, you headed straight in the direction of the MC grouped around their bikes. Your body collided with a hard surface.

“Woah!”

Using the distraction, you quickly darted your hand down the depths of the pocket near you and gripped the leather wallet before hiding it in your hand under the overgrown sleeves of your hoodie. You played the part well, stumbling around like you had two left feet. “Sorry, sorry,” you repeated frantically, keeping your head down as you passed by the group of rowdy bikers.

“Careful there,” a playful voice emitted.

You didn’t bother to look who said it, as your only goal was to get out of there swift and undetected.

With a cocked eyebrow, Jax only shook his head, disregarding the odd encounter, reaching into his pocket for his cigarettes. His eyebrows furrowed as his jean pocket felt lighter than usual. He pulled out the contents; being only his lighter with the reaper emblem and his pack. It dinged in head when he realized his wallet was missing from the pile. “Son of a — They stole my wallet!”

It only took a second to register with the others before Jax, Chibs, Happy, and Tig took off after the thief. You heard the shouts and sounds of heavy shoes hitting the concrete, encouraging you to break off into a sprint. Your feet guided you into an alleyway that would cut into the street across from the public park. You spotted the dumpster next to the chain-link fence and ran to it. As soon as you got one leg hooked on one side of the bar, you were grabbed by the back of your hoodie and slammed into the brick, making you yelp at the force.

“I don’t think so shithead.”

You struggled against a pair of strong arms, caged between them and the rough wall behind you, scraping you through the cotton. No doubt dirtying the oversized sweatshirt you wore.

Your hood was pulled off and you were faced with four men in the infamous leather kuttes that burned you at the sight. The one you stole from with the slicked back hair had the President patch, the one on his left who was holding you had graying black hair and a beard, but his most defining feature were the two scars that carved upwards from his mouth, and he had the V. President patch stitched on his leather. The other two stood behind them menacingly, one bald with tattoos trailing up and down his arms and the other with wild, untamed, raven black curls reaching his shoulders.

“Fuck,” you seethed in anger at yourself for being so stupid.

How are you gonna get yourself out of this one now, (Y/N)?

Their faces went from dark and menacing to surprise, and may you say, curiosity?

“Shite, ye is just a kid.” The vice had a thick Scottish accent, his speech pronounced.

“Jesus Christ,” The raven curly haired man exasperated.

“Jax what are we gonna do?” The bald one asked his prez calmly, eyeing you skeptically.

“Take ‘em with us.” He shook his head, matching his unsure attitude.

“C’mon kid,” the one with the Scottish accent ushered you away from the wall, with one hand firmly attached to your shoulder in case you decided to make another break for it, but not so much that it hurt you — more or less of a warning.

The four Sons brought you back to the ice cream parlor you passed earlier. Word on the street (since the residents of Charming were just as nosy and gossip-like as the average teenage girl) was that the Sons purchased said ice cream shop because their Clubhouse blew up. You remember hearing the explosion all the way on the other side of town at home when it was late hours into the night. You remember when the news program the next morning went on and on about it. They wouldn’t shut up.

You sat at one of the booths where they left whom they called a ‘prospect’ to be your own personal watch dog, while them four and a couple other went upstairs to discuss what to do with you.

You were picking at the cuticles of your fingernails, bored and anxious over the situation. You had less than a half hour till you had to go pick up Zoe from Mrs. Deidra, but you were stuck as the Son’s current prisoner. You were just a kid, they weren’t gonna punish you severely...right? They are outlaws, but the look on their faces when they realized how old you really were-

“Kid!”

You turned around in your seat and saw the Puerto Rican patch you briefly caught the name of as Juice when you first arrived at the shop. He motioned for you to follow him through the doorway where a set of stairs led directly to the next floor, to the Sons, and to your doom.

“Come on.”

You remained silent, still not having said a word since they caught you, and followed the man. He led you to a pair of wooden doors, opening one, and allowing you to walk inside first. With several pairs of eyes on you, scrutinizing you, you felt smaller than you already were.

“Take a seat,” the blond at the head of the table motioned his head towards the empty chair opposite him.

Wordlessly, you walked to the chair, sliding it out from under the table, only making you cringe as the pure silent room was filled with the obnoxious screech the chair made when it scratched against the floorboards. Once seated, you brought one leg up to your chest, and let your arm cradle it as your other hand laid flat on the table with the reaper carved in the center.

No one said a thing, which only made feel more awkward and out of place than anything. The blond, Jax, had gotten his wallet back already, but you knew what you did would not go unpunished.

“What’s your name?” Jax questioned.

You hesitated, but considering the situation you were in, you decided to just cooperate. “(Y/N)...”

They each went around the table sprouting off their names. Some of them cool, some odd.

“Cool name,” Bobby nodded at you.

You scrunched up your nose at the attempt at a compliment. “I’m sixteen...not six.”

“Good point,” he added, looking to his prez for help on how to talk to you, not having much experience with teenagers, even though he was one once upon a time ago.

“Did you need the money?” Jax had taken in your appearance and noticed the baggy stained sweatshirt you were drowning in, the ripped-up jeans which were easy to tell were not bought in that condition, and the worn-out sneakers that looked to be a size too small; and by the way you walked, it wouldn’t be surprising if you had blisters. Besides the clothes which hid most of your form, just by your face, your eyes were a dead giveaway — they didn’t have the youth effect of bright and happy. They looked stressed and tired.

“Does it matter?”

“Yeah,” the bald man with tattoos whose name you found out was Happy, had cut in.

“Why? I stole from you. Now, what, we’re swapping life stories?”

Tig leaned forward in his chair, his gaze met yours. “Your (Y/L/N)’s kid? The oldest right?”

Of course they’d figure out who you were. Small town life was a curse. This whole town knew the tragic and pitiful story of the (Y/L/N)’s. Headcase mother, druggie and alcoholic father, and the four kids on their own. The father racking up more debt and charges to his rep sheet than respect from his kids.

Your eyes narrowed at the question, straightening up in the chair. “That’s right.”

“We’re not gonna hurt you.”

You scoffed, not even bothering to hide the bite in your tone, “Well, that’s a relief. Can I go?”

Jax smirked, quirking up an eyebrow in amusement. “Got somewhere better to be?”

“As of a matter of fact, yes, I do.”

“Which is?”

“None of your damn business,” you snapped.

“Easy kid, you’re in our house,” the bald man with the tattoo sleeves warned you. “You stole from us.”

“Then either let me pay for my sins or let me go.”

“We had a better idea,” the Puerto Rican with a mirror tribal tat on his head told you, causing you to send him a look of confusion.

“What now?”

You stood on the porch of your neighbor’s house as she handed you Zoe. The year old gurgled and squealed in delight as she was placed into your arms. She pulled at the strings of your hoodie as you adjusted her. “Thanks again, Mrs. Deidra. I’m sorry I was so late, I got held up.”

“Oh, that’s all right, dear.” The elder woman brushed off with a light hand gesture. Her eyes peered over your shoulder, seeing a couple men of the motorcycle gang of the town at the end of her driveway leaning against a black SUV. “You aren’t getting into any trouble now, are you?”

“No of course not,” you gave her your most innocent smile, “but I best be going. Derek and Jordie should already be on their way home.”

“Oh yes! Do tell those two I miss having them around. They are welcome over anytime. You too, dear. Don’t be a stranger!”

“I won’t. Have a good night!”

“You too, (Y/N).” She waved you off, watching you bounce down the steps with your baby sister securely in your arms from behind the glass of her front door.

Once you stood in front of the Sons, Happy and Juice, they guided you towards the black SUV they brought you in. A young curly brunette with blonde highlights who you noticed was involved with the president, walked in with two blonde boys who were be exact replicas of their father. You were briefly introduced to the mother who you learned was Tara. You could tell she was informed of who you were as soon as she laid her eyes on you. But you didn’t have enough times for pleasantries as you were guided out by the Tacoma Killer and Puerto Rican.

As Happy opened the back door for you, you opened your mouth to object — you still had to pick up Derek and Jordi.

“Two other patches were sent to pick up your brother and sister.”

Without another word you pulled yourself up into the SUV with one hand as the other hand held onto the one-year-old in your arms. Happy closed the door behind you as Juice got settled behind the wheel. The drive was quiet for the most part, no one said much besides the low voices from the radio of classic rock, and your baby sister who gurgled and babbled here and there. It didn’t take long till you ended back in front of the new SAMCRO Clubhouse disguised as an ice cream shop. The minute you stepped out of the car, you saw your other two siblings seated at the bar where the man with prosthetic hands was handing them plastic spoons for their ice cream cups in front of them. Beside them was the older blond boy that you figured was Jax’s son, who also had ice cream and was chatting with Jordan and Derek.

“Pres wants to speak with you in Chapel,” the guy with the shaggy hair and the prospect patch told you as soon as you entered the little shop where everyone but Jax and the woman, Tara, were.

“Okay. Just, ah, give me a sec?”

The prospect nodded and stood off to the side as the other patches took their seats around the shop.

You rubbed Derek’s back as you placed a kiss on the top of his head, “Hey, buddy. How was school?”

“It was good, got a project due next Friday.”

“Mmm, tell me more about it in a bit. I just got to wrap something up real quick then I’m all yours, okay? Keep an eye on Jordi and Zoe for me please.”

“Okay, I will.” And with that he joined back in on the little conversation between the three kids seated at the bar.

“Thanks, baby,” You sent him a smile as you placed Zoe in his arms. It grew slightly as he grabbed his spoon that had a little bit of chocolate ice cream at the tip and placed it at Zoe’s lips, the baby opening her mouth to welcome the frozen treat.

You placed a kiss on Jordan’s head, greeting her the same way you did Derek, and asking how her day went at school before you told her that you would be right back.

The prospect guided you up the stairs to the “Chapel” (or the same room you were in earlier with the giant ass table in the middle). He opened the door for you after delivering a couple brief knocks to let those inside know you were coming in. You entered the room alone, noticing Jax seated in his seat at the head of the table, with his wife to his left. The brunette motioned for you to take the seat across from her on Jax’s right where you noticed Happy sitting earlier.

Your nerves only increased as your feet carried you closer to the redwood table. For whatever the Pres and his Old Lady wanted to discuss, you just hoped it didn’t come to the harm of your siblings. You made a choice that affected all of you, but you should be the one to deal with the consequences. When Juice said they had another idea on what to do with you the men didn’t fill you in on what they meant. They just had you explain why you needed to leave then sent Happy and Juice to escort you.

You sat down, wringing your hands together nervously before finally folding them on the table in front of you. “Before you start, I just want to get something out there. My siblings and I...we’re a package deal. What happens to one of us, happens to us all. I’m sure you can understand because those men downstairs aren’t like your family. They are.”

Jax nodded, allowing you to continue.

“And I didn’t fully take that into account when I stole your wallet. I’m not gonna say I’m sorry. I regret my actions because my consequences might impact my brother and sisters, but I’m not gonna apologize. I did what I did knowing the risks. It was stupid and desperate on my part and I take full responsibility for it, but sorry isn’t gonna change what happened. Sorry is just another way of begging for forgiveness, and I’m not asking for that.” You told the both of them.

“Thank you for your honesty,” he bowed his head towards you, putting out the cigarette he was pulling on.

“Everything I do is for them. We’re all each other has. I’m the only person viable to take care of them. With our mother god knows where and our father-” You had to cut yourself off as the air got caught in your throat, eyes glazing over at the fact that you were there lifeline, and they were yours. If something happens to you, you don’t know what will happen to them. What your father might turn them into...

“I’m not asking you to spare me from whatever it is you have decided — and I know I have no right asking this, but do you think you can keep an eye on them for me? Make sure they’re okay? I..I’m too far gone. I’ve done things I can’t take back. I’ve hurt people. I’m a thief and a liar — a damn street rat. But they can still get out of this shithole. They can leave and never look back; make something of themselves...”

“I’m asking you if you take me, spare them. I don’t want your pity. I don’t want your sympathy. I just want to know if they’re gonna be okay when I’m gone.”

The two other people in the room took in what you said. There minds still set on the decision they made. Your words only swaying them to solidify what was chosen.

“We’re not gonna hurt you.” Tara spoke softly, slowly reaching her hand out to lay on top of yours. Your reflex was to pull away, but you hesitated as the warmth covered your laced fingers like a blanket. “We wanna help you. It’s not out of sympathy or pity. It’s admirable, actually, what lengths and sacrifices you’re willing to go to for them. Something like that is rare. I hope one day our boys will have that strong of a bond.”

Jax cut in, “My wife and I talked it over, and we want you four to come stay with us for a little while.”

“I can’t ask you of that-”

“You’re not.” He stopped you. “It’s not permanent, but until we find something long term, we just figured you might be a little more comfortable with someone who had kids or was more reliable.”

“I work at St. Thomas from mornings to mid-to-late afternoons. I have Thomas at the daycare there while I work, and Abel goes to pre-school. I could sign Zoe up for the daycare if you’d like. Drop her off, pick her up. You wouldn’t have to worry about a thing. I could put your name on the list so you could still go see her.” Tara offered. “We could also get you job after school. We could use someone behind the counters, finally get this place up and running more smoothly.”

They got stutters in reply, clearly due to you being overwhelmed. They were offering much more then you already had. A roof over your head where you didn’t have to worry about bills, a steady job, and a parental and maternal figure (you were still sketchy about but would be good for your siblings to have).

“Listen, kid, we get that this must be a lot for you. We understand if you wouldn’t want to stay with us, some of the other guys have offered if you’re interested, but don’t take this as an opportunity to run. We get you don’t trust us, and we’ll work on that, but your family now. And family takes care of family.”

Your (e/c) orbs were wide with disbelief and uncertainty, but they could see the hope sparking behind those walls you have built up. The man you knew as an intimidating outlaw biker gave you a small but warm, inviting smile.

“Whataya say?”

SOA TAG LIST: @lexiesmain @talicat713 @woahitslucyylu @xx--day-dreamer--xx @sweetpeaflower01 @rebelwrites

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hockeyboysiguess · 4 years

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five golden rings -> five silver rings | m. rantanen

a/n: an hour later in all the rest so far, but here’s fic number five in my 12 days of christmas series! rest of the series linked here.

word count: 2,470

warnings: mentions of alcohol

You took a deep breath and smoothed out your dress before adjusting your hair one last time, deciding after all this time it was best to settle for that one pesky curl being out of place so you could get going. You grabbed your earrings off the dresser, a gift from Mikko, and headed to the living room where he was waiting for you. His suit jacket was tossed onto the couch next to him, his eyes trained on his phone. In the faint light of just the Christmas tree, illuminating his jawline his free hand came up to scratch, his blonde curls outlined by the light, he looked every bit as angelic as you thought he looked the day you met him, and every bit as angelic as he proved to be since that moment, worthy of the top of your grandmother’s Christmas tree. He had to settle for her mantle next to it though.

“Ready!” was how you announced your presence to him.

Mikko lifted his head from his phone as a lazy smile pulled slowly at his lips. His light eyes danced up and down your body appreciatively in a way that told you the dress was worth its uncomfortableness. You smiled and your cheeks heated under his gaze, but he just heightened it by letting out a low whistle.

“Merry Christmas to me,” he spoke through his smile.

“Christmas isn’t for two more days,” you reminded him as you grabbed your coat from the closet, attention away from him for a moment.

“Well then.” Mikko’s voice was suddenly in your ear and you gasped as you felt his large hands slide around your waist from behind. You hadn’t even heard him get up. “I guess Christmas came early for me then.”

You slid a hand down his forearm until your hand covered his. You slid your fingers into the gaps between his, lacing your hands together. He squeezed your fingers between his and pressed his hand against your stomach to push you firmly against him. A kiss to your neck followed by another and you knew you had to be the one to put your foot down and stop this so you could actually make it to the party sort of close to on time.

“Mik, you can do this later,” you mumbled out as he kissed your neck.

“Is it a crime that I want my fiancée?” he muttered out against your skin. “Especially when you’re wearing this dress…”

He trailed off and you were slowly getting pulled into the warmth that was Mikko Rantanen, but you had to stop this for now. Mikko needed to make it to this party seeing as it was for him. Well, him and the rest of his teammates, but your vested interest was in your fiancé. You pulled his hand away from you and stepped forward toward the closet, wrapping your hand around your coat again. Mikko groaned, but reached for his coat hung up next to yours instead of trying to pull you back in. He knew you were right, even though he didn’t want you to be.

You flicked off the Christmas tree before following Mikko out the door, hand in one of his large ones. He held your hand as he drove, a habit he picked up early in your relationship neither of you wanted him to shake. Especially after the ring Mikko agonized over made its way into your hand, he never let it go in the car. He frequently pressed soft kisses on the back of your hand periodically at stop lights. Under the streetlights decorated with wreaths lining the street of Denver, like under the lights on the Christmas tree earlier, you were looking at him and were reminded just how much you loved every part of him, every single thing he brought to your life. The holidays made a lot of people sentimental, you included, and there wasn’t anyone who deserved your sentiment more than Mikko.

With his hand on the small of your back, guiding you into the party, it didn’t feel as overwhelming as it was. The Avalanche Christmas party, not the ugly sweater drunken Christmas-fest that occurred at the Landeskogs, but the formal one that required a dress this nice that you could barely breathe in and heels as high as you could manage. It was all heightened this year by the silver cup on the table at the center of the room, visible from every angle. With the season shifted back this year, you had watched Mikko hoist the cup in October, shifting everything back and causing events and timelines to converge. The decision to give the team their championship rings at the Christmas party this year gave the whole event a little more fanfare and a little more weight.

Mikko grabbed two champagne flutes off a passing waiter’s tray and handed one to you with a wry smile, his dimples showing alongside that beautiful smile you loved so much. You tapped your glass to his before raising it up to him, the first of many silent toasts for the evening to celebrate his greatest accomplishment to date. The cup in the center of the room took you back through the times it starred in your memories. You looked at the Cup, shining under the lights, and remembered the way Mikko looked at you on the ice as the realization that his childhood dream was a reality hit him. You remembered the moment you watched him hoist it over his head like it weighed nothing, when from your own experience trying to lift it in his parent’s backyard in Finland, you knew it wasn’t all that light. The look of joy on his face, the brightness in his eyes, every single time he saw the Cup and knew he had won it, that his name was engraved on it, the feelings that expression on his face gave you reminded you of a lot of things. The warmth of a steady burning fireplace, the innocent untampered with joy of a child on Christmas morning, but most of all, it brought back the memory of Christmas two years ago, when he had the same look on his face, the look of a dream coming true, when you told him that you loved him too.

“Ready to mingle?” Mikko asked you, stealing your now empty champagne flute from you to place it on a tray passing by. “You know they all just want to talk to you instead.”

Coaches, executives, owners, and what felt like endless people with endlessly similar yet different job titles later, your feet were killing you and you’d had a few more flutes of passing champagne that you were definitely feeling. Mikko dropped down into his seat next to yours and you sighed with relief when you realized he’d grabbed two drinks on his way to the table.

“My savior,” you smiled at him as he leaned in closer to you. You stole a quick kiss before adding, “Did it hurt when you crash landed in Santa’s sleigh? Because you’re the best gift I’ve ever gotten.”

“Did you just make a terrible Christmas themed, ‘Did it hurt when you fell from heaven,’ joke?” Mikko was laughing as you nodded in response. “God, I can’t wait to marry you.”

You both turned your attention to the stage. One of the people you’d shaken hands with and turned on your most charming smile for was up there giving another congratulations speech. You were sure it was supposed to reflect the hard fought sixteen wins the team put in for the Cup and all the hours before and in between those, but you’d heard so many of these speeches since the team won that glaringly shiny cup in the center of the stage now that they all blended together, even as they were happening. The garland in the background and Mikko’s fingers tracing patterns on your shoulder were the only two things that made the speech stand out from all the others. You still gave it a standing ovation, like everyone else around you did.

Two more speeches later, and a veritable army of people suddenly emerged from doors you hadn’t realized were there with stacks of black boxes in their hands. Mikko rubbed his hands together excitedly. You knew he’d never wear it, but it would be an understatement to say he was excited to see his championship ring after months of waiting. As soon as the box was placed in front of him, Mikko’s hands were dancing on it, dying to open it and see its contents, but he was waiting for his teammates spread around the room to receive theirs as well. Everyone had been waiting for this moment and he wasn’t about to be the one to spoil it. Still, he looked like a child who had just had a present placed in front of them that was so uniquely shaped it could only be the one thing they most desperately wanted who was then told to wait for everyone else to get their presents too.

Mikko flipped open the top of the box as fast as humanly possible when he finally could. You could practically see the glint of the ring in his eyes as he reached forward with shaking hands to pick it up. He whistled long and low as he appraised it in his hand, turning it over and over slowly to see it from every possible angle. He shook his head softly, a youthful smile pulling at his lips. The championship ring was always a small part of the dream, the most material part, but also one of the more physical representations of it he would get to keep with him forever. It was a moment, winning the cup, that might not come again, no matter how hard he worked and your fiancé worked harder than anyone you knew. Because of that, you filmed him opening the box and sliding his hard earned championship ring on for the first time, wanting to give him every single opportunity to savor this moment over and over again.

“Baby, look!”

Mikko’s mouth was pulled into a wide open smile, absolute elation on his face, the monstrously large ring on his finger. You laughed as you filmed his reaction, his wide-eyed, wide-mouth joy burned into your phone memory forever. You couldn’t help but ruin the moment for just a second to lean forward and kiss him. Mikko didn’t hesitate for a second before kissing you back.

“I’m so proud of you,” you whispered softly to him, making him smile impossibly wider than he had been all night.

“Thank you,” he replied just as softly. “That reminds me. I have something for you actually.”

You groaned as Mikko leaned back into his chair and fished around in his suit jacket pocket for a moment. He pulled out a small black box, thin and long like it contained a bracelet, but slightly wider than that. Mikko had a penchant for getting you far too expensive jewelry, a habit he picked up early on your relationship that culminated in the ring on your left hand you hadn’t even wanted to venture the cost of when he slid it onto your finger. You didn’t think this Christmas would be any exception, even though your ring had come this year already. You knew Mikko better than to think this Christmas would be any different, except he was two days early.

“You’re early, Mik,” you sighed, tossing your napkin onto the table.

“Fits better with today,” he told you as he extended the box out to you.

You placed it on the table and gave him a small glare out of the side of your eyes, which only made him laugh. You opened it slowly, as painstakingly slowly as you could, just to make him suffer a little before getting your reaction since he cracked and was giving you a gift two days early. When you finally had it fully open, you gasped softly at the contents. Five silver rings sat nestled in the velvet, of various sizes and thickness, all beautifully polished and shining.

“I know you like those sets, with smaller rings that go like, on the top of your fingers and the bigger ones that go where your rings normally sit?” Mikko was pointing to his own hand to try and show you. “I thought um, five silver rings on the Stanley Cup, five silver rings for you? It didn’t feel right to get a ring myself and not get you one, since you’re my biggest supporter.”

It was a little cliché and you knew it, but your eyes teared up a little anyway. You let your fingers dance over the rings slowly, tapping over the one with the smallest diameter first and working your way up. You knew they were completely custom, and platinum not silver like Mikko was trying to make you believe for the sake of his homage to the Cup, which wasn’t even entirely silver itself to begin with. When your fingers reached over the biggest and widest ring, Mikko cleared his throat.

“There’s, um, you should take a good look at that one.”

Which was your cue to slide it from the box and look for an engraving on the idea. You ran the tip of your finger over the letters before your eyes became too cloudy to see them clearly anymore. It was just one word. Kiitos, in his native tongue. Thank you. That’s all he’d engraved inside, but it meant the absolute world to you. You saw Mikko as a part of all of your successes, your highest highs made possible and sweeter because of him and his steadfast love and support. You were holding evidence he saw you as part of his greatest success too.

“Merry Christmas, baby,” he told you softly, “and thank you. Thank you for everything.”

Everything was vague, yet all encompassing as a word. All encompassing because Mikko meant it so. He was thankful for you, saying yes when he got down on one knee earlier that year. He was thankful for your support. He was thankful for your love. But most of all, he was just thankful by some miracle that felt a lot like Christmas itself, you picked him back and were working on vows just like he was to say that you would pick him for forever. By this time next year, he would have heard those vows and you would have heard his. But Mikko didn’t want to skip ahead. He chose to live in the now, in that night with you, cherishing the Christmas that was to come in two days, while looking forward to his lifetime of them with you.

#mikko rantanen #mikko rantanen fanfic #mikko rantanen writing #nhl fanfic #nhl fanfiction #nhl fic #nhl blurbs #nhl imagine #Hockey Fanfiction #hockey writing #hockey imagine

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jackson--t · 3 years

Text

The last one turns off the light - Chapter 2

Words: 4.6 k

Tag Buddys: @youbloodymadgenius @ritual-unions-gotme

Here we go. Remember: this is just a fun thing for me, so it's not deep or serious. 🖤 AO3 down here, or if you want to stay - underneath the link. 😁

Bjorn, Torvi, Sigurd & Uncle Alfy

Bjorn stared at the coffin in the living room. It was a strange feeling to see it standing here, now that it was the right one - they had taken an extra look before the funeral home had left. It left a certain kind of heaviness on Bjorn's heart, and the pain of losing his father bored into his mind a little more real with this sight. Bjorn was tough, and he would hardly show any outward emotion here either - yet there was something numbing about it.

Aslaug and Ragnar's house slowly filled up. Relatives trickled in, and the priest came as well. He shook hands with Bjorn, Sigurd, and Torvi; he seemed kind and composed, and Bjorn was grateful that he did not offer his condolences as well. The fact that this funeral was much earlier than they thought was hard enough.

"I think we should start as soon as everyone gets here. Is Ivar going to give the speech after me?" the priest asked with a smile; Bjorn scratched his head slightly, then shook his head.

"Oh no, I'll... I'll give that one."

"Oh." the priest said, smiling encouragingly at Bjorn; he nodded to the three as he turned to more guests. Bjorn turned his gaze to Sigurd, who could hardly contain his laughter.

"What? That's not funny, he looked at me like I was learning disabled," Bjorn muttered; he could feel Torvi lightly stroking his back as Sigurd still laughed softly.

"You are learning disabled. That's probably what everyone who hears the news thinks," he grumbled, cashing in on a smack to the back of his head from Torvi. The three were silent for a moment; then Bjorn suddenly crossed his arms in front of his chest and stared at a man mingling with the guests with a soft smile. He seemed odd; he had brown curls and didn't seem like he knew anyone here.

"Look at that guy, Sigurd. Who the hell is that?" he whispered; his brother and Torvi also turned their gaze to the strange man, and Torvi raised his eyebrows.

"Maybe he's a friend of your father?" she said quietly; the three of them smiled affectedly as the guy looked in their direction with a soft smile.

"He's looks like a fag."

"Sigurd!"

"What, look at him. We know dad's friends, they're all different than that one. Oh my god, and here comes Uncle Alfy, oh shit. Did he have to come in a wheelchair?" Sigurd grumbled, and Bjorn had to stifle a smile. He knew exactly what Sigurd meant; Uncle Alfy may have been old, but he was by no means a smart mouth. He had the meanest mouth after Ivar, and was never above beating up people who got in his way with his cane or calling them potato Nazis.

"He just can't walk right." Bjorn retorted; he waved at Uncle Alfy, and was only dismissed with a grumbling look.

"He'll never forgive you for taking his...heeeey, Uncle Alfy!" Sigurd said, amused, as Uncle Alfy scowled and rolled over to them, and Bjorn patted him lightly on the back. Uncle Alfy's mouth twisted; he looked at the three of them and then wrinkled his nose.

"What are you losers doing here, standing around so stupid? Can we get this started now?" Uncle Alfy grumbled, looking up at Sigurd, who by now had almost hidden his smile again.

"We're still waiting for our brothers, Uncle Alfy."

"What, aren't those bums here yet? And cut your hair, you look like a used tampon!" the old man grunted before pushing past them, almost running over Sigurd's foot in the process.

Sigurd crossed his arms and rolled his eyes. "My God, why didn't he bite the dust instead of Dad? I don't think he's ever had any kind words for us. He used to call me a rug rat when I was a kid."

"Excuse me?"

A soft, masculine voice addressed Bjorn from the side; Bjorn turned slightly to the side and saw that it was the strange man from a moment ago they had been talking about; he returned the smile wanly and raised his eyebrows as the man began to speak softly.

"Hello, I'm really very sorry to bother you here... I... I'm an old friend of your father's, and I've heard a lot about you. You're Bjorn, aren't you?" the man said kindly; Bjorn's eyebrows drew together slightly, but then he nodded bluntly. His eyes remained on the man, who was still looking at him in an overly friendly manner; something told him that something was wrong with the man.

"Yes... exactly. Is there something I can do for you?" Bjorn asked.

The man smiled. "Did your father ever mention me? My name is Athelstan."

Bjorn considered; he breathed in and out for a moment, his mind actually elsewhere than on an old friend of his father's, and gave Sigurd a quick glance, who only rolled his eyes.

"No, he didn't."

"Oh, what a pity. Do you think we can talk a little later? I have something important to discuss with you."

"What here, now?" Bjorn asked; he looked at the strange man, and he nodded slightly. What was on the guy's mind? They were at his father's funeral, and no one really knew him - Bjorn could suppress his anger, but his confusion certainly jumped in the man's face.

But when Bjorn wanted to retort something less friendly, he came to no answer, because the doors of the front door opened again, and his brothers entered.

Ubbe, Ivar, Heahmund, Hvitserk & Eggsy

"Holy shit, I hate funerals," Ivar grumbled; his hand had clasped around Heahmund's forearm as he gave various relatives a smiling look.

Ivar didn't like death in general; but to be at his father's funeral now, that was really completely something he was inwardly resisting. He didn't like to feel grief, and he didn't like to see anyone feeling grief - especially his own family. His hand gripped tighter around Heahmund's arm, and he pulled Hvitserk along with him as well, who turned his head in all directions, slightly confused.

"Wow.", Hvitserk said quietly; his gaze went over the windows in confusion, and he pointed to the large pane in the living room that led out to the garden. "Dude, that looks like it's indoors outside. This room is so green."

"What?" Ivar grunted; though of course it was terrible that Hvitserk was on Eggsy's tablets; but they had to make the best of it. Stick it out, and hope no one exchanged too many words with the extremely confused Hvitserk. Ivar felt a slight chill run down his arm when he saw his father's coffin placed in the middle of the room - there was something real about it that made the whole situation not quite as funny anymore; at least for the moment Ivar's eyes were fixed on the coffin. But that was quickly changed again when he had to pull Hvitserk to him once more so that he wasn't running around haphazardly in the area.

"He's as high as anything... Just be glad Ubbe hasn't noticed anything yet," Heahmund murmured to him. They both glanced at Ubbe, who had just shaken hands with their aunt and put on his "I'm so terribly sad" look; they stared at him for a moment, then Heahmund sighed.

"I'm going to kill Eggsy for this."

Ivar grinned slightly. "Me too. Which I think is actually quite funny too, I mean... Hvitserk at least isn't sad. He would have cried all the time otherwise, you know him. So, I'd rather like this than have to see him hurt."

"Already, yes... Ah, speak of the devil." Heahmund replied, pointing to the front door; Eggsy was just entering. He was indeed wearing a shirt and jacket and had sensible pants on; but Heahmund's hand went directly to his forehead in embarrassment, and he clicked his tongue. Eggsy was wearing his ever-popular baseball cap and white sneakers to boot.

"He looks like he stole the clothes from the nearest Snipes store," Ivar laughed softly, and had to pull himself together when Aunt Helga gave Eggsy a strange look. Eggsy didn't seem to mind; he winked at Aunt Helga in amusement before joining Heahmund and Ivar. Hvitserk stared open-mouthed at the ceiling.

"Guys, I feel dressed up." Eggsy muttered, scratching at his jacket; Ivar let out a low snort, and almost choked on his own laughter when Ubbe suddenly set his sights on the four of them.

"Shh, be quiet. Ubbe's coming over, and you know what to do. Don't you actually have an antidote for this shit? I'm really scared this is going to go to shit," Ivar whispered, pressed; his arm gripped his brother tighter.

"No, man, how the hell am I supposed to... Well, Ubbe? How are ya? Sorry, funerals aren't my thing at all." Eggsy muttered, throwing Ubbe a smile; Ubbe raised his eyebrows in confusion, then nodded to Ivar and Heahmund.

"The speech of the priest is about to begin. Hvitserk, do you want to sit next to me?" Ubbe said; Hvitserk responded with a snort.

"Hahahaha, nope."

Ivar yanked Hvitserk by the arm even closer, then smiled. "He said he wants to sit next to us, it's okay, right? He's not doing so well, somehow..."

Ubbe raised his eyebrows, then turned his gaze to Heahmund and Ivar, both of whom were putting on absolute innocent airs and trying to look as composed as possible; only Hvitserk was grinning broadly and slightly drooling at Ubbe, while Eggsy scratched the back of his neck, not looking at Ubbe at all, but suddenly finding the carpet pattern on the floor terribly interesting. It took exactly two seconds for Ubbe to grab Eggsy hard by the back of the neck and pull him along.

"Hey, what the...?" Eggsy said still; he gave Ivar an uncertain look as he was dragged outside the door by Ubbe; Ivar bit his lower lip hard and looked at Heahmund.

"He knows."

"He sure does."

"I hope he leaves him in one piece, and that before the speech starts. Oh no..." Ivar grumbled, pressing his face lightly into Heahmund's upper arm; but even so he knew it was no use. "Uncle Alfy's coming over. Shoot me, please, Heahmund."

Ivar had actually still had the best rapport with Uncle Alfy; but now that he was finally appearing in public with Heahmund for the first time, he wasn't quite so sure it would end well. Uncle Alfy was already rough and rude when it came to normal people, but Ivar had a burning feeling in his throat that the old man wouldn't find his boyfriend all that funny. His fingers clutched tighter at Heahmund, and he smiled at the grumpy old man from a distance, who was slowly rolling toward them.

Hvitserk beside them audibly choked on his own spit as he murmured softly to Ivar, "Do you see a bear on a unicycle, too?"

Ubbe & Eggsy

"WHAT the hell did you do?" Ubbe murmured darkly as his fingers dug into Eggsy's collar; Eggsy gulped, but he looked at Ubbe openly, albeit with a slight look of panic in his eyes.

Ubbe had pulled him around the corner of the house so the other guests wouldn't see them; it was beautiful weather outside, and yet on a day like this it was supposed to be forbidden. But even when he had gotten up, Ubbe had had the strange feeling in his bones that something was wrong. That no matter how hard they tried, this day would end in disaster. Because that's just the way their family was. They had always been chaotic, and now that Ragnar was no longer there to keep them in check... Ubbe sighed softly, then pressed Eggsy's back harder against the wall of the house. Brown, warm eyes looked at him, and Ubbe fought the inner urge to weaken. Just not here.

"Theoretically, I didn't do anything wrong, you did. Just hypothetically, I mean.", Eggsy stuttered; his lips were slightly parted as Ubbe pressed him harder against the wall.

"What have you done? What's wrong with Hvitserk? Do you think I'm stupid? I could tell in the car when he was talking about imaginary dogs. I know your eyes, Eggsy. So, tell me."

Eggsy exhaled deeply; he turned his gaze briefly to the wonderful garden before meeting Ubbe's bright, blue eyes again. The back of his neck prickled slightly.

"There were no paracetamol in the brown bottle in the hallway. It was a new party drug I mixed together. I couldn't have known you'd give him two of them at once! And anyway, you asked me, and... you don't just take pills like that!" Eggsy complained meekly; Ubbe felt his fingers tighten violently in Eggsy's collar.

"What, you're not serious?!... That means Hvitserk is totally high? Especially today?" he asked, and Eggsy nodded; he flinched slightly as Ubbe released a hand from his collar and balled it up; his left eye tightened in anticipation of a punch, but Ubbe merely boxed his fist into the wall beside him. He exhaled deeply, then looked at Eggsy again.

"Shit... Man, I'd love to punch you in the mouth for that, for real! Do you know what kind of work that's going to be, holding him back? How am I going to explain this to mom? What's going to happen to him?" Ubbe asked darkly; his eyes once again turned to Eggsy, who by now was standing a little looser again and straightening his jacket slightly; he lightly tucked his chin.

"I don't even know myself, I was actually going to throw these in at a party tomorrow. He only has to last 12 hours, roughly, if I've done my math right. Basically, he's just happy and seeing funny colors... and apparently any dogs in the car... barking.", Eggsy said quietly; Ubbe grunted deeply and ran with a slow motion through his hair.

"Heahmund and Ivar know?" he asked, and Eggsy nodded.

"Yeah, since the beginnin'. They're trying to keep him together."

"Oh fuck, this is going to end in a disaster," Ubbe muttered; he could hear more guests entering the house, but he also noticed Eggsy's burning gaze on him. His bright eyes turned back to his future brother-in-law's little brother, his own little brother's best friend.

He looked around when he saw Eggsy's definite look.

"No, Eggsy, not here. You know very well that the risk of getting caught is too high. And despite that, it's Dad's funeral," Ubbe grumbled, trying to suppress the feeling of intense longing as Eggsy's hand closed around his forearm.

"Come on, two minutes. I can make you feel good again! We'll hide in the pantry, nobody goes in there," Eggsy whispered softly, and Ubbe allowed himself to be pulled closer, albeit grumbling.

It had been going on for a while, quite a while, that the two of them met secretly and had something together. It had first happened on one of the evenings he had picked up the unconsciously drunk Ivar and the cheerful Eggsy from a festival; after a very brief discussion of right and wrong, they had fallen over each other so violently that it was still a masturbation fantasy of Ubbe's today. The only problem was that this could never get out. Ivar would never speak a word to either of them again, and Ubbe was sure that Heahmund's fist bump would be legendary and fierce if he found out that Ubbe was fucking his little brother.

But they were also naive about their affair; even now Ubbe looked around slightly before taking Eggsy by the hand and pulling him along to the back entrance of the house.

"I know a perfect place, no one will look for us or find us there. But hurry, the speech is about to start."

Bjorn & Athelstan

"Can I speak to you just now, please?" the oddly curled man said after Bjorn greeted his brothers with a nod; Bjorn rolled his eyes slightly and looked around, but then nodded. He turned briefly to Torvi, who was standing next to him.

"I'm just going to go talk to this strange guy, maybe he'll go away. You just make sure everything goes according to plan here. And keep Sigurd and Ivar apart, okay? Where did Ubbe go anyway? He was supposed to bring me something," Bjorn muttered, and Torvi shrugged; she affirmed his task, however, before Bjorn took the strange man into one of the back rooms with a stiff nod.

They went into their father's study room; here were bookshelves, his expensive, large desk, and other things he liked; his father had always liked to retreat here. Bjorn breathed heavily; it was almost as if he could still smell his father's heavy aftershave in this room.

"Why don't you sit down? I must say, you astonish me a bit.", Bjorn grumbled; he himself sat down across from the guy, still eyeing him with slightly furrowed brows, before the latter began to speak, smiling slightly.

"I know, and I'm also sorry for just showing up today... But it couldn't be helped. Your father and I were very good friends, if you understand." the man said, smiling; he rummaged around in his strange jacket, pulling out a small stack of photos.

Bjorn raised an eyebrow; what was this becoming? Was this becoming a weird slide show? He had a strange feeling in his stomach as he picked up one of the photos, and sure enough: it was his father, along with this guy.

"I see. But what exactly...", Bjorn started, but the man pushed another photo into his hand.

"Here we are in Venice. We've done a lot of tours. And here, your father dressed up as a Viking, that was a party. He looked great, didn't he?"

Bjorn accepted the other photos as well and looked at them. His father looked happy on them, but Bjorn still didn't realize the meaning behind it. He looked at the photos for a moment, then raised his eyebrows again. His gaze fell on the man who still had a photo in his hand, which he held strangely twisted. Bjorn exhaled deeply, then said, "I don't quite understand what they want. I'm going to leave now, and you're going to stay at the funeral normally, okay? I don't have time for this."

"Wait. I have one more thing...You know, I loved your father," the man said, and Bjorn grunted.

"We all did."

"No, I really did lo... oh, see for yourself."

He thrusted the last photo into Bjorn's hand, and Bjorn's mouth dropped open.

For a moment he just stared at the photo like something that didn't exist; like it simply wasn't there, and yet there it was on his hand, staring back at him, pulling all the ground out from under him. It took him a while to even wake up from his stupor, then he hissed.

"What the fuck...No, that's... no."

"Yes, it is, I'm sorry. Did he ever mention me?"

Bjorn swallowed; he stared at the photo where his father and this strange guy were... and that naked. In a clear pose, and his father was grinning at the camera to boot. For a moment Bjorn didn't believe it was true, but there was no doubt in his mind.

"No, did he... oh my God, does our mother know?" Bjorn said; his shock bored deeper and deeper into his bones, and he had to catch himself for a moment. He had expected many things, after all. But guaranteed not that a curly-haired asshole would show up at the funeral and hold out gay photos of him and his father.

"No, she doesn't know, and she doesn't need to know... And that's my problem, you know? Your father and I, we loved each other, and I feel... so cheap, like a tramp, yes. I want a part of the inheritance, otherwise I'll go around showing everyone the photos."

Bjorn stared at the man.

The brown curls and warm face screamed innocence, but he wore the glint of the devil in his eyes. Against this man, Ivar seemed almost the image of the Christian and holy virgin, and Bjorn had to swallow hard.

"You come into our house, and blackmail me at my father's funeral? Really?" he said, and the man shrugged.

"I'm sorry, but I don't know any other way to help myself. Ten years we knew each other."

"Oh man." Bjorn ran his hand over his forehead and sighed deeply; his head was spinning.

Of course, he would have loved to smash the dwarf's skull in and throw him out on edge. But he couldn't ruin his father's reputation either, certainly not in this way, and certainly not on this important day. His mother would have a heart attack, guaranteed, and his brothers first... Bjorn raised his eyes again and grunted darkly.

"How much." he said bluntly, and the man named Athelstan smiled.

"Oh, ten thousand is enough for me. That would be... reasonable."

Bjorn stared at him for a moment; he had to resist his inner urge to smash one of Dad's bronze sculptures on the guy's head here and now; and as he looked around the room, it suddenly struck him all at once what kind of figures they were; fighting, naked men, young men touching each other. He had never paid attention to these statures, but now it felt like the gayness was surrounding him just with every single inch of this room.

"Oh man, Dad...," Bjorn grumbled softly, then turned his gaze back to the guy.

"Wait here. I'll discuss this with my brothers, and then... we'll see what happens. Will you disappear for good when we pay?"

Athelstan nodded. "I'd be gone, of course. Without a word And I'll wait."

“With these… disgusting pictures.”

Bjorn stood up, after giving the guy another threatening look, and left the room; he left the clear photo in his jacket pocket and walked towards the main room. Everything inside of him was spinning.

Heahmund, Ivar & Hvitserk

"Where is everybody? Sigurd is just standing in the corner looking like an idiot, and Torvi is just running after our mom...She got fat, didn't she? And where the hell are Ubbe and Eggsy? And where's Bjorn?" Ivar grumbled quietly; he had already taken a seat with Heahmund and Hvitserk on a couple of the many chairs placed in front of the coffin - many people were already seated, but most were still standing around talking quietly. Ivar snorted; he looked at Heahmund, who was smiling at an elderly lady.

"Will you stop flirting with old grannies, you disgusting dream of a son-in-law?" Ivar growled, and Heahmund laughed softly. He let his gaze slide around the room again, but there was no sign of his little brother and Ubbe; and it was beginning to seem strange to him.

"I flirt with whom I please. We're not engaged yet." Heahmund joked, almost regretting having said that; for a deep wrinkle bored into Ivar's forehead, and he looked at Heahmund with narrowed eyes.

"Asshole. Good, then I can flirt with other guys, besides, you're old enough to propose to me!"

"Ivar, please don't bring that up today."

"No."

"Yes!"

"Guys, the coffin is moving." Hvitserk mumbled dryly between them; he had opened his mouth and looked at his younger brother in shock. Ivar frowned and took a quick look at the coffin; but it was still standing there. Quiet.

"Hvitty, it's not moving. Shut up, we'll buy you an ice cream in a minute, too," Ivar muttered; he smiled wanly at Aunt Helga, who was sitting immediately nearby. Sigurd also moved in their direction; he sat down next to Hvitserk, who was still staring at the coffin with wide eyes.

"It moved..." Hvitserk said a little louder, and several people looked over at them. Ivar bit his lip hard and pulled Hvitserk closer; he could see Sigurd's questioning face, but he would not and could not explain it now.

"Hvit, please be quiet now, I'm begging you... People are already looking," Ivar hissed; he had his hand firmly cupped in Hvitserk's forearm, but Hvitserk pushed his hand away easily. He blinked a few times in panic, and then stood up even before Ivar could grab hold of him.

"Guys, don't you see that? THE COFFIN IS MOVING! DAD, are you alive?!" Hvitserk roared, lunging towards the coffin.

Heahmund, Ivar, and Sigurd ran after him, trying to stop him before he could lunge at the wooden coffin; only with their very last strength and effort could they hold the roaring Hvitserk away from the coffin, and yank him away. People were shocked, staring at them as they pulled Hvitserk out into the fresh air with some commotion; Aunt Helga fainted, Ivar saw it clearly before he and Heahmund and Sigurd maneuvered the still wriggling Hvitserk out the door.

"My God, what's the matter, Hvitserk?" Sigurd cried, aghast; the three stared at Hvitserk, and Ivar had to swallow hard.

"He took pills from Eggsy, and they were...not so good. You know he's not usually like that."

"What, it was clear that your family was going to fuck up here again, Heahmund!" Sigurd sighed at Heahmund, and Ivar stood protectively in front of Heahmund.

"He didn't do anything, actually it wasn't anyone's fault, it was an accident!" Ivar said; meanwhile Hvitserk was walking through the garden laughing softly and touching the leaves of the hedge. He could be heard singing softly.

"Oh man, but what kind of pills were those, please? Mom's going to freak out! Just look at him...did he just call the leaves his friends?" Sigurd grunted; the three watched Hvitserk roll up a green leaf and play it like a flute; the three looked at each other for a moment, then Ivar sighed.

"We have to watch him, I mean..."

But he got no further, for suddenly Bjorn came running out of the door; he was breathless and looked terribly pale. His eyes were fixed first on the dancing Hvitserk, then on the three, who were looking at him as bewilderedly as he was at them.

"What's wrong with Hvitty?" Bjorn said breathlessly; the three looked at each other for a moment, then Heahmund said quietly, "Long story, really. Did something happen?"

"Guys, you need to come with me. Real quick. And where's Ubbe? He has to come, too. You won't believe what happened. Remember that weird curly-haired guy who was hanging around the corners like a sex offender?" Bjorn said breathlessly; Sigurd nodded, and Ivar and Heahmund shook their heads.

"He... Oh man, I don't even know how to say this. Find Ubbe, now! Meet me in Dad's study room. Please. It's life and death, so to speak. And... um..." he said, casting an uncertain glance over at Hvitserk, who was apparently on an important phone call with a leaf; the brothers and Heahmund looked at each other, then Bjorn added, "Best we lock Hvitserk in a bathroom or something. You do that, Sigurd. And Heahmund and Ivar, you look for Ubbe, and then quickly to the study room! The speech will have to wait, the priest already knows!"

With these words, Bjorn disappeared into the doorway, and the three looked at each other questioningly.

"Well guys... I don't want to say anything, but the day already started out shitty when they delivered the wrong coffin," Sigurd muttered; he rolled up his sleeves and nodded to the two before turning towards Hvitserk; Ivar bit his lip.

"Well, great. After all, I'll be interested to see what kind of disaster Bjorn has to report. He looked like he'd seen a ghost," he muttered, nodding at Heahmund. "Come on, I think I know where we can find Ubbe. He's probably giving Eggsy an endless lecture about drugs and shit, and I don't want those two fighting to the point of yelling again."

"Sure." Heahmund mumbled, letting Ivar pull him along. He took one last look at Sigurd, who was trying with angelic patience to corral Hvitserk, while the latter was only lightly singing as he jumped away from his brother.

What a strange day. It could hardly get any worse.

#vikings #ivar the boneless #heahmund x ivar #ubbe x eggsy #eggsy unwin #ubbe lothbrok #bjorn ironside #modern hvitserk #modern au

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