#i just think they used to fuck and that’s part of their joint mutual obsession

[whatthefishh]

Sativa

Rydal Keener x f!reader

Part of the Oxford Comma series

Warnings: drug use (weed), studying excessively, oral (f receiving), mentions of p in v sex, baby cow eyes.

Word count: 2.2k

A/N: this took me way longer than I intended to write, it’s been a really difficult time in my mind for me and to those who are waiting for requests / chapters of other fics ily for being patient with me ❤️ huge thanks to my lovely mutuals who helped me, especially @xbellaxcarolinax for reading it over several times 🌹 love you

The room was slowly filling with the distinct smell of marijuana, little puffs of air spilling from Rydal’s lips as he took yet another drag of his joint before he tried to proposition you again.

“Wanna take a break now? It’s not like you can absorb the information by just staring at the textbook. Doesn’t work that way.”

You only sigh in response.

“A little smoke might make all those theories seem a little less… theoretical, yknow?” He laughs at the end of his quip like he finds himself extremely amusing.

“Oh, you think me finally giving in to your bad influence will help me pass this exam? You really think that’s the best way to study right now? Really?”

“Not a bad influence, princess, just wanna help you relax,” Rydal says while pushing your hair over your shoulder from where he was lying on his side next to you.

Smacking his hand away, you huff in annoyance. This wasn’t the first time he’s offered it to you, and it was never pressuring. He offered because he offered everything to you, and this was just another one of those things. You didn’t mind the smell. It was just irritating when you were trying to study and were very clearly stressed.

Rydal had learned these concepts from childhood, the topics of discussion in class were the same ones he’d have with his family at dinner, with his father over drinks at the early age of 14 back when he was obsessed with being just like him. The books on the syllabus were his summer readings as a child, the younger version of him desperate to impress with big words and bigger ideas, learning the hows and why’s of socialism when all his peers were riding their bicycles around the neighborhood. He didn’t have to focus as much as you did at this moment. And right now? Your brain was at its limit, barely digesting the words on the pages in front of you.

You lowered the textbook into your lap, turning to look down at him. His head was on the pillow next to you, eyes boring into yours calmly.

You felt your resolve slipping.

“None of this makes sense anymore.”

“What doesn’t?” He asked quietly, changing his teasing tone to match your somber one.

“It’s like, it’s like I’m reading the same thing over and over but I know—“

“You already know everything, you’re overthinking—“

“No, that’s what you think, but the last time I talked to your dad and he full-on tested me—“

“—wasn’t testing you, it came up organically so that doesn’t count—“

“Yes! Yes, he was! Who casually asks someone what their opinion on direct versus indirect democracies is over lunch? Like, what the fuck was I supposed to say?” Your voice is bordering on shrill, the memory of Lawrence’s unimpressed gaze and your face heating up in embarrassment as you struggled for words flashing through your mind.

“I’m sure he’d love hearing your rehearsed opinion next time. For now, though, I’d love to hear your opinion on something else.”

“Does it have to do with our actual reading material or does it have something to do with getting lost in a cloud of smoke with you?” You raise an eyebrow at him.

“I just wanna make you feel better, baby, is that so wrong?” Rydal is looking up at you, unwavering, moving to finger the edge of the sweater you had on before dipping his hand underneath to rest on your back.

Looking at him with those eyes, the intense deep stare he held; his pink lips and their slight upturn, gentle and playful all at once —you made up your mind.

Propping your hand to take the joint from him, he doesn’t give it but instead, he sits up to guide it to your lips himself, his other hand clutching your waist. Rydal rests the tip of it against your lips, his eyes watching the way you wrap them around it delicately and you swear you could see his pupils dilate and hear his breathing slow down.

“Take it nice and slow, deep breath,” he murmurs, eyes locked on your mouth as you inhale, “hold it, that’s it. Good girl. Now slowly exhale.”

You did as you were told, feeling the smoke fill up your lungs and burn slightly as you held it, and then exhaled straight into Rydal’s face.

“Oh god, sorry I didn’t realize how close—“

Before you could finish speaking, he took a deep drag of the joint and hungrily pressed his lips against yours, inadvertently blowing the smoke into your mouth while doing so. You could feel his warm breath mixing with yours, your hearts beating in unison as his lips worked yours. The almost sweet and earthy taste of the weed seeps into your lungs as his tongue claims your mouth. Everything was overwhelming and thrilling and arousing and beautiful and he felt so good right then that you wanted to claw your way into his lap and stay there, burrow into his chest until you were warm and safe.

Rydal would keep you safe, with him. He would.

Pulling apart for air, you don’t remember who moved first but he was tossing your textbook on the floor while you were peeling your sweater off, the room becoming instantly warmer, the need to be closer to him making you antsy. Needy.

The effects of the smoke kicked in sometime between kissing Rydal stupid and him taking off your bottoms, his eyes stripping you faster than his hands could. You were clutching his shoulders, desperate to keep him close especially once the weight settled over you and your limbs felt heavier.

He had to stay close, you couldn’t let him leave you at this moment. Your arousal mixed with the slight paranoia that came with the high resulted in a very strong desire to stay as close as you could to Rydal, needing him more than you could put into words. You hoped he understood from how tight you were holding him, from how much you were whining when he dragged a finger down your soaked panties.

You flopped back against his pillows and despite being naked, you didn’t feel cold, your eyes and nipples pointed to the ceiling as he kissed his way down your tummy. He already laved your breasts with his mouth, the traces of saliva he left behind from wrapping his mouth around your peaks now making them pebble in the evening air. Rydal’s hands were everywhere, his tongue dipping out every few seconds to taste your skin. The effects of the high made you hypersensitive to the maelstrom of sensations, his touches feeling ten times more powerful and intimate than usual.

You didn’t realize it, but you were making all the pretty and perfect noises for him, breathy moans louder than usual while he explored your soft skin, harshly panting and voice wavering on little moans. You were driving him up the wall, his hips softly grinding into his blanket for some relief while he mouthed over the top of your underwear.

Rydal’s mouth wrapped around your clothed clit, letting his drool soak the material until he could suck it and hear your shocked squeal of pleasure. You buried your hands in his soft hair, strands slipping through like gossamer.

He lifted his mouth an inch just to hook a finger around the gusset and plant an open mouth kiss on the very core of you. He was sweet like that.

Apparently, your panties were too much of an obstruction for him as they were ripped from your legs a moment later so that he could spread you open with his fingers. Licking a stripe up your dripping cunt, Rydal dived in, eyes closed, his nose gently nudging your clit while he tongued at your opening. He continued to tongue fuck you, slowly moving in and out of your little hole leaving you gasping and moaning lowly, tugging on his hair. He continued this little routine; licking up your peeled-back core, tonguing inside your cunt, and then to rile you up that much more, he would let his teeth graze your clit.

Rydal’s fingers were stuck gripping your thighs, leaving indents from how tight he had to hold you down just so you’d stop squirming. You were so restless from him edging you, almost cumming several times but he’d pull back, blowing cool air on your core just to take you all the way again. Occasionally, he would moan into you, swirling his tongue around your clit just to suckle on it sweetly as if it were honey he was drinking on. You were whining pathetically as you buck your hips up into his mouth, the synthetic dose of dopamine only serving to heighten your pleasure. Your limbs felt heavy, you could’ve been 10 feet underground, plunged deep within the earth itself, body like lead, and the only thing you could focus on was the way Rydal’s mouth lapped at you, slurping obscenely as he made you choke on a moan.

This time around, he didn’t let up, his tongue working double time as he stared up at you, his hands pushing your thighs further apart to give him the space to fuck you with his tongue with purpose. He was intent on making you cum, fucking finally. You tried to ask, tried to form the words to beg him – maybe you did, maybe you were begging him more than you usually did, maybe that’s why he was finally giving in to you, you really couldn’t remember what you were saying – but it seemed he wasn’t stopping. Reaching up with one hand to entwine his fingers with yours and resting it on your tummy, he groaned, almost as if giving you the permission you were waiting for to let go, that it was okay, that he’d take care of you, catch you when you inevitably fall.

And fall you did. Hard.

Eyes shutting, head thrown back, floating and sinking simultaneously, his mattress was soaked not only with your release but with sweat, your body feeling seven different emotions at once as you finally came into his eagerly awaiting mouth. Rydal was there just as he promised, made you feel good – brilliant, intoxicated, euphoric – true to his word.

The comedown was… interesting.

Rydal was still holding your hand, thumb rubbing the back of your palm while he nuzzled your thigh, resting his head and blinking up at you while you caught your breath. He was a sight to behold, his gorgeous hair mussed from your restless hands, lips shiny and swollen from use and his eyes, so fucking deep and loving and still hungry.

The giggling started, hazy thoughts from the high making it hard to stop, taking the weight off your chest as it continued. Thinking about how you were aggressively pushing his hands away from you just moments before letting you wreck his comforter had you covering your face, releasing another peal of laughter. Rydal’s lazy half-smile while watching you only made it worse, knowing he thought you were a lightweight and would definitely tease you about it later. Kissing his way back up your body, pressing his mouth lovingly on your soft parts, he met you at his pillow, smiling down at you prettily. You sigh after the last little laugh leaves your chest, eyes sparkling up at him and suddenly feeling bashful.

“Never heard you beg so nicely before,” he says, smiling, kissing the corner of your mouth before snickering at your embarrassed groan. “‘Pleasepleaseplease, oh GOD–’”

“Ssshhhhhhutthefuckup oh my god, I did not sound like that,” you shoved your hands on his face, hastily trying to cover his mouth from speaking and imitating you again. Your cheeks burned. You didn’t sound like that, right?

“Mmmph, yeah actually, you’re right. It was much worse,” he managed, despite your fingers slipping into (his?) mouth. After gently removing them, he held them down against the bed before leaning forward to hover right above your lips, “it’s okay, baby, I liked it. Can you do it again for me?”

And then he held your gaze, like a fucking siren, knowing exactly the effect he had on you and your now achingly empty pussy, the muscles clenching around nothing as he let his breath mingle with yours. Rydal didn’t kiss you, just stared at you with his eyelids low waiting for you to beg him.

“Are you gonna let me take care of you? Gonna ask me nicely?” He was so close but kept himself away until the only thing you could focus on was syncing up the movement of your lungs. His denial only made you want him more, desperation bleeding out from you.

“Mhmm,” you whimpered.

“Yeah? That the best you can do?”

“P-please.”

“There it is,” he mumbled, gripping his length in one hand, lining himself up to slowly push himself in, the fat tip of him stealing your breath.

Rydal never got enough of the way your sweet pussy gripped him, and made sure to pull as many soft pleas out of you as he could for the rest of the night.

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

What do you think would happen if one of the Cullens realized they might also be "in love" with Bella during Twilight along side Ed. Mates be damned (not like their marriages are gonna last anyway), and everyone's on the table (just 1 love rival, not at the same time buuuuut could you imagine the chaos? *cough*). The usual Bella eaten/killed by Eddy boi is def on the table obvie, but like do you think there's a chance he might concede to one of his family (or just any other alternatives)? -Sw

Oh boy.

Why I Don’t Think This Is a Possibility

That said, I have to caveat that I don’t think this is a very likely path (sorry, I cannot resist).

It’s true I don’t think any of the Cullen relationships will last in the long term, but I also don’t think they’re inclined to cheat on one another or fall apart at a moment’s notice. They’ve made it this long, several decades, but more, none of them realizes anything is lacking from their respective relationship. 

Carlisle and Esme are very devoted to one another and don’t realize they have fundamentally conflicting values. Jasper and Alice think they fulfil each other’s needs and don’t realize that they share nothing in common. Rosalie and Emmett’s is the healthiest relationship in the house but don’t see their major issues (Emmett doesn’t really support or understand Rosalie and Rosalie loves Emmett mostly for his love of her).

My point being, none of them are going to realize it’s not working out anytime soon. They’re going to need a catalyst, and per the end of Twilight, one is coming. Either a confrontation with the Volturi occurs, Renesmee decides to leave, the Cullen lifestyle changes, or things with Bella go awry. It can be any number of things, and it will happen given time, but at the start of Twilight we haven’t hit that point yet.

There’s also the fact that of the Cullens, only Edward would do this nonsense, and even for him it takes Bella’s delicious blood to grab his attention. When she was an ordinary human, he was not interested in the slightest, not even in her gift.

Each of the Cullens (Sans Alice and Esme) is completely baffled by Edward’s emotional whiplash and attachment to this human girl he doesn’t even know. Bella only becomes a vague concept to them when she enters as a serious fixture in Edward’s life, but even then, they really don’t know what to think.

No one in the family will do what Edward did in Twilight. Look at this girl they don’t even know and say “Ah, yes, I’m in love.” 

Now, that out of the way, let’s play ball.

Alice

This actually will work out shockingly well if only because I suspect Alice will come up with the pragmatic solution of “sharing”.

First, Alice is by far the closest Cullen member to Edward. He holds her in high esteem, feels a strong sense of kinship with her, actually confides in her, and sees her as a very close friend. Edward looks up to Carlisle and adores Esme, but it’s not the same.

If Alice sees herself as getting together with Bella I don’t think she’d see this as mutually exclusive to Edward having Bella. Alice cares deeply for Edward’s happiness, far more than she does Bella’s general existence, and I think the idea of entering a joint marriage with Edward and Bella would be very appealing to her.

She’d have to ease Edward into it, of course, as he’d balk at the very idea of it, but I think he’d see it as a strengthening of his and Alice’s relationship as well as having the wonderful Bella. Better yet, Alice can be physical with Bella while Edward can go compose music about their love.

As it is this... This is kind of what happens in canon.

Alice tells Edward that not only is he in love with Bella, but that Bella is going to be her best friend, so he better not muck it up. She has to ease him into the idea of being in love with Bella throughout the first part of Twilight. Then, when the relationship is solidified, Alice is right there introducing herself as Bella’s new BFF. Bella’s friendship with Alice throughout the series is extremely homoerotic and I imagine it remains so after Breaking Dawn.

Edward is very pleased that Bella counts Alice as her best friend, Alice being far and away his favorite sibling and the one he approves of Bella spending time with (generally, when she’s not foiling his schemes). 

I don’t think Alice and Bella will ever have sex, per se, but I imagine they remain quite physical with each other and Edward looks on with approval thinking to himself that this is how all female friendships should be.

And if Jasper has the nagging suspicion his wife is cheating on him then he’s not functioning quite well enough to put it into words just yet.

Carlisle

Edward would lose his mind.

First, Edward is very into Carlisle, and for all he insists his feelings are filial they sound remarkably romantic. I’d drop a quote, but it’s pretty much every time Edward thinks of Carlisle in Midnight Sun. More than that, Carlisle is the man Edward aspires to be, someone he sees as profoundly more good than he could ever hope to be.

Edward projects a very similar personality onto Bella herself.

So, I imagine if Carlisle sits Edward down and says, “Actually, Edward, I have fallen in love with this Bella” Edward feels very conflicting things all at once.

On the one hand, this means Esme/Carlisle is collapsing. Edward personally brought those two together and adores the idea of their relationship. Their relationship is what he hopes his and Bella’s will look like and is to him the married ideal of a perfect Mother and a perfect Father.

Carlisle/Esme alone falling apart would give him a complete existential crisis. That’s not allowed to happen. 

And then that Carlisle wants Bella Swan for himself?! Edward would be faced with the immediate,horrifying, thought that for all Carlisle is a vampire he would be the perfect man for saint like Bella. Carlisle and Bella deserve one another, would be perfect together, and Edward should not begrudge them that.

On the other hand, Edward himself is in love with Bella, and while he thought he could nobly leave her, now he has to nobly stand to the side and watch as Carlsile and her marry. It’d be a very romantic and tragic thing to do, but there’s leaving Bella to her human life, and then watching her up front for the rest of eternity while bitterly hiding his feelings.

More, Carlisle will turn her. If Bella is his true love, then there’s no question of that. Edward’s seen where this goes with Emmett. He will destroy Bella Swan to be with her forever, and Edward will have to live with the shell of Bella Swan staring back at him, fucking his father, forever.

I imagine Edward desperately pretends to concede to Carlisle, to be happy for the pair of them, but as things progress and Bella’s permanent position in the family looks more and more likely, he loses his mind. He’ll snap and there is no telling what he might do.

My money’s on him mercy killing Bella while she’s still human behind Carlisle’s back. He’s sobbing while he does it, but he just can’t let Bella be tarnished by vampirism, and now he will carry this tragic, terrible, secret for the rest of time.

Whether Carlisle was going to turn her or not is up to debate. Given he turned none after Emmett, I think he learned his lesson from Rosalie and would be more than willing to let Bella go, even if he loves her, should it mean he would not force something she does not want and does not understand upon her.

That said, I think he’d never tell Edward his feelings for Bella, as that would ruin Edward’s fledgling relationship with the girl. This is Edward’s first brush with love and seems to be the only romantic love he’ll ever have. Edward has been so miserable for so long that Carlisle would easily give up his own happiness for Edward.

So, more likely, Twilight would happen anyway and Carlisle would spend the entire time being utterly miserable and pretending he’s perfectly fine. LOOK HOW HAPPY HE IS, ESME.

Emmett

Edward tattles to Rosalie immediately.

He loves Emmett, but he knows Emmett can’t possibly be serious about this, and more, fundamentally doesn’t understand how wonderful and amazing Bella is. He wants to turn her into a vampire, clearly, Emmett doesn’t know what’s best for the girl.

More, a man who would so easily break his marriage vows (even to Rosalie), does not deserve Bella Swan.

Edward watches Rosalie and Emmett’s marriage utterly disintegrate with a juice box filled with mountain lion blood and swoops in on Bella while Emmett is thoroughly distracted. Edward then gaslights Bella into believing Emmett is dangerous and despises her, making Emmett the new and improved Jasper.

Esme

Esme would never tell Edward or likely even realize her feelings for Bella herself. If she did though, she would give up the possibility of a future with Bella Swan in a heartbeat for Edward’s happiness, which means everything to her.

Esme will have no regrets, won’t even smile sadly at Bella, because she has Carlsile as her consolation prize and she gets to see the joy in both Bell and Edward’s faces which is far more important than having Bella to herself.

Esme would live vicariously through Bella and Edward’s relationship as well as the very existence of Renesmee.

Like Alice, this is one of those things that’s pretty much canon. I won’t say anything for Esme’s feelings, it’s more that Esme ships Bella with Edward (and mostly because Edward himself comes to obsess over her), but she does seem to vicariously get her joy through their nuclear family within the Cullen family.

Esme is a very strange person.

Jasper

Edward would attempt to murder Jasper or at least severely injure him. Jasper would be the ultimate threat to Bella, not even a man unworthy of her but not a man at all, and exactly what Edward needs to protect Bella against.

Alice tries to stop the fight, to no avail, and Edward will ultimately lose (despite all his confidence). I imagine Jasper doesn’t kill him, but tears apart his limbs, and uses Edward’s lack of mobility to kidnap and then turn Bella.

Bella has no idea what’s happening and the next thing she knows she’s a vampire and Jasper is telling her they have to leave the area (as he must now leave the coven).

Edward tries to track them down for the rest of eternity. He will get vengeance upon Jasper and save Bella this terrible demonic existence forced upon her. Of course, he ends up lost in Rio.

Rosalie

Edward would tell her that her feelings cannot possibly be real. Bella is a woman. More, Rosalie is unworthy of Bella in every possible regard, even more so than Edward himself.

Basically, Edward would lay into Rosalie in a way that he never has before with all of his venom. He will do everything he can to sabotage Bella’s opinion of Rosalie before Rosalie can even get a word in edgewise. He is successful at it due to Bella’s perilously low self esteem (much the reason he was successful with this endeavor in canon).

Rosalie and Edward get in a vicious fight and I imagine Rosalie eventually confronts Bella, making an opportunity to do so, and both warns her away from Edward, tells her everything, and offers to turn her despite Rosalie’s own mixed experiences.

Rosalie and Edward probably then fight and it quickly turns into something that’s very serious. If Edward wins, he murders Rosalie in the heat of the moment, and then leaves the coven in horror over what Carlisle must think of him now. If Rosalie wins... I don’t think she will, she cares for Edward far too much and would never truly be able to aim to kill or maim.

Edward disappears, drowning in his self hatred, and returns to find Bella Swan at some later date unable to resist the call of her scent. Depending where she is in her life, he likely murders her human husband if she has one and dvours her, as Alice prophesied so long ago.

[rookisaknight]

Raf Tanager, meet Hope County

⤘⤘⤘There’s a new Deputy in Town⬽⬽⬽

So as a side benefit of getting into this fandom again with a brand new gender and a brand new vibe: a brand new deputy. Excited to introduce you all to my boy, they were developed for a joint Deputy au with @ophiebot​ (who will do this for their Deputy Elijah Rook if so inclined). Not exactly reinventing any wheels here, but this time its about the indulgence.

FYI, Molly is still extant, but her story I think has been explored in my brainspace as much as it needs to be. 

➷The Basics

1. Give their full name, and describe them or post a picture! (Height, build, hair, eye, and skin color, etc.)

Rafael "Raf" Tanager (birth name REDACTED). 5'4", prone to chub but hardening up with the frequent exercise, solid build. Freckles on cheeks that darken as time goes on. Short hair kept red by some truly obsessive hairdye upkeep, which is harder than you might think. Hazel eyes. Burns and shrapnel scars around the eyes and mouth.

2. How old are they?

24

3. Sexuality and gender?

Bisexual, transmasc genderqueer. She/they/he but a preference for they/he when he doesnt trust the person using them.

➵Pre-Game

1. How did they end up at the Hope County Sheriff’s Department? How long have they worked there?

Raf grew up closer to Missoula, but he’s still a Montana native. They’ve been at this for around 8 months, pretty much right out of graduating college. Even they honestly aren’t sure how they ended up here, just the latest in a series of adrift jobs after graduating, taken primarily to avoid any potential financial dependence on their  family. Probably would have resigned soon were it not for. Everything.

2. Relationship with Pratt, Hudson, and Whitehorse?

Pratt: Used to hate his guts. The teasing felt too much like flirting for their comfort and he was honestly kind of a bully. Now its trickier. He's pathetic in a way that’s hard for them to be around, as awful as that is, because it hits too close to home.

Hudson: Had a massive crush on her for most of their early days that pretty much went out the window post Eden’s Gate. They still try a little too hard to impress her though.

Whitehorse: Intellectually, they resent his passivity since it means a lot of Eden’s Gate ended up falling in their lap and he’s STILL insistent that maybe they should have left it alone when they’ve all had months to realize why that was a bad idea in the first place. Emotionally, well, they’re maybe a little in need of a father figure or two.

Elijah Rook: The former Rookie. They were quietly a little intimidated by him prior to all this and that’s never fully gone away, but they’ve now been able to witness more of his dorky side that makes it a little harder to take him seriously. You try chaperoning this guy from one end of Hope County and considering him at all frightening.

3. Do they have an education?

They have a MASTERS and its never relevant to anything because its a humanities degree, specifically the classics. Part of the reason they’re a little adrift currently, there was no easy dismount out of college. Just a hell of a lot of debt.

4. Where are they from? Did they speak a different language there?

Missoula, or close enough to it. They picked up some Latin and Greek from their degree. The Latin comes in handy more often than you’d think, what with the cult stuff, but the reading material is a real bummer.

5. Is there anyone outside the valley that might have come looking for them?

They’ve never had many friends in college and high school that could outlast physical proximity and they basically ghosted their family since that was easier than coming out to them at a certain point. So no, no one they want to find them is looking.

6. Did they have a religious background of any kind?

His father is a preacher, and while there’s some baggage there they would still describe themselves as broadly religious. Or at the very least superstitious.

➷Inside Hope County

1. What was going through their head when the helicopter went down and during the subsequent chase?

The crash was honestly the easiest part. That was just panic. The chase was the hard part. The helicopter exploding ended up catching them in the face, leaving them with burns and scarring that would remain for the rest of their life. She's lucky she wasn’t blinded. Still, he was forced to stumble out of the woods in intense pain and bleeding out. Had it not been for Elijah they definitely would have been taken then and there.

2. Were they afraid of Joseph and Eden’s Gate? Angry?

Terrified. Not just because of what they’ve done but because Raf knows intuitively that he's susceptible to it. As early as their first encounter they have a hard time breaking the hold Joseph gets on their mind. Even though they’re conscious of HOW they’re being manipulated, its hard to resist it.

3. Did they trust Dutch?

At that point Raf would’ve happily taken literally anyone who seemed to know what they’re doing and wasn’t holding a gun to his head.

4. How did they feel about their team being taken by the cult, did they count them as lost, did they want them back, did they not care?

Absolutely the nightmare scenario: people’s lives depending on them and their ability to be decisive. Had it not been for Elijah they probably would’ve high tailed it out of there and tried to find someone higher up the authority chain to deal with this mess. Still, just abandoning them all didn’t sit right with him either, and by the time they’d liberated Fall’s End even he had to admit he was there by his own choice.

5. How did they take to the idea of being part of, if not leading, the resistance?

Again, Raf doesn’t really do well with people depending on them. Alone. they probably would have found it a lot more miserable, but Elijah significantly helped lighten that load for them in terms of having a direction. They’ve found out they’re accidentally pretty good at working with a variety of people and can even be inspiring without meaning to. Still, in their ideal world they would’ve been left alone, or at least remained a foot soldier.

6. Which companions did they recruit, and who did they travel with the most?

All guns for hire were recruited, but Sharky and Nick were their go-to’s, Sharky for personal reasons and Nick for air support. Grace was usually the adult supervision when Nick couldn’t make it but. To be frank Raf's aim isn’t great and it drives Grace a little nuts on prolonged missions. She’s tried teaching them but it never really seems to stick.

7. Did they have time to find romance amidst the chaos? How did they do it?

Sharky. That relationship was a bit of a cold opener  (and don’t bother, Sharky already beat you to that joke). After getting their face fucked up during the escape they’ve had a pretty healthy aversion to fire and explosives, making his recruitment a little harrowing. Still, Sharky's sweet in his way, makes them laugh and breathe a little easier when the pressure gets to them, and operates on a pretty similar brainwave. They’ve been joined at the hip since their first few months in Holland Valley. They’re both a little on the codependent side, but really, who are they to complain.

8. Feelings about Joseph?

Joseph taps into a lot of vulnerabilities inside of Raf intuitively. The absence of a strong support system, the loneliness, the fear, the directionlessness, the relationship with their own spirituality, it all provides him a unique entryway into their psyche that he is exactly the kind of person to exploit. As a result, he tends to fixate on them over Elijah, usually to their detriment. Still, that connection can sometimes go both ways, and there are things about Joseph that Raf understands which even his brothers never fully do.

9. Feelings about the other Seeds?

John: They have a unique capacity for antagonizing him. Probably because as an oldest child themselves they know exactly how to jab at the youngest child insecurities. Still, that relationship didn’t stem any deeper and he focused his energies a little more on Elijah. Still, they have him to thank for the Sloth scars on their arm, thanks for that. They’re starting to run out of unmarked skin.

Faith: Faith, meanwhile, was a little more directly focused on Raf, partly because her region was the first time they had to operate a little more on their own. For personal reasons, Elijah wasn’t particularly able to engage with the Bliss. Meaning if Burke was ever going to get saved Raf had to be the one to go in there, again and again. Faith, like Joseph, can tap a lot of that loneliness that Raf has, as well as some gender and sexuality stuff Joseph can’t touch. Suffice to say Sharky had a pretty good reason for being as overbearing as he was during those months, even though he was eventually able to do the job. As a side note, they haven’t had access to their ADHD meds for MONTHS and it doesn’t help when the cult drug is the first thing to make your head feel clear in a while.

Jacob: Jacob was utterly uninterested in Raf and the feeling was mostly mutual. He doesn’t really get him or what he’s about, just knows that the county would be better off when he was put down. Transition goals, though (don’t tell Staci they said that).

10. How did they handle having to kill animals and other humans? Had they done it before?

Animals yeah, you don’t live in Montana as long as they did without hunting occasionally. People....well. You can get used to it.

11. Which canon ending did they choose in-game, and would you have changed the ending at all?

Resist. I wouldn’t. Raf might.

➷Personal

1. Favorite weapon(s)?

They usually prefer to show up to spots early and lay traps, try to minimize the direct combat involvement. When it can’t be avoided though, their pistol isn’t ever far and neither is a hunting knife.

2. Stealth or firepower?

Stealth, one hundred percent. Sharky and Eli are here to do the firepower.

3. How did they spend their time, when not fighting peggies?

A lot of bad movies with the boyfriend and a LOT of poker, one of their more unknown talents. Resistance isn’t gonna fund itself.

4. Where did they live during the events of the game?

Wherever there was a bed they could fall into. Their little trailer they’d been living in prior to all this got absolutely decimated while they were healing up on Dutch’s island.

5. Any other facts you want to share about your Deputy!

He’s got almost supernatural luck to the point that a couple of their guns for hire have gotten superstitious about bringing him to certain events. Including fishing. The catch just always seems somehow a little better. Also he’s privately obsessed with the 1998 recording of Cats and is terrified of anyone finding out.

[sugar-petals]

Sub!Yoongi A-Z

warnings ⚠️: smut, bdsm, dom/sub

a/n: entries for jk and jimin linked in mlist.

a = aftercare (what they’re like after sex)

Could not be clingier. Definitely the type to like some music in the background for it. If possible: Loves to be picked up and carried, or just guided to a prepared ‘surprise cozy place’ that promises cushions, calm & plenty of joint napping. 

b = body part (their favourite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

Tough one. Definitely not the hands, I can tell you that.

c = cum (anything to do with cum basically… i’m a disgusting person)

Jizz and saliva make Yoongi morph into his final form. A giant slutty mess. He always swallows what he can get and blows bubbles. Needs that stuff running from of his nose. Sucks out every creampie, laps everything squeaky clean. Disgust is not in his dictionary. Cum is his skincare routine.

d = dirty secret (pretty self-explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

Yoongi wishes he’d cry every time you have sex. It turns him on.

e = experience (how experienced are they? do they know what they’re doing?)

You’ll never be able to tell because he will come across as really competent either way. The type to search up all kinds of kinks on Naver, incognito mode. What you think might give him away but will stay anyways is how fidgety he gets beforehand. He doesn’t want to fail pleasing you. It’s one of your main obstacles to make Yoongi embrace the lax enjoyment and lack of pressure when you fuck. Because the more he stresses himself out, the less he’ll focus on pleasure in the first place. Experience is not a huge issue, but rather, developing ease. Once Yoongi can let go, his intuitive skills unfold the best.

f = favourite position (this goes without saying.)

While spooning. Both ways with him penetrating you, or you using a strap on him. He loves it because it resembles his favorite resting position aka fetal. Also excellent to whisper hot things into his ear.

g = goofy (are they more serious in the moment, or are they humorous, etc)

Super silly. Makes funny noises you’ve never even heard of. Adrenaline makes Yoongi go all out. Might laugh a lot during sex. Enjoys your reactions.

h = hair (how well groomed are they, does the carpet match the drapes, etc.)

All natural. Practicality. Yoongi leaves the little fuzz there is and it’s cute on him. Especially the happy trail. Face, of course: He had a laser treatment, you won’t kiss stubble. 

i = intimacy (how are they during the moment, romantic aspect…)

Oh my god, Yoongi is so sloppy and eager. Romance he’s 50-50 on, it’s more about how much you can mark him down and get out every little scream there is. 

j = jack off (masturbation headcanon)

The studio password protects him from his obsession becoming known, this guy can beat the meat like there’s no tomorrow. Boy can do this all day. Usually between long intervals.

k = kink (one or more of their kinks)

Asphyxiation. Yoongi loves to gasp and gag himself through sex and can’t help it. 

Fancy Clothes. He is fascinated; has something to play with his fingers. Kitten.

Degradation. Calling him names might become your second nature.

Chastity. Twice as loud when he’s locked up.

l = location (favourite places to do the do)

Sofa, his eternal buddy. Needs to be a surface that’s easy to wipe down given how messy as fuckity fucking fuck he is.

m = motivation (what turns them on, gets them going)

Loss of control, the sheer power exchange. Yoongi likes to be helpless and at the mercy of your teasing. Prone to seek total surrender. Not for every domme, but this guy makes for a perfect starfish. All that it actually means is: Calling for bondage.

n = no (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

Hard limit feces. Also Yoongi Kryptonite: A partner’s constant self-doubt. He will always reassure, but at one point, the feeling transfers & drags him down, too. Strong lead needed.

o = oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc)

Beware. Get tissues ready. Lives for sucking and licking the living hell out of his partner. Will perform a Cypher on your goddamn nipples and clit, that’s how intricate it goes.

p = pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.)

A lover of everything rapid and punishing. Likes to have his brains pulverized nonexistent by a good pounding. Wants to feel alive, being shaken, and thrown onto the bed. Would risk some major rug burn at any time, too. 

q = quickie (their opinions on quickies rather than proper sex, how often, etc.)

Knows that it takes 20 minutes to properly warm up with a woman, quickies are only reserved for backstage fuckery. Dislikes it because he wants to be painstaking with prep, contraception, cleaning, the whole shebang. Safety first.

r = risk (are they game to experiment, do they take risks, etc.)

Provokes you to do some audacious things on him with his trademark smirk or some sarcasm, knows he can get away with anything even if BTS hears the two of you.

s = stamina (how many rounds can they go for, how long do they last…)

Likes a literally climactic approach so it’s one time, one hard time, and then mutual collapse. Aims for a typical 30 minutes time frame, and yes, he always checks his Rolex. Probably leaves that thing on while you fuck. PS: Also counts when you choke him, guy’s aiming for a new record every time.

t = toy (do they own toys? do they use them? on a partner or themselves?)

Toy enthusiast, the more torturous, the better. Probably some electro shit to use on his nipples. As for your toy collection: Oh well, he can make that magic wand go out of business.

u = unfair (how much they like to tease)

Outrageous amounts, shit. Indulges in physical teasing all the time trying to guide attention to his attraction points. Arms, ass, legs, neck. Movements: Just like a cat. Verbally, he will dare you to one-up either him or yourself last time you fucked with his tiny font comments. “Can you...?”

v = volume (how loud they are, what sounds they make)

Desperate and pained moaning. Yes, noisy. And deep, respectively, that voice drops hard.

w = wild card (get a random headcanon for the character of your choice)

Yoongi couldn’t enjoy butt plugs more, spends time on his laptop wearing one. He also wants to try sounding and medical play.

x = x-ray (let’s see what’s going on in those pants, picture or words)

Floral imagery here we come. Now that’s a pretty snowdrop. Good small dick lovin’. 

y = yearning (how high is their sex drive?)

In overdrive particularly when you’re in his studio, adapts fast. Still goes all ham because of how easy it is to turn him on at the sway of a hip, which comes to his demise when you go for PDA. Yoongi lusts hard for your body, he pictures and enjoys it so much, feels boundless adoration. A lot of his drive goes into worship. You’ll see it in his gaze. That guy is nuts, nuts, nuts for your sheer presence, and always grateful that you spend time with him. 

z = zzz (… how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

Still apologizes for it. Dozing comes early, he’s really fucked out each time. Will be fast asleep for several hours with no dream in sight, nor tossing and turning either, because sex with you has the uncanny ability to put him at complete rest.

[blurglesmurfklaine]

Cornelia Street (3/?)

A/N: oh my god they were quarantined

yes. It’s one of those fics.

AU, obvs

I’m posting as I go and idk how many parts this is going to be, likely won’t be very long but I literally don’t know what I’m doing and should i be starting yet another WIP? definitely not but fuck it lets fucking go

Title is from T-swizzles Lover album, I’m OBSESSED

Summary: Three years ago, Kurt and Blaine went on a disaster of a date and never quite got off on the right foot. Now, just before they graduate from NYADA, there’s a national outbreak and they’re both self-quarantined in a mutual friend’s apartment.

Read On AO3

On Tumblr: Part 1, Part 2

Part 3

Kurt has the art of avoiding someone he’s sharing a confined space with down to an art. Blaine stays in the bedroom most of the time and the morning stiffness in Kurt’s joints from sleeping on the couch is well worth not having to interact with his roomie. He spends the first few days decompressing from the stressload of his schoolwork, social media, extra pampering, the usual.

This is enough to keep him entertained for a few days, but the first few hours of day four drag on like molasses. 

Kurt lies on the couch, flippantly scrolling and cycling through the same social media apps over and over again until he’s seen every tweet, every snapchat story, and every. Single. Facebook. Post.

This routine is fine when he has a full and busy life, but it can’t be all he does. He’s going stir crazy.

It’s this boredom, he tells himself, that motivates him to knock on the bedroom door. Because he’s a generally social person, and he’s certain that even the likes of Blaine Anderson could offer him some temporary entertainment.

“The living room TV doesn’t come with Netflix,” he explains when a confused Blaine opens the door. “And my social media feed is dry, so you can either let me in on whatever you’re watching, or you can deal with the consequences of not doing that. I should let you know, I have a brother, and I can be very annoying.”

Blaine hums, looking Kurt up and down. “I also have a brother who can be ridiculously annoying, so I suppose I can’t risk it.” He speaks carefully, but Kurt has a sneaking suspicion that Blaine’s just as out of his mind bored as he is and would appreciate the company. 

He opens the door wider to allow Kurt passage in the room. 

Blaine moves towards the bed, where he’s clearly made some sort of quarantine nest for himself—the blanket is puddled near the head of the bed where Blaine was lying, a few books scattered by where his feet would have been, a bowl of half eaten ramen abandoned on the nightstand. 

Kurt… doesn’t quite know what to do. He starts for the computer chair by the desk, but Blaine waves him away. “You can just sit next to me,” he says dismissively. “That’s Sam’s gaming chair, and it is just absolutely hell on your lower back. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

He raises an eyebrow, crosses his arms. “Is that what I am to you?”

Blaine looks at him like he’s genuinely surprised by the remark. “What? I… No. Not at all.”

“Really?”

“Look, Kurt, I know we have a weird history and we don’t particularly get along, but I don’t hate you.”

Kurt eyes Blaine up and down for a second, assessing him for any signs of deceit. He finds none, pulls the cover back and slides underneath it. “What are you watching?”

“Let It Snow. It’s a Netflix Original. It just started, do you want me to rewind it?”

Kurt waves a hand. “No, that’s fine.”

On screen, two teens are trudging through the snow towards a building with AFFLE TOWN on top of it. 

“If the train made you feel real, Waffle Town is gonna blow your mind.”

In the movie, the cheerleader character kisses the other main red-headed girl in the bathroom, but acts like nothing happened when the rest of the squad comes in. 

“Oh, she’s totally not out of the closet yet.” Blaine murmurs. 

“What? But she said she was, at the beginning.”

“I mean, yeah, but there has to be some sort of twist.”

“Hm. Seems like you have this movie all figured out.”

“I mean, movies like this are supposed to be predictable on some level. Let’s be real, we watch these movies because no matter what happens, no matter what misunderstanding there is, you know everything’s going to be okay.” He looks at Kurt, and Kurt’s heart does not skip a beat. But objectively speaking, Blaine is ridiculously adorable, and maybe he has a teeny tiny reaction when Blaine says, “You know that the right people will end up with each other.”

About twenty more minutes in, all the different storylines have been introduced and Kurt realizes why this movie seems so familiar. “Oh my god,” he says. “This is totally just a teen version of Love, Actually.”

Blaine chuckles. “Oh my gosh, you’re right!”

They both laugh out loud at the end, when the crappy best friend realizes she’s been crappy and gives the red-head a little speech. 

“If you and Beyonce were trapped in a house that was on fire and I could only save one of you... I would let Beyonce die.”

The movie draws to a close and Blaine leans back against the pillows, obviously satisfied with the ending. “See? Happy endings rule. They’re a little cheesy, a little predictable, but that’s what I like about them.”

Kurt smiles and looks over at Blaine. “Yeah, me, too.”

*

When the movie ends, Blaine excuses himself for a moment to go grab a drink from the kitchen.

When he finishes his glass of water, Blaine heads to the hall closet, clamoring around for that stash of board games Sam keeps for game nights. He finally finds it and grins a bit, pulling out Battleship. This should keep them entertained for a while.

He stops dead in his tracks, just outside the room, when he hears Kurt in a heated conversation on the phone. “No, Adam. I meant it, this time. We’re over… I know there’s a national crisis right now, that’s why I’m at—don’t… stop… will you let me—! You always do this! Stop talking over me! Oh my god, if you’re not going to listen, then this conversation is over.”

Blaine silently backtracks a few steps when he hears Kurt sniff, then after a minute or two, starts walking again, making sure to slap his bare feet against the hardwood floor so that Kurt hears him coming and can take a second to compose himself. He rattles the battleship game for extra measure and says loudly down the hallway, “So I found this battleship game in the closet, thought it might be a good way to pass the time.”

Kurt still looks a little lost in thought by the time Blaine is back in the bedroom. “Uh, sure, yeah. Why not,” he mindlessly agrees.

It takes them a few minutes to set everything up and figure out logistics. As a gesture of goodwill, Blaine insists that they both sit on the bed for this activity. He still feels a little bad for… whatever Kurt is going through right now. 

They’re well into the game when Blaine decides to tug a little more on the thread that will unravel Kurt Hummel.

“J1,” Kurt grumbles.

“Miss,” Blaine responds. “So… I thought I might’ve heard you on the phone earlier,” he says, and Kurt’s hard gaze pierces through him. “Everything okay?”

“Why do you care?” Kurt snaps.

Blaine felt his own defenses rising up. “We are going to be stuck with each other for days on end, so excuse me for trying to be a decent person.”

Kurt de-bristles himself. “Sorry,” he murmurs, shaking his head. “Sorry… I um… my ex is trying to get me to go stay with him. But I know he’s just going to rope me into getting back together again and I just… I’m done. Sorry,” he repeats, lifting his knees and wrapping his arms around them. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this.”

“It’s okay,” Blaine says, mouth twitching. “We’ll chalk it up to social distancing. Speaking of, I know why I’m self-quarantined, why are you? If you don’t mind me asking. Why not go home like everyone else? B4.”

Kurt sighs. “Hit. My dad had a heart attack back in high school. Left him in a coma for a while. Then he had a cancer scare last year, so his immune system isn’t the strongest. I can’t risk taking anything back to him. J2.”

“I’m sorry to hear that… Hit.”

“Thanks. What about you?”

“C4. Kind of the same thing. My aunt has lived with us pretty much my entire life. She's pretty much my second mom. She’s diabetic, and a year ago she needed a kidney transplant. If she even gets so much as a cold, it could mess with her anti-rejection meds.”

He doesn’t get a response for a while and Blaine looks up to find Kurt staring at him. The other boy blinks, like he himself has just noticed his fixed gaze. 

“Um, hit…” he says, looking back down at his board. Blaine thinks he might see a hint of a blush crawling up Kurt’s neck. “J3.”

“Miss.”

“Miss? That’s impossible. J1 and I2 were misses.” Kurt snaps his head up, narrowing his eyes at Blaine, but there’s a playful light that wasn’t there earlier. “Are you cheating?”

“Maybe,” he teases, evading the question because it actually is a hit. In fact, it’s the winning move. “Maybe I just don’t want this game to be over so soon.”

For a moment, Blaine wonders if his comment was too close to flirtatious territory. But then he thinks, so what if it is? There was a reason he agreed to be set up with Kurt freshman year, and after half a conversation with him, Blaine is definitely intrigued, to say the least.

Kurt’s lips curl up into a smile. “Alright… I don’t want to go back to being bored either, so how about this? We each move one of the small pieces and the first one to get a hit wins.”

Blaine agrees, taking one of his small pieces off and moving it.

“I’ll start us off,” Kurt says. “You mentioned you had a brother. What about the rest of your family? A6.”

“Miss. I’ve only got the one, thank god, because he is a handful. My mom is a total goofball, gives the best advice. I love her to death. My dad is the essence of I hate everything except my family. He can be a total grump sometimes, but I know he’d do anything for us. G7. You?”

“Miss. I mentioned my dad. My mom passed away when I was eight.” Blaine’s eyes glaze over with sympathy. “She was… she was really something. I miss her everyday, but I’m also really grateful that my dad found someone as wonderful as my step-mom. They got married my Junior year of high school, and I got a brother out of it. He drives me up the wall sometimes, but I love the big lug.”

Kurt tells Blaine all about the ridiculousness of his high school show choir, his relationship with his dad, and the bullying he endured in high school. In turn, Blaine confesses some insecurities he has about being a musical theatre major, about how he absolutely adores his kooky aunt, and his love for harry potter.

The game takes longer to finish than it should since occasionally they get so deep into conversation that they forget about playing the game. Eventually, it’s nearly two am, and Kurt decides to call it quits.

“Alright,” he says. “I’m calling it. I’m never gonna fund that darn ship of yours.”

“You’re right about that,” Blaine agrees. Kurt had actually hit his piece about three turns in, but again… Blaine wasn’t ready to say goodnight yet.

Kurt snorts out a laugh and rises from the he’d, stretching his arms high over his head. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he groans.

Blaine has no idea what compels him to say this, but he does. “You don’t have to sleep in the living room.”

Kurt freezes and gives Blaine a look. 

“I just mean…” he swallows. “I’ve had the bed enough nights. Time to pay my dues. I can take the couch tonight.”

He hops off the bed before Kurt even has the chance to protest. 

“I… um, thanks,” he gives Blaine a shy smile. 

“I’ll see you in the morning, Kurt.” He returns the smile—more than just a nicety at this point—and turns around to head to the living room.

He can’t keep the dazed grin off his face when he pulls out his phone to text Sam.

Part 4

[samingtonwilson]

Relationship Tutor: (3) Contemporary Sadism

relationship tutor masterlist

Summary: College AU. Bucky, a relationship novice, asks for your help in dating your friend. Unable to say no to him, you agree despite everyone and everything telling you not to.

Pairing: Bucky x Reader

Warnings: language

A/N: when i wrote this part, i really wanted to go to the taqueria down the street from me and get horchata but i didn’t because im a FOOL. also, the gif below is quite large. i apologize for that but i couldn’t find a smaller one. whatever, he looks good so just forgive me and move on

You walked into your kitchen to find stacks of red cups and bottles of unopened alcohol on each surface, glass bottles of vodka too expensive for university students to afford lying in the freezer alongside dreaded tequila.

The refrigerator was filled with different fruit juices and a few varieties of soda, your sixteen-ounce bottle of grapefruit-mint juice dwarfed by the gallon of Costco brand cranberry juice and orange juice that looked far too bright to be as natural as the label claimed.

You sighed as you bent to pull the clear bottle from the second shelf, frowning at Sam when you stood upright again. “I’m assuming we’re having a party?”

“S’Friday, baby girl!” he practically cheered, his voice thick with an unswallowed bite of cereal. He banged his fist against the table. “Time to get fucked-up.”

“There a reason we’re playing host? Steve and Bucky’s place is more equipped for a party,” you said as you twisted the bottle open and sat across from Sam at the table. “And by that I mean they don’t care if people puke on their furniture or fuck in their beds. Plus their floors are already scuffed up.”

Sam narrowed his eyes at you as you took a long sip of juice, stirring his cereal slowly. “If the party wasn’t here, you wouldn’t show up. This way you have no choice.”

You mouthed his words imitatively and sighed, leaning back in your chair so the wooden backrest creaked a bit. “Have you already told everyone?”

“Texted ‘em all last night.”

“So I don’t really have a way out of this, do I?”

“Nope,” he replied, popping the “p” with a grin. “Didn’t tell Natasha yet, though.”

You tilted your head. “Why not?”

He shrugged and stood up to place his bowl in the sink, flicking on the sink to fill the porcelain with water. His gaze was on the sink as he shrugged again. “Are you sure you want her here?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Barnes is gonna be here.”

Once you texted Natasha and received a reply, you nodded to yourself and rose to join him at the sink, standing beside him as you leant against the counter’s edge. You reached up to nudge his shoulder with your fingertips so he would let his focus fall from the dish he was washing for a moment. “She isn’t my enemy just because Bucky’s interested in her. We’re still friends and I still love her. I can’t blame her for how Bucky feels.”

“You know how he gets at parties.”

“Yeah, well, he wants to take it slow with her. He only asked me because he doesn’t want to have sex with her right away.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

“Sadistic as fuck, Y/N.”

You leant towards him, smiling despite yourself. “It’s very flattering to see how concerned you are about me. You sure I’m not your leather jacket, Sampson?”

He snorted, setting the bowl in the dish basket and wiping his hands on a towel. “You ain’t my leather jacket. But you are a pain in my ass.”

“You could just tell me you love me.”

He shook his head. “Don’t have time. I’ve got class in ten minutes.”

“Yeah, yeah. Go learn,” you said with a dismissive wave of your hand, laughing when he blew you a kiss.

You’d busied yourself in the kitchen while he left, washing and cutting one of the many green apples you had stowed in the bottom drawer of the fridge. You were cutting the fruit in half when the door opened and slammed shut once more. “You forget something, Samington?”

You heard a chuckle that had you setting your knife down. “S’not Sam.”

You squared your shoulders and picked up the knife again, cutting the seeds out of the four segments you’d made. “Don’t you have class right now?”

Bucky clicked his tongue, strolling into your kitchen and casually stealing a portion of the apple to bite into obnoxiously. “Cancelled. Professor’s sick, or missed his train, or something. Didn’t pay attention to whatever the email said beyond, ‘Class, I regret to inform you that I must cancel lecture today.’”

“But you memorized that part of it specifically?”

He hummed, smiling. “It was so emotionally significant, I had no choice but to memorize it.” He glanced around the kitchen, narrowing his eyes. “You guys having a party?”

“Detective Barnes at it again,” you quipped, laughing as he scowled at you. “Sam didn’t text you?”

He shook his head. “Probably texted Steve to tell me. He’s not my biggest fan.”

“Can you blame him? He and Steve were practically joint at the hip before you transferred here.”

Bucky nodded with a frown.

“I mean, I’d probably be living alone had you not transferred. I’d have my own bathroom,” you continued, your voice lilting dreamily. “My own fridge, my own television, a Netflix account used only by me, I probably wouldn’t be awoken by the sound of a different girl’s moaning every weekend.” You cocked an eyebrow. “Why’d you transfer here again?”

He shrugged, opening the freezer and rummaging until he could retrieve a popsicle, popping the plastic wrapper. “I missed Steve.”

“Yeah? S’cute,” you smiled, ruffling his hair as you passed him.

He smiled back and shook his head, biting half the popsicle off in one go. “Less cute, more co-dependent. I grew up with the punk needing me and as soon as he moves away, I find myself needing him.”

“That’s somehow even cuter,” you cooed, shooting a grin to him over your shoulder while he followed you to the couch. “Little, scrawny Steve being protected by little Bucky against the ruffians on the schoolyard.”

“Ruffians?” he asked with a snort. As soon as he sat, he pulled your legs onto the sofa cushions and placed them in his lap. “We grew up with him instigating fights with guys twice our age and weight— not in the nineteen-thirties.”

You found yourself looking away from the amusement in his eyes, trying to control your breathing when his free hand toyed with your fuzzy socks. “So are you coming tonight?”

“Will you be here?”

You nodded, sitting back against the armrest behind you and tipping your nose towards the ceiling with your eyes shut. “Don’t really have a choice.”

After tossing the popsicle stick onto the coffee table, his fingers wrapped around your ankles while his thumbs rubbed comforting circles against your skin. “We could escape, go to that taqueria you’re obsessed with for some horchata.”

You smiled despite the hammering in your chest. “You sure about that? Nat’ll be here.”

He didn’t reply until you lifted your head to meet his gaze. He smiled softly and shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t want you staying here for my benefit.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Buck. I would’ve been stuck here regardless.” You took your legs from him and folded them under you. “Sam said he only took the responsibility of throwing a party so I’d actually show up. Helping you would just be killing two birds with one stone.”

“Good because I was thinking we need to get a move on.”

You snorted. “Was all that considerate crap just an act, Barnes?”

He gasped in mock offense. “I would never.”

Laughing through your nose, you shook your head. “I was thinking we should get a move on, too. Nat’s probably forgotten you by now.”

It’d been a week since your feigned run-in with Natasha. You hadn’t given Bucky any specific instructions on how to follow-up, simply telling him to not act too friendly, too fast. You knew how uncomfortable it made you when people you’d only seen once or twice for five-minutes acted as if you were lifelong friends— it put you off almost permanently. And, seeing as Natasha was one of the only people that could hold a candle to your need for distance and slow progression, you thought it was safe to assume she was similar.

It would take some more time together, some more meaningful exchanges, some more feigned run-ins for Natasha to accept Bucky as someone she was actually familiar with, rather than just a stranger with a name.

He shook his head. “She hasn’t actually.”

“Yeah? And how would you know that?”

“She says hi from time to time. Smiles, waves.”

You frowned in consideration and nodded. “But you haven’t spoken again?”

“Even if you told me I should, I wouldn’t know what to say,” he laughed nervously. “She just— She looks at you in this intense way. It’s intimidating, especially when you haven’t given me a script.”

Your lips resisted the urge to fall into a deep scowl. “I’m not going to be around you all the time, telling you what to say if this does turn into something.”

“I know, I just— I just need your help for now. I lose my nerve around her.”

You looked away from him for a brief moment. “Seems like you’re over whoever it was.”

He smiled in that soft, small way that still managed to reach his eyes. “Not really. Natasha’s insanely hot, but I don’t know her yet. She makes me nervous from how elusive she is.”

“The mystery is very hot and nerve-wracking.”

He hummed. “What’s the next part of this? How do we proceed?”

“I was thinking you should find things you two have in common, reasons you’d be around each other. Common interests, mutual friends, you know? We already know you’re both friends with Sam and I so you two could find yourselves in the same places if they involve me or Sam.”

“What does being in the same places have to do with anything?”

“Ever heard of the mere exposure effect?”

When he shook his head, you continued, “It’s basically, like, the more you see something or someone, the more attractive that something or someone becomes to you. It also has to do with proximity— which is another factor in who you’re attracted to. You tend to like people more if you’re closer to them and if you anticipate being close to them often.”

“Aren’t you an English major?”

You nodded. “Psychology minor, but that’s beside the point. Proximity, mere exposure— it’ll make you more attractive to her, as will similarity.”

“What happened to ‘opposites attract’?”

“It works if all you want is to fuck, but you said you wanted something more,” you answered. “Relationships work better when both partners have things in common. Tonight, talk to her to see if you guys have things in common.”

“You could just tell me about things she likes so I can bring them up and tell her I like them when we speak tonight.”

You shook your head and grimaced at him. “I don’t endorse lying.”

He frowned in return. “You endorsed telling her she dropped a pen last week when I was supposed to introduce myself to her.”

“That isn’t the same. I told you to do something that would make for a cute story in the future. This is basically lying about your characteristics and who you are just to make her like you. It’s morally repugnant.”

His frown turned to one of consideration. “Makes sense.”

“Yeah, so just talk to her tonight. I’ll be there if you want me to be, just to facilitate things in case it gets awkward or there’s a lull.”

“You’re the best, you know that?”

If his grin hadn’t stopped your heart, his leaning towards you to press his lips to your forehead would have.

Your eyes fluttered shut and you inaudibly exhaled, swallowing and pushing at his chest so he fell back against the couch with a small smile. “I have class in a bit but stay as long as you’d like. If you go through my stuff again, I’ll know.”

“That was one time! It was raining and I felt particularly snoopy.”

PART 4: SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 

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[andya-j]

In spite of its dark history, the entrance to the Brotterling Cave complex, eleven miles south of Kremming, Kentucky, appears bucolic, even inviting—a rocky, green arch, swathed in bulblet ferns, Virginia creepers, and sumacs meandering in lazy zigzags along the slope of the hill. In summer, a sumptuous veil of ironweed and lobelia spills over the lava-dark basalt, and cavers, from novice to expert, grind up the mudhole-pocked logging road in their four-wheel-drives, leave their rides in the turn-around, and trek inside like ants marching into the maw of a sleeping triceratops. Most of the time, they come back just fine. I’ve caved in the Brotterling a few times myself, but never before alone and always in thoroughly mapped parts of the cave system. And even though I’d heard all the stories, I was never afraid. Now I’m terrified. Just before sunrise, a little over seven hours ago, I crept through the woods alongside the dirt road and slipped inside the leafy green mouth of the cave. Only Boone knew what I wanted to do, and he didn’t approve it, of course—how could he, when he’s captain of Bluegrass Search and Rescue? In the heat of our argument about how to find and extract the four cavers who are currently missing, he called me “reckless and goddamn delusional” and accused me of thinking I was invulnerable because “you’ve got that synthetic thing going on.” I bit back a laugh that would’ve embarrassed us both and told him the word was synesthesia and mine is a rare form in which sounds are “heard” through the skin as vibrations. I explained to him again how my ability could help in a situation where noises inside the cave appeared to be causing a neurological event in the brains of those exposed to them. I said I would go into the cave wearing the in-ear waterproof headphones I use on occasion to get relief from life’s general babble, which can prove overwhelming for someone with my sound sensitivities. He just shook his head and looked at me like I was contesting the curve of the earth. But this morning, no one was posted at the cave entrance to stop me, so I took that as his tacit blessing. Or maybe he was so desperate to get Pree and the others back that losing me is an acceptable risk, albeit one he won’t sign off on. As any caver around here will tell you, even minus the uncanny noises, the Brotterling can kill you in any number of ways. One is by tricking you into thinking it’s not a damn dangerous cave. The first two hundred feet or so are deceptively easy: after you’ve slithered and squeaked past a row of huge boulders crowded together like a mouthful of grey, diseased teeth, the cave opens up like a belly. A bit farther on, you stroll down a broad, pebbly incline while the natural light gradually dims. The vertical slit of the opening shrinks to the size of a peach pit. Suddenly, you find yourself in a constricted, mausoleum-black oubliette. You switch on your headlamp and commence the descent, scuttling through barely shoulder-width tunnels, snaking up vertical cracks, traversing a series of amber-blue lakes, some of which you can ford without getting your knees wet, others deepening into treacherous sumps where you’ll drown if you don’t have a rebreather or a damn good set of lungs. Piece of cake was my grandiose appraisal the first time Pree Yazzie guided me through the Brotterling, but I was twenty then, brand-new to caving, recently graduated from the University of Louisville with an altogether useless BA in English lit, and just out of a closet I had not fully realized I even was in. I was also in love with her and thought it was mutual, a conclusion based on nothing more solid than a couple of nights of hot sex. I didn’t realize then that the only thing Pree ever lusted for was adventure, which she found in equal measure in caves, beds, and underground rivers. She came, she saw, etc. We’d met at a meeting of Search and Rescue, where Boone gave a presentation on abseiling techniques. I paid scant attention; Boone Pike was just another fortysomething, hardcore cave rat with a granite-gray ponytail, a smile like a crack in an anchor bolt, and big, spade-shaped hands that looked like they’d been crushed and pinned back together a time or two. I kept sneaking glances at Pree, the only other woman in a room full of men who, as the bumper stickers boast, “do it in tight places.’ A line that would make me chuckle right now, if I could expand my squeezed lungs enough to get a full breath of air. Tight places, indeed. During that day when Pree and I explored the Brotterling, she filled me in on the cave’s not-so-savory past—how every few decades, a caver fails to resurface or, worse, crawls back out physically whole but with a maimed mind and homicidal intent. Not quite what I wanted to hear a quarter mile under the earth, but I loved the sound of her voice when she explained the cave’s frightening history. The first incident was Dr. Reginald Moore, a caver and Presbyterian minister who spent four days lost in the Brotterling in 1935. Lacking modern caving equipment and (perhaps a greater hindrance) a suitably arachnid-like frame, he was thwarted by narrow tunnels and unswimmable sumps, but eventually found his way to the surface and described the “eerie and infernal yodeling” of demons who tormented him by chanting the Psalms backward in fiendish, fist-thumping cadences. Widely mocked by the press, Moore later hung himself after setting fire to his house with his wife, father-in-law, and two young sons tied up inside. Twenty-seven years later, Garth Tidwell, a teenager who entered the Brotterling on a dare, killed himself, his parents, and a neighbor hours after exiting the cave, writing in his suicide note about singing that sounded like “a wild hallelujah of wind chimes and fornicating bobcats.” The lurid description was dismissed as psychotic rambling, probably exacerbated by the terror of being alone and disoriented. If Tidwell had heard anything at all, it was explained away as wind hissing through passageways or water burbling up from an underground stream. But now we come to the Hargrave brothers—Mathew and Lionel—experienced cavers who entered the Brotterling this past Sunday. Lionel, an Iraqi War Vet whose hearing was lost to a roadside IED in Mosel, is totally deaf. A few hours after the two men entered the cave, he emerged alone, battered and bloody. He described how, half a mile below the surface, Mathew had signed to him that he could hear music “coming from distant and delicate singers” and insisted they search for the source of the sound. For a while, Lionel obliged him, but when the way proved too difficult, he suggested they turn back. In response, Mathew became enraged, bludgeoned his brother with a rock, and left him unconscious and bleeding. When Lionel finally found his way to the surface and summoned help, three senior members of Bluegrass Search and Rescue were dispatched—obsessive, spearmint-gum-chewing Bruce Starkeweather, extreme ectomorph Issa Mamoudi, and the ever elusive Pree Yazzie. Boone’s Dream Team. That’s when things started getting weird. At nine that night, Starkeweather contacted Boone via cave phone to report high-pitched humming or chanting. Boone told him to return to the surface. The final transmission, a few hours later, came from a distraught, incoherent Mamoudi—mangled syntax and a garble of English, French, and Farsi that degenerated into choking and wails. No one’s heard from any of them since. Which is how I come to be half a mile under the earth, worming my way through a twist in the moist, black, and aptly named Intestinal Bypass, a wretched, rib-crushing, claustrophobia-inducing belly crawl. Nearing the end, just a minute ago, I came to a plug in the tunnel about ten feet ahead. I can see the bottoms of dirt-packed, lug-soled boots, a damp, filthy oversuit, and, if I crane my neck almost out of joint, I can make out the white dome of a mud-splattered helmet. It’s not Pree, who’s waif-thin and wears size six boots, but one of the men, Hargrave, Mamoudi, or Starkeweather. I crawl closer, scraping along on my elbows and toes, but get no reaction to the light flaring out from my headlamp. My initial thought is that the caver’s become wedged in the last few feet of the Bypass, where the tunnel cinches like a cruelly corseted waist. The first time I came through here with Pree, I tore a rotator cuff trying to shove myself through the passage. Now, four years later and at least fifteen pounds thinner, it’s still a brutal squeeze. My second thought, after I grab a leg and begin shaking it, is that while he may or may not be stuck, this guy’s stone-cold dead. Which means if I can’t push him out, I’m fucked. Shit. Panic pinballs around my ribs. My lungs rasp, and all the air’s vanished. Forget whatever’s inside the cave. Forget Pree and the chance of finding survivors. I want out of here—NOW! Then a soothing, calm voice that I’ve trained for just such situations begins speaking inside my head: Breathe, Karyn. Just breathe. You’re okay. We’ll figure this out. It’s my own voice, the voice I’ve heard in other bad situations above and below ground, and I heed it. I must if I want to live. Gradually, I coax a full breath past the terror constricting my throat. I’m not going to die down here. Not yet, anyway. A numb resolve settles in: I can do this. Trying to eject a dead guy out the end of a tomb-black tunnel while you’re flat on your belly feels like a sadist’s idea of a stunt on some nightmarish survival TV show. I push until my biceps blaze, but it’s impossible to get any traction. I might as well be trying to strongarm Atlas’s Dick, a colossal stalagmite cavers use as a waypoint in one of the Brotterling’s upper chambers. I strain and curse and hyperventilate. Drink tears and cold, musky sweat. The white noise churning through the headphones under my helmet provides an incongruous soundtrack to my struggle: monster breakers shattering on a raw, rocky coastline of black sand and a harsh sun (at least, this is the image I get of it). The sound’s meant to protect me from the singing, but right now—pinched like a thumb in a pair of Chinese handcuffs—the buffering noise only intensifies the terror of being stuck in a limestone tube with a corpse. Desperate, I decide to wiggle back out and look for another way to go on, but the tunnel twists and contorts at excruciating angles. It’s impossible to slither out the way I came in. All I get for my efforts are bruised elbows, torn knees, and the mother of all wedgies. Panic claws at my throat. I’ll never get out. I’ll die here, squished inside a stone straightjacket. But the voice in my head bullies and curses me onward, so I crawl back to the body. Since I’m not strong enough to rely on brute force, I devise a slow, minimalist series of tweaks that gradually loosens this obstinate flesh-cork in its stone bottleneck: nudge, twist, rock side to side, nudge again. The poor son of a bitch must have died two to six hours ago, because rigor’s setting in, which helps me extract him. He’s plank-stiff and (I discover later) both arms are arrowed out in front of him like a cliff diver, the body so rigid by the time it finally pops free, he could double as a javelin or a maypole. I wriggle out, shaking and sweat-slick, and aim my lamp down at the dead man, groaning when it illuminates the back of Mamoudi’s seamed, bloodied neck and reveals the muddy helmet to be a porridge of gray matter and hair glommed around a split, trepanned skull. I picture Mamoudi frantically trying to birth himself out those last crushing inches of squeeze, the irony of a rockfall shattering his skull just as his head poked free. It’s a reasonable theory, except that I don’t see any fallen rocks or broken stalactites to back it up. Looking around, I find myself in a wide, high-domed chamber forested floor to ceiling with dripstone. Farther back, overlapping ledges of white limestone crease and crinkle like bolts of brocade. The scene is enchanting and eerie, a grand Gothic hall carved out of calcite and ornamented with aragonite blooms. At one end glimmers a deceptively shallow-looking pond where eyeless albino salamanders laze on its mineral shores. I know from the survey map this is a sump, the entrance to a flooded tunnel leading into the next chamber, but whether it’s swimmable without a rebreather, I won’t know until I’m underwater. Before I can ponder this or Mamoudi’s demise any further, something more compelling than mere violent death snags my attention: a rapid-fire spitting of sound energy, like a mad tattoo artist bedeviling my nervous system with rhythm rather than ink. The energy natters against my palms and wet-kisses the space between my breasts. I get a sense of its volume and pitch, the aural equivalent of a blind person reading Braille, and I’m lashed with fear and euphoria. Although I’ve come down here to find Pree and the others, I also want to locate the mysterious noise. Boone must have realized that too. It’s why he didn’t want me to go. Displaced air caused by something big lunging out of a passageway makes me whirl around. A frenzy of shadows spills over the chamber as my lamp illuminates a surreal sight: Bruce Starkeweather, his naked torso smeared with geometric designs painted in cave dirt and gore, brandishing three feet of a blood-streaked stalactite. His shell-shocked stare tells me all too clearly I’m nobody he’s ever seen in his life, and my death is all he desires. As the sound energy from the faraway singing swells over me, he raises his club and charges. “You should wear headphones to block out the sounds,” I’d told Boone and the others less than twenty-four hours earlier. We were in a small conference room in the Timber Hill Lodge outside Kremming. A map of the known parts of the cave system was tacked up on a board, the shaded areas indicating parts not yet surveyed. Mamoudi and Pree sat together, guzzling coffee and wolfing down bear claws, while Starkeweather, ascetic as ever, stripped foil off a stick of Wrigley’s. Boone, unshaven and haggard-looking, had just come from the hospital where Lionel Hargrave was recovering from a concussion. He told us Hargrave had described his brother’s manic insistence on finding the source of the singing. In his deafness, of course, Lionel heard nothing and, probably for that reason (and because he evidently had a thick cranium), had survived to talk about it. At my remark about the headphones, Pree laughed. Boone looked away, and Mamoudi got up to refill his and Pree’s coffee mugs. I couldn’t entirely blame them. I was technically there as backup, but since I’m also the newest member of the team and never found time to get my cave diving certificate, my inclusion in the expedition was unlikely. Pree, looking fetchingly peeved, said, “How do we communicate if we can’t hear? What are we supposed to do? Use sign language? Text?” Starkeweather mimed headbanging. “Maybe it’s a death metal band down there making people go batshit. That used to drive my old man insane.” Met with such thoughtful responses, what could I say? I wanted to point out that noise isn’t always benign, that whatever’s down there might be the aural equivalent of lobotomy picks jabbed into the brain via the ears. But it’s only a feeling I have, and this group, Pree especially, is not into feelings. Starkeweather asked a question about the survival kits, and while Boone was responding, I went outside and paced alongside a thin strip of forest next to the parking lot. After a short time, Pree came up beside me and tried to slide her arm beneath mine. I swatted her off like you would a pesky mosquito. Only a few hours earlier, she’d stopped by my apartment to try to rekindle some romance. We’d smoked a joint, laughed about old times. Then she took everything off except Mamoudi’s engagement ring and made love to me like I was the last woman on earth. And I let her. Figured I’d hate myself for it later. Seemed like later had come sooner than I expected. “Seriously, Karyn,” she was saying, “if anything goes wrong down there, if there’s a problem, Issa and Bruce and I will deal with it. We know the Brotterling, and we know what we’re doing. So, don’t try anything heroic.” She should’ve stopped there, but she added, “I know it must be tempting, you with your superpowers and all.” I glared and walked faster. “Okay, sorry. It’s just that hearing sounds through your skin, that’s pretty bizarre.” That’s one word for it. It’s also a gift, this intertwining of hearing and touch, where sounds can be physically felt as everything from a shy tap to a punishing blow. It’s a door into something most people never experience. Pree’s voice, for example, feels lemony, tart. It fizzes under my nails and buzzes up my spine like spikes of Kundalini flame. Intimacy enhances the effect. Pree’s voice used to give me not just sensations but images, too: a fire crackling in the kiva of a house that must be from her childhood in Gallup, New Mexico, a young Pree popping figs into her mouth outside an adobe church, and a pale, bearded man who cooed to her while he lay over her body and pounded. My skin drank her life in through her voice. None of this, of course, I could tell her. “Bizarre’s not the word I’d have chosen,” I said. “But when you put it that way, I feel so special.” “You are special, though, aren’t you? You got written up in that magazine.” She was talking about a story that ran in Scientific American (June 2008), in which I was tested along with a number of other more “traditional” synesthetes. Some heard colors; others tasted or smelled numbers and words. An anomaly even among anomalies, I was the only one who could pick up tactile sensations and images via sound waves, even when I didn’t understand the language. “Aural imagism,” the writer of the article called it. I sat with my eyes closed and listened to a woman recite the same passage in a foreign language over and over. Later, I learned it was Finnish. Her vocal tones prickled the soles of my feet; it felt like dancing on tiny ball bearings. The vibrations of her voice formed images like patterns in a turned kaleidoscope. I described a dark red cup, a yellow rose, a strange bird on the wing. The man doing the testing glanced at his notes and paled. The speaker had read a quatrain from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and I’d just described the primary imagery. Pree laid a hand on my biceps, but I flinched, holding on to my indignation like it was a winning lottery ticket. I said sullenly, “Boone’s screwing up not to send me down with you. I’d be able to feel the singing before the rest of you even heard it.” She sighed and fell into step with me. “Look, Karyn, you’ve been inside plenty of caves. You know what the silence is like down there. Gigantic. A void you don’t want to fall into. Then all of a sudden, you hear something so spooky and so unexpected, you just about crap in your pants. If you heard it topside, you’d know it was nothing, maybe the caver in front of you farted or dropped a carabiner, but underground, it’s terrifying. Most cavers shrug that stuff off, but some people can’t. They have panic attacks; they hallucinate. For all we know, what Hargrave heard was a colony of bats or maybe a few million cave cockroaches.” When I didn’t answer, she snapped, “Dammit, Karyn, are you even listening?” (More intently than you can imagine.) “Maybe Hargrave went crazy because the singing he heard was too beautiful,” I said. “What are you talking about?” “There’s a line in the Duino Elegies by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It’s something to the effect that beauty is the beginning of terror we can just still stand. Maybe that’s the deal with the singing. It triggers a level of terror humans aren’t meant to endure. It’s too beautiful.” Her mouth set in a pinched line. I thought she was going to slap me. “Nothing’s too beautiful. That isn’t possible.” Then before I could argue, she gave me a punch on the arm that was too hard to be play. “Don’t worry, Karyn; it’s gonna be fine.” She looked back toward the motel as though somebody there had just called her name, although nobody had. She said, “See you on the surface, babe,” and hurried away. Right now, as the sound energy of the singing floods into me and Starkeweather charges, that surface Pree spoke of might as well be on one of Jupiter’s moons. Starkeweather halts just short of the sump. He spits out a lump of gum, bares his teeth in a cannibal grin, and takes a few warm-up swings with the club. I think he’s going to pound me to mud, but to any real caver, what he does next is unimaginably worse: he starts attacking the cave itself, swinging viciously, destroying elaborate lacework and yards of dripstone that have grown at a rate of a half inch per century. Clusters of wedge-shaped helictites explode overhead; stalagmites as tall as a man shatter and crash into the sump. The destruction sickens and horrifies me. Within seconds, something sublime and ethereal has been reduced to an empty mouth full of snaggled teeth. Starkeweather, surveying the rubble, cocks his head and does a bizarre little jig, like he’s shaking off a swarm of cave spiders. He shimmies and scrapes at his face while his lips form the words Shut up! Make it stop! When his eyes refocus, his red gaze finds me again. I switch off my headlamp, and the world floods away in a torrent of black. I drop to the ground and start inching along the cave floor. The headphones are a real hindrance now; they prevent me from hearing which way Starkeweather’s moving. The only sound I can feel is the singing, and that has receded to a shivery caress, a centipede skittering over my eyelashes, a salamander disturbing the roots of my hair. A hail of stones peppers my back and pings off my helmet. Suddenly, Starkeweather’s big hands paw at my legs. I kick out blindly. My boot thuds meaty groin. Then he’s on top of me, spearmint breath hot in my face, mud-slick fingers fumbling for my jugular. A blacker, thicker shade of night starts shutting down synapses, accompanied by a dazzle of sizzling white stars expiring behind my retinas. Under my hand I clutch a slab of smashed dripstone and heave it in the general direction of his head. He releases my throat but then latches on to either side of my mouth and tries to unsocket my jaw. I bite down on a finger until my teeth close on a nugget of bone, then roll away as blood fills my mouth. Next thing I know, I’m underwater. The sump’s frigid and inky, and— Starkeweather be damned—I switch my headlamp back on. I’m inside a flooded tunnel where so much silt has been stirred up, it’s like swimming through horse piss. I look for an air pocket overhead but can make out only jutting mineral walls and the segmented bodies of albino worms ghosting behind swirls of particled water. My lungs bleed for air. The sump narrows into a long, jagged throat, where beyond, water splashes over a pale, fluted ledge. Between me and the air glitters a gauntlet of stone cudgels and knives. My cave pack rips off and my oversuit’s torn. Dark red snakes squiggling too close alarm me until I realize I’m batting away my own blood. My head punches the surface, and I heave myself onto a milk-white dome of flowstone, then collapse across it, teeth wildly clattering. Eventually, I rally enough to fill my hands with rocks and wait to see if Starkeweather follows me. A short time later, he pops to the surface floating facedown. I let him stay like that for five minutes before I grab his belt and haul him up next to me. His neck and cheeks are grotesquely ballooned. When I turn him over, jagged pebbles and mineral chips mixed with shattered enamel gush out of his mouth in a torrent of red. I want to think Starkeweather was already dangerously unstable and would have acted out sooner or later, but I don’t really believe it. I know the singing has unhinged him to the point of attacking the cave with his teeth—the same sounds Mamoudi and Hargrave must have heard, and that Pree, if she’s still alive, is hearing right now. It feels stronger and a helluva lot closer than it did before I passed through the sump. Those previously faint waves of energy are now sharp and urgent, a persistent scratching at various parts of my body, like a frantic child seeking entry to a house at one door and one window after another. But the images accompanying the sensations aren’t so innocuous: a debased horde of humanity crammed into a stadium of bleeding, cruelly crushed bodies, on their knees weeping and howling. Heads thrown back, ready for the knife, keening mad invocations to an obscene deity. Their blood soaks the earth, out of which bloom stone flowers brimming with nectar and death. The vision claws at my heart and I hear my own voice telling me to get moving, to find Hargrave and Pree and get out. It’s hard to obey. I go on. The next chamber confounds me: a sprawling catacomb dripping with soda-straw stalactites and mounded with nodular masses of calcite popcorn. Crystals of moonmilk, a carbonate material the texture of cream cheese, festoon the floor. None of it corresponds to any maps I’ve seen. Even worse are the braided mazes of lava tubes offering a bewildering array of possible paths deeper into the cave’s interior. But the cave, in its infernal sentience, appears to respond. The energy of the singing amplifies, the frequencies becoming imperative, like the head of a silky mallet pinging a flesh xylophone. Letting it guide me, I scramble up a succession of ledges to access a passageway midway up the wall. Its coiled path empties into an angular chamber that resembles a vandalized ossuary: stone pillars surrounding a scattering of femurs, ribs, clavicles, and fragments of skull. That the bones have lain here since long before cavers first discovered the Brotterling is made clear by the centuries-old webs of calcite deposits that veil them. I pick my way through the boneyard as quickly as possible. Beyond it, my headlamp illuminates the area from where the sound energy seems to emanate—a lavish display of boxwork about four feet overhead, where calcite blades project at angles from the cave walls, creating a dense and elaborate honeycomb. Between the mineral blades gleam dark seams, fistulas of ebony pulsing like fat heaps of caviar that vibrate with an avid, luminescent life. Fine, blood-red webbing threads through the black, a network of alien capillaries that carries not blood but warm, coppery sound—it seeps under my scalp and teases behind my ears, seeking to peel back and penetrate the soft, vulnerable creases of brain. If I get out of here alive, I know what I’ll tell Boone: the singing’s not random or chaotic; it has distinct meters and color tones, and it pulses with dark languor underlaid with vicious intent. I will tell him the creators of this song are not human, but not unsentient, either. And if the term life-form applies to them at all, it’s a life in service only to the obliteration of all others. Long stretches of spellbound time pass as I stand here, watching the tiny caviar mouths pulse and burble out a black saliva of sound that feels ripe and almost sexually decadent. Avid and succulent and, yes—Mathew Hargrave nailed it—delicate, too. I want to slather my hands in the mineral meat between those basalt blades, squeeze up fistfuls of its alien iridescence and lather it into my pores, let it replace all the blood in my body with its unholy wails. I take off my helmet and hurl it away. Then I reach up to remove the headphones. And stop. Above me, imbedded into the hivework, loom strange columns worked into the stone, skeletal formations lifting toward the obsidian sky. Sections are patterned with ovoids and creases of lighter stone, the pale areas inlaid with vertical striations of crimson. The sight wallops the breath from my chest. One of the columns is watching me. Basalt doesn’t bleed, but burst eyeballs and lacerated skin weep red down the sides of the dripstone cloaking two human forms in their mineral shrouds. Mathew Hargrave has been almost entirely consumed. Crusts of muscle and gashed bone jut out from his stone sarcophagus. Only his upper chest, the arms tucked into his torso like folded wings, and his slack, swollen face are still recognizably human. His remains are being played like a bone flute as torturesong rasps from his mouth. But Pree, oh Pree, is another matter. Her time inside the Brotterling has been briefer than Hargrave’s; less of her has been entombed. Rigid and ashen-faced, she balances on a narrow outcrop a few feet above, tarry squiggles of hair falling over the rags of her clothing. Her mouth convulses in torment. Skeins of sound tangle in her teeth and snake from her lips. Tendrils of it adhere to her face. The frequency of the vibrations chugs to the lowest registers, rich and mellow, bassoon-like, the notes unspooling in hypnotic spirals, so that each births the next lower note on the scale, and all the while, Pree’s terrified eyes tell me the truth: it’s a death song and she can’t help but sing it. Black rings frame the edge of my vision as Pree’s silent screams flail me. Her body spasms. A rent opens under her breast as the slender spear she’s impaled on exits her chest in a gleaming red fist. Behind two snapped ribs, I glimpse a gray, pulpy thing beating feebly. The ledge is slick and cushiony, weirdly flesh-like, when I climb up, wrap my arms around her, and try to lift her free from the stone. Crimson bubbles erupt from her mouth. She tries to form words. I put my face close to hers as she exhales. Her death-rattle breath goes into me like an intubation tube, rancid and chokingly floral. There are no last words, no blessing, just a sob that’s a truncated ode to damnation as she bleeds and convulses in front of me. And I leave her. God help me, I abandon her there and begin the torturous trek to the surface, a wet, nasty, soul-crushing ordeal, while with every step, I expect the cave to crush or consume me. Most of the way, when I’m not using my hands to climb or to crawl, I clutch at the headphones, terrified they’ll fall off and the singing will overpower and annihilate me. Yet despite hours of exhaustion and terror, somehow I prevail. The passages, in fact, seem to widen as I pass through, the skin-you-alive cold of the sump is less heart-stoppingly frigid, the waypoints more easily spotted. Even the terrifying Bypass, outside of which Mamoudi’s body still sprawls, feels smooth as a tube and excretes me effortlessly. When I finally reach the surface, blinking and bedazzled by the afternoon light, a small army of cavers, media, and National Guard are assembled, as another team of cavers prepares to go down. Boone’s there among them. Seeing me alive, his eyes well, as do mine. I tear off the headphones and sweet sound rushes in, the wind whistling, a truck backfiring, the crowd erupting into ecstatic cheers to see someone come out alive. Then they get a good look at me and my appearance—soaked, shivering, smeared with cave dirt and blood—shocks them silent. As one, they reel back. Finally the braver ones gather their wits and being firing off questions. What happened? What’s down there? Is anyone else still alive? But these are not words the way I remember them. What I hear is a saw-toothed cacophony, an unwholesome chorale—discordant, repellant, impure. I want to rush back inside the cave to get away from their cawing, but I remember that first, I have something important to do. I must warn them of the terrible danger, so I focus my mind and conjure the sounds I will need. When I know what I must say, I run toward Boone, who is already beckoning me. I scream, Get back! Get away from the cave! Everyone inside is dead! But that’s not what comes out. An excruciating hitch unlocks in my chest as an arcane melody, a kind of cryptic trilling, slithers free and soars to the winds—the feral and wondrous, delicate song birthed from the mouths of monsters, from Pree’s mouth into mine—into theirs. Madness made tangible. Contagion by sound. It spews from my lips—a song of such deadly beauty and unholy allure that I experience only the briefest frisson of horror—an emotion something inside me instantly quells—when their mouths fall open, songstruck, enthralled, and they begin to rend their own flesh and tear each other apart. I understand this is how it must be. I go on, unfazed by the carnage, undeterred by the din. For I am the throat of the Delicate Singers. In the cities, the towns, in the streets, and beyond, I know others are waiting to hear me.

In spite of its dark history, the entrance to the Brotterling Cave complex, eleven miles south of Kremming, Kentucky, appears bucolic, even inviting—a rocky, green arch, swathed in bulblet ferns, Virginia creepers, and sumacs meandering in lazy zigzags along the slope of the hill. In summer, a sumptuous veil of ironweed and lobelia spills over the lava-dark basalt, and cavers, from novice to expert, grind up the mudhole-pocked logging road in their four-wheel-drives, leave their rides in the turn-around, and trek inside like ants marching into the maw of a sleeping triceratops. Most of the time, they come back just fine. I’ve caved in the Brotterling a few times myself, but never before alone and always in thoroughly mapped parts of the cave system. And even though I’d heard all the stories, I was never afraid. Now I’m terrified. Just before sunrise, a little over seven hours ago, I crept through the woods alongside the dirt road and slipped inside the leafy green mouth of the cave. Only Boone knew what I wanted to do, and he didn’t approve it, of course—how could he, when he’s captain of Bluegrass Search and Rescue? In the heat of our argument about how to find and extract the four cavers who are currently missing, he called me “reckless and goddamn delusional” and accused me of thinking I was invulnerable because “you’ve got that synthetic thing going on.” I bit back a laugh that would’ve embarrassed us both and told him the word was synesthesia and mine is a rare form in which sounds are “heard” through the skin as vibrations. I explained to him again how my ability could help in a situation where noises inside the cave appeared to be causing a neurological event in the brains of those exposed to them. I said I would go into the cave wearing the in-ear waterproof headphones I use on occasion to get relief from life’s general babble, which can prove overwhelming for someone with my sound sensitivities. He just shook his head and looked at me like I was contesting the curve of the earth. But this morning, no one was posted at the cave entrance to stop me, so I took that as his tacit blessing. Or maybe he was so desperate to get Pree and the others back that losing me is an acceptable risk, albeit one he won’t sign off on. As any caver around here will tell you, even minus the uncanny noises, the Brotterling can kill you in any number of ways. One is by tricking you into thinking it’s not a damn dangerous cave. The first two hundred feet or so are deceptively easy: after you’ve slithered and squeaked past a row of huge boulders crowded together like a mouthful of grey, diseased teeth, the cave opens up like a belly. A bit farther on, you stroll down a broad, pebbly incline while the natural light gradually dims. The vertical slit of the opening shrinks to the size of a peach pit. Suddenly, you find yourself in a constricted, mausoleum-black oubliette. You switch on your headlamp and commence the descent, scuttling through barely shoulder-width tunnels, snaking up vertical cracks, traversing a series of amber-blue lakes, some of which you can ford without getting your knees wet, others deepening into treacherous sumps where you’ll drown if you don’t have a rebreather or a damn good set of lungs. Piece of cake was my grandiose appraisal the first time Pree Yazzie guided me through the Brotterling, but I was twenty then, brand-new to caving, recently graduated from the University of Louisville with an altogether useless BA in English lit, and just out of a closet I had not fully realized I even was in. I was also in love with her and thought it was mutual, a conclusion based on nothing more solid than a couple of nights of hot sex. I didn’t realize then that the only thing Pree ever lusted for was adventure, which she found in equal measure in caves, beds, and underground rivers. She came, she saw, etc. We’d met at a meeting of Search and Rescue, where Boone gave a presentation on abseiling techniques. I paid scant attention; Boone Pike was just another fortysomething, hardcore cave rat with a granite-gray ponytail, a smile like a crack in an anchor bolt, and big, spade-shaped hands that looked like they’d been crushed and pinned back together a time or two. I kept sneaking glances at Pree, the only other woman in a room full of men who, as the bumper stickers boast, “do it in tight places.’ A line that would make me chuckle right now, if I could expand my squeezed lungs enough to get a full breath of air. Tight places, indeed. During that day when Pree and I explored the Brotterling, she filled me in on the cave’s not-so-savory past—how every few decades, a caver fails to resurface or, worse, crawls back out physically whole but with a maimed mind and homicidal intent. Not quite what I wanted to hear a quarter mile under the earth, but I loved the sound of her voice when she explained the cave’s frightening history. The first incident was Dr. Reginald Moore, a caver and Presbyterian minister who spent four days lost in the Brotterling in 1935. Lacking modern caving equipment and (perhaps a greater hindrance) a suitably arachnid-like frame, he was thwarted by narrow tunnels and unswimmable sumps, but eventually found his way to the surface and described the “eerie and infernal yodeling” of demons who tormented him by chanting the Psalms backward in fiendish, fist-thumping cadences. Widely mocked by the press, Moore later hung himself after setting fire to his house with his wife, father-in-law, and two young sons tied up inside. Twenty-seven years later, Garth Tidwell, a teenager who entered the Brotterling on a dare, killed himself, his parents, and a neighbor hours after exiting the cave, writing in his suicide note about singing that sounded like “a wild hallelujah of wind chimes and fornicating bobcats.” The lurid description was dismissed as psychotic rambling, probably exacerbated by the terror of being alone and disoriented. If Tidwell had heard anything at all, it was explained away as wind hissing through passageways or water burbling up from an underground stream. But now we come to the Hargrave brothers—Mathew and Lionel—experienced cavers who entered the Brotterling this past Sunday. Lionel, an Iraqi War Vet whose hearing was lost to a roadside IED in Mosel, is totally deaf. A few hours after the two men entered the cave, he emerged alone, battered and bloody. He described how, half a mile below the surface, Mathew had signed to him that he could hear music “coming from distant and delicate singers” and insisted they search for the source of the sound. For a while, Lionel obliged him, but when the way proved too difficult, he suggested they turn back. In response, Mathew became enraged, bludgeoned his brother with a rock, and left him unconscious and bleeding. When Lionel finally found his way to the surface and summoned help, three senior members of Bluegrass Search and Rescue were dispatched—obsessive, spearmint-gum-chewing Bruce Starkeweather, extreme ectomorph Issa Mamoudi, and the ever elusive Pree Yazzie. Boone’s Dream Team. That’s when things started getting weird. At nine that night, Starkeweather contacted Boone via cave phone to report high-pitched humming or chanting. Boone told him to return to the surface. The final transmission, a few hours later, came from a distraught, incoherent Mamoudi—mangled syntax and a garble of English, French, and Farsi that degenerated into choking and wails. No one’s heard from any of them since. Which is how I come to be half a mile under the earth, worming my way through a twist in the moist, black, and aptly named Intestinal Bypass, a wretched, rib-crushing, claustrophobia-inducing belly crawl. Nearing the end, just a minute ago, I came to a plug in the tunnel about ten feet ahead. I can see the bottoms of dirt-packed, lug-soled boots, a damp, filthy oversuit, and, if I crane my neck almost out of joint, I can make out the white dome of a mud-splattered helmet. It’s not Pree, who’s waif-thin and wears size six boots, but one of the men, Hargrave, Mamoudi, or Starkeweather. I crawl closer, scraping along on my elbows and toes, but get no reaction to the light flaring out from my headlamp. My initial thought is that the caver’s become wedged in the last few feet of the Bypass, where the tunnel cinches like a cruelly corseted waist. The first time I came through here with Pree, I tore a rotator cuff trying to shove myself through the passage. Now, four years later and at least fifteen pounds thinner, it’s still a brutal squeeze. My second thought, after I grab a leg and begin shaking it, is that while he may or may not be stuck, this guy’s stone-cold dead. Which means if I can’t push him out, I’m fucked. Shit. Panic pinballs around my ribs. My lungs rasp, and all the air’s vanished. Forget whatever’s inside the cave. Forget Pree and the chance of finding survivors. I want out of here—NOW! Then a soothing, calm voice that I’ve trained for just such situations begins speaking inside my head: Breathe, Karyn. Just breathe. You’re okay. We’ll figure this out. It’s my own voice, the voice I’ve heard in other bad situations above and below ground, and I heed it. I must if I want to live. Gradually, I coax a full breath past the terror constricting my throat. I’m not going to die down here. Not yet, anyway. A numb resolve settles in: I can do this. Trying to eject a dead guy out the end of a tomb-black tunnel while you’re flat on your belly feels like a sadist’s idea of a stunt on some nightmarish survival TV show. I push until my biceps blaze, but it’s impossible to get any traction. I might as well be trying to strongarm Atlas’s Dick, a colossal stalagmite cavers use as a waypoint in one of the Brotterling’s upper chambers. I strain and curse and hyperventilate. Drink tears and cold, musky sweat. The white noise churning through the headphones under my helmet provides an incongruous soundtrack to my struggle: monster breakers shattering on a raw, rocky coastline of black sand and a harsh sun (at least, this is the image I get of it). The sound’s meant to protect me from the singing, but right now—pinched like a thumb in a pair of Chinese handcuffs—the buffering noise only intensifies the terror of being stuck in a limestone tube with a corpse. Desperate, I decide to wiggle back out and look for another way to go on, but the tunnel twists and contorts at excruciating angles. It’s impossible to slither out the way I came in. All I get for my efforts are bruised elbows, torn knees, and the mother of all wedgies. Panic claws at my throat. I’ll never get out. I’ll die here, squished inside a stone straightjacket. But the voice in my head bullies and curses me onward, so I crawl back to the body. Since I’m not strong enough to rely on brute force, I devise a slow, minimalist series of tweaks that gradually loosens this obstinate flesh-cork in its stone bottleneck: nudge, twist, rock side to side, nudge again. The poor son of a bitch must have died two to six hours ago, because rigor’s setting in, which helps me extract him. He’s plank-stiff and (I discover later) both arms are arrowed out in front of him like a cliff diver, the body so rigid by the time it finally pops free, he could double as a javelin or a maypole. I wriggle out, shaking and sweat-slick, and aim my lamp down at the dead man, groaning when it illuminates the back of Mamoudi’s seamed, bloodied neck and reveals the muddy helmet to be a porridge of gray matter and hair glommed around a split, trepanned skull. I picture Mamoudi frantically trying to birth himself out those last crushing inches of squeeze, the irony of a rockfall shattering his skull just as his head poked free. It’s a reasonable theory, except that I don’t see any fallen rocks or broken stalactites to back it up. Looking around, I find myself in a wide, high-domed chamber forested floor to ceiling with dripstone. Farther back, overlapping ledges of white limestone crease and crinkle like bolts of brocade. The scene is enchanting and eerie, a grand Gothic hall carved out of calcite and ornamented with aragonite blooms. At one end glimmers a deceptively shallow-looking pond where eyeless albino salamanders laze on its mineral shores. I know from the survey map this is a sump, the entrance to a flooded tunnel leading into the next chamber, but whether it’s swimmable without a rebreather, I won’t know until I’m underwater. Before I can ponder this or Mamoudi’s demise any further, something more compelling than mere violent death snags my attention: a rapid-fire spitting of sound energy, like a mad tattoo artist bedeviling my nervous system with rhythm rather than ink. The energy natters against my palms and wet-kisses the space between my breasts. I get a sense of its volume and pitch, the aural equivalent of a blind person reading Braille, and I’m lashed with fear and euphoria. Although I’ve come down here to find Pree and the others, I also want to locate the mysterious noise. Boone must have realized that too. It’s why he didn’t want me to go. Displaced air caused by something big lunging out of a passageway makes me whirl around. A frenzy of shadows spills over the chamber as my lamp illuminates a surreal sight: Bruce Starkeweather, his naked torso smeared with geometric designs painted in cave dirt and gore, brandishing three feet of a blood-streaked stalactite. His shell-shocked stare tells me all too clearly I’m nobody he’s ever seen in his life, and my death is all he desires. As the sound energy from the faraway singing swells over me, he raises his club and charges. “You should wear headphones to block out the sounds,” I’d told Boone and the others less than twenty-four hours earlier. We were in a small conference room in the Timber Hill Lodge outside Kremming. A map of the known parts of the cave system was tacked up on a board, the shaded areas indicating parts not yet surveyed. Mamoudi and Pree sat together, guzzling coffee and wolfing down bear claws, while Starkeweather, ascetic as ever, stripped foil off a stick of Wrigley’s. Boone, unshaven and haggard-looking, had just come from the hospital where Lionel Hargrave was recovering from a concussion. He told us Hargrave had described his brother’s manic insistence on finding the source of the singing. In his deafness, of course, Lionel heard nothing and, probably for that reason (and because he evidently had a thick cranium), had survived to talk about it. At my remark about the headphones, Pree laughed. Boone looked away, and Mamoudi got up to refill his and Pree’s coffee mugs. I couldn’t entirely blame them. I was technically there as backup, but since I’m also the newest member of the team and never found time to get my cave diving certificate, my inclusion in the expedition was unlikely. Pree, looking fetchingly peeved, said, “How do we communicate if we can’t hear? What are we supposed to do? Use sign language? Text?” Starkeweather mimed headbanging. “Maybe it’s a death metal band down there making people go batshit. That used to drive my old man insane.” Met with such thoughtful responses, what could I say? I wanted to point out that noise isn’t always benign, that whatever’s down there might be the aural equivalent of lobotomy picks jabbed into the brain via the ears. But it’s only a feeling I have, and this group, Pree especially, is not into feelings. Starkeweather asked a question about the survival kits, and while Boone was responding, I went outside and paced alongside a thin strip of forest next to the parking lot. After a short time, Pree came up beside me and tried to slide her arm beneath mine. I swatted her off like you would a pesky mosquito. Only a few hours earlier, she’d stopped by my apartment to try to rekindle some romance. We’d smoked a joint, laughed about old times. Then she took everything off except Mamoudi’s engagement ring and made love to me like I was the last woman on earth. And I let her. Figured I’d hate myself for it later. Seemed like later had come sooner than I expected. “Seriously, Karyn,” she was saying, “if anything goes wrong down there, if there’s a problem, Issa and Bruce and I will deal with it. We know the Brotterling, and we know what we’re doing. So, don’t try anything heroic.” She should’ve stopped there, but she added, “I know it must be tempting, you with your superpowers and all.” I glared and walked faster. “Okay, sorry. It’s just that hearing sounds through your skin, that’s pretty bizarre.” That’s one word for it. It’s also a gift, this intertwining of hearing and touch, where sounds can be physically felt as everything from a shy tap to a punishing blow. It’s a door into something most people never experience. Pree’s voice, for example, feels lemony, tart. It fizzes under my nails and buzzes up my spine like spikes of Kundalini flame. Intimacy enhances the effect. Pree’s voice used to give me not just sensations but images, too: a fire crackling in the kiva of a house that must be from her childhood in Gallup, New Mexico, a young Pree popping figs into her mouth outside an adobe church, and a pale, bearded man who cooed to her while he lay over her body and pounded. My skin drank her life in through her voice. None of this, of course, I could tell her. “Bizarre’s not the word I’d have chosen,” I said. “But when you put it that way, I feel so special.” “You are special, though, aren’t you? You got written up in that magazine.” She was talking about a story that ran in Scientific American (June 2008), in which I was tested along with a number of other more “traditional” synesthetes. Some heard colors; others tasted or smelled numbers and words. An anomaly even among anomalies, I was the only one who could pick up tactile sensations and images via sound waves, even when I didn’t understand the language. “Aural imagism,” the writer of the article called it. I sat with my eyes closed and listened to a woman recite the same passage in a foreign language over and over. Later, I learned it was Finnish. Her vocal tones prickled the soles of my feet; it felt like dancing on tiny ball bearings. The vibrations of her voice formed images like patterns in a turned kaleidoscope. I described a dark red cup, a yellow rose, a strange bird on the wing. The man doing the testing glanced at his notes and paled. The speaker had read a quatrain from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and I’d just described the primary imagery. Pree laid a hand on my biceps, but I flinched, holding on to my indignation like it was a winning lottery ticket. I said sullenly, “Boone’s screwing up not to send me down with you. I’d be able to feel the singing before the rest of you even heard it.” She sighed and fell into step with me. “Look, Karyn, you’ve been inside plenty of caves. You know what the silence is like down there. Gigantic. A void you don’t want to fall into. Then all of a sudden, you hear something so spooky and so unexpected, you just about crap in your pants. If you heard it topside, you’d know it was nothing, maybe the caver in front of you farted or dropped a carabiner, but underground, it’s terrifying. Most cavers shrug that stuff off, but some people can’t. They have panic attacks; they hallucinate. For all we know, what Hargrave heard was a colony of bats or maybe a few million cave cockroaches.” When I didn’t answer, she snapped, “Dammit, Karyn, are you even listening?” (More intently than you can imagine.) “Maybe Hargrave went crazy because the singing he heard was too beautiful,” I said. “What are you talking about?” “There’s a line in the Duino Elegies by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It’s something to the effect that beauty is the beginning of terror we can just still stand. Maybe that’s the deal with the singing. It triggers a level of terror humans aren’t meant to endure. It’s too beautiful.” Her mouth set in a pinched line. I thought she was going to slap me. “Nothing’s too beautiful. That isn’t possible.” Then before I could argue, she gave me a punch on the arm that was too hard to be play. “Don’t worry, Karyn; it’s gonna be fine.” She looked back toward the motel as though somebody there had just called her name, although nobody had. She said, “See you on the surface, babe,” and hurried away. Right now, as the sound energy of the singing floods into me and Starkeweather charges, that surface Pree spoke of might as well be on one of Jupiter’s moons. Starkeweather halts just short of the sump. He spits out a lump of gum, bares his teeth in a cannibal grin, and takes a few warm-up swings with the club. I think he’s going to pound me to mud, but to any real caver, what he does next is unimaginably worse: he starts attacking the cave itself, swinging viciously, destroying elaborate lacework and yards of dripstone that have grown at a rate of a half inch per century. Clusters of wedge-shaped helictites explode overhead; stalagmites as tall as a man shatter and crash into the sump. The destruction sickens and horrifies me. Within seconds, something sublime and ethereal has been reduced to an empty mouth full of snaggled teeth. Starkeweather, surveying the rubble, cocks his head and does a bizarre little jig, like he’s shaking off a swarm of cave spiders. He shimmies and scrapes at his face while his lips form the words Shut up! Make it stop! When his eyes refocus, his red gaze finds me again. I switch off my headlamp, and the world floods away in a torrent of black. I drop to the ground and start inching along the cave floor. The headphones are a real hindrance now; they prevent me from hearing which way Starkeweather’s moving. The only sound I can feel is the singing, and that has receded to a shivery caress, a centipede skittering over my eyelashes, a salamander disturbing the roots of my hair. A hail of stones peppers my back and pings off my helmet. Suddenly, Starkeweather’s big hands paw at my legs. I kick out blindly. My boot thuds meaty groin. Then he’s on top of me, spearmint breath hot in my face, mud-slick fingers fumbling for my jugular. A blacker, thicker shade of night starts shutting down synapses, accompanied by a dazzle of sizzling white stars expiring behind my retinas. Under my hand I clutch a slab of smashed dripstone and heave it in the general direction of his head. He releases my throat but then latches on to either side of my mouth and tries to unsocket my jaw. I bite down on a finger until my teeth close on a nugget of bone, then roll away as blood fills my mouth. Next thing I know, I’m underwater. The sump’s frigid and inky, and— Starkeweather be damned—I switch my headlamp back on. I’m inside a flooded tunnel where so much silt has been stirred up, it’s like swimming through horse piss. I look for an air pocket overhead but can make out only jutting mineral walls and the segmented bodies of albino worms ghosting behind swirls of particled water. My lungs bleed for air. The sump narrows into a long, jagged throat, where beyond, water splashes over a pale, fluted ledge. Between me and the air glitters a gauntlet of stone cudgels and knives. My cave pack rips off and my oversuit’s torn. Dark red snakes squiggling too close alarm me until I realize I’m batting away my own blood. My head punches the surface, and I heave myself onto a milk-white dome of flowstone, then collapse across it, teeth wildly clattering. Eventually, I rally enough to fill my hands with rocks and wait to see if Starkeweather follows me. A short time later, he pops to the surface floating facedown. I let him stay like that for five minutes before I grab his belt and haul him up next to me. His neck and cheeks are grotesquely ballooned. When I turn him over, jagged pebbles and mineral chips mixed with shattered enamel gush out of his mouth in a torrent of red. I want to think Starkeweather was already dangerously unstable and would have acted out sooner or later, but I don’t really believe it. I know the singing has unhinged him to the point of attacking the cave with his teeth—the same sounds Mamoudi and Hargrave must have heard, and that Pree, if she’s still alive, is hearing right now. It feels stronger and a helluva lot closer than it did before I passed through the sump. Those previously faint waves of energy are now sharp and urgent, a persistent scratching at various parts of my body, like a frantic child seeking entry to a house at one door and one window after another. But the images accompanying the sensations aren’t so innocuous: a debased horde of humanity crammed into a stadium of bleeding, cruelly crushed bodies, on their knees weeping and howling. Heads thrown back, ready for the knife, keening mad invocations to an obscene deity. Their blood soaks the earth, out of which bloom stone flowers brimming with nectar and death. The vision claws at my heart and I hear my own voice telling me to get moving, to find Hargrave and Pree and get out. It’s hard to obey. I go on. The next chamber confounds me: a sprawling catacomb dripping with soda-straw stalactites and mounded with nodular masses of calcite popcorn. Crystals of moonmilk, a carbonate material the texture of cream cheese, festoon the floor. None of it corresponds to any maps I’ve seen. Even worse are the braided mazes of lava tubes offering a bewildering array of possible paths deeper into the cave’s interior. But the cave, in its infernal sentience, appears to respond. The energy of the singing amplifies, the frequencies becoming imperative, like the head of a silky mallet pinging a flesh xylophone. Letting it guide me, I scramble up a succession of ledges to access a passageway midway up the wall. Its coiled path empties into an angular chamber that resembles a vandalized ossuary: stone pillars surrounding a scattering of femurs, ribs, clavicles, and fragments of skull. That the bones have lain here since long before cavers first discovered the Brotterling is made clear by the centuries-old webs of calcite deposits that veil them. I pick my way through the boneyard as quickly as possible. Beyond it, my headlamp illuminates the area from where the sound energy seems to emanate—a lavish display of boxwork about four feet overhead, where calcite blades project at angles from the cave walls, creating a dense and elaborate honeycomb. Between the mineral blades gleam dark seams, fistulas of ebony pulsing like fat heaps of caviar that vibrate with an avid, luminescent life. Fine, blood-red webbing threads through the black, a network of alien capillaries that carries not blood but warm, coppery sound—it seeps under my scalp and teases behind my ears, seeking to peel back and penetrate the soft, vulnerable creases of brain. If I get out of here alive, I know what I’ll tell Boone: the singing’s not random or chaotic; it has distinct meters and color tones, and it pulses with dark languor underlaid with vicious intent. I will tell him the creators of this song are not human, but not unsentient, either. And if the term life-form applies to them at all, it’s a life in service only to the obliteration of all others. Long stretches of spellbound time pass as I stand here, watching the tiny caviar mouths pulse and burble out a black saliva of sound that feels ripe and almost sexually decadent. Avid and succulent and, yes—Mathew Hargrave nailed it—delicate, too. I want to slather my hands in the mineral meat between those basalt blades, squeeze up fistfuls of its alien iridescence and lather it into my pores, let it replace all the blood in my body with its unholy wails. I take off my helmet and hurl it away. Then I reach up to remove the headphones. And stop. Above me, imbedded into the hivework, loom strange columns worked into the stone, skeletal formations lifting toward the obsidian sky. Sections are patterned with ovoids and creases of lighter stone, the pale areas inlaid with vertical striations of crimson. The sight wallops the breath from my chest. One of the columns is watching me. Basalt doesn’t bleed, but burst eyeballs and lacerated skin weep red down the sides of the dripstone cloaking two human forms in their mineral shrouds. Mathew Hargrave has been almost entirely consumed. Crusts of muscle and gashed bone jut out from his stone sarcophagus. Only his upper chest, the arms tucked into his torso like folded wings, and his slack, swollen face are still recognizably human. His remains are being played like a bone flute as torturesong rasps from his mouth. But Pree, oh Pree, is another matter. Her time inside the Brotterling has been briefer than Hargrave’s; less of her has been entombed. Rigid and ashen-faced, she balances on a narrow outcrop a few feet above, tarry squiggles of hair falling over the rags of her clothing. Her mouth convulses in torment. Skeins of sound tangle in her teeth and snake from her lips. Tendrils of it adhere to her face. The frequency of the vibrations chugs to the lowest registers, rich and mellow, bassoon-like, the notes unspooling in hypnotic spirals, so that each births the next lower note on the scale, and all the while, Pree’s terrified eyes tell me the truth: it’s a death song and she can’t help but sing it. Black rings frame the edge of my vision as Pree’s silent screams flail me. Her body spasms. A rent opens under her breast as the slender spear she’s impaled on exits her chest in a gleaming red fist. Behind two snapped ribs, I glimpse a gray, pulpy thing beating feebly. The ledge is slick and cushiony, weirdly flesh-like, when I climb up, wrap my arms around her, and try to lift her free from the stone. Crimson bubbles erupt from her mouth. She tries to form words. I put my face close to hers as she exhales. Her death-rattle breath goes into me like an intubation tube, rancid and chokingly floral. There are no last words, no blessing, just a sob that’s a truncated ode to damnation as she bleeds and convulses in front of me. And I leave her. God help me, I abandon her there and begin the torturous trek to the surface, a wet, nasty, soul-crushing ordeal, while with every step, I expect the cave to crush or consume me. Most of the way, when I’m not using my hands to climb or to crawl, I clutch at the headphones, terrified they’ll fall off and the singing will overpower and annihilate me. Yet despite hours of exhaustion and terror, somehow I prevail. The passages, in fact, seem to widen as I pass through, the skin-you-alive cold of the sump is less heart-stoppingly frigid, the waypoints more easily spotted. Even the terrifying Bypass, outside of which Mamoudi’s body still sprawls, feels smooth as a tube and excretes me effortlessly. When I finally reach the surface, blinking and bedazzled by the afternoon light, a small army of cavers, media, and National Guard are assembled, as another team of cavers prepares to go down. Boone’s there among them. Seeing me alive, his eyes well, as do mine. I tear off the headphones and sweet sound rushes in, the wind whistling, a truck backfiring, the crowd erupting into ecstatic cheers to see someone come out alive. Then they get a good look at me and my appearance—soaked, shivering, smeared with cave dirt and blood—shocks them silent. As one, they reel back. Finally the braver ones gather their wits and being firing off questions. What happened? What’s down there? Is anyone else still alive? But these are not words the way I remember them. What I hear is a saw-toothed cacophony, an unwholesome chorale—discordant, repellant, impure. I want to rush back inside the cave to get away from their cawing, but I remember that first, I have something important to do. I must warn them of the terrible danger, so I focus my mind and conjure the sounds I will need. When I know what I must say, I run toward Boone, who is already beckoning me. I scream, Get back! Get away from the cave! Everyone inside is dead! But that’s not what comes out. An excruciating hitch unlocks in my chest as an arcane melody, a kind of cryptic trilling, slithers free and soars to the winds—the feral and wondrous, delicate song birthed from the mouths of monsters, from Pree’s mouth into mine—into theirs. Madness made tangible. Contagion by sound. It spews from my lips—a song of such deadly beauty and unholy allure that I experience only the briefest frisson of horror—an emotion something inside me instantly quells—when their mouths fall open, songstruck, enthralled, and they begin to rend their own flesh and tear each other apart. I understand this is how it must be. I go on, unfazed by the carnage, undeterred by the din. For I am the throat of the Delicate Singers. In the cities, the towns, in the streets, and beyond, I know others are waiting to hear me.

From Horror photos & videos July 03, 2018 at 08:00PM

[youreghanamissme]

Hey There, Brown Booger

a11/14/2017

It's that time of year again-- when I'll have to filter my tears, my sweat, and every drop of water imaginable because the rain has finished. The landscape has reverted back to its tan and dusty self. I can no longer leave anything of value near the windows overnight lest I want to a nice coat of dust on it in the morning. My boogers are red-brown, and soon, my hacking cough caused by the dust will return in full force. Moto drivers have already started to wear their face masks, some of which perform double duty as a fashion statement (fuzzy cheetah print is all the rage right now, y'all). It's been a while since I've sat down and typed about myself. I wish I could say it is because I'm a very, very important person who hasn't a modicum of time to spend on my arse, detailing the contents of my crazy life to the internet. Nope, nada, nein! Idleness is three-fifths of existence in country. Henceforth, the abridged capitulation of the past few months for my five readers out there (hey peeps!)...

I.       Wake Me Up When September Ends

Half a year later, and GLOW/BRO camp still lives! One of my favorite campers had been reminding me to visit her community for a while, and I wanted to! But life happens, so instead, I invited her to mine :) She's a Gonja by tribe, so I thought it would be cool to show her a little taste of how we live it up in the heart of Dagomba land. Her stay was short but sweet. She wanted to continue living a slice of my siliminga (foreigner) lifestyle, but she couldn't bear to be apart from her mother for too long. Her siblings don't help their mother out at the market. Honest, my few days with Gifty were some of the most rewarding and intense bonding moments I've had as a mentor. Spending time with her illuminated a fact of Ghanaian life that I already knew but never fully internalized until Gifty shared with me the hardships of her life—that children in Ghana are forced to deal with the burden of adulthood far too early. We cried, we laughed, we watched a lot of movies and played a lot of checkers... Youth camps may be a finite venture in the Peace Corps realm of projects, but I say participate if you can. Or, just work with youth through volunteership or something. If not for GLOW/BRO I wouldn't have met some of the most intelligent, self-motivated, and hopeful young people in Ghana.

Casa de Deeshini was lit in September! Thankfully not literally. The end of the month marked the Fire Festival, a traditional Dagomba celebration. The story goes something like this:

A long, long time ago a Dagomba prince went missing. His father—the Chief—and the community members scoured the land for him. At the edge of the community they found him asleep in a tree. They concluded that the tree was evil for stealing their prince from them. They rescued him, and to punish the tree, they threw flaming torches at it. And every year following the prince's abduction, they would set a tree on fire with flaming torches to commemorate the return of the prince and to penalize the tree.

I wasn't able to go last year because I was at OpSmile in Tamale, so I knew I HAD to go to the one in my community this year or else I would forever regret it. And y'all... IT. WAS. LIT. ...LITERALLY!! I have never seen nor experienced so much energy in my community. Hell, I have never seen so many people out and about in my community. There was so much food and drumming and singing, and people were so, so kind. We made torches; we gave torches away; people gave us torches... I loved it. Every single minute of it. I got such a high from the cumulative energy of the whole experience. I invited a few PCV's to come and join in on the festivities where my community lit not one, but THREE trees on fire. We were conked after Tree #2 and headed back to decompress and catch some Z's, but I have never danced, screamed, yelled, sang, and ran with such intensity or felt such ecstasy as I have at Fire Fest. I truly felt beloved and accepted by my community at that moment, and I will forever hold onto those feels when PC life isn't looking so bright.

  II.    It's Scorpio Season, Bitches

October was so intense that I was barely in my community. I had a lot of workshop prep going on that took me out of site (more on that below). It was also my birthday month, the race in Accra, and Halloween (one of my Top 5 favorite holidays of all time)!

It was a little embarrassing this year. I forgot how old I was. I did the math and thought I lost a year of my life, culminating in one of the most pitiful weeks in the history of my existence (sorry, PCV friends who had to deal with my woes and existential crisis), but then I realized I did the math wrong and felt young and relieved (who needs to swim in a tub of virgin blood to retain your youth when you can just buy a calculator?)! Woo-hoo! But then it made me think... is my shitty memory due to the antimalarial pills or am I just truly deplorable in simple arithmetic? The jury is still out.

I celebrated my most recent revolution around the sun with my long-lost twin... who just happens to be from the other side of United States of America (South Carolina, holla at yer guuurl). Something was amiss when I found out that Allie and I both had an unhealthy obsession with costume/ period dramas, chiefly of the British persuasion. And then she told me she used to be a museum docent (!! One of my dream jobs!! Up there with bartender). And when I I found out we had the same birthday... OH LAWD.

It all made sense. We are basically the same person. Once our mutual love for Antiques Roadshow was uncovered, it was basically like the universe was fucking around. What else was there for us to do? Throw a joint costume birthday party, duh.

October 23rd, dudes. I made acquaintances write it on their calendar, and I'm not even ashamed.

But we celebrated the day before because, y'know, the weekend.

She dressed up as Squints from The Sandlot (ugh, a classic!). I dressed up as a deadbeat-nik. Yeah, YEEEAH. Y'all aren't the only ones who didn't think it was punny/ funny. It's fine though. I chuckled to myself. It also gave me the opportunity to finally, after a year and a half, wear that beret that I got in Accra. KG had proclaimed time and again, “Di, I don't know why you bought that fucking beret. It's a million degrees outside. YOU'LL NEVER WEAR IT.”

I whatsapped her a photo of me in the beret.

It was super fun. Friends came and dressed up, even though some of them hate costume parties, DIY costume parties even more so. I had a grand ol' time, and I thank the folks who made it out and those who wished me a HBD.

A couple days after my superspecialawesome day was the regional Tamale Spelling Bee. My homegirl Sarah is involved with the organization/ event, having volunteered last year. It seemed like such a cool opportunity that I asked and received permission to help out too. I'm not well-versed in the logistics, but the brightest of the bunch in Tamale will travel down to Accra to participate in the national spelling bee. Ghana is the only country in West Africa that participates in the International Spelling Bee held by Scripps. The winner of the national spelling bee gets to go to America to participate in the Scripps competition. They also receive a cash prize (thousands of Cedis, dude), material gifts, and a trip to South Africa or something. Their teacher gets to accompany them too, so it's not just the student benefiting. It's such a cool opportunity, and I'm sad to say that the students (Primary 6 to JHS 2 are eligible) in the north do not have as great an advantage as those in the more southern regions, especially those from Greater Accra or Tema with their ipads and better, more consistent education. But to see the Northern students try their hardest made my heart swell. These students were so bright that some stiff competition will not diminish their shine!!

There were two parts to the regional contest. A written comprehension portion and a verbal spelling portion. The combined scores determined who was going to go to Accra. At the end of the verbal spelling portion, after students had been spelling for over two hours, many remained, but only five students were supposed to be selected. The spellers were exhausted, and somehow the MC of the event asked her boss, the event organizer, if he would allow to send the remaining six spellers to Accra. In a moment of unexplained virtue, he was convinced (sucks for that seventh student that was eliminated...), and the crowd erupted into cheers and whoops and whistles. Just pure happiness, y'all.

 After the Bee, the Accra International Marathon happened. I participated. I didn't die. #praisebe #underhiseye

It was awesome to see so many expats, Ghanians, children, and students participating in the race. I even ran into (not literally, thank jah!) a colleague from an NGO in the North at the 10K starting point! Pardon my smugness, but I wasn't last! In the scheme of life, it doesn't matter as much as the fact that I finished! WOO-HOO!! It was such a thrill. And I felt overwhelmed with joy when I heard the friendly cheers calling out my name near the finish line. These voices were familiar... these voices could only come from loud PCV's who DGAF!! It was bliss to see my friends there. The best thing to come out of training and completing the race was my new found appreciation for running. I have said in the past that I hate running. I often scream it at the top of my lungs when people ask me my views on the very subject, “I. HAAATE. RUNNINGGG!!”

I hate it less now. Part of it may be my assumption that “running” meant going hard, 100% of the time. I'm more lax about it. I walk a little here and there, and I always listen to a good podcast while I'm out completing a run. Take home story: if I can be converted to the Church of Somehow-Running, you can be too. Even though it often appears so, it's not some sort of cult. It just feels nice after you finish (It's those goddamn endorphins). I even kinda feel like a lump if I skip running for too many days. I'm hoping to one day train towards a half marathon and then, maybe, a full marathon, kindasortanotreallyidunno.

Whenever I'm in Accra, which is seldom, I try to couple my visit with a medical purpose because all medical distins are taken care of there. Sucks for folks in the Northern and Upper regions. I went to the dentist for some tooth pain that had been recurring for months. The PC Medical Officer had been telling me that we should “wait and see” about the pain for the past half-year. Whelp, I got it sort of checked out. It's a cavity, underneath a filling of an older cavity... probably. They weren't 100% certain since their x-ray machine was broken and they couldn't fix it before I left for the north. Dang-diddily-nabbit. Add that to my diminishing hearing abilities (to be checked out next time I'm in the country capital as well) and frequent questionable moles (sunscreen is moot when you sweat it all off), and I tell ya what—Ghana, maybe, has a vendetta against me.

  III. I'm An Unauthorized Authority Because I Have a Degree In This

I was chosen to be a trainer for the 2017 Nutrition IST (In Service Training). YASSSS. YAAASSSSS. Started as a participant, now I'm here!

It was a lot of work and planning, and my team was fabulous. The star qualities of this IST compared to the other IST's offered in country are that a female counterpart is required, that female CP's can bring their child, and that there are translators available, so English comprehension/ a formal education is not a requirement. The latter two solutions are imperative in overcoming many of the barriers that prevent women (the primary caretakers and often the MVP when it comes to nutrition in the household) from going to Peace Corps Ghana trainings. I am so proud that the Nutrition IST was so inclusive and mindful of the mamas.  It's empowering to the women that participate, and it's encouraging as trainers and as PCV's to witness their growth and excitement.

I have to give plenty of kudos to the Moringa Man and the Health PCVLT (Peace Corps Volunteer Leader-Trainer ?? I don't know. Too many letters in this acronym) for arranging curriculum that is interactive and varied to meet the needs of our audience.

The Ghanaian diet is mostly carbs and fats because it's cheaper to, say, pound a cash crop like maize into a ball and eat it with groundnut stew, a soup made of a lot of oil (more fat means more calories AND it helps preserve the stew) and another accessible crop, than to buy fresh fruits and vegetables. Poverty already affects access to vegetables and meat. The dry season—a time when food is scarce and can be more costly to families whose plush harvest money has already been spent—makes good nutrition even harder. Knowing that food security is an issue, we did our best to come up with applicable alternatives that Ghanaians can explore, highlighting the nutritional benefits of staple crops but emphasizing the addition of others that are available in the market.

We put the men to work in the kitchen!

We did a LOT of cooking demos, often with fortified recipes for existing Ghanaian meals. We discussed the benefits of breastfeeding, certain micro-nutrients during pregnancy, the correlation between food safety/hygiene and malnutrition caused by frequent diarrhea, and so much more. Because the crops and the culture of the northern regions of Ghana are vastly different from the southern regions, we had two separate workshops.

The best surprise is hearing updates from PCV's who attended and their stories about their empowered CP's holding space to talk about nutrition in their communities. Moments like these remind me of the reasons why I'm here and why I choose to stay. I have a lot more thoughts on the Nutrition IST that I'd like to spotlight in a post apart, just because there are so many facets to it. Look forward to it soon, hopefully haha

  It's November now, so I can stop listening to Christmas music in the privacy of my own room and start singing “Santa Baby” off-key in public. More updated posts coming somehow-soon (read: as soon as I finish my session plans for future nutrition IST’s, eek!)

[ceaselessly-into-the-past]

belonging

I’ve had a horrific cold the last three days, so as a result this post will probably be even less coherent than usual. I suppose it was about time that my body caught up with my mind in terms of health. 

I skipped last night’s 7-10 orchestra rehearsal and plan on skipping all of today - I haven’t missed any of my Wednesday classes so far save for theory, which I’ve now missed four times. The first two were when I woke up with terrific migraines and knew immediately I wouldn’t be able to function in class. The third time was when my tracheostomy tube fell out in my sleep and the hole in my neck had almost closed up completely.

I looked in the bathroom mirror and squinted. At first, in my just-awoken, bleary-eyed state I thought, a stake of horror shooting up through my body, that it had closed up completely. But no - as I scrambled on top of the toilet to get a closer look, I saw that there was a small dot of black in the flesh of that hollow part at the base of your neck. No bigger than two millimeters or so in diameter.

Fuck, I thought, I have to have this cut open.

The problem was that I would have to involve my parents and also notify the school of what happened. And I had no doubt that they would question my ability to live alone in the dorms.

I would not go back to my parents.

No fucking way.

My autonomy was in danger, and so I proceeded to do the following:

I wiped the end of a pen - where the gently-sloped cone-shaped cap was - with an alcohol swab.

Looking in the mirror, I slowly fed it into my neck, not very deep at all, not even up to the rubber part that you hold when writing with it, and carefully pushed. I supposed this was akin to what anal sex feels like, just on a smaller scale and in a completely different location.

Every so often I pulled the pen away and observed. The hole, just as I thought it would, was growing back to size.

I also noticed that sticking a pen in my neck hurt a lot.

After twenty minutes of gentle pushing I decided it was big enough.

I reinserted the tracheostomy apparatus.

Blood slowly tricked down my chest, but that was okay. Blood more often than not stops after a while.

I got the idea from one of those stupid gore-fest Saw movies. Yes, the one where the guy is chained up to a bathtub and he has to cut off his leg to free himself. That’s the first one, which is actually not bad. The series definitely went progressively to shit after that.

When I was in seventh grade I suddenly became obsessed with the concept of death - what a fascinating thing it was, to think that there’s simply nothing after your body expires for whatever reason. Complete nothingness. It was thrilling to me. 

After I discovered the existence of the Saw franchise, I often watched video compilations of every ‘test’ in the movies. One of them involved a man whose head was encased with a box that was slowly filling with water. The solution became apparent to him - he had a pen in his pocket, and he had to perform a tracheostomy on himself by piercing his throat with the pen so he could breathe without his nose or mouth.

What fascinated me most about the Saw deaths was that there was always a way out. It was interesting to see who made it and who didn’t. Were the puzzles not lethal, I used to think, this would be an exciting game show.

I was not quite sound of mind in the seventh grade. But I suppose it came in handy in the end.

And now I’m missing theory for the fourth time, because of a bad cold.

In other news, I’ve found some friends, the process of which started quite a while ago.

The annual kick-off-the-year Circle Line Cruise, where Juilliard kids get to go on a short cruise down the Hudson River, around the Statue of Liberty and back up again, was on the 6th of September, 2017. That wasn’t the point, though - nobody gave a shit about the cruise. There was fucking booze on that ship, and kids that were old enough got their starting drinks for the night there while the underaged looked on wistfully. They would get their chance, though, in just a few hours - because immediately after the Circle Line Cruise would come a veritable plethora of wrecked-for-school parties across Manhattan. I managed to get into one on West 68th street. Interestingly enough, Michael - the host - lived in the same complex as the instrument dealer I bought my most recent cello from a few years ago.

Needless to say, I launched myself headfirst into that shit. I walked in and immediately got a shot, then another drink, then a mixed drink to lay off the hard stuff. Mixed drinks, I should mention, are great.

Eventually and inevitably we got a noise complaint from some neighbor and the party had to be cleared out before we got busted. There were whisperings, though, of an afterparty in the back room for those that stayed behind. Naturally, I stayed behind - and this was how I met Andrew.

Andrew, along with another older student, were rolling joints in the back room, and about eight other kids were sitting around and passing around what I know like to call ‘the weeds’. I approached Andrew and without my even having to ask he handed me a freshly-lit blunt. As I got started on it we made conversation - we had a mutual friend named Philip, who I knew in Pre-College and was now a third year. Philip had made a Facebook group called Juilliard Memescript Archives that we occasionally posted in. Andrew was a second year and, as I soon learned, was 'the’ Juilliard drug guy. Andrew, however, was not some pale, half-present white douchebag - he was darker-skinned, for one, and wore glasses and dressed smartly. It was as if he had walked out of an alternate version of the 2015 film Dope in which the protagonists were nerdy Latino classical musicians. 

‘When’s your birthday?’ Andrew asked, and I told him that it was in two weeks or so.

‘Really? Shit man, you know what, I’m gonna host a party for you. It’s gonna be fuckin lit. We’ll have some booze and weed and also, I like cooking. I cook a lot because I have my own place and it’s the only way I can get good food around here. The cafeteria is hopeless, you know. Juilliard doesn’t give a fuck about what they feed us. We’ll make some really good food and get wrecked.’

I awkwardly thanked him. In the back of my mind I carefully noted that this might just be some kind of idiotic promise that people make when they’re especially drugged out, but I held on to some hope that finally, someone had reached out to me.

Sure enough, a week later Andrew messaged me asking when my birthday was again and what kind of food I liked. I told him again and explained that I actually couldn’t have solid food, so he should really consult whoever he was going to be inviting.

On the 24th of September I went up to West 120-somethingth street to Andrew’s apartment. It ended up being a small party, with just me, Andrew, Philip, and his extroverted girlfriend Helen, who was also a 3rd year. It was a Sunday and we all watched the new episode of Rick and Morty while sipping the shittiest vodka I’d ever tasted and tried getting high on the little weed available to us. Andrew kept getting messages requesting various drugs and at one point he left the room to make a sale at his front door.

About three weeks later, I got a message from Helen asking if I wanted to be the cellist for her ChamberFest group. Chamberfest was an intensive program at Juilliard where participating students would come back a week early from winter break and spend that week preparing an entire chamber music work to perform in concert for the rest of the returning students. I had tried putting together a ChamberFest group to do Shostakivoch’s String Quartet 6 in c minor - a chamber music epic if there ever was one, I highly recommend everyone listen to it at least once - but things hadn’t quite worked out. Helen told me she was trying to get a group to do Schubert’s Trout Quintet.

‘Yeah, definitely!’ I replied.

The next day I met the other four members in the chamber music office to fill out our application form - Helen, Andrew, Michael (that host from the cruise afterparty), and a girl named Natalie. All save for Helen were second-years.

A week later, the chamber music office emailed us informing that our request to work on Trout Quintet had been approved.

Since then, my home has been our group chat. All of us happen to be, as Helen put it, ‘waaaaaay into not being sober’. So our plans, naturally, revolved around working our asses off during the day and getting fucking destroyed at night. There are talks of dropping acid at some point and evening weed rehearsals to try and get some new ideas on the piece.

It’s so funny. I considered my life until college to be extremely sheltered - I never went out often with friends, I certainly never partied or drank or did anything of that sort. But here I was with Helen, who was notorious for dealing with the shit in her life and in school by smoking weed daily; Andrew, who was Drug Boi(TM) and had been caught alongside his roommate with bags of weed in his dorm room last year (and had luckily only been admonished); Michael, who had an infamous anti-establishment streak with the Juilliard administration (though to be fair, we all did) and didn’t hesitate to trash them in Facebook posts; and Natalie, who seemed to really like wine. 

Our philosophy was: Fuck this school, fuck how it disproportionately puts pressure and stress on its students, we’re going our own way and we’re still gonna be good at our fucking art while we do it so fuck you.

I feel like I belong to something now. It’s a feeling I haven’t felt since I last saw my friends from high school in June. But it’s rushing back now, and I feel a new life welling up in the future.

tl;dr ChamberFest is gonna be fucking lit.

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

i don’t like “ship it” in that i don’t care about them like that or feel any emotional investment in the concept but the farther we get into gundam wing the more deeply i feel that this entire show makes about 3000% more sense if zechs and treize have fucked