#in construction if anyone’s interested. just raise your hand and i’ll talk to you afterwards. thank you’ and then the assembly ended

[kattegat-kittycat]

Fates Entwined, part IX: Claim Me

The story so far and a short synopsis are over here.

 A/N: Fun fact, the Head Meadow at Ribe is in fact believed to be called “head meadow”, “Hovedengen”, because the Vikings used to display the heads of pirates and criminals on stakes in said field as a warning to others. Depending on who you ask, people will tell you they *might* have done that or they *definitely* did it.

Fair warning, there is a slight dub-con scene in this chapter, also, sex, but nothing shocking really if you have watched the show. But if something like that bothers you, then this might not be for you. Also, this one became kinda long, you might wanna bring snacks ;)

Lastly, thanks to the people who asked to be tagged: @youbloodymadgenius @xnnskwjeheb2j @blonddnamedhandz  it’s appreciated and I hope you’re not already regretting being tagged in here.

 You love to bring me down But I'll stay to hear you out Some might say that I'm the fallen one

Free me now Crawl out of my soul

Bring it on Tear me down May the world go round and round At the end of desire Your world falls down and dies

(Entwine – Break Me)

 It was a short ride to the marshes beyond the Head Meadow, where the remains of my uncle’s head and the heads of the other traitors could still be seen. But once I had reached the edge of the marshes, I had to leave my horse behind and go on by foot, too treacherous were the paths through here and more than once did we lose a good horse to the bogs. I had felt around my head for Ivar, but he wasn’t there, so he was probably awake planning things somewhere in Kattegat. I set my foot on the sandy path that led me past small bogs and ponds, until I saw the first signs of the völva’s homestead. There was a large wooden frame that held the hide of a horse, a few feet further down the road a ram on a similar wooden construct. Then I saw the small hut, which – to be honest – reminded me a bit of Floki’s home. Yrsa was sitting in front of it, sifting through herbs she was preparing to dry. Her head shot up, when I moved closer, the sharp green eyes in her ageless, yet old face scanning me and trying to see through me. Even from where I was, a couple hundred meters away, I could see the shock in her features. This was nothing she had ever expected to see walking across her doorstep.

Still, when I reached her, she silently motioned to a rickety stool across from her and made me sit. I stared at her; she was still the same weird old lady, I remembered, but how could that be? It had been at least ten winters since I had last seen her, but she hadn’t changed a bit. Her long white hair fell onto her shoulders, which were warmed by the pelt of a white wolf. Beneath that the same dark brown clothes she had worn a decade ago.

She shook her head. “Those are similar clothes, my child, not the same. But that is not why the two of you are here today, is it?”

Confused for a moment, I looked around, but couldn’t see anyone except for me and her. She sighed, slightly exasperated. Then I caught on. She was talking about me and Ivar. I almost groaned about my own stupidity, which made her chuckle.

“So, you are not stupid, only nervous, but why is that?” she asked me, her eyes studying my face with unveiled interest.

“I… I always thought you to be scary, to be quite honest. And I don’t even know where to start, what to ask you, what to tell you…” I started rambling.

She chuckled. Again. “My child, I understand that we and our way of life might seem scary, but all we want to do, is help the living. Help folks like you, caught in between issues of the divine. And when it comes to what to tell me, you can tell me everything. Or nothing at all. Most of it I already know just by looking at you and feeling your…cracked aura. So, the easiest way to start this is to tell me what it is you want to know.”

I looked at the earth to her feet and felt incredibly vulnerable and helpless for the first time. For the first time, I realised how deep this thing went and how little Ivar and I knew.

“What… what is happening to us? What has been done to us? Why?” I had to hold back tears. Speaking those three questions made it real. Something we had no power or influence over had been done to us, and it did something to us, and we didn’t even know why Aslaug had done it.

Yrsa smiled calmly. “She didn’t know any better. She was afraid of things she had seen and she wanted to save her little son. That is why she did it. But why the things which happened and are happening to you are going on, that is written on another page. She invoked magic, she had no experience working and the Gods grasped at their chance, because the seeds she sow fell into readily plowed and fertile earth. You and Ivar have been favoured by the Gods since you have come into this world, they had plans for you, so calling upon them to bind you into an unbreakable union was like unleashing a beast.”

My eyes found hers. “So, what exactly did she do?”

Yrsa took my hand into hers and her long and bony fingers followed the veins on the back of my hand up my forearm into the crook of my elbow. There she pressed on the most prominent vein, then pricked it with a long thorn from one of the spindly rose twigs that lay to her side. A thick droplet of blood came from the little wound and she dipped her middle finger in it, then spread the blood over the whole tip of her finger with her thumb. I looked at it, fascinated by the deep red of my own blood.

She raised her eyebrows and looked at me, then shook her head. “This is not your blood. Not yours alone. Not anymore.”

I frowned. I meant to show her the wound on my shoulder, but she raised her hand and motioned me to stop. “I know. I know all about that. I know more about you than I want to. More than I am allowed to share. But I can tell you a few things. Do you know what blood was used in the blót ritual during your wedding? Which God was supposed to watch over your marriage?”

“I was told we were going to sacrifice a goat’s blood, so Thor, I guess?” Margarete had told me about the goat that had been bled dry, so they would have enough blood for the ritual.

“A lie. Your marriage was consecrated to Freya with the blood of a sow being sacrificed. Aslaug had the blood swapped out. She wanted to make sure you would have children, I suppose. What she didn’t know or didn’t care enough about, was the fact that the blood that runs through you is that of a magical woman. Like Aslaug, your mother was a seer, and we völvas and seers are under Freya’s protection. What this did to you, was amplify the powers that lay dormant within you in one single moment, making you something more than a seer but less than a völva the moment the blood touched you. And weddings to magical women, they are tricky. Are you familiar with the stories of Hávamál?“

I tried to remember the things my mother had taught me, but the name did not sound familiar.

“It is said within its verses that you risk getting trapped in a magical bond. Which is exactly what happened to the two of you. This magical bond is only hinted at in the Hávamál, but either the two partners are suitable, which means they will be bound together and share one life for the rest of their life and in the afterlife, or they are not, which means that the husband will die a slow, drawn out and painful death. You can probably already tell, what happened in your case.”

I blinked a few times. “So Aslaug made me…”

Yrsa smiled an unsettling smile: “Yes, she made you one of us.”

“And then she bound me and Ivar together for life.”

“No, you will not be able to escape each other in the afterlife, either. He dies, you die. You die, he dies. Where ever one goes, the other will follow and nobody will be able to keep you apart.”

I swallowed hard. Sat in silence for a moment. Looked out over the marshes around us. This was all too much too fast.

“And is there any possibility to break this bond?” I did not exactly want to end things with Ivar, I just wanted to know if it was even possible to not get a flesh wound everytime he decided to ride into battle.

“For that, you would have to wage war on Asgaard and defeat the Gods, I fear.”

“Huh”, I pondered for a moment. “And this connection we have? Why do we keep seeing what is happening in the other’s life?”

She shrugged. “That’s part of your unique bond. But mostly it is things that move you on an emotional level, the two of you will see. And I believe with some practice of your abilities, you could gain more control over it, maybe even guide and control the thoughts you let him have a part in. The things you see and access.”

I took a deep breath. “My abilities? And what exactly are those?”

And this was, where Yrsa smiled broadly. “So many questions… I have given you a lot of answers today and I believe you have heard a lot your mind needs some time to work on. This is also the one question I am unable to give you a straight answer to, because the truth is, nobody knows until you start practicing those. So, if you want to know and explore the answer to this question, you know where to find me. For today, it has been quite enough for your pretty little head.” She got up and went into her hut, and I was wondering if I should just leave, when she came back and gave me a small vial with a greenish-yellow liquid.

“If you wouldn’t mind, you might want to give that to your friend from Hedeby. It helps with physical trauma. She might need that sometime soon.” I got up, slightly confused, then went to pay Yrsa for her services, but she held up her hands.

“It would be enough if you came here and worked with me when the dust has settled. See your husband off to fight the Saxons, afterwards we will meet again.” And with that she turned around, making it clear that now, now she wanted me to leave.

 *

 Ivar knew everything she had told me by the next morning and seemed taken aback by some of the information. He had not thought that his mother had done something that went so deep without telling him. Then again, he knew that she had wanted to save him by all means and the völva had told me that Aslaug hadn’t known herself how deep the consequences would run.

I, on the other hand, had hesitated to tell Ragnheiđur what I had come to find out. After I came back from the marshes, I found her waiting for me at the market. She jumped up as soon as she saw me riding across the bridge into the city, greeting me with an easy smile, as always. She took the reigns of my horse as I jumped off, then cocked her head.

“Did she tell you what is going on?” she then prompted.

I shrugged. “Yes. And no. I am supposed to come back when we are done with…” I waved my hands around in the general direction of all the busy goings-on around us: “With all of this. But she gave me something for you…” I felt around in my pockets for the vial and as I found it, I handed it to Ragnheiđur.

She looked at it, puzzled. “What is it?”

I frowned. “She told my, you might need it. It is for treating physical trauma.”

Ragnheiđur looked all the more confused. “But why? Am I going to get injured or hurt?”

I shrugged again. “I don’t know, all she told me, was to give it to you and well… I did. I thought maybe you knew.”

Ragnheiđur shook her head. “No, but she might know more than me, so I’ll take it. Who knows what it might be good for.” She grinned again. “Are you ready to see your husband again?”

I sighed. “Yes”, I smiled, “I am actually looking forward to seeing him again. He might not share the sentiment, though. But I never know with Ivar. I guess, Ivar never knows with himself, he is so unpredictable.”

Ragnheiđur gave a small nod, as we started toward my estate. “Just take all the time you need. I will keep everything in order over here with Ole and the council by my side.”

I looked at her profile as she led my horse and looked straight ahead. “I still don’t know how I earned that level of support from you. What do you want for your life? Why are you here?”

She looked to the ground. “I don’t know”, then she looked straight at me, “But something in me tells me that this is the right place for me to be. For now.” She smiled.

I shook my head. “You know, I would give you your own estate if you decided to stay here.”

She gave a laugh. “I might just take you up on that offer if life leads me that way. You know I love the old Hviding estate.”

“Noted.” I smiled, half hoping she would decide to stay.

 The next morning, we were on our way to Bork by boat. We did have some longboats, but as Earl Magnusson had promised to take some of the warriors on his boats, some of us also travelled aboard smaller trading ships, which also meant that we took some trading goods to Bork, maybe not to repay Magnusson for the ships, but to show good intent and work toward good neighbourly relations. I really disliked politics.

We were given a warm welcome and were able to see the forces Jutland had sent to Bork first hand. It was a proud sight, an army by itself, but only part of the greatest army our countries would ever gather. Ragnheiđur and I were still looking upon the camp all around the towns walls, when Earl Magnusson appeared behind us.

He seemed chipper enough for someone who had just had to pry his look away from my lands, lands he had wanted to incorporate into his own. But then again, if the stories were true, he and his two younger sons would leave for Northumbria and probably hoped to gain wealth over there.

“I hope you found your way to my humble lands well, Earl of Ripa?” he asked more than just politely.

I smiled back at him. “Very well, thank you very much. It was an easy enough trip with the boats. Your lands are beautiful with the fjord and the sweeping meadows. And your fleet of ships, it is impressive.”

He patted my back. “You sound just like your father. He had a knack for boats, but you knew that.”

I bowed my head and smiled to myself. My father had always been fascinated with boats and their building, that much was true.

“He was a good friend of mine, and I hope we can continue that tradition.”

I wasn’t sure how forceful I could react, but I decided to mark my territory clearly. “As long as you stay on your remarkable lands, I don’t see anything that could stand in our way.” I smiled friendly enough to show that my comment was not meant as a threat, but more of a friendly reminder.

Earl Magnusson barked a laugh. “Forgive me for that, but you will find that we all have a tendency to test boundaries, especially with a new earl in our midst. But you did well. Had I known who you are, I might have reacted differently. Then again… probably not.” He laughed again.

I shook my head with a crooked grin. Maybe I might like him a little. “I appreciate your honesty. Thank you for that.”

He shrugged. “Oh, you’ll learn about these games of power, little annoyances and small arrangements soon enough. I have always quite enjoyed politics.”

I looked at Ragnheiđur and rolled my eyes, when he looked away, something that made her smile.

“But Earl [Y/F/N]sdottir, Ragnheiđur Tokesdottir, where are my manners? Would you mind joining me and my sons for supper?”

We followed his invitation and soon found ourselves around a small table eating some meat, vegetables and bread with only him, his wife and his three sons.

“You might be a little confused as to why I asked you to be our guests this evening, but there are several things that I thought we should talk about without an audience.” The earl started after we were finished with most of the food.

I looked at him, now a little suspicious. “I am all ears, Earl Magnusson.”

He smiled at me. “You truly are your father’s daughter. He raised an intelligent woman. And I have to tell you that it plays into my cards pretty nicely, because I have to ask you a favour.”

Ragnheiđur became slightly unsettled and nervously moved in her chair, but I tried to remain calm. We had to hear him out before we could see if there was anything we had to or should do. I gave him another nod, to proceed with his request.

“I am going to join the raid against the Saxons, I guess you heard that already. I decided to stay home when Ironside wanted to explore the Mediterranean and I am still mourning the chance, but somebody had to stay here and take care of my earldom. Now, fate has intervened and my son Birger cannot join the raid, but he can very well hold my place here in Bork. I hear you are staying in Ripa as well, is that true?”

I gave him a crooked smile. “My husband doesn’t think it safe for his wife to traipse around the battlefields in a foreign country, so I will be staying in Ripa. But I will come to Kattegat to say my goodbyes to my husband, Ivar Ragnarsson. It might be the last time I will see him alive.”

Earl Magnusson smiled fondly. “Yes, yes, you should come to see him off. It is a rare gift to have a husband care so deeply for your safety. I trust that you will leave Ripa in the capable hands of your second, Ragnheiđur Tokesdottir then?” His eyes darted to her, just as she was stuffing her face.

Ragnheiđur looked up, gave a nod and tried to swallow quickly. “The one and only. I will return to Ripa as soon as our troops are off and will have a watchful eye on all matters of the earldom.”

Birger now entered the conversation. “I heard you learned to fight under Queen Lagertha, is that the truth?”

“Lagertha taught me far more than just to fight. I was her second in Hedeby before she asked me to come here with Y/N, so I learned everything necessary to lead an earldom and its people from her. She is an extra-ordinary woman, Lagertha is.” Ragnheiđur beamed.

Birger smiled at Ragnheiđur. “You sure make it sound like she is.”

Earl Magnusson looked from one to the other. “Would you be willing to help and advise my son if need be, as he will take care of Bork for me?” Birger wanted to protest, but his father shushed him with a gesture of his hand. “It’s not that I don’t trust him, but his wound is still fresh and other Earls might see it as a weakness. I don’t want to come home and find my earldom claimed by usurpers. Also, he has been away for a long time and it wouldn’t hurt for him to be able to ask the opinion of one or two people in matters of ruling a people and preparing this town for the winter.”

Ragnheiđur smiled uneasily and I frowned. Then she looked at me, looked for my stance on this matter. This conversation had taken a turn I hadn’t expected and I knew that Earl Magnusson could read it on my face.

He sighed. “To be honest, I would have asked you to consider marrying my son, but seeing that you are already married and that my son is a cripple, I cannot do that.” He chuckled, but I knew it was to hide the insecurity and slight shame he was feeling.

I cocked my head to the side. “You haven’t met my husband yet, Earl Magnusson, but I believe your son is more than able to manage your estate and earldom. However, I do understand your fear of your son seeming weak in the eyes of possible usurpers. But you should keep one thing in mind: it is always an advantage if people underestimate you. Just ask my husband and you know what I am talking about. I believe that because people are going to underestimate him, Birger will be more than fine. You have our support, but I sincerely doubt that you will need it.”

I heard Birger whisper to Ragnheiđur “What is wrong with her husband?” and Ragnheiđur answer “Nothing, he is just a cripple that cannot use his legs.”

Birger chuckled nervously, not sure if she was being serious or making a joke, but he didn’t dare ask and Ragnheiđur just shrugged and grinned at him.

“So, we will set out tomorrow morning and you will be coming with us to Kattegat, and in the meantime, Ragnheiđur will take care of Ripa and any issues Birger might experience. Do we have a deal?” Earl Magnusson asked.

I gave a nod. We had a deal.

 *

 Never before had I approached Kattegat by ship, but it was an impressive sight. The city in the heart of the fjord gently stretched across the coastal line and even a few of the rolling hills surrounding it. A shiver ran down my spine, when I smelled the familiar scent of the fjord; its sea, its fir trees, its craftsmen’s fires. It felt right to come back here, like coming home, even though deep in my heart, I knew that the only thing that made it feel that way, was the man waiting for me in this town. Even before I saw anybody else, I saw Floki stealing looks at the different boats tied in the harbour, judging their handywork, looking for differences in technique, ways to improve his own ships, if he wanted to or found anything worth adapting. I jumped off the longboat I had been on to the jetty and walked toward him, smiling, but shaking my head.

“Floki, did I just catch you stealing trade secrets from my people in Jutland?”

He jumped, looking at me with wild eyes. “I am not stealing any….Y/N! It is you!”

He took a step toward me and gave me a hug that smelled of tar and wood and I would not have wanted it any other way.

“Does Ivar know you are coming?” he then asked. “He might be in need of a little lightening up. He seems pretty intense these days.”

“I know Floki. And he should know. He should have felt me coming deep in his bones.” I smiled at the boat builder.

He shook his head. “How did Aslaug know that you would be the Skagerrak to Ivar’s Kattegat? You two are crashing into each other in heavy waves, but one without the other? Impossible.”

“How is Helga?” I asked him and his smile became strained.

“Good, she is good. She found herself a child. Tanaruz. But…” his voice faded.

“But what?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing. I don’t know.” He giggled. “Speaking of Helga, I should see how she is. But it was great seeing you again.”

I smiled after him. “You too, Floki, you too.”

Earl Magnusson appeared behind me. “So, you know your way around here, don’t you?”

When we reached the Great Hall, Torvi told us that Lagertha was in Hedeby, but also took the troops off my hands and showed them where they could set up camp. As she went with them, to show them the site, I made my way through the narrow lanes of Kattegat to see if I could find Margarete somewhere, but I didn’t exactly know where I should start, because she was no longer a slave and probably didn’t stay in their quarters anymore. Just as I considered to go to our home and look for Ivar, I bumped into Björn who came sneaking out of a house that I knew was not Torvi’s. He looked at me with wide eyes, then put his finger to his mouth. I rolled my eyes at him and we started walking a few feet into the direction of the harbour.

“Y/N, it is great to see you…I…” he began.

I just looked at him and then could not keep from breaking into laughter. He looked dishevelled and his shirt was half open and he still tried to act like nothing had happened.

“Björn, you smell of sex. And that was not Torvi’s door. It is none of my business, though, you don’t need to try to get me to keep my mouth shut. Whatever there is between the two of you should stay there. I got enough drama in my life.”

He laughed, relieved. Then threw me a sharp look. “Are you here for Ivar? Because he is going mad. He thinks father chose him for this, he wants to be our leader on this raid.”

I gave Björn a level look. “Well, he did. Your father, I mean. Still, you are not wrong in not trusting him with all that power by himself. But you would do well to consider his input. He is not as inexperienced as you assume. And he is a brilliant tactician. But you knew that already.” I smiled coldly.

Björn looked at me for a long time then shook his head. “Forever his advocate, aren’t you? I will never understand the two of you.”

I shrugged. “Somebody has to be on his side, when he is right. But can you tell me, where I can find Margarete these days?”

He pointed me into the direction of a small house Ubbe had built, and there she was, hanging the laundry. I slowed down my steps when I saw her. She looked so happy, I had to smile. When she looked up and saw me, her mouth fell open, then she started toward me, gained speed and before I could think anything of it, she hugged me tight, tears in our eyes.

“You are back! I thought, Ivar had driven you away for good!” she exclaimed, taking a little distance to look into my face.

I shook my head. “I had to take care of important business back home and Ivar just happened to speed up my departure. I cannot stay long, but I had to see you and wish my husband good luck on his raid.”

Her eyes were big and blue and innocent when she looked at me, absolutely frightened: “You cannot go back to him. You should avoid him as best you could, he is even worse than he was before he met you!”

I closed my eyes. “It is not as easy as that. Leaving him does not resolve any of our problems.”

She swallowed thickly then smiled a brilliant smile: “But you can come to our wedding! Ubbe asked me to marry him, we are getting married tomorrow. Are you coming?”

A laugh bubbled from my chest. “How could I stay away?!”

 *

 I tried to think of other people I might have to meet, other ways to delay the reunion with Ivar, not because I did not want to see him, but because I did not know, which version of him I would find today. Not even today, but the moment he saw me. Had I wronged him with the way of my departure? Probably. Had he wronged me with the way he tried to manipulate me into staying? Probably. In the end, I thought, it shouldn’t be so hard for two people who wanted to stay together, to be together. It should not be so hard for two people to love each other. I sighed and my feet slowly but steadily carried me to our home. The garden was a little less cared for, but other than that, it looked the same. My chest felt slightly compressed, which made it harder to breathe. I closed my eyes against the pictures of the past that threatened to wash over me, slightly shook my head. There was the slight prick of tears when I thought about the way we had left things. I had left things. There had been so much else to do that I had never confronted my own feelings of guilt until I saw the place it all had happened. I took a deep breath, exhaled and stepped closer, then entered the house.

“Ivar? Are you home?” I asked into the dim light inside. There was no fire in the fireplace and only little light filtered in through some cracks in the wood. I looked around the living area. Ubbe had moved out of the family home since I had left for Ripa, but judging by the belongings strewn around, Hvitserk and Sigurd still lived here with Ivar. I groaned. No wonder everything was in disarray and chaos, I shook my head, but smiled. “Hvitserk? Sigurd?” I asked, just to be sure, I was alone.

I entered Ivar’s space and put my bundle of clothes onto the bed. I looked around and found Ivar’s room unchanged, there were still the table and the stool I had sat on, when he had first washed me. I smiled a small smile. Then I saw a wooden box in one corner that hadn’t been there before. It was beautiful, probably Floki’s work. I went over and wondered what it held inside, wondering if Ivar would be angry if I had a look inside. I looked around again, as if to make sure that Ivar didn’t hide in some corner of the room, then I opened the box and peered inside. It drew the air from my lungs and I had to sit down on the ground before it, when I saw my meticulously folded wedding dress and the dried flower crown I had worn inside. I took the crown and placed it carefully on the table, then took out the dress and held it up, held it to my cheek to feel the material. We hadn’t been able to get the bloodstains out, so I had never been able to wear it again. When I looked back at the box, I saw something else inside. It was a beautiful necklace that held a moonstone in its center. I knew it, it had been my mother’s and I had given it to Aslaug when I had arrived in Kattegat. I stared at it on the bottom of the box, when I heard his familiar sing-song voice from the door.

“Look who finally came home.” His voice was neither hostile, nor friendly, but then he saw what I held in my hands. His eyes widened and his mouth set in a strict line. “Put that back.” He demanded.

I took a last look at my mother’s necklace then folded up the dress as neatly as I could and let it as well as the flower crown drop into the box, which I closed.

Ivar gave a small snort. “Look at you, listening to what I tell you. Must be the first time.” He crawled into the room, then dragged himself up onto the bed.

I looked at him from my spot on the ground. His face had grown sharper and his eyes seemed darker than before, though that might have been the light. I smiled slightly at his sight. Looking at him still made me feel like I was right where I was supposed to be.

He looked down to the ground. “Same with me.” He said, answering to my unspoken inner monologue. Then his eyes went wide and the two of us just stared at each other.

“She could not tell me how deep and how far this goes.” I told him.

He gave a nod. “I know.”

Then the two of us just looked to the ground, two people wanting to be close but too torn apart by the words said and deeds done before. So we simply breathed and sat together in our awkward mixture of feelings. I could feel my own feelings echo within Ivar, which made me breathe a little easier. If neither of us knew how to go on from this, we could choose a path together.

“Ivar, I…”

He shook his head. “Don’t. Don’t try to explain anything. It’s not worth it. I will be leaving for Northumbria in a few days and you will be back in Ripa. I know why you had to leave. But you also have to understand why I have to leave.”

I hung my head. Then looked up and smiled at him crookedly.

He closed his eyes and let himself fall backwards onto his bed. “For what it is worth, you are a good leader. Politics? You are better at it than I thought.”

“Please, come back to me.” was all I said. It was all I really wanted. For him to be with me. To really be with me.

Another snort. “And how do you imagine that? Me settling down with you in Ripa? Leaving Kattegat to that murderous snake on the throne right now? Or her son, the ‘oh so brave and strong’ Björn Ironside?” He sat up and looked at me with fire in his eyes. He was too consumed by his own mission right now to talk about us. So I changed the subject:

“Speaking of Björn, who is he bedding now? I ran into him sneaking out of a house that was not Torvi’s. He tried to keep me quiet.”

Ivar rolled his eyes. “His mother’s lover, that Astrid. But well, at least he is not offering up his arse to other men.”

I was slightly confused at that comment. “What?”

“Sigurd. Where Björn doesn’t care about his lovers’ other partners, Sigurd doesn’t care if they are men or women. He just… he’s into people.” Ivar said with a playful lightheartedness that sounded false.

I shrugged. “Well, I can see no fault in that.”

“Not unless you let yourself be mounted like a donkey. He is too submissive to be a son of my father.”

“You never liked him and he never liked you. Don’t let that cloud your judgement when it comes to his sexuality. Remember, you have to be a united front if you want to beat the Saxons.” I replied.

“I hate it when you try to reason with me, because sometimes, you are right.” Ivar whined, but then grinned.

I laughed. “Well, somebody has to be the voice of reason in this madness.”

Ivar groaned. “But sometimes, I don’t want to hear it.”

Hvitserk’s voice came from the door. “Ivar, get your cripple ass to the Great Hall, we have people to meet, Y/N sent a whole fleet from Jutland to support us!”

Ivar’s eyes met mine and he nodded slightly impressed. “Did you now?” he asked me.

“Who are you talking to?” Hvitserk’s voice came again, slightly annoyed. Then his head popped in the door. As he saw me, the whole viking followed and he quickly made his way to me, still sitting on the ground, hugging me tightly as he reached me. I hugged him back and grinned broadly.

“I heard that you were seen around town, but I thought people were making it up.” He said with sparkling eyes.

“You mean, you saw Margarete and she told you, but you thought, she had dreamt it, because it’s her wedding tomorrow.” I chuckled.

Hvitserk shrugged. “Maybe that as well, but it is great to see you. Now come on, you two, there is going to be a feast for our troops.”

I looked to Ivar, who inclined his head, even though he rolled his eyes. “You go first, Hvitserk, we’ll be right behind you.”

 *

 Kattegat did not hold back on its hospitality when it came to the Great Army and its supporters. The whole town seemed to be in a constant state of festivities, but the feast that night was impressive, even to me that had seen a few feasts in this very hall on several occasions. I said as much to Earl Magnusson, who had found me after the dinner was over and everybody had started to greet each other.

“So this is where you spent your days after you had to flee from your uncle? You could have had it worse.” He smiled and for the first time it was open enough that I did not get suspiscious of any ulterior motives. “It is good to see that you were well cared for.”

“Oh, but Kattegat has grown, even since then. I assume some of the warriors coming back from the Mediterranean just decided to settle here as well. And the feasts were definitely smaller back then.” I laughed lightly.

“I definitely think that an alliance with Kattegat is not the most stupid thing you could have gone for. They have capable craftsmen here, not to mention the trading goods…”

He trailed off, as the crowd to our left parted and his glance fell on Ivar crawling towards us. He tried to hide it, but a frown appeared on his forehead.

Before he could say anything that might infuriate Ivar or just annoy him, I decided to introduce him.

“Earl Magnusson, that is my husband Ivar Ragnarsson, one of the sons of Ragnar leading the army. Ivar, this is Earl Magnusson from Bork, he is the one who supplied us with most of the longboats we have.” I bent down to give Ivar a cup of mead from a nearby table, so he could drink with us.

Ivar took it, while he eyed the earl suspiciously. He knew that man had meant trouble for me, but he also saw us relatively relaxed with each other, so he decided to give an appreciative nod.

“Earl Magnusson. I have heard a few things about you, it is nice to finally make your acquaintance.” Ivar raised his cup.

The Earl of Bork however gave a short laugh and clapped my shoulder. “This is what you meant when you said that my son would not be too crippled to marry or lead my people when I meant to offer you his hand.” He seemed honestly delighted that Ivar was living proof that his son could still amount to something.

I saw Ivar’s jaw set, though. He did not like to hear that I had been proposed to, even if he did not know the circumstances, because somehow I had been able to keep this detail from him.

“It is great to see you, Ivar Ragnarsson, and I hope you can show me how you overcame the obstacles your…circumstances confronted you with.”

Ivar smiled superficially, but it was a cold, reptilian smile that let cold shivers run down my spine. “It is always a pleasure to be a good example. If you’ll excuse me, I believe my brothers wanted to see me.”

And with that he crawled away.

Earl Magnusson looked at me, slightly unsettled. “I hope I did not offend your husband.”

I shook my head and closed my eyes. “Don’t worry about it. He just has a lot on his mind at the moment. I am sure he has some important business to sort out with his brothers. One of them is getting married tomorrow, so I am actually surprised they showed their faces tonight.”

That was when Lagertha waved me over and I had to excuse myself from Earl Magnusson myself. In a corner of the room I saw King Harald and Halfdan talk to someone I had never seen before. When he turned to look at me, I felt slightly nauseous and I didn’t know why. Probably just too much ale and not enough to eat, so I shrugged it off and walked over to Lagertha, who wanted to know how Ripa fared and if Ragnheiđur was well.

 I left not long after my conversation with Lagertha was over, mostly because I could not shake that feeling of nausea. Shortly after I had left the hall, I could feel a presence that I knew all too well by this point. I didn’t even need to turn around and look at him, I could feel it in the air, when Ivar was close. It was a certain electric quality to the air around us, it was charged with his anger and my stubbornness and a pull towards him that almost made me afraid.

“Wait up, Y/N! You might remember I am not as fast on my hands as you are on your feet.”

“I do remember you being faster than people tend to think you are.”

He reached me and looked up to me with his unbelievably blue eyes that even shone in the dark of the night out here. There was something like hope in them for a moment, but that was quickly washed away by his constant guardedness and an anger, I could not place this time. Normally, I could at least tell what angered him. But all emotion was shut away right now, I had to navigate blindly.

“Why are you here, Y/N?” he asked me directly.

I started walking in the direction of our – his? – home.

“Our home.” He said softly. “It will always be our home, that small room in my family’s house.”

I looked straight ahead, carrying a small smile in the corner of my mouth.

“I had to…no, that is wrong. I wanted to say my goodbyes, wish you luck and see you off. This is your fight and I wanted you to know that I am on your side.”

He chuckled. “Funny. For someone claiming to be on my side, you are gone quite a lot. And you are rather quick in telling me how wrong I am in what I do.”

I chuckled. “Because I love you, Ivar. I only want, what is best for you. And sometimes that means giving you an opinion you don’t want to hear when I believe you are going down the wrong path. Sometimes loving somebody means not letting them get their will, but telling them they are wrong to keep them from harm.”

We had reached the threshold I had carried him over all those moons ago and I heard him laugh.

“So, you claim you love me, but why should I believe you?”

I was getting annoyed. I had honestly told him how I felt and he contested it. With a dark look at him, I entered our room and sat down on the stool to take off my shoes. “I guess you just have to trust me on this one.”

He shook his head. “But how do I know that nobody else is calling you their own?”

Incredulously I stared at him. “How do you come up with things like this?!”

His voice sounded almost reasonable when he explained: “You have been away quite a while, my wife, and now I have to hear that you have been offered the hand of another man in marriage. And even though I know everything that is going on, you decided to hide that fact from me. What do you think, how does that make me feel?”

I rolled my eyes. “Ivar, stop the games, I was never actually offered the hand of Earl Magnusson’s son, because I told him I was married. Besides, you know what I have been doing most of the time I was away, you probably just overlooked it.”

His jaw clenched. It actually bothered him. “I have seen how they looked at you. The men from your town. The earls at the Thing. Do you have any idea how many of them wanted to claim you and that earldom of yours?”

Still sitting, I started taking off my jewellery and put it on the table. “But I am not interested in them and I am very well capable of defending my honour. I am only interested in my earldom and in you, my husband.”

He came up behind me and I could feel his hot breath on my neck. “So, you have not come to stay in Kattegat and wait for me to come back? You are still holding on to that little earldom of yours?”

“Ivar, you are going to Northumbria, you won’t even notice I am not in Kattegat.” I tried to reason with him. With his jealousy of my earldom.

“So, you will be here when I return?” he asked darkly.

I gave a sigh. “If I…”

He groaned like a wounded animal. “No! There is no If! You are mine! You don’t belong to that earldom of yours, you belong to me!”

I turned around on the stool to face him. “I have seen your thoughts, Ivar”, I said, sounding as menacingly as him, “I know that you don’t plan on coming home after you have had your revenge! I know the schemes you are putting together; while your brothers only want revenge for your dead father, you want more. You seek glory, fame and notoriety!”

Our faces were only a few breaths away from each other and his eyes glittered coldly, his lips were pressed together tightly. He exhaled a quick breath through his nose.

“What is it to you? You are not here, so don’t tell me that you will miss me!”

“Did it ever occur to you that it numbs the pain of you being away when I have something else to do than to just wait for your return? I do miss you, I miss you badly. And if you want me close then take me with you to Northumbria! Let me fight by your side.”

His eyes were wet. “No.” he simply said. Then crossed his arms in front of his chest. “No!”

“And why not?”

“We have talked about this, Y/N.” he growled. “You are mine!”

My stare became furious and I wanted to hurt him. So, I pushed his shoulder. “Then stake your claim, cripple!” I snarled at him, pushing my face even closer to his, baring my teeth. “Show me that I am yours, Boneless!” I shoved him a second time -

It was as if a switch had been flipped, as white-hot anger washed over Ivar and he only growled deeply, before he leapt forward kissing my lips hungrily, so he accidently bit my lower lip. Then he shoved me so hard, I toppled backwards off my stool. He grabbed it and threw it aside, before I felt his familiar weight on me, his lips back on mine, then on my neck, biting, drawing blood. His hands pushed up my skirt and pulled down his pants. He looked at me, eyes dark and a feral fury within them. He only gave a gutteral grunt when he suddenly and unexpectedly pushed into me. My eyes went wide with shock at what was happening and I drew up my knees, as if to shield me, but it only helped him to push deeper. A moan was drawn from my lips and I dug my nails into the fabric at the back of his tunic. He didn’t care, didn’t stop to think, fumbling at my still clothed breasts, as he started to move faster and harder, chasing for release. I crossed my ankles over his ass, to answer his rhythm, let my head fall back and my eyes fall closed. His fingers caressed my cheek and then his mouth was at my throat again, kissing, biting, licking. I moaned again. Let his name roll from my lips. He rolled his hips more violently to answer. Once, twice, and as his hips started to stutter, he finished with one final, deep push that made me bite his collarbone to keep from screaming, not from pain, but from pleasure. As suddenly, as it had begun, it was over and Ivar collapsed on top of me. His eyes found mine, as he exhaustedly mumbled:

“You are mine, Y/N. Mine alone.”

We lay in a heap on the floor and didn’t move for a moment. I did not argue.

“And you are mine.” I sighed and let my head roll back, exposing my neck, so Ivar could see the marks he had left. I was about ready to drift off to sleep, when Ivar pulled himself off the floor and said my name.

“Come on, get up from the floor, you’ll get sick.” He said in a weird tone of voice, I had never heard before. I glanced up into his face and found genuine concern in it, so I reluctantly got off the floor, took off my dress and brushed off the sand off my legs and butt, then quickly dried off the juices from between my legs with the dress, before getting into the bed and beneath the furs. He followed quickly after, but kept a safe distance. I felt his hand touch my shoulder hesitantly.

“Did I… did I hurt you?” he asked, still in that weird tone. I turned around to face him and frowned.

“No Ivar, you didn’t. Why do you ask?”

“You… you screamed. And not quietly, like…really loud. And then you bit me and almost passed out.”

I looked at him. Was that what had happened? I tried to clear the warm fuzzy feeling in my head.

“No, it was… it felt… I have never had sex before, but I guess this was not bad.”

Suddenly, his eyes went wide and then his whole face lit up with joy. “I am not boneless.” he whispered in awe.

I smiled before I rested my head against his strong chest. “No, you are definitely not.”

He chuckled. “I don’t even really know what happened.”

“You lost control, that is what happened. You were scary angry, Ivar.” I told him in a level tone of voice, to cover my concern. Then again, I had pushed him into this fit of anger.

“I could say I am sorry, but that would be a lie.” He grinned smugly.

We lay in silence for a while then he asked:

“There is no getting out of this? You die, I die, right?”

I closed my eyes for a moment, breathed in his scent. “Yes. Also, your mother made me a völva or something more than a seer and the Gods might have plans for us.”

“You have to admire my mother’s handiwork. She did not hold back. The way she brought chaos to our lives, she did it properly.” He said quietly.

“I don’t think it was all her fault. Someone must have given her the idea.”

“Oh, believe me, my mother had that idea all by herself. She did it for me. She did everything for me. She loved me.”

I gave a small nod. “I will go back to Yrsa, once I am in Ripa. She wanted to practice with me, teach me how to controll our bond.”

Ivar looked at me curiously. “And why would you do that?”

I hid my face in his chest. “To be able to check in with you at will. See what you are doing.”

“Winning battles of course. The Saxons won’t know what is coming for them.”

I smiled sadly against his body. “Promise me to come back alive.”

Ivar kissed my hair and smiled into the kiss. “Even if I die, we will go to Valhalla together. No one can keep us apart.”

My arms wound around his torso and hugged him firmly to my body. “Yes, but I would love to spend more hours like this.”

“When I get back, we’ll see.” He replied hesitantly.

 *

 The next couple of days flew by in a rush; Margarete’s and Ubbe’s wedding went by quickly, it was a beautiful ceremony and I was happy I was able to attend it. Hvitserk gave her away and I could feel there was something going on there, but I did not want to snoop and I had a lot on my mind already. I promised Margarete to meet her when we had said our goodbyes to the men and then left the festivities rather early to get some time for myself.

 I went down to the beach a little outside of town and looked out onto the sea. It was a clear day, yet the sea was restless, just like myself. I closed my eyes against the breeze and took in a deep breath. Suddenly, I felt snowflakes on my skin, was back in the city, looked around the new reinforcements of the city, there was a shieldmaiden lying in the newly fallen snow. Her blood had tinted it a dark red, molten it in places. There were people fighting all around, Kattegat was under attack. I opened my eyes and was back at the late autumn shore I had been a moment ago. This was new. And unnerving. I sat down on a piece of driftwood in the sand, when I suddenly felt a hand on my shoulder.

“You are awfully alone out here on a day your family is welcoming a new member.” Floki said, before he dropped down onto the log as well.

“Well, shouldn’t you be at the wedding as well?” I looked at him with a cocked eyebrow.

He shrugged and giggled. “Maybe. But I don’t feel much like celebrating these days. There’s a change in the wind and strange tides are coming in. But I don’t need to tell you that, now, do I?” His grin was replaced by a serious and questioning look.

“Floki, do you believe our Gods are on our side? That our Gods are friendly?”

“I don’t know if one necessarily includes the other. I believe they test us. Some more than others. Some are born into greater fates and have to fight harder than others. I believe that you and Ivar are two people that will have to fight a lot. Not with each other, though you keep getting better and better at that.” Again he giggled.

“Oh, Floki, where do we go from here?” I didn’t expect an answer to that question, it was just a genuine question I asked myself, and he understood and we sat in slience for a while.

Then he cleared his throat. “I have a feeling, Y/N, that I won’t return to Kattegat. Helga says, she is going with me, she is taking Tanaruz. There is nothing left for me here. Ragnar is gone, all of our old friends, they have gone to Valhalla before me. Only Lagertha remains, but she is not the same. Kattegat is not the same. I am tired of the constant fighting and scheming, everybody wants to be king or queen. It hasn’t been like this in the old days. I feel like our lives were easier back then, when Ragnar was just a farmer and I was just his boat-building friend.”

Floki’s eyes searched for mine then I gave a slight nod. “The tides will turn once again in Kattegat, but also in Northumbria. Nothing will be as it was. I feel it as well.”

Floki took my hand. “Don’t tell Ivar what I told you. It would hurt him and he would not understand. He is young and looking for infamy, just like his father when he was younger, but with more to prove.”

“I don’t know if he hears what I am saying. I try to save him from the path he is sliding down, but he doesn’t want to be saved. It is like trying to sail a boat in a storm. I fear I will lose him out on the waves.”

Now Floki giggled. “Y/N, use that pretty little head of yours. What do we do when there is a storm while we are out at sea? We wait for it to pass and cut our losses. Maybe you will have to take a step back and let Ivar’s boat take a few hits. You can still send a boat to save him when the storm has passed. You don’t sail into the storm.”

I had to laugh at his comment and shook my head. “To see the world through your eyes for only a day would probably change how I look at a lot of things.”

He cocked his head. “If you don’t go crazy in the first couple of hours. It is funny in that head of mine.” He giggled again and I only shook my head.

 *

 I stood in our garden when Ivar came home from the wedding and he saw me instantly. I could feel a sense of nervousness radiating off of him and his movements toward me became more urgent. I frowned at that. And it broke my heart when I understood where his reaction came from. His eyes scanned the garden quickly and I knew, he thought I was leaving again. Still, as soon as he had made sure that there were no packed bags and I did not intend to leave, his pokerface returned. We were broken in a way. Tied together, but broken apart.

“Back home, my husband?” I asked him playfully.

Ivar smiled back. “And happy to find you here. What are you doing out in the garden?”

I shrugged, looking around. “You know what I always loved about this garden, small as it is? In the spring it was so full with Blåveis blossoms, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I was just, maybe looking around if I could find any of its beauty right now.”

Ivar scoffed. “It’s almost winter, there’s nothing blooming right now.”

I let myself fall to the floor next to him. “Yes, but it will all be in full bloom again next spring, even if we would never suspect its beauty right now.”

He let his head drop to the side and was facing me now. “Why do I feel like you are not just talking about flowers?”

I wriggled my eyebrows and smiled at him. “Because maybe, my dear Ivar, I am not just talking about flowers.”

Ivar looked at me and could not surpress a small laugh. “You look ridiculous when you do this thing with your eyebrows.”

I wriggled them again. “You mean this?”

He let his head drop back in mock-exasperation. “Y/N, why do you have to be like this?”

I grinned. “Because I know it annoys you. No, come on, let’s get inside. It is getting cold out here.”

Ivar followed me inside the house and we noted that neither Hvitserk nor Sigurd were home. The house was quiet and dark except for the two of us. We quickly washed off the day and got into bed. Today, Ivar moved closer to me as soon as we were beneath the furs. He kissed my shoulder.

“I would love to try the thing we did yesterday again.” He whispered close to my ear and I felt a shiver running down my spine in anticipation, as he started to kiss along my spine. Then I turned around and looked into his eyes and kissed him slowly. I could feel his hands on my body and let mine explore as well, as I started to kiss along his neck and collarbone. He started playing with my breasts, but after a while I noticed that something was off.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him, as a deep furrow started to form between his eyebrows.

“It’s…”, his voice was small and pressed, “…nothing is happening. It’s like before. I don’t understand…”

I looked at him and felt my heart break for him once again. My hand found his cheek and I pulled him closer to me, as I closed my eyes.

“It’s okay Ivar. You are just putting too much pressure on yourself. Let’s just… let us just be for a moment, okay?” I kissed his cheek and I felt a hot tear falling from his lashes. He was feeling ashamed and worthless again and buried his face against my shoulder. I kissed his temple. I was there with him, but I knew that this broke something in him he had thought fixed. I saw him fight with Sigurd, but I beat down the images, because I did not want to see them now. Or ever. I had seen how that situation played out the moment we got married. Maybe the Gods had tried to warn me back then. But even if they had, by now, I was too far down the rabbit hole to get out of this. Right now, I felt my broken husband cry against me and tried as hard as I could to hold the pieces of him together.

“I love you, Ivar.” I whispered against his hair.

I felt him laugh humorlessly. “How could you ever love a cripple like me? How can you say that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. And believe me, sometimes I don’t know why. But I do. I do love you.”

I knew that right now, he did no believe me. But I also knew that he needed to hear it before he left.

[thewadapan]

Cybertron does not bury its dead.

(I wrote an honest-to-god Transformers fanfic. It’s three connected conversations strongly inspired by concepts from Brian Ruckley’s ongoing series for IDW Publishing, but very much set in a continuity of their own, with no background reading required. Nautica is in it. Artwork by my pal David “Ikkad” Salamante.)

“You know what I love about the sea?” asked Nautica.

A moment later, a faint burst of static came from her commlink. It sounded like a sigh. “I don’t know. You seem to love the ocean for a whole myriad of reasons, few of which make sense to me.” Though she was in her submersible mode, Nautica’s turbines remained still. She sank. “All right. What is it this time? The fish? The feeling of weightlessness? The way the corrosion eats away at your finish? It’s the fish, isn’t it—it’s usually the fish.”

Nautica couldn’t smile, but she would’ve. “I love the silence.”

“Ha, ha. Well, I’ll shut up then.”

“No, don’t,” Nautica laughed. The walls of the trench rose to meet her. “Road Rage. Roaaad Raaage. Say something.”

Another burst of static. “Something.”

“I just mean that it’s nice to sometimes be in a place where… where the only breaths you can hear are your own.”

“I don’t think you could’ve worded that in a creepier way if you’d tried,” remarked Road Rage.

“Oh no, I didn’t mean it like that,” said Nautica. She liked talking to Road Rage, but she frequently found herself phrasing things more to bait out a reaction than to get her point across. As a scientist, Nautica felt it was important to be good at communicating herself clearly—and yet. “It’s just… up there, everything’s alive. The walls are alive. You can hear it all the time, the wind in the hallways.”

“I like that. It makes me feel like I’m part of something, like I’m never alone.”

Nautica’s headlights finally fell on the seabed. She started her engines. “You should come down here sometime.”

Static, laughter. “You know I can’t do that. We’re not all airtight. I’d sink, you’d have to fish me out… it’d be no fun for anyone. Plus, I’d stink of rust for ages afterward.”

“Like me, you mean?”

“Hey, I didn’t say that.”

Nautica fell silent for a moment, collecting her thoughts. “Look, I dunno, I just feel like maybe you’d feel differently if you came down here once in a while. Like, even now, when you’re about as away from it all as you can be, you’re still with Tidal Wave.”

“He’s sulking, by the way.”

“And the sky is blue.” Tidal Wave was dependable, but dependably sullen. Part of Nautica wanted to put that down to age—he was something of a giant—but apparently that was just how he’d always been. She liked to think that they were kindred sparks of a sort, as neither one of them much liked walking, but aside from that they had little in common.

Quietly, Nautica knew that one day she would be a giant like him. A submarine so heavy that it would never again be able to surface.

“Don’t tell me you’re sulking too,” came Road Rage’s voice.

“No! No, I’m not, I’m just-” A shadow separated itself from the gloom ahead, moving into Nautica’s floodlights for just a moment before vanishing again. A round form, coated in iridescent verdigris, with spindly limbs and sharp fins.

“Was that a sharkticon?” asked Road Rage. Nautica was quietly pleased to realise that she’d been paying attention to the optical feeds. “Since when do they come down this deep?”

“They don’t, usually, they prefer the shallows,” said Nautica, making no effort to hide her excitement. “This is new.” Another sharkticon swam through the beams.

“So why are they here?”

“I don’t know. Something must have…” In the distance, Nautica saw a faint pinprick of blue light. “Something must have drawn them here. Whatever that is, it’s drawn a whole shiver of sharkticons.”

Slowing her engines, she let the current carry her closer. The sharkticons swarmed around the light, occasionally darting towards it only to veer away at the last second. They ignored Nautica entirely. Eventually, she realised what she was looking at.

“It’s a spark,” she whispered.

“That’s impossible.”

Nautica drifted until she was almost directly over it. “You’re seeing what I’m seeing, and I’m seeing a spark.”

The sharkticons circled. “Nautica, you can’t bring it with you. If you transform, they’ll be on you in moments.”

“I’m faster than them.”

“Nautica, no, you can’t do this.”

“I can’t not do this. Look how big it is already—if it doesn’t get put in a protoform soon, it’ll collapse.”

“Yeah, and when you go to grab it, and you get…” For a couple of moments, the commlink transmitted nothing but static. “Well, what’d be the point in that?”

“I can do this,” Nautica insisted. “Do you trust me?”

“I trust you, which is why I really don’t want you to die.”

“Okay, then I won’t.”

Nautica transformed.

Far, far above the surface of Cybertron, Rubble stood in the outstretched palm of Metroplex and gazed out across the landscape. Bumblebee was talking to him.

“...And you see those spires, way over there in the distance? That’s Trypticon,” said his mentor, pointing, then glancing down at him to see if he was paying attention. He made no response.

Slowly, he raised a hand out in front of his optics, pointing his digits upwards. He lined it up with the glittering hands that made up the skyline.

“The Titans have lived for Millennia, Rubble,” said Bumblebee after a moment. “So will you. You’ll grow up to be just like them.”

“They’re all so still,” Rubble spoke.

“Well, when you get to that sort of size, moving around is very tiring,” Bumblebee laughed. “To say nothing of how the poor bots living inside them feel when corridors start going topsy-turvy.”

Rubble thought about that as he surveyed the landscape. Limbs and bodies, half-submerged in thick smog. Eventually, his optics fell on a Titan which stood out from the rest. He pointed. “That one doesn’t have any lights.”

When Bumblebee saw which one he was looking at, his mentor’s face settled into a strange expression. “That’s the Necrotitan,” he said. “I’ll take you there one day… when you’re older.”

Satisfied by that, Rubble turned his attention to another, one with gargantuan treads forming what might once have been described as a torso. “They can’t transform any more,” he observed.

The expression on Bumblebee’s face intensified. “No, they can’t.”

“I don’t understand. I can’t transform yet. You can.” Again, Rubble turned his hand to face the sky. “They could, but now they can’t.”

“That’s how life works. We’re all good at different things, and we all help each other out.”

“But their faces look so…” For a moment, Rubble struggled to find the words he was looking for. He turned to Bumblebee. “They look like the face you’re doing,” he said, finally.

Bumblebee didn’t seem to know what to say to that. Rubble turned back towards the palm’s edge, and stepped closer to it. “Aww, no,” Bumblebee said. He moved in front of Rubble, taking the protoform’s hand into his and stooping until they were at optic level. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know this would upset you, I shouldn’t have brought you up here. Let’s go back inside,” he said, but Rubble shook his head.

“It’s okay. I’m not upset.”

Bumblebee squeezed Rubble’s hand. “You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay then.”

Bumblebee led Rubble over to one of Metroplex’s fingers, which towered above both of them, and they sat down with their backs to it. For a while, they simply stared up at a blue sky full of stars.

“Have you given any more thought to what you’d like to be?” asked Bumblebee eventually.

“Yes,” said Rubble. “I liked flying with Thundercracker today.”

“Oh? Really?” asked Bumblebee.

“Yes. It was scary, but I got to see a lot.”

“So you like the idea of being a jet?” Bumblebee stretched his arms out to either side and moved them, like they were wings.

For a moment, Rubble smiled, before his face fell back into its default expression. “I don’t understand what jets do.”

“Oh.” Bumblebee dropped his arms, and hesitated. “Well, Thundercracker’s a good friend of mine, I’m sure you’ll see him again soon. You should ask him yourself.”

“Okay.” Rubble fidgeted, struggling to get comfortable against the hinge at the base of Metroplex’s finger. “I don’t want to be a construction vehicle.”

“Is this because of the things Hook said?”

“It just seems like a lot of responsibility. Like once you pick that, that’s it. You spend all your time putting up buildings. You have to do it right, so the spark goes into them.” Rubble made a motion, like piling things on top of one another, before his hand settled once more into a titanic pose. He studied it intently, trying to work out where exactly he would be sitting, were he a miniscule version of himself. “Everybody wants you to do a good job.”

“I’m sure you’d do an excellent job,” smiled Bumblebee, but Rubble just shook his head. Bumblebee sighed. “I knew leaving you with Hook was a bad idea.”

“I could just be a car,” Rubble said. “Like you. Then I could do whatever I wanted.”

“You could,” said Bumblebee. “You’re special, Rubble. You can be whatever you want to be.” He peered down at the highways in the distance. From this far away, the traffic barely appeared to be moving.

“What does Nautica turn into?” asked Rubble, but Bumblebee didn’t answer. He was staring at the cars. Rubble poked his mentor impatiently. “I want to know what Nautica turns into.”

“A submarine,” said Bumblebee, finally tearing his gaze away. “She’s a submarine.”

“I don’t know what that is,” said Rubble.

Bumblebee turned away once more, and pointed at another part of the horizon—a great streak of orange trapped between the black smog and the blue sky, surrounded by countless Titans. “You see that huge flat area over there?”

Rubble nodded, but his mentor wasn’t looking. “Yes,” he said.

“That’s the Sea of Rust,” Bumblebee said. “There are special alt-modes called boats, which float on its surface. A submarine is like a boat, only it goes below the surface instead. Nautica’s interested in sea life, hence… submarine.”

“I want to meet her one day,” stated Rubble. “Maybe I want to be a submarine too.”

“She’d be very happy to hear that.”

“I was reading about petro-rabbits the other day,” said Megatron.

With a grunt, Orion Pax pushed a log into the forge. He wiped a layer of condensation from his forehead. “I don’t suppose you could lend me a hand, so long as you’re waxing poetic?”

Megatron laughed, and hefted a log of his own. “Gladly, if you’ll lend your thoughts.” He carried the log over to the edge of the smelting pool, before balancing it with one end on the ground. He took a moment to collect himself. “On the surface, they seem to be quite stupid creatures. Sparkless. Living metal living on instinct alone. And yet, when one of their number dies, they drag its body down into the part of their burrow where it once lived, and they collapse it.” He tipped the log over the edge, and it landed in the forge with a hiss.

“All right,” said Orion Pax, as they watched it slowly sink into the molten liquid. The smoke was clouding his optics. “I suppose you want me to ask why they do that.”

“Well, you see, if they leave the body where it falls, turbofoxes come and consume it. And the petro-rabbits and turbofoxes are natural enemies. If the turbofoxes are well-fed, then they’ll multiply, and more of the petro-rabbits will die.”

“Clever,” said Orion Pax. Internally, he wished his friend had picked a less morbid metaphor. Turbofoxes—and other mechanimals, like sharkticons—had a deeply unpleasant method of subsistence. “You think that’s just hard-coded behaviour, I suppose? Not something they’ve learned?”

Megatron shrugged. “That’s not what I’m getting at here. It just struck me—the petro-rabbits bury their dead.” He turned away from the pool, and gestured at the great molds which lay empty below. “We bury our living.”

The log disappeared entirely below the surface, meaning it was time to add another. “How is Rubble doing?” asked Orion Pax as he moved over to the pile.

“Very well. We’ve seen each other just once since his forging. His mentor, Bumblebee, seems to be an upstanding bot.” Turning back towards the forge, Megatron held his hand out to feel its heat. It was ravenous, insatiable, and yet so oddly comforting. He turned his hand over and, after a moment, rubbed away the layer of black soot that had collected there. “His spark has settled. You know it was touch and go at first.”

“That’s good to hear.” Orion Pax dragged a log from the pile. “From what you said, it was a miracle he’d survived for so long down there.”

“It was, and a miracle he was found.” Megatron sighed deeply. “Senator Starscream wants to keep the whole thing under wraps. If Cybertron at large finds out that sparks are appearing at the bottom of the Sea of Rust—and dying there—there’ll be outcry.

“I think we deserve to know. It’s horrific.”

“It is,” agreed Megatron. “And yet… I find the notion of a submarine generation all the more horrifying. There is no more room here, Orion. You know this to be true, better than most. We could be out there, searching for new worlds like this one—but instead we’re turning in on ourselves, scrambling to save countless sparks while consigning them all to early deaths.” For a moment, Megatron was silent. “The senate and the populace both—it’s the dissonance between their stated values and their behaviour. It’s mass delusion, it’s self-deception.” He watched his friend feed the log to the forge. “You’re quiet, today.”

“I don’t know, Megatron. We aren’t built to make these kinds of decisions.” Again, Orion Pax walked away. “If I’m being honest… you scare me sometimes, when you talk like this. It’s so… callous.”

“You’re not scared of me because I’m callous. You’re scared of me because I’m right.”

“I don’t know that you are.” With a harsh sound of metal scraping against metal, Orion Pax turned on the spot. “The Titans, our generation… I think our roots run too deep. We’re stuck here. And if we aren’t the ones to leave, then who? Who, Megatron? Yes, perhaps not your submarine generation—but maybe the one after that.” He turned away. There was only a single log left in the pile. “It’s like with petro-rabbits, only the opposite. Not death leading to more death, but life leading to more life.”

Megatron gave no response to that, instead settling into thought and descending to the base of the forge. There, he turned his attention to the control panel.

Above, Optimus added the final log. “Has the situation with Road Rage improved?” he asked as he made his way down the ramp.

“Physically, she’s made a full recovery.” Living metal flowed out into the mold, casting Megatron’s face in orange light. “If the Senate follows Starscream’s lead, however… we’re concerned that she’s going to get herself into more trouble.”

“...And Nautica?”

The flow shut off with a hiss. “She’s alive,” said Megatron, turning away. “It’s for the best that Rubble doesn’t see her, for the time being.”

The words hung in the air. Orion Pax said his goodbyes and transformed, leaving Megatron to his work.

As he wound his way down through Metroplex’s arterial catacombs, Orion Pax counted the layers. The chambers of the lower levels had not been used by anyone other than the blacksmiths for a very long time, and the thick smog of the forges choked the tunnels. Those who had once lived here had long since outgrown their accommodation. Now, they were part of the world, and their voices were naught but the low wind that whistled through its fingers.

Metroplex’s own voice had left the audible range a long time ago, but his spark practically overflowed from his body—an inescapable will which permeated every wall. How many more skyscrapers?

Orion Pax thought about the things that Megatron had said. The Necrotitan cast a long shadow. Though Megatron had never gone so far as to speak his heresy aloud, Orion Pax knew him well enough to know that, if he had his way, the sparkless city would become the raw material from which Cybertron’s future could be forged. The world would forget that death existed, at least for a little while.

One by one, Orion Pax counted the layers, until eventually he lost count. He always lost count.

Even when the smooth panels of Metroplex gave way to the rough latticework that formed Cybertron’s old surface, Orion Pax’s journey was not yet done. He followed the trail between the stumps for a very long time, until finally he came to the forest’s edge. There, at last, he transformed.

He took his axe, and got to work.

Commentary

This story owes its existence entirely to Ikkad. In the aftermath of San Diego Comic-Con 2019, he was the one to comment that the axe of the new ‘cel-shaded’ Optimus Prime (designed to evoke his appearance in the 80s cartoon and celebrate the brand’s 35th anniversary) could’ve been improved if they’d made it cartoon-accurate orange. I got thinking about Prime’s axe, and realised that—despite it being an iconic design aspect for many of his incarnations over the years—there’d never been a take on the character that leaned into the lumberjack associations of such a tool.

Of course, Cybertron is a metal planet; it’s not traditionally known for its verdant forests. I wondered what sort of Cybertron could support the existence of Optimus Prime as a logger, while still allowing his rise to command of the Autobots to feel like a natural progression.

I. There Are Listed Buildings

The pitch for Dendrochronology was written on my phone, apparently around midday on Friday 19th of July, which means that I must’ve been at work at the time. I thought I’d written it on the train, but no, apparently I just spent my lunch break writing Transformers fanfiction, because I guess that’s the sort of person I am.

The idea of metal trees was inspired by some mixture of the organic life on Beast Machines Cybertron and the Tangle of Mirrodin from Magic: The Gathering. I envisioned the trees as being made from ‘living metal’, a phrase which evoked the ‘sentio metallico’ and blacksmiths of IDW’s first original comic continuity.

(Mirrodin Besieged was my gateway into Magic: The Gathering. In fact, had any other expansion been on the shelves at the time, perhaps I wouldn’t have fallen down the rabbit hole; I’m just kinda fascinated with metal worlds, I guess. When I spoke to him about it, Ikkad—despite being a fan himself—apparently didn’t know that it existed, and was quite taken with its landscape.)

I didn’t intend to write anything like a proper story based on the idea. Rather, I wanted to try and tell a short story entirely through worldbuilding: a descriptive piece with complete themes and something of an arc. I drafted some prose to that effect on my phone’s notepad app, then threw it on Pastebin. I’ve reproduced the text here:

Cybertron is very crowded.

When a new spark is born, it is placed into a specially-forged protoform. Although Cybertron is a world made entirely of metal, not just any metal will do - protoforms must be made of the "living metal" from which all Cybertronian life is formed. As the spark grows, so too must the protoform grow to accommodate it. As the protoform grows, so too does the amount of energy required to power it.

A Transformer can live forever, but their spark will never stop growing. At each new stage of their life, they must visit the blacksmiths, who nurture their growth by adding new layers of living metal. The most drastic change occurs when it is time for a Transformer to choose their alternate form - a complicated process steeped in tradition, by the end of which their body will have doubled in size.

The oldest Transformers fell still millennia ago, and their titanic frames form the cities in which their descendants now live. To keep the cities alive, new suburbs must constantly be added - all constructed entirely from living metal.

Long ago, as the borders of the cities met, they expanded in the only direction available: up. Vast quantities of living metal were moulded into towering skyscrapers, piled endlessly atop one another, reaching - grasping - at the stars, at life. Their voices became naught but the low wind that whistled between the spires.

Cybertronians do not bury their dead. They bury their living.

The youngest Transformers do not know where living metal comes from. They live in the newest dwellings, above the thick layer of smog which obscures the lower levels. It is no great secret. If they so wished, they could see the source for themselves - were they willing to spend the years needed to venture down the endless stairwells and navigate their way through the arterial catacombs along which fuel yet flows. Along the way, they could count the layers for themselves, and witness the lifetime of their species. At the end of their journey, in the strangled air of Cybertron's wilderness, they would find the trees, and witness how little remains of that lifetime.

When thinking about trees made of living metal, and Cybertronians harvesting that metal, I found myself thinking that it’d be much like if we lived in a world where trees were made of flesh. To me, that seemed to imply a completely different use for them—and yet at the same time I couldn’t escape the idea of trees serving as construction material. So I hit upon the idea that the Cybertronians’ bodies and buildings were one and the same: the smaller Transformers lived inside bigger ones (drawing inspiration from the so-called ‘citybots’ from the original toyline, and from the countless other figures with ‘base modes’).

A society stratified by size further implied something which has almost never been touched upon in Transformers stories: the idea that a Cybertronian might grow over the course of its lifetime, rather than simply having been born or constructed to a certain size. Of course, if the only way a Cybertronian could grow is through the addition of more living metal to their body, then there needed to be some biological imperative to do so—thus, I had the idea that the spark is always ‘growing’, requiring ever-greater amounts of living metal to provide it with physical structure.

I saw this as having links to ideas of transhumanism, and to the idea that Transformers are driven by a very literal kind of change: they change their own bodies not just as a means of self-expression, but because they must in order to survive. I’ve given a lot of thought to the idea of identity through the lens of Transformers, particularly in terms of selecting an alt-mode—the Cybertronians literally must choose what they’ll turn into.

This premise came with ready-made conflict, too. There was an in-built, ever-increasing cost to the life of each individual Cybertronian. Dwindling resources have been a common theme in Transformers since its inception, which had its roots in the energy crisis of the 70s, but approaching this through the angle of raw material seemed novel. It also seemed more reminiscent of real-world agriculture and deforestation, while not exactly a direct mapping.

In this case, I had this image of civilisation encroaching on nature, one that stripped away a lot of the complexity of the real world. The restrictions placed on space and on resources were directly linked, and every aspect of the system was alive. I’ve always liked the idea of Cybertron as a world choked with smog and acid rain—and of course, the idea of feeding logs to a forge seemed like a cool inversion of their typical use as fuel.

The close relationship between the trees and the Cybertronians probably—I speak in retrospect here—also had its roots in the Orson Scott Card book Speaker for the Dead, which I had to read for an astrobiology class I took a couple of years ago. I didn’t care much for the book itself, but it left an impression on me nonetheless. Unlike the relationship between the trees and the aliens in that book, the dynamic on Cybertron is much more adversarial.

Another conceptual convergence occurred when I recalled the last Transformers setting to place a heavy focus on size: Gigantion, the ‘Giant Planet’ from Transformers: Cybertron. Each colossal Transformer on that planet was partnered with a much-smaller ‘Mini-Con’ (a concept itself drawn from previous series). Their lives were spent constantly building and subsequently abandoning new cities; by the time of the cartoon, they’d started building new cities atop old ones, creating a layered planet. I could see a similar concept tying into the emerging themes of generational divides—each new generation literally being built upon the last.

I immediately drew a connection to the tree rings which appear annually in the cross-section of a tree trunk (in fact, I’m not sure which idea preceded the other). A quick Google search for tree rings threw up the word ‘dendrochronology’, which turned into the title of the pitch. I’m not actually that keen on that title, but couldn’t think of a better one (this seems to be par for the course with the things I write).

One of the main goals of my pitch was to communicate as much as possible with as little as possible, and as such there are a lot of ideas that it only hints at. The sentence about the ‘drastic change’ that occurs when a Cybertronian picks their alt-mode was intended to imply it to be an analogue of puberty. The use of the word ‘suburbs’ was probably supposed to evoke more ideas of generational conflict (I think a lot of my peers resent the older generations for creating the housing market as it is) while also implying that Cybertron moves at a slower pace than one might expect; suburbs are quite unchanging places.

I tried to avoid proper nouns aside from ‘Cybertron’, ‘Cybertronian’ and ‘Transformer’, as I feel like a lot of Transformers fiction has a tendency to throw out buzzwords (something which this story still ultimately wound up being guilty of), but did use the word ‘titanic’ specifically in reference to the Titans. There’s a beat in the final fic where Rubble moves his hand into a ‘titanic pose’; this was a word choice I went back and forth on, having at one point settled on ‘titan-like’ instead. I also had mixed feelings on the word ‘mechanimal’—an established portmanteau of ‘mechanical’ and ‘animal’—but stuck with it, even going so far as to name sharkticons, petro-rabbits and turbofoxes (some of which have historically been rendered as proper nouns).

When I wrote the pitch, I hadn’t intended the line about skyscrapers ‘grasping’ to be entirely literal, but it seemed like an evocative idea, so that’s how it shook out in the final story, and I ended up adding the hands as a backdrop to Ikkad’s design for Orion Pax (which I’ll talk more about later). The resulting image, to me, actually brings to mind zombie fiction—an unintentional connection, but one which holds weight in a story so heavily centred around death. To be trite, the Titans are like reverse zombies: alive, but unmoving.

Not everything that I came up with made it into the pitch itself, and not everything in the pitch made it into the story proper. I envisioned the story as having less of a focus on death and more of a focus on tradition: of people living with the decisions of older generations. I liked the idea that some of the younger Transformers would use the living metal from mechanimals, becoming versions of the Maximals and Predacons from Beast Wars and facing persecution from the older generations, who’d perceive this method of growth as being unnatural.

In case I’m not being clear: I hadn’t intended the story to be a cut-and-dry kind of ‘old people bad’ screed. The younger Transformers—in my head I was using the word Mini-Cons, but aside from size they have little in common with traditional Mini-Cons—were naive, literally living above the cloud layer obscuring the cost of their lives. In the pitch, I’d intended the hints towards an interstellar exodus to be read with a veneer of colonialism (like that of IDW’s comics), but decided to go with a more charitable presentation of Megatron’s beliefs when it came to writing the story proper.

Finally, you’ll note that—despite its roots—the pitch made no mention of Optimus Prime whatsoever. I envisioned him as being a younger bot who had lived above the clouds but travelled down to work as a logger. This seemed like a path that could ultimately lead to him returning to the world above and inciting change in Cybertronian society. One aspect of the pitch which didn’t survive the transition to proper prose was the idea that the Titans were so large that travelling from the skyscrapers all the way down to Cybertron’s surface would take years; I’ll talk a little more about this later.

II. My Year in Lists

The Pastebin’s reception was unanimously very positive, though admittedly the only people I showed it to were good friends of mine with similar sensibilities in terms of what they like to see in Transformers stories. At the time I was determined not to develop the pitch further, as I was in full ‘get as many of these old projects out the door as quickly as possible’ mode (over half a year later, I seem to have more projects on the go than ever). I knew that, if I wanted to do the pitch justice, I’d have to devote significant resources to it, and between work and “The Beast Within (My Pants)” I was decidedly occupied.

Once I’d released that comic, I started to feel fatigued with Transformers in general. Particularly in the aftermath of TFNation 2019, it seemed to be consuming my mind, and I suddenly felt a growing concern that there wasn’t really a future for me in the fandom. Not just in terms of the things I was making—look, nobody wants to read Transformers fanfiction—but in terms of the people I was meeting; outside my friends on Discord, I was increasingly feeling that I just didn’t want to talk to other fans. I’ve written more about this elsewhere, in a non-fiction work that is unlikely to see the true light of day.

Somehow, my efforts to divert my attention towards more productive things failed at every turn. I wrote a review of Transformers: Galaxies #1 for the Allspark, along with a long article about toys which might see a public release at some point. I made a bunch of posts promoting frikkin’ Hauler as a candidate for 2019′s baffling Hall of Fame vote (he didn’t win). I devoted an increasing amount of time to the Allspark Chat Discord server, and then—once that crashed and burned (a little more on that later)—to the TFWiki Discord server. Apparently taken by a fit of madness, I decided that I wanted to read every single Transformers comic Marvel ever put out (in a similar vein to the comprehensive BIONICLE read-through I subjected myself to during the summer), and while I’m barely a sixth of the way into that run I still have vague plans to expand my reading list to include a significant majority of Transformers print media, along with as much of the abominable original cartoon as I can stomach. I’m working on two different Transformers-related secret projects. And, oh Primus, I’ve spent money on action figures.

It seems like this might just kinda be my life, at least for the time being, so I may as well try to own it.

Marvel’s Transformers comics are, in my newly-informed opinion, severely underrated in the fandom’s current landscape. This is partially a result of the fact that there is no single definitive method in which to read them: IDW’s Classics reprints were the first to comprehensively print the US material in order, but their remastering process kinda butchered the artwork and introduced errors to both the colouring and the lettering. Their Classics UK line (which prints the various UK-exclusive comics mostly written by Simon Furman to slot between issues of Bob Budianski’s American series) seems to have been quietly put on indefinite hiatus, but working out a reading order with which to swap between these two series of books is challenging for the casual reader anyway.

Another factor that’s led to these comics falling into semi-obscurity is the relative prominence of the concurrent Sunbow cartoon, which—certainly in the US—reached a much wider audience and left a stronger impression, despite objectively being much worse. Modern audiences will be surprised to find that many of the most successful aspects of the live-action movies or IDW’s comics were actually present in the franchise from its inception, having been pioneered by the likes of Bob Budianski.

The original four-issue limited series in particular—written by varying combinations of Bill Mantlo, Ralph Macchio and Jim Salicrup, though I’ll specifically note that Macchio was the one to script the first issue’s iconic prose—is a pretty enthralling read, presenting a vision of Cybertron which actually feels very fresh when compared to its successors, and laying out the Earth-based conflict in a compelling way. The Classics reprints include Jim Shooter’s original pitch for the series:

“Civil war rages on the planet Cybertron. Destruction is catastrophic and widespread, and yet no life is lost.  None, at least, in the sense that we know life--for the inhabitants of Cybertron are all machines. There is NO ‘life’ on Cybertron save for mechanical, electronic, ‘creatures.’ As mankind is first among the organic denizens of Earth, intelligent, sentient robots are the dominant species on Cybertron. Even the planet itself is one vast mechanical construct. Perhaps there was once a ‘real’ world upon which Cybertron was built on, into, under, and through until no trace of the original planet can be found, but the origin of the planet is unknown, lost in antiquity. Similarly, it is unknown whether the robotic ‘life’ of Cybertron was originally created by some mysterious, advanced, alien race in the dim, distant past, or whether these strange metallic beings somehow evolved from bizarre, basic life forms beyond human comprehension.”

“What is certain is that the sentient, robotic beings of Cybertron are destroying one another.”

I was quite taken by the presentation of this premise, and posted it in Allspark Chat. Ikkad idly noted that it reminded him of the ‘lumberjack Prime’ pitch, and when I started reading the first issue of the comic itself, one panel immediately jumped out at me...

This is the very first view we’re given of the Transformers. It’s unlikely that any of the figures drawn here were supposed to be the actual characters they resemble: just by eye, there are colour schemes matching Bumblebee, Trailbreaker, Sunstreaker, Hound, and—most notably—Optimus Prime, whose actual body design could be interpreted as a pre-war version of the more toy-accurate design he’s seen sporting just a couple of pages later.

Having already been reminded of the existence of my pitch, I couldn’t help but see this Optimus Prime lookalike and his peaceful Cybertron as being dead ringers for those I’d written about months prior, and Ikkad agreed. Later that same day, he posted a pencil sketch that kinda blew my mind.

This sketch is basically the first time that someone’s drawn artwork inspired by something I’ve made! Suddenly, I felt the urge to tell a real Dendrochronology story, something with more than an hour or so devoted to it. Of course, if you’re here, you’ve already read the result, but I’ll talk about that later—suffice to say that once I finished writing, I started converting Ikkad’s sketch into a proper cover image for the story. Digitally colouring a photo of a pencil sketch is quite challenging, as I needed to clean up the linework; I’m not very good with the pen tool.

Once that was done, I began working out a colour layout. I took hues directly from the Marvel artwork and copied the layout for Prime’s upper torso. For the rest of him, however, I drew inspiration from his Animated incarnation; that Prime’s defining characteristics are his relative youth and inexperience, and he carries the trademark axe. I felt like Ikkad had himself used the character for inspiration, cleverly drawing a conceptual parallel between the double-wheel-heels found on many Animated Optimus Prime toys and those depicted on Optimus Prime’s Cybertronian ‘combat vehicle’ mode in the Marvel comic (which also provided the chest detailing for Ikkad’s design).

I’d originally planned to give him an orange axe, like the one he wielded in the original cartoon, but knew from the rest of the layout that it wouldn’t work. That didn’t stop me from attempting to make the logs on his trailer orange (there’s a certain order to how I used colour in the story itself, which I’ll discuss later), and sure enough I was immediately unhappy with the result. I also wasn’t happy with the white stripe across his chest, despite its origins on the Animated colour layout; Marvel had consistently used an outdated character model which lacked the stripe, and besides, I couldn’t help feeling like it made the chest of Ikkad’s design look like a moustachioed face!

For the final layout, I made the logs a blue-grey reminiscent of Optimus Prime’s original trailer, and opted for a red stripe, which I felt resulted in a cleaner look that was more faithful to the comics. I already had a sense of the tone I wanted to achieve with the final image: I wanted it to look, at a glance, like a piece of artwork from the poor scans of beat-up 80s comics I was reading. My version of Photoshop had a ‘color halftone’ effect, which—while not exactly authentic—was close enough for my purposes. I also deliberately avoided fixing minor colouring errors, particularly on Prime’s legs, to create a rough quality to the flats; this head-to-toe gradient also seemed to mirror the setting itself.

For the final version of the cover, I added hands in the background, roughly traced from stock photography using Photoshop’s vector tool. Their proportions could stand to be more titanic—the arms in particular should be much blockier—but I liked their dynamism too much to make changes, and worried that I’d block out too much of the sky (again, I’m sure you can see what I was going for with the gradient). The title (‘OENOROCHRONOLOGY’, heh) was just blocked out in a Transformers font I’d downloaded a while back, while working on the trading cards for the Allspark’s unofficial Hasbro Heroes Sourcebook Extended, with an outline applied.

I don’t have any aspirations of being a colourist, but I enjoy it, and working on lineart like this was pretty special. Ikkad gave me pointers towards the end, which certainly improved the finished piece.

III. The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future

The only constraint I placed on myself for Dendrochronology was that it had to feature Optimus Prime (or Orion Pax, as he ended up being called) in some significant capacity. I quickly decided that I wanted to include Rubble, the breakout audience surrogate from Brian Ruckley’s ongoing comic, and preferred the idea of porting over Bumblebee as well instead of setting up a new mentee/mentor dynamic between him and Orion Pax.

As I didn’t want to spend too long on the story, I gave myself two choices: either I'd do the whole thing as a single continuous scene, or I’d skip around a few short scenes with timeskips between them. The latter seemed like an interesting approach, because the time-adjacent concept of age was at the forefront of the setting’s themes. I’m not sure how exactly the idea to tell part of the story from Nautica’s perspective came about, except for the fact that her recent spotlight issue of the comic had left an impression on me. If I was telling the story in one scene, I’d have used dialogue to establish that she’d been the one to find Rubble’s spark; were I using connected scenes, I’d just have a short snippet of the moment itself.

(Like I discussed way back in the commentary for Another Son, I have something of a morbid fascination with the ocean. Also, the second #writing contest for the Homestuck Discord server—prior to the channel being shut down for being dead as a doornail—had a prompt about a submersible, but I didn’t enter, and since then I’d been vaguely feeling like I wanted to tell a story like that. You can read about the first of those contests in the commentary for “Cowboy”, if you like, though I must warn you that the two works I’ve linked in this aside are amongst the worst ones on this blog.)

There's a text file on my computer titled ‘DendrochronologyOutline.txt’, dated to the 24th of October, which simply reads:

- In the Sea of Rust, Nautica conducts a survey of mechanimal life. She finds a spark. - Rubble stands in the palm of Metroplex, with Bumblebee. - Orion Pax talks with Anode.

After writing that, I figured that if I dawdled any longer then I wouldn’t end up writing anything, so I just started typing. I wanted Nautica to have someone to talk to, and Road Rage—her partner from her aforementioned spotlight issue—was the obvious choice. But of course, Road Rage turns into a car (or a flying car, I guess), so they’d be physically apart. I liked the asymmetry of the dynamic: they talk as though they’re right next to each other, but there’s distance between them.

Thanks to the fandom, I’d actually misremembered Nautica and Road Rage’s dynamic as being more than the friendly professional relationship portrayed in the comic itself. Look, I’m not much of a shipper, but in this case it seemed like the natural angle from which to approach my versions of the characters; Nautica’s job is an isolating one, and Road Rage’s is far less evocative than her occupation as a bodyguard in the comic. I drew a lot from the idea of dating in the information age, where a huge amount of interaction just takes place over text.

(Later issues of Ruckley’s comic would actually bring the ‘subtext’ to the foreground, with Road Rage having unrequited feelings for Nautica; I’d approached the relationship from the opposite angle!)

Although I briefly considered using Broadside, in homage to the handle of a friend in the TFWiki server, I settled on Tidal Wave as a cast member very early on. The character is a favourite of the old Allspark Chat regulars, and indeed of the fandom at large, with his role in Nick Roche’s Sins of the Wreckers providing most of his characterisation in this story. I remember also thinking about the water mages from Worth the Candle (a niche web serial that’s basically my favourite story ever; I swear I mention it practically every time I write a commentary, for the love of god what are you doing here just go read it already, if I tell you Megatron is in it will that be enough to convince you), and saw Tidal Wave as having a similar relationship with the ocean. This didn’t really make it onto the page, as thematically I was already digressing pretty far from the core ideas I’d started with, but if I ever revisit the character that’s an angle I’d like to explore. A related metaphor serves as the focus of Jeff Lemire’s The Underwater Welder, a graphic novel which I didn’t much like at first but which I seem to grow fonder of as time passes.

Perhaps the biggest challenge with Nautica’s scene was that I couldn’t have the characters physically interact. Plus, as a submarine, Nautica doesn’t have any way of emoting! Still, I tried my best. I ended up describing Nautica’s spatial movement in more detail than I would’ve otherwise, and occasionally used the static from the commlink to punctuate Road Rage’s dialogue.

The prose mentions Nautica’s ‘headlights’, and at one point I actually debated a little about whether or not to throw a space in there. See, when editing a story for another friend from the TFWiki server, I’d noticed that they’d mistakenly described a character as having ‘head lights’, which I thought evoked the idea of a car with a literal head, like the Vehicons from Beast Machines. It seemed like a pretty soulful bit of prose, and I filed it away for later use, but ended up deciding that it’d be confusing in the context of this story. Another time, perhaps!

There’s an awkward line in the dialogue where Nautica says “And the sky is blue.” I wrote this intending it to be an expression of ‘yes, obviously’, but then realised that Cybertron might not have a blue sky, and that even if it did, it’d be filled with smoke on most parts of the planet. I couldn’t think of a replacement line that made sense in the context of both Cybertron and Earth, and didn’t want to trip up the reader, and couldn’t think of an entirely different beat to substitute, so the line persisted through to the final draft. I’m not really happy with it, but maybe you didn’t notice it; I made sure to describe the sky as blue above the smog in the subsequent section.

As a result of the challenges of this scene’s setup, I briefly considered playing up the parallel I was drawing to real-world messaging by switching format to Homestuck-style chatlogs, with no descriptive prose whatsoever. Looking ahead at the vague plans I was piecing together for two scenes to come, I realised this’d cause me more problems in the long run, in addition to serving as (yet another) barrier of entry to the story. Plus, I liked the imagery with the Titans’ voices from the pitch, and felt like there’d be thematic dissonance if I never actually had any of the smaller characters speak out loud.

When I laid out the image of the sharkticons circling the spark, I had a specific scene from another story in mind, but I couldn’t work out exactly what I was thinking of. Perhaps it was something from BIONICLE—fish circling a mask? Or maybe I was just remembering a couple of the illustrations from Another Son. The sharkticons actually caused me a bit of a headache; in traditional portrayals they usually transform, and are pretty aggressive, whereas I needed some reason for them to ignore Nautica at first. I settled on the idea that Nautica was safe so long as she remained in submarine form, a sealed unit that keeps the spark’s ‘smell’ in much like it keeps liquid out. The sharkticons could smell Rubble’s spark, and would approach it, but found that it held no living metal upon which to feed. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a nice way of explaining this logic in the story itself, so it’s kinda up to interpretation.

I considered using other kinds of mechanical sea life from Transformers history, but the only ones which came to life were the Allicons and the other fish seen on the planet Quintessa in The Transformers: The Movie. In particular, I wanted to namedrop the squid-like creature that attacks Hot Rod and Kup, but apparently it was never named in the script or in derivative media. Maybe I would’ve called it an ‘octobot’, except I’m sure a brief Google search will show that there’s a billion other things with that name, and it sounds pretty dumb anyway. Speaking of Google searches, I had to look up what a group of sharks is called, and was not disappointed!

IV. Hold on Now, Youngster...

When the first issue of Brian Ruckley’s ongoing came out, I wrote a pretty impassioned review of it for the Refined Robot Co. Though the series has since surpassed that issue, it’s still the one which lingers most strongly in my mind, because there’s a real weight to the scenes that are just Rubble, Bumblebee and Windblade bumbling around the landscape of Cybertron—a powerful atmosphere of endless possibilities.

By the time it came to write the second scene, I’d very much settled on structuring the story as being three conversations between three distinct pairs of characters. There’s a delicious irony—which I’m sure was Ruckley’s intent—in using Bumblebee, the audience’s traditional point of contact with the robotic casts of Transformers stories, as the mentor to an entirely distinct audience surrogate.

In the end, my own take on the dynamic between the two wound up feeling more cynical than Ruckley’s. My Rubble struggles to express himself, and at times is almost vaguely hostile towards Bumblebee, who finds himself out of his depth with most of his mentee’s observations. A key trick I used with Rubble’s dialogue is that he speaks entirely in flat statements, using periods instead of commas and never asking questions (that is, until he finally asks about Nautica). Conversely, I deliberately made a significant proportion of Bumblebee’s dialogue into questions.

Bumblebee namedrops Thundercracker mostly because their friendship in the first IDW continuity was one of the highlights of those comics—certainly in the eyes of the ex-regulars of Allspark Chat, for whom Thundercracker is another favourite—and it seems unlikely to recur in Ruckley’s run. I wanted to characterise him in an oblique way, by hinting towards the idea that he spent a significant amount of time flying Rubble around but never actually explained what his job was.

Hook, meanwhile, was included in reference to Tyler Bleszinski’s “Constructicons Rising” arc of Galaxies, the other book set in IDW’s new continuity, which was shaping up pretty well at the time when the story was written. I saw him as just being his typical arrogant self, with Bumblebee being right that Rubble was put off mostly by his attitude.

The Titans Metroplex and Trypticon are both namedropped, but they weren’t the only ones I considered including. Aside from Fortress Maximus and Scorponok, I liked the idea of mentioning Omega Supreme as being the only theoretically-spaceworthy Titan, tying into the themes of the third scene, but ultimately decided against it. The Titan with treads on its torso that Rubble points out was intended to be Grandus, but I chose not to name him in the text itself.

I came up with the idea of reimagining some of the original combiner teams as hodgepodged-together citybots themselves, but it was an uneccessary complication. I could’ve also used the various Micromaster bases; there’s a certain pleasant irony in turning some of the smallest characters in Transformers into some of the biggest.

I saw cameos like these as being a good way of expanding the world; the existence of Thundercracker and Starscream implies that there’s a Skywarp out there (I actually wanted to namedrop him (her?) somehow, but I couldn’t find a neat way of doing it) while Hook implies that the rest of the Constructicons are around too.

One of my prereaders asked me what face the Titans and Bumblebee were making around the midpoint of the scene—this was something that I’d originally made explicit, but I realised that Rubble would lack the frame of reference to interpret a lot of expressions, and chose to introduce an aspect of ambiguity. For the record, I envisioned them as looking sad; Bumblebee worries that he’s made Rubble upset, but really he’s just upset himself.

The second part has the most heavy lifting to do in terms of laying out key aspects of the setting, but I did everything possible to avoid it becoming an exposition dump. There’s a fair bit in the way of physical description and imagery, albeit a clumsy sort, and most of the worldbuilding details are presented in a way which allows readers to fill in the blanks for themselves.

Bumblebee’s line “You’re special, Rubble. You can be whatever you want to be.” was a fairly late addition to the story. I wanted to make the frame of reference that I was drawing on—namely the millennial experience—a little more explicit. I was planting the seeds of Megatron’s “submarine generation”, a phrase which was supposed to evoke the so-called ‘snowflake generation’. In case you're wondering, yes, that’s why I used the snowflake-like design of sentico metallico from IDW’s comics as a dinkus.

(Huh, “millennial”. The Titans have lived for millennia—does that make them millennials?)

V. The Fall of Home

From the start, I’d planned to save Orion Pax until the final scene, wherein he’d talk to a blacksmith. At first, I wanted to use Anode—an original character from James Roberts’ Lost Light, with whom he’d explored the concept of a Cybertronian blacksmith—but there were a few problems with that idea. First, I’d feel the need to include Lug (Anode’s partner) in some capacity. Second, being a Roberts character, Anode’s kind of a jokester, and I had a specific tone I was angling for. Finally, I just felt like she wasn’t principled enough to lead the conversation I wanted.

Considering that I’d already completely reimagined Optimus Prime’s original occupation, I felt comfortable retooling another character into being a blacksmith, and I only really had one option: Megatron. I follow a one-time official Transformers artist on this site who, for reasons I cannot particularly fathom, likes shipping Optimus Prime and Megatron, and I think they must’ve rubbed off on me. Then again, it’s not as if there’s a shortage of compelling interactions between the two in official media.

I envisioned the scene as being something of a departure in form from those preceding it—I wanted the characters to disagree, but then to ‘leave the camera rolling’ and shine a spotlight on Orion Pax’s viewpoint. Megatron would temper his ideas in his forge, and Orion Pax would turn introspective on his solitary journey.

Once more, I found myself running into problems with the physicality of the scene. I liked the idea of having the characters feed logs to the fire, but wanted to avoid making the prose too repetitive. Hopefully I was able to keep some interest. I think the forge—which looms over the conversation—is a decent enough image, described as ‘insatiable’ to bluntly show that, so long as there are Cybertronians alive, more metal will be needed. I wanted to reference the Smelting Pool from the Marvel comics, which I thought was a suitably horrific comparison to draw. The idea of the forge having ‘molds’ is, of course, an oblique reference to the molds used to produce Transformers toys; I’m probably more pleased with this than I should be.

Orion Pax describes Megatron as “waxing poetic” in reference to Impactor’s famous “not more poetry” line from IDW’s first continuity, which cropped up a couple of times in interactions between him and Megatron. ‘Revolutionary thinker’ portrayals like this have (for better or worse) become the norm for pre-war Megatron, sharply contrasting with the ‘warmongering megalomaniac’ approach taken by older stories.

Megatron’s “petro-rabbits and turbofoxes” metaphor was inspired by Silva’s “last rat standing” soliloquy from Skyfall, which is a friend of mine’s favourite movie (yes, we know it’s got its problems, but there’s some good stuff in there). I was probably also drawing on my experience programming a ‘rabbits and foxes’ simulation for my computer science qualification back in high school. The metaphor was included entirely as setup for some version of the ‘bury their living’ line from my original pitch, as I was quite proud of it but didn’t want the Cybertronians in the story to have interacted with humanity.

My original concept for Maximals and Predacons on this Cybertron reared its head slightly in the prose where Orion Pax thinks about the mechanimals’ ‘unpleasant method of subsistence’. I was hoping that the reader would put the pieces together and realise that the trees aren’t the only source of living metal on Cybertron.

For this final conversation, I found myself cribbing a lot from rationalist ideology (although neither character takes a particularly rationalist stance). Rationalism—at least the kind that I’m familiar with, as a denizen of weird spaces on the internet—is about behaving in a way which produces outcomes that match your values; this is what Megatron finds frustrating about the “dissonance” he sees in Cybertron’s populace. To make some huge generalisations, a lot of rationalists generally care a lot about not dying, and take greater pains than most to avoid death, and think that everybody should be immortal. They also tend to be more interested in space than your average person.

The key points of disagreement between Megatron and Orion Pax concern the next generation and the Necrotitan. Megatron doesn’t want more Cybertronians running around, because he thinks they’ll be a drain on the world’s resources that won’t contribute to its long-term survival; Orion Pax wants to give as many people as possible a chance to increase the likelihood of some small number of them learning how to solve the world’s problems. Megatron wants to tear down the Necrotitan and start using mechanimals as sources of living metal; Orion Pax is deeply uncomfortable with these ideas and sees them as temporary measures anyway.

Of the two, Megatron’s point of view is the more radical, but in my opinion—to be glibly centrist—neither of them is entirely right. This is a world where mechanimals are empirically less sentient than Cybertronians (they lack sparks), and where the reasons against melting the Necrotitan are entirely cultural; it would be a tragedy for any Cybertronian to die when these sources of metal are so readily available. On the other hand, it seems obvious that the world’s current population isn’t equipped to solve its problems, and time is unlikely to change that (most Cybertronians are very old; if they were going to do something, they already would have done it).

The Necrotitan was actually a fairly late addition to the story; I remember going back to the Rubble/Bumblebee scene to insert the beat concerning it while I was writing the Orion Pax/Megatron scene. The original Necrotitan appeared in John Barber’s comics for IDW’s first continuity, and I’ve always thought it to be a pretty evocative conceit. In the setting of Dendrochronology, it serves as a reminder that death is real, ever-present on the skyline.

Starscream is the only additional character to be namedropped in the final section, drawing inspiration from both of his IDW portrayals. Until this point in the story, I hadn’t given much thought to factions—in fact, I deliberately chose Decepticons as cameos in earlier scenes, wanting to present the image of a united planet. With the final scene, I wanted to plant the seeds of the Decepticon movement; Megatron’s use of the phrase “self-deception” was intended to be the origin of its name. I wasn’t too interested in laying out the whole conflict, but suffice to say that Megatron would fall out with Orion Pax and ally with Starscream, with Orion Pax using his unique insights to lead the opposition.

Throughout the story, I tried to use colour for effect. The Transformers movies are a prime example of the ‘blue and orange’ filmmaking trend, and it made sense to call attention to those colours in the story itself. The spark and the sky are both blue, and they share associations with the future. The forge and the sea of rust are both orange, and they’re associated with the ugly costs of living.

VI. A Slow, Slow Death

There’s one major aspect of the story that I’ve left untouched thus far, that being the ultimate fate of Nautica. While writing the end of the first scene, I (unironically) became concerned that I was introducing pro-life undertones. I was approaching the setting on a generational basis—the question posed being ‘how many sacrifices should we make for the next generation’ (answer: lots)—but the actual mechanics of the Cybertronian life cycle meant that sparks were a direct analog to unborn children. This was my intention, in the abstract sense of ‘we have an obligation to those who have yet to be born’, but that’s subtly different to ‘we have an obligation to unborn children’, and I was worried that people’d be more inclined to read it as the latter (which is a much more concrete real-world point of contention than the former).

So yeah, in the scene, Nautica risks her life to save the spark that’ll become Rubble. At the time, I didn’t want her to die—hence her “then I won’t” line—but as I headed into the next scene, I started running into problems.

See, my issue was that I’d never intended Nautica to be Rubble’s mentor; I wanted instead to present the idea that the whole world has an obligation to young people. If Nautica raised Rubble, she’d be his parent in all but name, and the setting hadn’t been created with themes of parenthood in mind. I found the idea that she’d never met Rubble very compelling, and wanted a reason for that to be the case.

At first, I considered that it’d be a case of governmental meddling, perhaps with some functionism mixed in—‘we can’t have submarines raising our kids’—but once again, I was really muddying the waters in terms of what the story was about. It’s not a story about government oversight, nor is it a story about about institutional discrimination, nor is it a story about adoption. I believe a lot in economical narratives and clear themes, and kept finding myself with neither.

So I was like, well, damn, I guess I’d better just kill Nautica then.

The final exchange between Bumblebee and Rubble was absolutely supposed to create the sense that she’s not around any more. I wanted to juxtapose the possibilities of Rubble’s lifetime against a lifetime with no possibilities left. From there, Nautica’s death becomes a shadow which hangs over the story’s conclusion—a real and personal symbol for the cost of life. It was made explicit in the original ending to the exchange between Orion Pax and Megatron, which lacked a few lines present in the final version:

“Has the situation with Road Rage improved?” he asked as he made his way down the ramp.

Living metal flowed out into the mold, casting Megatron’s face in orange light. “Physically, she’s made a full recovery.”

The words hung in the air.

Although I think that first draft of the story was a little cleaner, it was a weaker, more conventional approach, and all in all I found myself pretty uncomfortable with it.

In terms of the writing on this blog—and most of the writing off this blog—I don’t have a stellar record in terms of doing right by girls. I was initially happy to realise that, thanks to the conversation between Nautica and Road Rage, Dendrochronology passes the Bechdel test, being the first of my stories to do so.

(Although their conversation does include a brief mention of Tidal Wave, for the most part it’s squarely concerned with the relationship between Nautica and Road Rage. However, one might argue that Rubble’s spark—the focus at the end of the conversation—counts as a male character, thus invalidating the test. Either way, this is still less ambiguous than candidates from previous stories of mine: the conversation between Lizzie and the maybe-a-figment-of-her-imagination devil at the end of Are You Happy, and the conversation between gendered-according-to-interpretation characters at the end of Retrace Steps. If it sounds like this is becoming a little tortured and overwrought, there’s two reasons for that: one is that the Bechdel test is kind of a dumb metric, and the other is that I don’t write enough about girls.)

If I killed Nautica, I’d be fridging her, perhaps burying her too (though I suppose textually that’s open to interpretation). It felt grossly cynical, and pretty far removed from what I’d set out to say with the pitch. Ultimately, my friend gearshift from the TFWiki Discord server came up with a simple solution: not killing her.

In abstract, leaving Nautica grievously wounded is a kind of fridging all of its own—but the key difference is that it leaves room for her condition to improve. This neatly mirrors the state of Cybertron itself: she’s not doing well, but with a little care, she’ll survive. Aside from clarifying that she’s alive, I decided that the less said in the story itself, the better. Whatever condition she’s in, it’s bad enough that they don’t want Rubble to know about it. I see Road Rage as wanting nothing to do with Rubble; she can’t help but blame him. This fate also has symmetry with the events of Nautica’s spotlight issue in Ruckley’s comic.

VII. ...And We Exhale and Roll Our Eyes in Unison

From a certain perspective, Dendrochronology fails to live up to its potential. Had I been able to devote an unlimited amount of resources to the fic, it’d look wildly different. The stratified society would ideally have provided the structure: the story would begin at the highest point on Cybertron and end in the forest on its surface, with the protagonists passing down through the layers and witnessing their life cycle in real time. It’d be told more traditionally, with, y’know, actual events, rather than the kinds of static conversations which usually constitute short stories. Ideally, it’d have more thematic focus.

Aside from that, I’ve deliberately avoided giving the hypothetical fully-realised version of this story much thought, because I have other stuff I want to work on. The idea of writing Transformers stories strongly appeals to me—and heck, I’ve talked a stupid amount about them—so it was nice to finally put my money where my mouth is and write a piece of serious prose. I’ve got maybe three or four pitches or openings for different Transformers stories sitting around on my hard drive, but they’re all too ambitious, which is why the goal here was to always keep things as constrained as possible. Right now, I feel like I can’t commit any real amount of time to any project like this; maybe one day the world will convince me that the things I make will be read by more than a dozen people, and I’ll be able to justify it. Or maybe when more people read my stuff I’ll just feel bad for not making enough? I don’t know. We’re in the doldrums of the commentary now, where I realise I’ve spent more time writing about the thing I made than on the thing itself, and start thinking about the fact that after I add the thing to the list of things I made I’m probably not gonna hear about it again, and that I’m not entitled to anything more than that anyway. Okay, this paragraph’s gotten needlessly self-indulgent and depressing, time to abort.

Ikkad’s favourite Transformers is Cosmos, and I drew a terrible redesign for him in MS Paint. I figure maybe in the good ending of Dendrochronology, he’s the first in a generation of spacefaring bots. I had this vague idea in my head—and I suppose Cybertron would look quite different if this were true—that the Transformers maybe wouldn’t grow if they were in stasis, and that once a ship escaped the pull of Cybertron’s gravity it would fall dormant, only awakening its crew members upon arrival on another planet. Y’know, kinda like in the 80s stories. Or maybe Cosmos is, for the time being, one-of-a-kind, tumbling through space as far away from home as anyone’s ever been. He’s historically been characterised by his loneliness.

Yeah, I kinda suck at drawing. Poor Cosmos didn’t deserve this. Here’s a compilation of stock photos of my sources of inspiration for this redesign, in case you want to steal his look.

Okay, okay, I’ve kept you longer than I should’ve—I’ll wrap things up.

This project has been sitting completed in my drafts folder for many months now, and that’s in large part down to the fact that—for most of those months—the future of my long-time home in the Transformers fandom, Allspark Chat, was deeply uncertain. This isn’t the place to tell that story, but the long and short of it is that most of the longstanding members of that community were ultimately forced to abandon what was once one of the fandom’s most eminent forum. We’re making a go of it in the brand-new official TFWiki Discord server, and we’d love for you to join us—certainly, that’s where people will be chatting about this story!

Without the ex-regulars of Allspark Chat, Dendrochronology really wouldn’t exist—in many ways, it’s a love letter to them, and the scores of conversations we’ve had. I hope that one day I’ll be able to dedicate to them something with a higher word count! More people responded to the original pitch than I can name here, but in particular I should thank my prereaders, who gave me a ton of feedback and encouragement: Fear or Courage, gearshift, and shiny. I’ve already talked about Ikkad’s role in the creation of this story, but I should thank him one last time for all of his support.

If you enjoyed this story, tell your friends about it! The ones who’d be interested in Transoformers fanfiction, that is. The rest of my writing—including rewritten versions of old Transformers comics—can be found right here on this blog. In terms of wholly-original fiction, I recommend checking out Retrace Steps if you haven’t already. If you want to be informed when my next project gets released, you should follow me either here or on twitter (where I mostly just ramble about robots occasionally)—and as always, my ask box is open. Thanks for reading!

[emoboijk]

kth | daffodils

“Daffodils are an optimistic flower, and foolproof.” (Tasha Tudor) or sometimes denial is the brain’s way of protecting itself. —hanahaki disease au, flora & fauna series

4,388 words

p.cred

The waiting room is beige with a dark brown carpet, the kind that has either always been that color or is that color as a result of years of use. There are paintings (ironically) of flowers on the walls, and potted plants stationed randomly between the chairs. A receptionist sits behind a counter, typing on a computer and answering the phone when it rings. Aside from her, there are seven people scattered about the room.

Taehyung is sitting by the door to the doctor’s office, flipping through a back issue of Vogue he’s already seen, thinking of other things. He doesn’t feel any different; just the same old Taehyung. He’d been having coughing fits, hadn't noticed any petals or blood, but his general practitioner noticed some flora-like images on the precautionary x-rays and made him book an appointment right away. Taehyung had heard of Hanahaki disease, of course, had a friend of a friend who’d suffered from it, but for the life of him, there wasn’t a one-sided love in his life that he could think of. 

When the nurse calls his name he’s surprised to find that he’s nearly the last person in the waiting room. He crosses the space, smiling politely at the nurse as he follows her through the maze of hallways to one of the private rooms. 

“How long have you been experiencing symptoms?” she asks without looking up from the clipboard.

Taehyung opens his mouth to reply but pauses before he can speak, reaching his fingers into his mouth and extracting a daffodil petal that’s a brilliant shade of yellow. It shocks him. It’s his first petal and it’s so beautiful. No one ever talks about how beautiful the petals are… With his eyes still wide and his heart suddenly hammering in his chest he replies, “About a week.” 

The nurse raises her eyebrows and says, “Is it just the petals? No blood?” 

Taehyung shakes his head, “Nope. And just the one petal.” He’s still holding it in his hand, cradling it like a baby bird, as though it might fly away. It’s proof of something—the disease, of course, but something else. He just can’t place it. He slips it into the pocket of his shirt gently and looks up to find the nurse staring at him questioningly. 

Taehyung smiles sheepishly and the nurse shrugs, telling him that the doctor will be in soon. When the door clicks shut, Taehyung relaxes, breathing deeply. He swings his legs back and forth from his high vantage point, scowling as his brain goes back to the puzzle. 

He goes through every person he knows (men and women, older and younger, close friends and acquaintances), still nothing. He’s sorting through various one night stands when the doctor comes in. 

“Everything alright?” she says when she sees Taehyung’s expression. 

“Huh?” he asks, cocking his head at her before realizing, “Oh, um.” He hesitates, unsure of how to phrase this, “It’s just...doesn't Hanahaki disease manifest from unrequited love?” 

“Yes, that’s right,” the doctor says, sitting on a stool and looking up from his file. 

“But, I don’t...love anyone.” He winces as he says the words because they sound colder than he intends. He just means that...unrequited love, from what he’s heard, is the most painful thing a person can experience (actual Hanahaki disease aside). Taehyung doesn’t feel anything like that. 

The doctor raises her eyebrows, “Well,” she says, closing his file and folding her hands across her lap diplomatically, “this would be the first documented case of Hanahaki without a love interest.” 

Taehyung’s shock reads on his face, “Really?” 

The doctor nods, “People have claimed, of course, to not have an unrequited love before. But it almost always turns out to be,” she pauses. She hates having to tell someone that they do in fact have an unrequited love; as if the Hanahaki disease wasn’t cruel enough, telling someone previously unaware that they have actually been in pain this whole time...it’s awful. 

“What?” Taehyung asks, even though he’s pretty sure what her answer will be. 

“Denial,” she sighs. 

Taehyung breathes deeply, “Well then what am I supposed to do?” 

“Well,” the doctor says, “surgery is an option. It’s so early on in the flora progression that there would be minimal risk, except for the obvious one: you’ll no longer love the person, will have no emotion toward them at all.” 

“Sign me up,” he says, shrugging, “I already don’t feel it, clearly.” 

The doctor keeps her gaze steady, “We do require a fourteen-day waiting period since this is your first appointment for the Hanahaki itself.” Taehyung nods along. She pauses for a long moment before adding, “And you might want to think more about who it is you might have feelings for.” 

“I told you, I don’t—” 

The doctor raises her hands to silence him, “I know. But oftentimes, people who claim to have no unrequited love that rush into surgery...they realize afterward who it was and lose a fundamental piece of their lives because of it.” 

“But the patients don’t even care, right? Because they don’t have any emotion for that person?” 

“That’s true,” the doctor concedes, “but it’s like the person has died. It fundamentally changes your life.” She stands up, turning to swipe a brochure from the counter and handing it to him, “Just think about it. We’ll make an appointment for two weeks, a follow-up, and then we can schedule the surgery.” 

“Okay,” Taehyung whispers, glancing down at the brochure: Who Do I Love? Tracking Down the Source of Your Hanahaki Disease. He stands from the table and folds the brochure neatly, tucking it into the pocket of his pants and following the nurse through the maze of hallways again. 

“Follow up,” the nurse says, craning her neck into the reception area. The receptionist nods and Taehyung leans against the counter to wait. 

“Two weeks, is it?” the receptionist says. 

“Yeah,” he nods, worrying his bottom lip before pulling out the brochure again. The picture on the front is of a man with a forlorn expression, a glowing picture of a flower (violets maybe?) in his throat. Taehyung frowns. 

“Tuesday the 14th work?” the receptionist says, and Taehyung nods without looking up. She slides a reminder card across the counter to him and he takes it, eyes never drifting from the brochure, even as he leaves. 

Taehyung’s feet take him there without his knowledge. He just looks up from the brochure and he’s standing in front of the gallery. There’s a tacky white neon sign that blinks in and out: Open. The windows have all been blacked out with heavy construction paper (he’s already seen the latest installation ‘Black Stars’ - every piece glows in the dark). Multiple copies of the same flyer have been pasted to the heavy metal door: BLACK STAR EXHIBITION NAOMI CRAWFORD THURSDAY — MONDAY. 

It’s Monday. 

Taehyung folds the brochure into his back pocket carefully and pushes through the metal door. 

It’s dark. Melodic jazz is humming through the overhead speakers and it puts him at ease (he likes it better than the heavy metal they played when Jake Martinez held his instillation of decapitated dolls as a comment on beauty standards). There’s a small corner near reception lit by soft yellow candles. 

Taehyung is still staring into the darkness when you call his name. You step out from behind the reception desk (which feels more like a shrine, what with all these candles) and are greeted with a wide, box-shaped smile shrouded in shadow. 

“I was wondering if you'd stop by.” You wrap your hand around his wrist and tug him toward the counter, “I saved some snacks for you.” 

His face lights up when he sees the various catered goodies you’ve kept hidden in a napkin amongst the candles. He holds it in his hand delicately and starts munching. 

Silence. Or worse yet, jazz-filled silence. You want to say something but there doesn’t seem to be anything to fill the space. And Taehyung seems…distracted. 

The phone rings harshly and even though it’s dark you can see Naomi glare at you like a demon in the dark. You hold your hands up to appease her and scurry around the desk. Naomi huffs when the phone rings a second time and you actually roll your eyes as you pick up the phone, “Bogo Sipda Art Gallery.” 

Taehyung wanders off. 

You can see him stall in front of a wide canvas covered in brown and black paint, pinpointed with tiny drops of glowing yellow. It’s called ‘Alone.’ 

“Sorry, sir, yes, I’m here. What was your question?” 

Taehyung is still there when you approach to mark the painting with a red ‘sold’ sticker. 

“Someday,” he says and his eyes aren’t here, they’re amongst the painted stars and fantasy clouds, “I’ll have a home filled with art.”

“I know.” 

When he turns, his eyes have grounded again, but they’re still alight, glimmering in the low light like the Milky Way, “Do you?” 

“Yes.” 

You jump when the phone rings again and Naomi immediately screeches your name like you are single-handedly ruining the entire evening. Artists. 

“Bogo Sipda Art Gallery.” 

Taehyung wanders again. 

You find him nearly two hours later, crouched at the end of the exhibit, the darkest point, pitch black but for a small, square canvas painted edge-to-edge in white glow-in-the-dark paint. It almost illuminates his face. 

His fist is closed so tightly over the used up napkin that his knuckles have turned white. When he frowns it takes up his entire face. You don’t think you’ve ever seen him frown before; neutral or stoic, yes, when considering a piece of artwork, but never such a blatant display of unhappiness. Not here. 

“I can take that,” you say, holding your hand out for the napkin. 

Instead, he slides a worn-out brochure into your palm. He holds the napkin between his knees and begins to tear it up, the soft white pieces fluttering to the ground. 

Your eyes scan the brochure. “Hanahaki disease?” 

He shrugs. Passive aggressively. 

“Do you have Hanahaki disease?” 

He shrugs again. 

Figures. 

You sit beside him on the bench. “Have you told anyone?” 

He shrugs then adds, “You.” 

You know why he’s telling you. You’re not real friends. Telling his real friends would make it real, would mean having to face it and make decisions about it. Telling you…an acquaintance…that’s safer. But it does feel like a needle in your spine. 

He sits up straight and leans against the back of the bench, stretching his legs out in front of him and tossing the rest of the napkin harshly. As if just to defy him, it flutters to the ground in mid-air. “I don’t love anyone.” 

You snort. You’d argue that he loves too much, everything too much all the time. The sky and the birds and the trees and art and his friends and his life. Love, love, love. As if he just has to dip a hand in to sprinkle it on top of everything. 

He actually smiles at your response. “I’m not in love with anyone.” 

You don’t believe this either. You’re not sure how Hanahaki disease works but you’re pretty sure the fundamental, unavoidable cause is being in love with someone. 

“I know that’s impossible,” he sighs and you wonder how he’s reading your thoughts. 

You shrug then, “Maybe your subconscious knows something you don’t.” 

“How can I be in love without knowing I’m in love?” he huffs, “I love love.” 

You shrug. Again. And wonder how much of a conversation can actually be shrugs. “The brain avoids pain…tries to protect you from pain.” 

“And gives me Hanahaki disease instead?” 

Anyone else would have scoffed that sentence or laced it with anger and bitterness like a martini with too much gin. But Taehyung says it like a boy in Algebra class presented with a problem he hasn’t studied for, something he hasn’t learned yet. His voice is pure confusion and innocent wondering. 

“The brain is the only thing to ever truly name itself.” 

He laughs so loudly it tears a hole right through your chest. 

You don’t see him for three days after that. Naomi’s exhibition ends (she sold almost all of her paintings, a new record for the gallery) and you’re back to stocking one-offs from various local artists. When you put up the sketch Taehyung drew three years ago (not in the best spot, a little nearer to the back than you would like) your boss scoffs at you; he doesn’t understand why you’re so attached to it, why you insist on putting it up between installations when no one’s shown an interest in it. 

You think it’s the closest you’ll ever get to confessing. It’s like your own silent love letter that Taehyung is deaf to. It feels both like a security blanket and a knife in the chest. 

When he does come in he brings the smell of french fries with him. He’s carrying a large street vendor plate of them (smothered in cheese and bits of bacon). He walks right by the handsome new hire flipping through a high-brow art magazine at the front desk and walks the gallery maze until he finds you. 

“Thanks, Taki.” You’re smiling up at the aging Japanese man atop the ladder, screwing in a light bulb over an abstract painting the size of a flatscreen TV. But both you and Taki freeze when the smell of fries wafts in your direction. 

Taehyung’s face transforms into a smile painted with recognition. “Hungry?” 

“Starved.” 

Two minutes later (after Tae gave Taki some fries and you struggled through an introduction between Cole The Receptionist and Taehyung), you’re perched on the bench outside, picking gingerly at the cheesy-fries with your fingers. 

“How are you feeling?” 

Taehyung shrugs, “Still in love, I guess.” He leans against the brick wall behind the bench and stretches his arms above his head, “But I told some more people… and I’ll have the surgery.” 

You try not to let your surprise electrocute you and turn you stiff, you fight to keep from looking at him like he’s crazy. “You will?” Your voice comes out even. 

He picks up the last fry and offers it to you. “I don’t even know who I love…what’s there to miss?” 

You lean forward and bite the fry, leaning back when Taehyung releases it. You chew slowly and swallow. “You aren’t scared?” 

This stumps him. Taehyung hadn’t even thought that far. “Scared of what?” 

You take a deep breath and lean against the wall, too, watching the orange sun sink behind the familiar outline of the buildings downtown. “Of losing something.” 

Taehyung doesn’t think he is, but there’s a flicker. It’s like the last bit of light before a candle extinguishes. That’s his fear. 

He spends all day thinking about what you said. He’s in a daze as he walks the three blocks back to his apartment (the one he shares with Minho and Hyungsik and Seojoon). He ignores the elderly lady that sells churros from a cart (and sneaks him free, extra-crispy bits); he ignores the homeless man he chats with a couple minutes every day before handing him a couple of bucks; he even ignores the sweet woman and her two kids that live above him. None of these people, though, are at all perturbed by this daze. That’s Taehyung; sometimes he’s a bright ball of uncontrollable light and sometimes he’s the early morning fog that wraps around the trees.

When he makes it up to the apartment, all three roommates are in the living room. Minho is typing quickly on a laptop perched on his knees and ignoring the drama playing on the television. Hyungsik is absorbed in it, dropping pieces of popcorn in his distraction. Seojoon is fighting with his partner via text. 

They all look up when he unlocks the door, pausing to toe-off his shoes in the entryway before drifting down the hallway. 

“Hey,” Seojoon says, grateful to look away from his phone, “how was the gallery? Anything good?” 

“Yeah,” Minho says, already chuckling at his own joke, “did she put up that sketch of yours again?” 

When he doesn’t respond (or rather, when he doesn’t immediately start gushing about the pieces of artwork and how nice they are to put his on display after all this time, how nice you are in general), they look closer. The normally bright and vibrant Kim Taehyung seems diminished, just a shade of his usual self. 

“What’s going on?” Hyungsik asks, pausing the drama and turning to face him. 

Taehyung side-steps the couch and then moves to sit between them, chewing on his bottom lip. He takes one of the decorative pillows Hyungsik picked out (this one is pink with a festive llama embroidered on it) and hugs it to his chest. 

“Is this about the Hanahaki?” Seojoon says quietly, leaning over to squeeze Taehyung’s knee, “I thought you had decided to have the surgery.” 

Taehyung nods and, inexplicably, there are tears in his eyes. 

“What happened?” Minho asks quietly. 

He looks up and everything’s blurry. The tears. “What if I lose something?” 

“Lose…something?” 

“Something I don’t know I have now.” His voice breaks on the last few syllables and he hides his face in the pillow. The flicker of fear you’d set alight in his chest has grown into a forest fire, it’s consumed him. 

They share a concerned look over his head and Hyungsik rubs soothing circles into his back. Seojoon ruffles his hair. “Do you think you’re going to lose something?” 

“I don’t know,” Taehyung sniffles, “It feels like I will now.” 

“Why?” 

“She and I…” he’s talking about you, they already know, he doesn’t have to clarify, “we were just talking and she said that. She asked me ‘what if I lose something’ and…” Taehyung looks up and his eyes are red. He hits his chest harshly, “What if she’s right?” He wipes his nose with the back of his hand. 

The three others all have the same thought. It’s not so much what was said but who said it. 

“Tae,” Minho starts. Both Hyungsik and Seojoon look at him desperately over the younger boy’s head, don’t their expressions say. But Minho knows he has to. “What about...her?” 

Taehyung rubs his eyes and sits up straight. He always feels a bit saner when talking about you; a bit safer and like things are for-sure. He tilts his head to the side. 

Hyungsik sighs, giving in, “Don’t you think maybe…it’s her? Don’t you love her?” 

“What?” 

Seojoon closes his eyes and prays for patience. “You’re always talking about her, Tae. And when you brought us to that exhibition last month, to introduce us…” 

“You’ve never looked so happy,” Hyungsik finishes. 

“Well, of course, I love her,” Taehyung says. His words are fact and he says them like they’ve been carved into stone, but his brow is still knit in confusion. 

“Then don’t you think, maybe, she’s your unrequited love?” 

Taehyung shakes his head, “No. I’m not…it’s not…like that. I don’t…why are you—” He gets up in one quick motion like it's the only way his newfound nervous energy can be released. He walks out of the room quickly, stopping to repeat, “It’s not like that,” before disappearing. 

This time when his three roommates share a look they agree on this: Taehyung is in denial. And it’s going to kill him. 

When Taehyung wakes up the next morning he stays in bed. His eyes open to the sunlight through his window and he rolls onto his back to stare at the ceiling. He switches off the alarm on his phone without looking and counts the imperfections in the ceiling plaster. He listens to each of his roommates as they go about their mornings. 

Hyungsik hogs the bathroom, Minho berates him for it. Seojoon pads around the apartment quietly and Taehyung knows that he’s just staying out of the younger two’s way, sipping his coffee and ducking in and out of the kitchen, the living room, and the bedroom. He hears Hyungsik grab an apple and his keys off the counter before rushing out. He hears Minho dripping from his shower as he meanders back to his bedroom. He hears them all leave, slowly, one by one. 

Then he climbs out of bed, walks across the hall to the bathroom, kneels over the toilet and spits the flower petals he’s been holding on his tongue into the bowl. When he looks in the mirror he’s paler and his teeth are stained pink. And he’s sad. He tries to brush his teeth but he keeps having to stop for the flower petals. 

He calls out of work and skips classes. He climbs back into bed with a trash can to vomit into. 

You spend nearly a full week walking in crazed, frantic circles in the art gallery, waiting for Taehyung to come in. He’s never gone more than a few days without stopping by, not without telling you first. 

I’ll just have the surgery. 

Five words. Like ice in your veins. 

His number, which he wrote on a donut shop napkin (the one around the corner that sells the sugary, cinnamon covered ones he loves so much), and which you never felt you were allowed to use, finally gets dusted off. You open a message and type the first thing that comes to mind. 

Did you have the surgery? 

Sorry…that was blunt

I just…did you? 

This is a stupid decision. 

You’ve been to Taehyung’s apartment once before. Last Halloween he invited you to the party he and his roommates were throwing. Then, like now, you stood on the sidewalk across the street and stared up at the window you imagined to be his with a feeling of nauseous dread crouching in your stomach. 

On that day, you had turned (perfectly crafted Tinker Bell costume and all) and left, texting him a half-hearted excuse and folding into your couch with a pint of ice cream. 

Today, you swallow the nauseous feeling and plunge forward. 

You slip inside behind a resident, stepping into the elevator and pressing the button for the fourth floor. You feel pathetic for having that information memorized, despite not even having attended the party a year ago. 

You know which apartment is his because there’s a faint pencil sketch on the faded red wallpaper beside the door of Taehyung and his three roommates. You would be able to recognize him from the sketch, but you mostly know this because after he’d done it (when he was slightly tipsy after his exams last semester), he’d shown you a picture on his phone proudly. 

You trace the drawing softly, stalling as you muster the courage to knock on the door. 

But you don’t get the chance. Someone sidles up next to you at the door. He jingles his keys and jimmies it into the lock. He says your name with a smile in his voice. 

“I’m Seojoon,” he smiles, “Want to come inside?” He pauses in the doorway and adds, “You’re here to see Taehyung, right?” 

You follow him inside, bowing politely at the two other men lounging in the living room, but freezing when you see Taehyung turn the corner. He freezes, too. 

“What—?” Taehyung looks between his roommates and you, “What are you doing here?” 

You feel winded looking at him. He’s wearing a large, faded baby blue t-shirt and loose flowing pants. There’s a kimchi stain on the collar of his shirt. His hair is oily and disheveled. His lips are chapped and his cheeks have drained of color, his whole face has. 

He looks…wrong. That isn’t the right word but it’s the only one you can come up with. 

The Taehyung you're used to has the sun beneath his skin and so many easy smiles that they fill you up inside. He’s frowning now. 

“I, um—” You fumble for an excuse but your mouth is dry and your brain is wringing. You feel like a dishcloth being twisted in his hands. You squeeze out a sentence, “Did you have the surgery?” 

His eyes dart away from you but you can’t look away. Your eyes have gone wide like saucers, trying to take in every detail of him. Everything’s slightly askew. 

“No.” It’s not him who answers but one of his roommates; Hyungsik, you think. 

Taehyung looks at him like shut up. 

Your knees almost give out you’re so relieved. Not so much, maybe, because you didn’t want him to have the surgery but because you wanted to be there with him, for him. You wanted to hold his hand and fetch him water and make sure he was alright. 

And maybe they almost give out a little, too, because you’re afraid. You’re afraid that whatever they cut out in surgery a piece of it will be you. Maybe not you directly—you aren’t the flower—but what if you’re a side fixture? What if you’re the painting beside the painting he’s cutting out and by consequence he never sees again? 

Now Taehyung looks at you like what the hell. 

You can stand straighter now, more composed now that you’re carrying the information you came for. You fold your arms around your stomach and worry your lips together, “I was worried.” 

Now he looks at you like your answer to his next question is the only answer in the universe. “Worried about me?” In his eyes, you see that he’s teetering on the edge of hope and despair. 

It’s your turn to look at him like what the hell. 

“Of course. You.” 

Then, because you’re a little lost in the galaxies beneath his eyes, you reach forward and put your palm on his chest. You feel his breath hike and you almost feel something else, the hint of growth, of something else in his lungs. But you press harder because you can’t say the words aloud, you have trained yourself not to.

But he seems to understand. “I love you,” he says, softly and with blood on his lips. 

You fist his shirt in your hand and press your lips to his. You kiss the blood, the flowers, and the fear away. 

author’s note— i took ‘bogo sipda’ from spring day; ‘보고 싶다’ (literally ‘i want to see,’ figuratively ‘i miss you’) 

for more of my works check out my m.list

[geimei]

Hello. Please, can you tell about the "mizuage"? I've searched for the information on many websites, on some it was said, that in the past many geikos had it, on others it was said, that it was sort of "illegal" ritual for Geikos, so only few had. What about Mineko Iwasaki? When did that ritual begin? Was it for real or no? Looking forward!!! P.S. I love your page!!!*-*

I’m sorry that I took so long to answer, I wanted to include everything that I know (missmyloko has talked about this topic on her blog just a few days ago, so I wanted to add that as well) and construct it so that it’s easy to follow and not completely mixed up, like some of my longer asks ^^. So take a seat, this is going to be a long one ^^.

The word mizuage (水揚げ, “Raising Waters”) has several meanings. The first is that it’s the name of the ceremony during which a junior Maiko is promoted to a senior Maiko. The most visible differences between a junior and a senior Maiko is that a junior Maiko wears the wareshinobu hairstyle and a senior Maiko the ofuku hairstyle; the junior Maiko also wears a visibly more red collar than a senior Maiko; that of a senior Maiko is almost white, only a small part at the neck is still red.

During this ceremony, the top-knot of the respective Maiko’s wareshinobu hairstyle is ritually cut open and small presents are handed out to ochaya she frequents, close clients, or okiya her okiya may have close relationships with. It’s like a little party to celebrate the promotion of the girl. Afterwards, the girl will wear the ofuku hairstyle as her everday-hairstyle.

However, mizuage was also the name of a ceremony during which Oiran, high-class courtesans in old Japan, and Yuujo, ordinary prostitues, were ritually deflowered in exchange for a large amount of money paid by the highest bidder. It’s not clear why the names for the two ceremonies are the same, but it’s probably because the quarters of Geisha, Oiran and Yuujo were close together and they were all part of the karyukai, the flower and willow world.

Additionally, and this is likely where the word originally came from, fishermen use the word mizuage to talk about how much fish they caught a day, and the word mizuage is also used by Geisha to talk about their monthly earnings. As you can see, this is starting to get confusing.

Now, many people belive that Geisha also had a mizuage-ceremony in the sexual way; i.e. being deflowered by a man in exchange for a lot of money. This belief is also used time and time again to give reasons for Geisha being high-class prostitutes, which is still what most people in the west think Geisha are, if they know them at all. That is wrong, simply put. If you want to know about why Geisha have the reputation of being prostitutes in the west, do not hesitate to answer, I’ll gladly answer you.

However, this belief is also supported by both the novel and the movie Memoirs of a Geisha, sadly the most popular piece of fiction, and pretty much all modern literature, to been written on Geisha. In that book and corresponding movie, the main character, a Maiko and later Geiko in Gion Kobu, is ritually deflowered by a client for the largest amount of money anyone has paid for a mizuage in decades. This portrayal of mizuage in context of Geisha is plain wrong and extremely misleading and disrespectful, as is the rest of the book, and I’d highly recommend anyone who is new to Geisha to not read until they have gathered some further knowledge.

Arthur Golden, the author of the novel, talked to famous retired Geiko Mineko Iwasaki of Gion Kobu and used things she told him about her life as a Geisha in his book. However, he completely distorted things and even plain made up things that fit better into the imagination of what Geisha are by western people. For example, Mineko Iwasaki referred to her monthly earnings as mizuage, but he wrote into his book that the “sexual kind” of mizuage aso took place in Kyoto (and even happened to her, as he claimed his main character was greatly influenced and modelled after her), specifically in Gion Kobu, which is plain wrong. He also credited her in his novel, although she explicitly asked him not to. As a result of the public now knowing that she had consulted with Golden and people thinking that she herself made these horrible false claims, she received death threats and her old district Gion Kobu broke off all relations with her, and it took years to clear up the situation and rekindle her broken relationships.

But here we get to a point where it gets really complicated, as things are rarely simple in the karyukai: In the past, some Geisha did have sex with their clients. That is because, before WWII, in some Geisha-districts across Japan, it was legal to become “double-registrated” as a Geisha and a prostitute, a Yuujo. These women would entertain their clients with music, dance, games and conversation, like all Geisha do, but would then, unlike other Geisha, go on to have sexual relations with some of them.

Double-registration was especially common in poorer parts of Japan, where the respective Geisha had to also become prostitutes to make a living. Especially affected were Onsen-Geisha, which is what the Geisha working in hot spring resorts (Onsen) are called. First of all, there just are a lot of them, Onsen-Geisha made and make up the majority of Geisha, and also, aside from popular Onsen-towns like Beppu and Atami, many Onsen-towns lacked a steady stream of visitors and enough merchants (the main supporters of Geisha before WWII) to support Geisha. They were simply forced to make money through other means as well.

Many double-registrated Geisha also had a sexual mizuage, because it meant making a large amount of money at once. It was usually used to pay off a big part or all of the debt they had with their okiya for their accumulated training and living-expenses.

If you’re interested in learning more about double-registration, I’d recommend the book “Autobiography of a Geisha” by Sayo Masuda, who worked as a double-registrated Geisha before and through WWII.

Now, I want to emphasize, because they have a very bad reputation, that Onsen-Geisha were and are not prostitutes; the majority of them were just regular Geisha, like their sisters in the big cities, and even those who did work as prostitutes were still well-trained artists; the fact that they also were prostitutes does not undermine their artistic accomplishments. And double-registration did occur in other parts of the country as well, of course.

Double-registration occured in what many (Ex-)Geisha themselves, including Mineko Iwasaki, call “lower-class districts”, meaning that most prestigious and well-known districts were never affected by it. Overall, double-registration never affected the vast majority of Geisha, and double-registrated Geisha were even looked down upon by their fellow Geisha-sisters in more well-off hanamachi.

Then, there’s also something missmyloko mentioned in her dicussion about mizuage and Liza Dalby’s book “Geisha” on her blog a few days ago. For her famous book “Geisha”, Liza Dalby interviewed several older Geiko working in the Pontocho-hanamachi of Kyoto, one of the most high-class hanamachi in the entire country, who said that their mizuage was, indeed, of sexual nature.

Missmyloko pointed out that they may not have been talking about their actual mizuage-ceremony, but about something different. She said that the rules in Pontocho possibly stated that a Geiko couldn’t be a virgin, as Geiko are considered mature women, which may have intailed, at that time, that they should have had some sexual experience. In that case, there would have been a more experienced man found to “help the girl out”, i.e. deflower her, not too long before her Erikae. Since this ritual wouldn’t have been performed for pleasure on both sides and there was no money or goods exchanged, it wouldn’t have been prostitution. It would have basically been a rite of passage, and wouldn’t have been illogical by customs and mindsets at the time (not only in Japan, by the way). However, since it wasn’t specified and since most or all women interviewed by Dalby are dead by now, there is no way to find out the truth.

I hope I covered everything and did so correctly. If you have any follow-up questions, don’t hesitate to ask me ^^.

[hellacluttered]

Back (Red Harvest)

   It had been a year since the battle for Rose Creek, and you had done your best to move on from what you lost in it. You cried when your baby was born, first from joy and later because your husband couldn’t be there to welcome him into the world with you. You named the baby after him though- Micah. You visited your husband’s grave regularly, often bringing fresh flowers to adorn the cross that stood there.

    You had a couple suitors, and you didn’t know if you weren’t interested them or if you were still in love with your husband, but you didn't fall in love again. So you lived alone with your child. Your husband had worked as an overseer during the construction of the transcontinental railroad and owned several properties in the town, so you had plenty of money to live off. It was a simple, peaceful life, and you were glad to have all the time to spend with Micah.

    You were sitting on the porch of your small house one day when you heard voices and cheers down the street and rose, walking to the edge of the porch with Micah in your arms to see what was going on. Walking down the center of the street were three horses with three familiar figures astride them- Sam Chisholm, Red Harvest, and Vasquez, the remaining of Rose Creek’s intervening saviors.

    The memories they brought back were bittersweet.

    But you still dressed up and joined the festivities in the street that evening as the people of the town came together to give the three a proper banquet. You ended up sitting on the top step of the saloon steps with a group of children, a few parents, and Vasquez, who was telling them stories that had all the children totally entranced. Even Micah’s eyes were on him, though he couldn’t understand the words being spoken. You sensed someone next to you even though your peripheral vision hadn’t alerted you yet and you glanced up to see Red Harvest standing there, quietly eating, apparently listening to Vasquez’s story as well.

    After awhile, Micah started to become fussy and burst into tears and you quickly stood, apologizing for the disruption, and were about to walk away when Red Harvest said, “I’ll walk with you.”

    You’d never heard him speak before- you never even knew he spoke English- and you started slightly. “Oh! Thank you.”     “You’re welcome,” he said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

    “It’s fine,” you said, feeling slightly embarrassed at your own reaction.

    Micah quieted slightly as the sounds of the festivities faded. “Your husband fought?” Red Harvest asked.

    You nodded. “He died in the battle.”

    “I remember him,” he said. “I saw you with him afterward.”

    “Really?” you said.

    Red Harvest nodded. “He was a good man.”

    “He was,” you agreed. You walked in silence until you reached your house and then you said, “Thank you for coming with me.”

    He just nodded and then turned to walk away.

    The next morning you had the teenage girl who lived next door and sometimes babysat for you watch Micah while you went out for a ride. As much as you loved your son, sometimes you needed time totally to yourself, to focus on nothing in particular and get out away from everyone. This morning was one of those times. You rode out of town on the main road, and then departed from it, heading toward the small river you knew was just beyond the horizon. Once you got there, you dismounted and sat down on the riverbank, unlacing your boots and sliding them and your socks off before dipping your feet in the fresh, cool water.

    Times like this always helped you refresh your mind, and being away, on no one’s time but your own… It was freeing. You’d been sitting there barely a half hour though when you heard voices nearby.

    “How much farther til we get to this damn town?” a man’s voice asked.

    “Not much longer,” a second voice said. “It’ll be worth it, I swear.”

    “It better be.” A pause. “Well I’ll be… What’s a horse like that doing out here?”

    A few shrubs concealed you for now, but as soon as the men came to investigate your horse (or steal it, as you guessed they were probably planning on doing), they would find you, unless you managed to hide somehow.

    “Full tack and all; gotta be someone around,” the other voice said as you carefully stepped down into the river, huddling against the bank and wishing it was higher. As it was, the top of your head was barely below it and if they came close to the edge at all, they would find you. You adjusted your position until you were lying on your side in the river, now flatter against the bank though your nose was hardly above the water. You heard footsteps on the dry ground and your horse whinny.     “I don’t see anyone,” the voice of the impatient man said. “Let’s take it.”

    “Wait a minute,” the other voice said and you silently cursed as the sound of footsteps approached the river and moments later a worn, bearded face was leering down at you. “Look what I found over here!”

    You pushed yourself away from the bank and surged to your feet, managing to escape the man’s grip when he reached for you, but you stumbled over the rough rocks of the riverbed in your haste and fell over backward, and before you could stand and properly regain your balance, the man who had found you was in the river next to you, his grip tight on your arms as he pulled you toward the bank. “We just want to talk with you, missy,” he said, but the expression on his friend’s face as he took in your clingy, sodden garments made you think otherwise.

    You cleared your throat. “That’s my horse. I’m from Rose Creek. And if I don’t return, there will be people looking for me right away. You won’t escape.”

    The man who had caught you laughed. “I think we could. What’s your name, sweetheart?”

    Repulsed by the pet name and his greasy smile and implications, you lashed out, jamming your knee into his crotch and he yelped out in pain, releasing you and doubling over, but you turned to run only to be caught by the other man, and when you tried to give him the same treatment as the first, he pushed you away without relinquishing his hold, and had just opened his mouth to speak when there was a faint whistling sound and a thud before the man’s eyes blew open and he swayed on his feet for a moment or so and fell to the ground. Thirty meters or so away was a grayish horse, a familiar figure on its back, and moments later he had reached you, dropping easily off the back of the horse next to the second man, who was fleeing at a run. Red Harvest easily tripped him, and drew one of his knives as he crouched next to him, the blade glinting in the sun as he pressed it to the man’s throat. “Leave now. Don’t come back,” he said, his voice terse, commanding. Then he withdrew his blade and the man scrambled to his feet, eyes filled with fear, and ran for his life.

    “Are you all right?” Red Harvest asked as he approached you.

    You nodded, wrapping your arms around yourself as you shivered slightly, both from your drenched clothes and because of the adrenaline that had kicked in during the situation and was now starting to wear off, leaving you feeling drained. “Thank you.” The words didn’t express your gratitude, but they were all you had.

    “You’re welcome.”

    “How did you know?” you asked as the pair of you rode back to Rose Creek side by side.

    “We saw them when we were traveling,” he explained. “I remembered them after I saw you leave.”

    “Ah,” you said. “Thank God you remembered.”

    He nodded. “Yes.”

    After changing into dry clothes and eating some lunch, you were feeling considerably less rattled, and you felt much more yourself than you had earlier by the time a knock came on the door and you opened it to see Red Harvest standing there. “I wanted to see how you’re doing,” he said simply and you smiled.

    “Thank you. I’m doing well.”

    “Good,” he said, and then held out a bottle of whiskey, which you took with raised brows.

    “What’s this for?”

    “Vasquez sent it,” he said. “He said it would help you warm up and calm your nerves.”

    You chuckled. “That was thoughtful. I’ll thank him later. But… Do you want to come in?”

    He shrugged. “Sure.”

    Vasquez and Red Harvest opted to stay in Rose Creek while Sam went about some business in the area, and through the weeks that passed, you kept spending more and more time with Red, as you ended up calling him, though the first time you did it, his expression was unreadable so you apologized, saying you wouldn't do it anymore. But he just smiled and said it was fine.

    You got to know him much better and it didn't take you long before you started picking up on his little quirks and habits, how he couldn't relax as long as there was work to be done, how he was particular about having things be neat and clean at all times, how he never ate breakfast but always ate a snack late at night, how when he got frustrated he turned silent, and how one of the things that bothered him the most was not being able to help people who needed it.

    “Do you want to hold him?” you asked one day as you sat on the porch, Red sharpening one of his knives while you read a book, Micah resting comfortably in your lap.

    “Hold him?” Red repeated.

    “Yeah!” you said. “If you want to.”

    “How?” he asked.

    You smiled, gently lifting Micah and setting him in Red’s arms. The man cradled him gently, glancing at you briefly for confirmation that he was doing it right but when you nodded, his eyes returned to the baby. He'd never seemed that interested in the child before so his rapt attention on him somewhat surprised you, but it was a pleasant surprise. He reached up one hand, his fingers gently touching Micah’s, and Micah wrapped his fingers around Red’s thumb, his tiny digits pale and smooth in comparison to Red’s tawny, weathered ones. Normally you were borderline paranoid about others holding Micah, but Red doing it didn't worry you at all. “I think he likes you,” you said finally, and Red glanced over at you, a small smile curving his lips.

    “Really?”

    You nodded, watching as Red’s eyes returned to Micah, a surprisingly tender expression softening his strong features. In that moment there was undeniably a feeling in your chest that you hadn't felt in a long time.

    Micah soon fell asleep, and Red asked quietly, “Do you want him back?”

    “If you don’t want to hold him anymore, sure,” you said, but Red just shifted the baby to a slightly more comfortable position and relaxed with the little boy in his arms.

    Red Harvest was there in the relaxed times, but also when you needed help, when you were lonely or tired. And eventually he was there the late nights you sat on the porch because you couldn’t sleep. At those times, he didn’t talk. But his presence was more comforting to you than any words could be. You thought of yourself as good at concealing your emotions, but he seemed to be able to read you like a book, and he always seemed to show up at just the right times.

    Tonight, a warm September one, you sat outside alone, lost deep in your thoughts. You wondered often whether Rose Creek was the right place for you, or whether you should travel back east to be with your parents. This had seemed like a perfect place to raise Micah, but now that he was fatherless, you wondered if he needed a stronger familial support system. But you loved Rose Creek, you didn’t want to leave it or all the people in it you cared for, a list that had recently increased by one.

    You laced your fingers behind your head, dropping your gaze to your lap before squeezing your eyes shut. The responsibility was heavy.

    You didn’t hear his footsteps, but somehow you knew Red was there even before the porch creaked quietly and you opened your eyes to see him crouching in front of you, his eyes gazing into yours with curiosity and sympathy. “What are you thinking about?”

     “I’ve been trying to decide whether Micah and I should stay here or not,” you said.

     He nodded, and it seemed like the news came as no surprise to him. “Why?”

     “Because of Micah. He needs more than just me, if he doesn’t have a father at least he should have a family,” you explained.

    “You are enough for him,” Red said simply, surprising you. Normally in times like this he just listened while you talked. Then he reached forward, slipping his hands into yours, which were resting in your lap. His hands were callused and rough, but warm and gentle.

    “Really?” you asked, your heart inexplicably speeding up.

    “Yes,” he said. “No one can take better care of him than you do.”

    Your emotions hit you like a wave then, and you impulsively leaned forward, wrapping your arms around him and pressing your face into his shoulder. After a moment, he tentatively embraced you back, though he didn’t seem to know quite where to put his hands, and you were fairly certain one was dangling. “Thank you,” you said finally. He didn’t answer, just gently pulled you off the chair to sit on the ground with him, your backs against the porch railing and your head on his shoulder. It was like that that you fell asleep, though you roused slightly when Red carried you inside and up to your bed. In the morning you could vaguely remember him taking off your shoes and carefully tucking you in before he left.

    Sam returned a week later, and all the worries you’d been suppressing rose to the surface again. The feelings you’d almost unknowingly developed for Red seemed too deep and tangled for you to totally understand but you couldn’t imagine him not being around.

    Four nights later you were about to get ready for bed when there came a knock on your door and somehow you already knew it was bad news. You opened it to find Red standing there, an inscrutable expression on his face. “Come in,” you said, stepping aside to give him room. As soon as he’d stepped over the threshold and you closed the door, he said,

    “We’re leaving tomorrow.”

    You gulped, looking down. You didn’t know what to say, so you just nodded. Red’s hands landed lightly on your upper arms, and you looked up as he stepped closer, gently resting his forehead against yours. His proximity made your heart pound, but it felt totally right, entirely natural. “I’ll be back soon, I promise,” he said, and you could feel his breath against your lips as he spoke.

    Your whole body seemed to relax at his reassurance. “Good.” You wrapped your arms around his neck and shifted the angle of your head, gently pressing your lips to his, just once. Your eyes opened and you found him looking down at you with a small smile. He wasn’t one to speak his emotions much, but the way he trustingly closed his eyes and leaned in to kiss you again as his arms, now looped around your waist, pulled you closer, told you everything you needed to know.

[l0v3r-d0-da]

tomson jones

backstory

tomson jones was born to mary and saywer jones in january 9th, 1981, in georgia. at the age of three, his mother left. her reason was: “i can’t raise such a monster. how’d *that* get all over him?! you see the looks he gets!” in refernace to his vitiligo. july 24, 1984, saywer took his son and moved to derry, maine for a job as a construction worker. as a present for the difficult move and divorce, though tomson didn’t understand at the age of 3, he was gifted a small seal plush, for it was his favorite animal, and named it ‘johnny.’ he never went anywhere without it.

during his years in derry, saywer remarried and had another kid. emilia jones. tomson often played sports, soccer being his favorite. which lead to his most recent injury, a broken arm, that hung loosely like a limp noodle. he got picked on for plush and mostly for his ‘freakish coloring.’ ‘that he looked like a coloring page.’ ‘the printer ran out of ink.’ 1988, october 31st. halloween.

tomson, emilia, saywer and his new wife, tiffany, all went to go trick-or-treating. tomson as a skeleton, wearing a homemade mask, which he adored. after hours of filling bags with candy, (tomson used his old backpack, which had johnny inside,) three members of the jones family were ready to go home, a 3 year old emilia asleep in her mother’s arms. after begging for about twenty minutes, tomson was allowed to go to three more houses while his family waited in the car and talked about dinner.

the first house, tomson received a treat. the second, a treat. and the third. but when he was walking to the car..

trick.

in the front yard of an abandoned and run down house sat on of those carnival games. where you have to toss ping pong balls in bowls of goldfish to get one, though the bowls were painted like pumpkins, and couldn’t see the inside nor the top. tomson slowly walked over, the flickering streetlights adding more flair. he peered and looked, just curious. though he gasped as he was startled once a tall and limber clown walked up, bending down to look at the newly seven year old boy, who stepped back.

“don’t be afraid little boy! it’s just a costume.” pennywise insisted, for the younger was terrified of clowns and jesters and tightrope walkers and the dark. all of that. he was glad that it was dark to hide his spots. the clown had to stop himself from drooling, ‘fear, delicious fear..’ was its’ thoughts. “come, come,” he ushered, tomson hesitantly stumbling in front of a stick to mark the place to toss the ping pong balls, which he accidentally nudged with his foot as he moved. “here,” he said in a cheerful lively tone, moving thomson’s hand and flipping it for his palm to be sticking out, placing three ping pong balls in it with his long and skinny fingers. “my daughter wasn’t interested in these fish. i kept buying different ones for her so she could have a nice birthday, but, alas, she didn’t like them. hopefully some other kids could enjoy them! would you little boy?”

this would be tomson’s first ever pet. hopefully his father and step mother let him keep the fish. he nodded, looking back up at the slender figure, with a gulp. “are you scared? there’s no need to be. my name’s pennywise. the dancing clown!” he introduced himself, smiling at the boy. “what’s your name?”

“..t—tomson. tomson jones.” he answered, holding the balls in his hand as he attempted scratch under his lilac cast, the color picked out by his sister. “oo, that’s a silly name. i like it.” pennywise encourages, then pointed to the six bowls on a table. “alright, go ahead and throw one in.” “i..i should really go home..” tomson mumbled hesitantly. “oh, please? please? no one else has stopped by! it’ll only take a second. i’ll explain everything to your parents,” pennywise promised, knowing that this tomson would never be seen again after the encounter.

after waiting a few seconds, peaking down the sidewalk, where the families were walking home and kids stuffing their faces with candy in costumes, tomson jones sealed his fate.

he shifted, then aimed one of the balls. after a moment, he tossed it.

clink.

clink.

splash.

one.

“ah! good job! that’s one fishy friend for you. try again.”

another ball was in the air.

clink.

clink.

tap.

splash.

two.

now penny was starving, watching the seven year old’s movements. “once more.”

clink.

clink.

tapppppp.

splash.

three.

excited, tomson clapped his hands together with a beaming smile on his face. “amazing! come and look at your fish while i put them in the bag for you.” the clown hesitated before walking and grabbing a plastic bag, filling it with water. tomson walked over, gripping onto the straps of his backpack, peaking into the top of a bowl.

huh?

maybe it was the lighting.

it looked like something red was in the place of clear water.

“can you cup the the fishes in your hand and put them in the bag? it’s too messy to pour the bowl.”

tomson nodded, slowly cupping his hands, despite not wanting to get his cast wet, and dipped them in the bowl, feeling around. once he collected something, he pulled his hands out, looking in the flickering light momentarily.

a dead fish and a..

a..

finger?!

with a startled yelp, he dropped both, stumbling back, hands and the cotton of his cast drenched in the red substance.

the streets were empty now.

freaked out and alone, tomson started to run away, until his backpack was grabbed, being pulled back and gripped by the throat, sweating with fear, eyes wide. the boy squirmed and gasped as he clawed at the long hand tightening around his throat, kicking at his chest until he pushed away, falling against the ground. he ran, knocking the table over, and the bowls of blood with dead fish, the only surviving one flopping around on the ground, and fingers, ears and eyes scattered that was soaking in the liquid.

he ran, panting and screaming for help as he ran around the yard, ending up pissing himself in pure terror. he stumbled, finding an opening in the metal fence, scrambling to get through, until his foot was grabbed and he was pulled back.

screaming loudly, as his mask was ripped off, a clean and large bite being taken of tomson’s face, which left him still and bleeding, his heart throbbing in his chest until it slowly stopped, pennywise feasting.

around twenty minutes afterwards and hearing a scream of bloody murder, saywer went to look for his son. a flashlight in hand and walking fast and angrily, he knocked on the doors and asked if anyone had seen his son and giving a description. finally, he came up by the neibolt house, even that place gave him the heebie jeebies. he flashed the light around quickly, until he saw a table and broken glass, going to investigate. on further inspection, he had to hold back vomit, hoping it was just fake props.

he walked around the yard, until he saw the black backpack, the zipper open, and his little son’s precious seal plush laying a few inches away, on its side. “tomson?!” saywer called, searching around furiously. “tomson?! tomson jones?!!”

the next day, missing posters for the boy were put up, and the search continued for months, until everyone just.. forgot. saywer still treasured the backpack, and held the plush close every night, keeping it with him everywhere.

now tomson stays in that treacherous little lair, wearing that mask for eternity, his cast keeping two parts of his arm together.

one of pennywise’s toys.