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astermacguffin · 3 years

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What if the Mark of Cain manifests differently when it's imprisoning God and not the Darkness? If the Darkness makes the Mark bearer go insane with unbridled want for destruction, then what does sealing God make you do?

An obsessive desire for creation? Creation to the point of corruption? (Think of the Shimmer from the film Annihilation. Continuous reproduction to the point of begetting alien, cancer-like entities. A refracted, distorted notion of creation.)

Okay, so canon divergence from The Trap. They successfully seal away Chuck, then Castiel bears the Mark. (Jack won't be back until later episodes, so he's not here yet.)

At first, they think he's fine. Cas says he's not feeling any bloodlust just yet. (He does feel a certain itch under his skin. Not a desire to murder, but a desire to do...something. He doesn't tell this to anyone.)

His grace is getting stronger, almost archangel-like (if not more). It's incredibly helpful for hunts, and Cas is happy to feel his wings healthy again after a long time. Sam is happy for him, but Dean is suspicious of things (especially since he's a previous Mark bearer).

After a while, Cas starts feeling...burdened, almost bloated by grace. (After all, he does have access to an infinite supply of it.) He needs to have an outlet for it.

Cas tells them so and Sam suggests healing people. Dean gives the green light on the condition that he remains invisible and he doesn't go Godstiel on them again.

It's a great outlet, and for the first few weeks they start feeling normal again. But unfortunately, healing stops being enough to relieve Cas of his excess grace anymore. The mass healings start to pile up all across the globe and it catches everyone's attention. Some think it's a blessed miracle, some think it's a sign of the end times. They make him slow down on the healings after that.

Without an outlet, however, Cas starts feeling antsy and pained. They brainstorm on possible alternatives. Cas suggests going to Heaven and saving it from collapse by healing his brethren's wings and creating more angels out of consenting souls in Heaven.

He explains Heaven's endangered and dwindling numbers. Sam agrees that it would hit two birds in one stone: relieve Cas from excess grace and prevent the extinction of angels. Dean doesn't like the idea of more winged dicks so he shoots down the idea. Eileen says that since Cas is the one in pain, he should be the one to decide.

Ultimately, Cas defers to Dean's judgment (as always). Sam protests, arguing that he can't just shoulder that pain. Cas replies: "I've suffered worse, Sam."

Cas doesn't complain about the pain for about a week, so for a while, everyone believes him when he said he can shoulder the pain. One day, Dean finds him outside the bunker, groaning in pain as he bleeds himself out, his grace pouring into the ground and sprouting plants. Dean sees this and is finally convinced to allow Cas to make more angels.

What follows then is a series of escalating events:

While Sam and Eileen are practicing their witchcraft for spell they need in a hunt, Cas suggests to enhance Sam's physical and magical abilities using his grace. "It will make the process faster and safer," he reasons. He agrees, but Dean eyes this suspiciously.

During one of their hunts, they encounter a young and freshly-turned vampire. The boy begs them not to kill him, and Cas gives him a proposal. "Promise not to feed on humans ever again and I shall cure you of your hungers and your pains. Pledge your allegiance to me and you shall never be afraid of yourself ever again." The boy agrees, and before Dean could even protest, Cas slices his palm and feeds the vampire his grace.

They argue about the grace-feeding in the Impala. Dean notices Sam's pointed lack of complaints and figures it out. "You're in on this, aren't you? How long has Cas been doing this? He's going Michael behind our backs and you're letting him?"

Sam argues that it's different because Cas isn't making super monsters; he's making them less "monstrous" (whatever that means). Sam's obsession with his own "purity" is key to understanding him here.

One time, Dean catches Cas in his "garden" ("forest" seems more apt with how lush the greens already are) creating butterflies and bees out of thin air using his grace alone.

Reports of the miraculously healed people suddenly gaining new abilities like increased strength, heightened senses, and prophecy start popping up. Some are experiencing phantom limbs, talking about their sprouting "wings."

Sam is becoming addicted to Cas' grace to the point that he willingly lets himself be hurt in hunts just so Cas can cure him. Dean confronts him about this, but Sam just argues that he's "never felt this pure before." Eileenn shares the same concern as Dean.

Hunts are becoming less frequent the more monsters are being "cleansed" by Cas. The world is becoming disconcertingly quiet.

Cas' "garden" is starting to emit this strange aura. The plants and creatures growing inside it are starting to look more...alien.

One of the original angels goes to Dean and tells him of Heaven's affairs. The Host is stable again, but the angels he created are...not exactly angels. They're graced up and they sustain Heaven, but their true forms are "horrifying and incomprehensible, even to an angel." The angel adds that more than 60% of Earth's creatures have already been touched by Cas' grace.

The final nail in the coffin is when Dean catches Cas in the garden fiddling with his angel blade. It's emitting a strange glow, vibrating a subtle hum and looking as if it's liquid, flowing and distorting here and there.

Dean asks him what he's holding. "Oh, this?" Cas responds. "This is the Last Blade. Last, not in terms of time but in concept, for no other blade shall ever compare to it. The spark of creation. Fiat lux."

Dean's heart sinks. Of course. The First and the Last, Alpha and Omega. "Cas...the Mark, I think i-it's scrambling your brain, man."

"I know," he replies, eyes wet and apologetic. It's a small moment of lucidity amidst weeks and months of...whatever that was.

"Okay, okay, so you're still you, that's... that's good. Okay." Dean doesn't know how to approach this. Give him a fight and he'll know what to do, but this? Watching his best friend, the love of his life, be distorted into something incomprehensible? Yeah, this is totally beyond him.

"You know, I used to hate Chuck," Cas says. "How could the Father of All Creation be this angry, petulant child? But," he continues, "knowing what I know now, it's either regressing into a petty child or being reduced to insanity."

"Cas...what are you talking about, man?"

"No mind should bear this burden, Dean. No matter how infinite they are," he says, voice trembling in exhaustion.

(more below the cut)

He continues. "The awareness of everything is the awareness of nothing at all. Imagine perceiving every possible piece of information about the world all at once. Seeing light in all its forms all at once: ultraviolet, infrared, etc. Sensing all the neutrinos zip by, sensing gravitational waves, sensing the slighest bit of seismic activity."

Dean doesn't know how to respond, so he lets him go on.

"Knowledge can only ever be a slice of the Totality of Truth. Truth is absolute chaos, and Knowledge is the partial ordering of this chaos. One can sanely approach Truth only through organized paritions of Totality. Why do you think Chuck is so obsessed with stories? Stories are linear and finite; they're sensible snippets of the endless sea of possible worlds."

"So, what? Are you trying to—"

"I'm not trying to justify Chuck's actions, Dean," he interrupts. "I just want to contextualize them. Chuck's simplistic and repetitive narratives are what they are: manifestations of a chaotic Totality, gone insane trying to understand itself. Looking for simple things to hold on to."

Cas takes a deep breath. He speaks with a shaky voice. "I'm barely holding myself together, Dean. I can feel the universe beneath my skin."

He doesn't know what possesses him to ask, but he does it anyway. "What are you holding on to?"

Cas smiles at that. "You."

They stare at each other for a while, frozen where they stand. Cas, with unrestrained affection in his face. Dean, struck by shock and indecision. It's Cas who first breaks the silence.

"I think we both know what needs to be done, while I'm still lucid enough." Cas slices his palm and lets his blood drip down the soil. He then thrusts the Last Blade into the ground, lifting it when the soil glows.

Dean stared in awe as the ground erupts and a familiar shape rises from the hollow. "Is that.."

"The Ma'Lak box, yes. I also enhanced it with the Blade to be able to house things as powerful as me."

"Cas, wait, maybe we can think of another way to—"

"Dean," he says, calmly. "You know there's no other way. I wouldn't ask this of you if there was."

In any other scenario, Dean would've kept arguing, but even he knows that they're running out of time. Sam's grace addiction is getting worse and all the creatures touched by Cas' grace are slowly mutating into eldritch horrors. Dean offers a shaky nod. "Okay."

Tension visibly releases from Cas' body. "Thank you, Dean." He opens the box and enters it with ease. "When you lock this, bury me with the garden's graced soil. Once I'm under, my influence over the world should dampen."

Dean gives a wordless nod. For a while, they just stared at each other, Cas lying down and Dean trying to memorize every inch of his face while he can.

Cas presses his hand into Dean's left shoulder where his mark used to dwell. "My untainted grace," he whisper gently. "Some of it is still inside you. That's probably why you're not as affected by me."

Dean wants to say, I'll always be affected by you, but he holds himself back.

He takes his hand back, a bloody handprint now on Dean's jacket. "I love you, Dean," he says, breathless.

"Cas..."

"I probably would've built up to that if we had more time but," he makes a surprised laugh, "I am, as you would say, already 'losing my marbles', so."

The air quotes would've been funny and endearing in any other scenario, but it just makes Dean's vision blur up with tears.

"Thank you for everything, Dean. I know we've done nothing but repeatedly hurt each other these past few years, but I don't want to spend a deathless eternity with that as my memory of you. I forgive you, even for the things you haven't forgiven yourself for yet. And I'm sorry for everything, especially for ending things like this."

He should probably wipe away his tears to clear his vision, but Dean can do nothing but stare at Cas in awe, in fear, in grief, in reverence. They're both fully crying now.

"Goodbye, Dean."

"Wait, Cas."

Cas looks at him, waiting.

"Can you...can you say it again?"

He doesn't need to clarify what 'it' means. They both know.

With one last mournful smile, Cas says: "I love you, Dean."

And with that, Dean finally gathers all the strength he needs to shut the lid and lock the box. He stares at it for a while, unblinking. He forgot to ask, Can you hear my prayers down there? But it's too late now to ask.

The box automatically lowers itself into the hole it arose from. Now all that's left to do is to cover it again with soil.

Dean doesn't bother with a shovel. He gently buries the box with his hands deep in the soil, some of it getting trapped under his nails. He continues the mindless task, whispering a tireless series of I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I hope you're okay I'm sorry, over and over between his quiet sobs. Cas is quiet inside the box. No screaming or crying. Dean doesn't know if that's better or worse.

When the final clump of soil is pressed into the mound, he suddenly feels it: a visceral shift that echoes throughout the world. The alien glimmer of the garden dims, and the world corrects its axis. Dean screams his agony into the air.

That's how Sam finds him: sprawled over a mound of soil, crying his heart out. Dean doesn't need to say anything: he knows what happened. He pulls his brother off the ground and brings him inside the bunker.

For the first two weeks, Dean cycles through drinking and passing out in various places in the bunker. If he's not wearing the jacket, he's holding it with close to him. Sam gives him a considerable space to grieve while he monitors the world grace problem with Eileen. The grace mutations have significantly dropped since then and everyone's going back to normal.

Unfortunately, that means monsters are getting hungry again. Sam doesn't want to leave his brother alone after going nonverbal with grief and dysfunctional due to alcohol. Eileen assures him that she can handle hunts on their own and that the hunter network that they're building will lessen the workload.

Sam's attempts to sober Dean up finally work, mostly due to the latter having very little strength to protest. Dean remains sober an entire day for the first time in weeks, and all he can think about is: I haven't prayed to Cas in a while. The longing might have reached him, but never a coherent prayer.

The first time he goes out of the bunker in a while, he heads straight to Cas' garden. Sam's glad that he's finally going out because "the sun is good for you" or something, but he's really only here for Cas. He kneels in front of the burial mound (where a patch of an unknown species of flowers is already growing).

The first prayer he says to him in a while is: I love you, Cas. I should've said it while you were still here. Not saying it out loud and just strongly thinking about the words somehow bolsters him to get the words through.

He's crying again, and he knows he's losing coherency. In his mind, he's explaining about his hangups and his regrets and his continuous denial of his own joy, but one constant remains: he's beaming all his love and affection into this prayer.

He's halfway through explaining all the traits that he finds endearing in Cas when suddenly, he feels it like a snap. If the glimmer dimmed when he buried Cas, now it's as if it was never there in the first place. With an unsettling amount of certainty, Dean just knows that Cas is gone. For real, this time.

"C-cas...?" It's the first thing he's said in a while and it sounds rough in his long unused voice.

"CAS! CAS!!! " He's now screaming, ripping away the flowerbed with his bare hands and scratching the soil away. Tears are obstructing his vision, but he has no time to wipe them away. He needs to make sure that is really gone. His hands are bleeding and he doesn't give a damn.

Eventually, Sam comes running towards him. "Dean! Dean, stop!"

He tries to hold his brother back, but Dean just keeps on clawing away soil. "Sammy, Sammy he's gone, he's not there anymore, Sammy I have to see, please, let me see Cas again, I need—" he breaks into sobs again, and like a puppet with its strings cut off, he slumps into Sam.

"Dean, it's okay, it's okay..." he says softly to his shaking brother.

Eventually, when Dean calms down, he looks at the carnage he's done and starts sobbing again. The flowers, his last evidence of Cas being here, are all destroyed. Now Cas truly is gone.

. . .

When Cas first heard Dean's confession prayer, he was overcome with joy. When he realized what that means, however, his stomach suddenly sinks.

He hears before he sees the Empty arrive, slithering like black goo.

"Wow, were you excited enough for eternal slumber that you wanted a preview?" The Shadow teases in Meg's voice.

At first, he was dreading the Empty, but now that he thinks of it, it's actually the perfect prison for him: a vast, endless nothingness for him to fill with his creations.

And if Jack wasn't in Heaven, that only means that he's in the Empty, and he can't wait to see his son again. Even when blinded by the madness of the universe, he can never forget the joy of being a father.

"Yes," he replies, "I'm actually glad you're here now."

. . .

Somewhere around the globe, Billie drops Jack back.

"Don't worry, kid. You'l reunite with your father very soon."

(to be continued)

#spn #destiel #supernatural #aster writes #destiel fic #long post #im totally obsessed with moc!cas #moc!cas

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fremedon · 3 years

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Brickclub 3.4.1, Almost Historic, 3/?

Where do you even start with Combeferre?

(ETA halfway through this post: Anywhere, because trying to reduce this to a linear structure is futile; this wants to be a huge stringboard. No one in the Amis except possibly Courfeyrac is neurotypical, but Combeferre is the biggest “nine footnotes and four parentheticals in every paragraph” ADHD mood.)

I’m going to start by grumbling at Donougher for calling him “quixotic” instead of “chimeric.” “Chimeric”--I’m indebted to @everyonewasabird for the insight--is key to Combeferre’s personality. It doesn’t just mean unusual or fanciful--Hugo is also using it very literally: Combeferre is, philosophically, a chimera; he’s composed of parts that don’t fit together. (In a way that is endemic to the time, as the paragraph earlier this chapter on democratic bonapartism reminded us.)

Combeferre abhors violence; Combeferre believes, with all his heart, that revolutionary change is necessary. He’s never going to reconcile those beliefs; once he comes to believe that revolution cannot be left to happen on its own--or that the violence of tyranny that doing so would permit outweighs the violence of revolution--progress in any direction is always going to contradict one of his deeply held convictions. But stagnation is worse--he can’t pull a Grantaire and just retreat into magical thinking and pretend things will work out.

(I’ve been talking on Discord about Combeferre and Grantaire as shadows or mirrors of each other. Grantaire is set up by his intro as Enjolras’s obverse and opposite, but it’s Combeferre who actually “completes and corrects” him. They are the two characters who voice the strongest objections to revolutionary violence in and of itself; and as much of a mess as Combeferre is at the barricade, I think a Grantaire who actually persuaded himself to pick up a gun would be even more of one.)

Which is not to say he’s unwilling to entertain some magical thinking, even outside the framework of “affirmed nothing, not even miracles; denied nothing, not even ghosts.” While his dreams of railways, anaesthesia, etc., are all things he would have seen, and fairly soon, if he’d lived, I think our distance from the fever-dreams mentioned a little earlier, the ones that didn’t come true, makes his hopes seem more sensible than they should--that section doesn’t come around to the accurate predictions until it’s mentioned the mesmerism of Puységur and Deleuze and the utopian socialism of Fourier and Saint-Simon--utopian both in the senses of “what if we actually fed and housed everyone?” and of “after the revolution the seas will turn to lemonade (really) and Nature will spontaneously evolve an Anti-giraffe and it will be my friend.” Of Enjolras and Combeferre, Enjolras is the hard-headed realist. He’s working for well-defined political goals via extremely prosaic means. (Guns, and a heap of rocks.) Combeferre is the wild-eyed idealist, and he completes and corrects Enjolras by pushing him to wilder idealism.

(As an aside, that inclusion of “the suppression of pain in surgical operations” is so important for understanding Combeferre. He’s a surgeon, or a surgeon-in-training, in a time when surgery is violent to the point of torture. He does understand that some pain and decay cannot be allowed to continue unchecked, even when the alternative is, in the moment, even more painful. He groks the costs of inaction at a fundamental level.)

All of which is to say--while she can fight me over “chimeric,” I do like what Donougher does with “the good must be innocent”:

“Combeferre would have gone down on his knees and joined his hands in prayer that the future might arrive in all its blamelessness and nothing disturb the immense and virtuous development of nations. Good must be innocent, he kept repeating.”

I don’t read that as an statement of fact or belief about the world, but as a fervent wish--and probably one he knows can’t be true in the way he wants it to be. The good should be innocent--but it can’t be, right now, and he’s going to spend the rest of the next two books / his life grappling with that.

#brickclub #lm 3.4.1 #combeferre

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ravenvsfox · 3 years

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Things Fall Apart; the Centre Cannot Hold

Summary: He keeps remembering the chafe of Ronan’s shoulder against his ribs as they got oriented in his little bed, the glisten of tears and nightwash wringing his lovely eyes, the lonely twist in his unguarded late-night voice over the phone, the one that Adam had almost liked, because it meant that he was indisputably missed. It was worse, that Ronan had been trying so hard for Adam, because it was easier to tell when he stopped.

(Adam's perspective throughout Mister Impossible, as his worry reaches a fever pitch, and the two versions of himself begin to converge)

Word Count: 9.5k

Warnings: mi spoilers, death/suicide mention

A/N: batshit middle books my beloveds. adam pov or bust 😌

Read on AO3

In high school, Gansey would very occasionally call Adam in the middle of the night.

He would speak low and fast, his panic pinched between thumb and forefinger and held at a respectable distance. Adam would smother the receiver with his palm and step outside of his family trailer, listening hard for movement at his back.

The news was always the same: Ronan Lynch was on his latest rampage or bender, exercising his dark talent for bullying his way into people’s lives and then breaking down all of their windows and doors trying to get out again.

Gansey would fret and apologize, guilty for luring Adam out of his wolf-den, guiltier for neglecting his duties as Ronan’s warden. Adam would wait tiredly on the line for Gansey’s anxiety to exhaust itself, and then dutifully join the search party.

He would step into his beaten tennis shoes and pry his bike from the fence, silencing the silvery shock of metal on metal, and avoiding the reedy whir of the spokes by holding the whole thing aloft until he reached the gravel road.

From there, he would venture out into the abandoned Henrietta streets, the crunch of his tires cutting clean through the woolly midnight silence. He often circled the perimeter of the park nearest Monmouth, stepped through the great dark portal into St. Agnes, and nipped under the old bridge, squinting into the darkness for the challenging shoulders, the oil-slick BMW gleam, the slump of a body or clatter of bottles.

This is a part of Gansey that I admire, he would think. And with equal fervour, this is a part of Gansey that I resent. This blood attachment to Ronan, who was not even attached to himself. The insomnia that seized two heads of the lopsided Cerberus that Adam, Ronan, and Gansey were all part of, a restlessness on either side of him that shook him awake over and over again.

He chased Ronan’s shadow, hating him. Hating his thoughtlessness, his privilege, his chokehold on Gansey’s interests, his purposefully and continuously ruined potential, and yet bristling with anxiety at the idea of finding him bleeding.

They hadn’t known then that he was a dreamer, but they’d felt the ear-popping pressure of his grief, glimpsed the hulking animal of his self-loathing, urged onwards by the twin spurs of Declan and Gansey, the past and the future, digging into his sides.

Adam had seen Ronan, teeth bared, hurling himself at rock bottom, and he had rubbed the sleep from his eyes and pulled him back by the collar.

Things are completely different now, but he still finds himself sleep-raw and petrified, reaching after Ronan in the dark.

He examines himself in the mirror of the communal bathroom in Thayer hall. The overhead lights are an unflattering yellow, the sink has a long dark hair stuck to its basin, and Adam’s face is gaunt and bruised with lack of sleep.

He’s losing it, a little bit.

He takes his own pulse, focusing on the faraway burble of the ley line. Everything, lately, seems far away.

As if through a stranger’s eyes, he slips from the seafoam tiling and bleach tang in Thayer’s North bathroom to the accordion door of the trailer toilet, the creaky cubicle shower, his gawky, hurt reflection in the burnt-out light. This version of Adam had to watch his best friend’s best friend escape suicide watch and get screaming drunk in public, treading mud and malicious dreams all over Monmouth manufacturing.

He can still smell the salt tang from teenaged Adam’s ocean of disdain.

Now that he loves Ronan, his irritation has only gotten sharper, more deadly. Ronan performs each perilous swan dive into the unknown, each foolhardy act of self-sacrifice, as if the people who care about him aren’t gasping spectators. It makes Adam furious.

Perhaps neither of them have changed as much as they wanted to believe. As Gillian keeps advising the crying club—with the confidence of a seasoned psychiatrist—progress isn’t linear.

He keeps remembering the chafe of Ronan’s shoulder against his ribs as they got oriented in his little bed, the glisten of tears and nightwash wringing his lovely eyes, the lonely twist in his unguarded late-night voice over the phone, the one that Adam had almost liked, because it meant that he was indisputably missed. It was worse, that Ronan had been trying so hard for Adam, because it was easier to tell when he stopped.

He slides fingers over his temples, smooths a knuckle over each eyebrow to ease the tension he always carries there. Sleep is a little knot of gristle lodged at the back of his throat; he can’t swallow it and he can’t spit it up. It never used to be this hard to put his problems to bed. He would worry the weight on his chest into small pieces, and go to sleep knowing that even the worst things about his life were organized correctly.

This time though, he’s out of sorts, divided, always busy but always spinning his wheels. He has a white-hot secret pressed to the roof of his mouth.

Every time he folds himself into bed, his subconscious helpfully reminds him that Ronan might be dead. And then a highlight reel plays in his head like an In Memoriam: Adam’s hand cupping Ronan’s nape, a barn silhouetted against a melancholy sky, a fistful of dreamt light, a dozen hard-won smiles and a hundred easy ones, a white handprint on a flushed thigh, a colourful joke to placate a brother, a kiss pressed to a dream’s forehead. All of that—gone. And Adam, at Harvard.

He highlights long patches of text in his sociology textbook, drinks a sensible amount of jack and coke at Eliot’s birthday party, declines Gansey’s calls by sending cheerful and conciliatory texts, and drifts through the library with his hand knotted in the strap of his satchel, looking for something that he can’t really articulate. He reads the same line of theory over and over and over and over, feeling like he’s scrying, like his focus isn’t his own.

He did all of this before Ronan went missing too, but now it’s a whole different class of performance. It used to be, I’m convincingly attentive, I’m sipping overpriced coffee on the way to class like a good Ivy leaguer, I’m making an impression on my professors, I’m forging friendships. Someday I will cash in these relationship tokens, and it all will have been worth it. It felt impossible that his life could be so simple and rewarding.

Now he thinks, I’m studying for finals and my boyfriend is being hunted by people whose job it is to kill him. I’m drinking a latte and the only people I’ve ever loved have left me, and I'm alone again. I’m putting my hand up in class and somewhere, Ronan’s life is changing, rapidly, dangerously, without me.

He lies to everyone, all the time, and tells himself that this life he’s building is more important than anything.

Once, as they cleared placemats and mugs full of stagnant coffee from the kitchen table, Ronan—still cobwebbed in his most recent dream—had detailed the sensation of hovering over himself afterwards. He was unable to manipulate his physical body or even really recognize it as his own, and his consciousness, detached, had its own limbs, its own intentions. He was like a parasite trying to wriggle back into its host.

Whenever Adam consults his double in a bit of glass, he imagines himself as a nimble dreamer, peering down, working to bring a fantasy to life. He can see his own outline, a slick college student with a flat, pleasant affect and a gaggle of soft-shelled friends. He plays his role impeccably well, but he can’t fit himself into it. If he passed himself in the hallway he would not stop.

Looking in the mirror now, he feels a red pang of fear, then a supercut of the ways he used to let himself love and be loved, then resentfulness hot on the heels of his worry.

His reflection withers, and he looks deliberately down at his hands. It’s a Tuesday, and he needs to sleep, or his tightly-scheduled Wednesday will be a misery. It’s a Tuesday, which means he hasn’t spoken to Ronan in—he stalls. Call me, he thinks, miserably. Just call me.

He can deal with a multitude of challenging and improbable situations if only he can see them clearly. Ronan is, for whatever reason, keeping him in the dark.

The not knowing is bad. It’s not how he functions. It’s not how they function. But instead of dwelling, he puts his back into the narrative that is now his reality: Impeccable student. Devoted friend-group. Tough break-up. Bright future.

Ronan isn’t here. Can’t ever be, physically, so far from the ley line. Adam has to be.

“Croissant, as ordered.” His gaze snaps up, connecting—not with his own image, but with clever, horn-rimmed Gillian. “They tried to foist it upon me without butter, if you can imagine that.” She deposits a crinkly brown and tan paper bag in front of him, and then two little plastic pots of butter. Adam regards the squashed shape of the bag’s contents with confusion.

It’s— “Is it Tuesday?”

“Wednesday,” Eliot corrects airily, licking jam from their thumb.

“My god, Adam. Whatever happened to your infallible circadian rhythm?” Fletcher asks. “You are the Swiss timepiece by which we measure our days.”

A terrible wave of vertigo strikes him, and he’s grateful to find himself sitting, at one of two conjoined wrought-iron tables in the courtyard near Thayer. He can feel the ley line breathing for the first time in a long time.

He must have gone to bed after his late-night breakdown in the bathroom. He must have. He hadn’t realized how exhausted he was. His hand strays to his hair. Wet. He’d woken, showered, and met his friends for breakfast, and he can barely remember it.

“Sorry,” he chokes. “Sleep deprivation is catching up to me, I think.”

“Aw, chicken,” Benjy says affectionately. “I’ve sung those end of term blues. The profs think we’re machines. Don’t even get me started on Dr. Fraundberg’s Lit Crit for assholes.”

“Whyever would we?” Eliot says. “We want to make it to class before noon.”

“Har-har. You wound me. Adam you’d better get a tissue ready, I’m about to tear up.”

“Also,” Gillian says, pointing her be-honeyed knife in Eliot’s direction. “Speak for yourself. I want to make it to class never.”

“Your presentation is going to be exceptional,” Fletcher tells her. “Your rough draft already drove me into paroxysms of jealousy. I don’t know why you’re so concerned.”

“I don’t just want to pass,” Gillian says. “I want to win.”

“Admirable,” Benjy sniffs.

“You’re being awfully quiet, Adam,” Eliot says, at length. He’s aware that they’re all trying very hard to act like they don’t notice how poorly composed he is.

“Can’t a man savour his pastry, Eli?” Fletcher rumbles.

“No, that’s fair,” Adam sighs. The four of them peer at him expectantly, eyebrows arranged into an array of benign and non-threatening shapes. “It’s possible I’m having a slight breakdown,” he says, adopting the grim hyperbole of a student for whom finals are the beginning and end of their emotional upset.

Everyone at the twin tables indulges in a bit of mild laughter.

“What a coincidence, so am I!”

“Well if it’s only slight, I’ll stow my concern.”

“Harvard or personal?”

He smiles faintly, and says, “kind of both. The personal is political, or something.”

He thinks he’s laying it on thick, but Gillian grins at him. “'Atta boy.”

Fletcher goes to take a sip of his tea, but chokes when his phone lights up with an incoming text message. “Criminy, is it eight already? Starting the day with a bang, as usual. I’ll meet you at Weld this evening, yes?” he asks, shaking out his tweed jacket and thrusting an arm through it, securing the remains of his bagel between his teeth with his other hand.

“Of course,” Adam says. Fletcher gives him a thumbs up, mouth charmingly stuffed, and sweeps away across the now bustling courtyard.

“Hey magic man,” Eliot says. “Will you do a reading for my sister tonight? The break-up with Margot is hitting her kind of hard. I’m pretty sure she just wants to be told she’ll find love again.”

Adam watches the juddering impact of Benjy kicking Eliot under the table.

He shrugs. “First come first serve, but I’ll give her the friends and family discount.”

“You’re a prince,” Eliot says, blowing him a kiss. Adam tries to imagine any of his friends from Henrietta doing such a thing, and can’t. “Come along Benjy. Bookstore or bust. They’re giving out discount computing textbook codes at sixty dollars a pop.”

A slip of paper for sixty American dollars. Adam’s head aches profoundly.

Gillian waggles her fingers at their friends as they depart, then she turns and fixes Adam with that familiar amateur therapist look.

“What?”

“Are you sleeping?” she asks bluntly.

“I’m a very good sleeper,” Adam says wryly. “Ask anyone.”

“But are you actually doing it?”

“Yes, Gillian.” Liar, liar. “Do you want me to keep a dream journal as evidence?”

“Oh, yes please.” That shark’s grin. “I’d pay to know what the fuck is going on up there.” She taps her own temple to indicate Adam's guarded mind.

He spreads his hands between them. “I’m an open book.”

She hums, only half-smiling now. “I dunno. That Southern charm. I’m never quite sure if I should trust a politeness that perfect.”

“On that note,” Adam says, standing. He’s relieved to find that he’s wearing matching socks, and his pant legs are rolled just so. There’s a tiny streak of yellow on one of his shoes, and with a jolt he realizes that it’s dream-crab guts. He presses on. “Thanks for the croissant. And the psychoanalysis. Send me the bill.”

She salutes him with her coffee cup. “You couldn’t afford me.”

He laughs, and turns, and then spends the whole walk to his 9 AM class trying to straighten all of the haywire compasses in his brain so they point due north.

His assignment is in his bag, pressed neatly into a navy blue folder. He has three classes today, a meeting with his supervisor at three, a study block set aside from four to six, then dinner, then tarot readings all evening—his phone rings. His treacherous heart leaps. Ronan.

He stops mid-stride, scrambling for his cell in the front pocket of his bag.

“Hello?”

“I—oh—Adam! I didn’t expect you to pick up. How on Earth are you?”

“Gansey.” He exhales through his nose. “I’m just on my way to class.”

“Fantastic to hear your voice. How’s—not that one, Jane, the I-90—exactly. How’s Harvard? Are you batting away job offers yet?”

“Constantly. How are your nature hikes and hippie communes? Contracted any backwoods diseases yet?”

“Charming. I’m actually in remarkably fine form, health-wise.”

“Is that a brag?”

A guffaw. “More of a curiosity. It’s actually part of the reason I’ve been trying to get in touch. Have you noticed any surges of power from the ley line lately? I mean, of course you have, but do you have any idea what’s causing them?”

He frowns, pinning his cellphone between his good ear and shoulder as he heaves open the ancient door to the physics building. “I could give you my best guess.”

A beat, and then, “I’m listening, Parrish.” Something about the way he says it makes homesickness pulse painfully in Adam’s chest.

He finds a semi-secluded stone slab bench behind an empty stairwell, and slings his belongings across it before he replies, “Dreamers.”

“Dreamers,” Gansey repeats, but it sounds like he’s saying of course! “Plural?”

“At least three.”

“Doing what?”

“I’m not one hundred percent sure yet.”

“Ronan hasn’t spoken to you,” Gansey guesses.

“Not—in a few days.”

“Is everything alright?”

He swallows, and is horrified to find tears burning at the back of his throat. There’s no pretending with Gansey. It’s why he never calls him.

“Adam,” he says quietly. “Is he in trouble?”

He struggles with his composure for several long seconds. “Possibly.”

A world-weary sigh. “I really wish you had called.”

“Yeah, well,” he says vaguely. He checks his watch. 8:23.

“So he’s playing with others. Why would Ronan want to do that?”

“I think—he’ll do anything not to feel powerless.” He understands as soon as he says it that it’s the pockmark in the windshield from which all of the damage is splintering outwards. “And people take advantage of that.”

Gansey makes a thoughtful noise, somewhere a thousand miles away, and it clicks in a lock and opens Adam’s shoulders up. Maybe he doesn’t have to be alone in this fight. How could he have forgotten careful, persistent Gansey?

“Well. He’s certainly not powerless. I almost feel back to my pre-Cabeswater self. Everything is pleasantly linear. And Blue is—lighting up.” In the background, he hears her say supercharged with relish. “I can only imagine what it’s like for full-blooded dream stuff, with all of that energy at their disposal.”

“I don’t know if I like it,” Adam says carefully. “It’s good for a while, helping all the Matthew’s of the world, and then what? Where does all of that diverted power end up? What makes dreamers qualified to harness it without their worst nightmares manifesting?”

“You’re worried about the Lace.”

The last time they spoke, Adam had told them briefly about his last scrying session, warning them to look out for the hateful, faceless thing that had pierced his cells and magnified all of his pain and fear until all he could possibly do was scream.

“I’m worried about Ronan. I know he’s in over his head, and I know he won’t believe it until it’s too late.”

“Sounds like someone I know. Don’t bite off more than you can chew with this, Adam. I know you’re enormously busy.”

It stings, a little. “I’m still going to—I’m obviously still going to make time for him. Especially when he’s—“

“Struggling. Yes. I understand perfectly.” It occurs to Adam that, unlike his well-meaning Harvard friends, he actually might. A needling murmur in the background, and then, “listen, Blue’s telling me that you should get in touch with the psychics, and Mr. Gray.”

He nods. The rhythm of problem-solving is soothing his frazzled nerves. “I’ve been considering it. I’m also pretty sure that Declan has been keeping his own tabs on things.”

“My money’s on yes,” Gansey says. Adam half-smiles. His money has been on a lot of things. “Poke around when you can. See what turns up. I’ll give Ronan a call, not that it’s ever done me much good before.”

“I’m pretty sure he ditched his phone.” He checks his watch. 8:24. It feels like it’s been much, much longer than a minute. There is so much day ahead of him.

Ordinarily, he would be compartmentalizing better than this. No feverish Gansey phone calls directly before class. No pleasure with his business. No finesse when logic will do the job just as well. But the subterranean, black-eyed Adam is still within him, tethered to the ley line and to his friends, and he wants very badly to fix this.

“Ah, Ronan,” Gansey sighs. “It’s always got to be him, doesn’t it?”

“I know,” Adam says narrowly. “If he’s not looking for trouble it’s looking for him.”

“You sound like Declan.”

Adam makes an offended noise in the back of his throat. Blue must be leaning across Gansey, because she says “that’s a new low,” almost directly into the receiver.

“I’m hanging up now,” he says flatly.

“Update me if anything changes? We’ll come home the moment things go south.”

He resists the urge to check his watch again. “Don’t cut things short on my account.”

“Well. Don’t disrupt your studies on Ronan’s. I’ve never known you to put your future on hold for anything.”

“I’m not—“ he stops. “Ronan is a part of my future.”

“Good,” Gansey says warmly. A test, then. And like most tests, there was never even a possibility that Adam wouldn’t pass.

______

It’s easy to tell when a dreamer is suffering.

As the energy from the ley line ebbs, dreamt creations judder and bolt like horses loosed suddenly from the service of a carriage, galloping towards safer pastures. If the dreamer is in more immediate peril, the dream simply folds its limbs into an agreeable shape and passes into sleep.

In the wee hours of Thursday morning, Adam lies awake in bed, dangling his hand between the wall and his bed frame, feeling along the subtle unfilled crack in the plaster. A flagpole casualty, from the day that everything stopped being enough for Ronan, and he slipped away on a dreamt current like a dark Ophelia.

He’s being dramatic.

He feels the drywall flaking, and digs his thumbnail into the split, wanting to rip the whole wall open with his fingers.

He keeps picturing Matthew’s half-lidded eyes, cloudless and blue as a wide prairie sky. The slouch of his posture, the tarnished golden head, the body briefly without a pilot.

Matthew had looked—Adam turns in bed, taking his chalky hand from the wall and fisting it in the sheets. He had looked like a faded old pillow, tucked unobtrusively into the chair by the window. He wouldn’t respond to Declan’s call, fluttering his drowsy lashes, and Adam had thought, ah. This is how I find out. His heart slumped over in his chest, dizzy with sudden grief. The tarot cards in his hands were dead leaves.

This is what happens when your life is tied to my brother’s, Declan had said, diverting his horror into scorn as he often did. The death of any one member of his family ensured the destruction of another. It had always been that way.

Matthew eventually roused, and Adam had closed his eyes and turned his face towards the ceiling until he could be normal again. He felt suddenly foolish for peddling lies to college students when magic was so obviously in the room with him.

Earlier, he had called Maura over lunch, and she vaulted right over small talk to ask him, with concern, about his loosening grip on his psychic inclinations. She’d said, “You do know that the ley line isn’t the source of your problems, right? Give yourself some credit. You can fuck things up in a completely non-mystical way.”

She pulled the Magician, reversed, and the eight of wands, and then, without further comment, passed the phone to Mr. Gray.

Unexplained weaponry, he’d reported. The Lynch brothers loosed on two separate worlds at the same time. Buttoned-up Declan for the first time unbuttoned, schmoozing with an array of dangerous and connected people, trading in secrets just as his father had. Purposeless Ronan for the first time with a purpose, wading out from the murky waters of his dreamspace and bringing the tides with him.

Bryde, the name in the corner of everyone’s mouth, joined all at once by Ronan’s and Hennessy’s.

Renegades, liberators of dreams, scorchers of earth. He could see, easily, why this would appeal to Ronan. A mission, finally. A father figure to guide his hand. A world that wanted his dreams, and wouldn’t crumple under the weight of his unusual ambition.

When they were teenagers, Aglionby was just another one of Adam’s jobs, but it was one of Ronan’s nightmares. He would go to school, a hooded bird of prey, seething with resentment and squandered ability. He longed for the Barns because of what they represented: the childlike belief that his family would never die; the possibility for creatures like him to roam free; a landscape powered by unconditional love.

Bryde, Adam knows, must be offering him the same relief. Exquisite flight, after the cage.

It’s not possible, is the thing. It’s a pipe dream. A Niall Lynch fairytale.

Foresight has never been Ronan’s strong suit. He gets it into his head that a solution is right up until the point that it falls apart in his hands. He throws himself entirely into belief. It makes him an extraordinarily loyal and trusting person. It also makes him stubborn, rash, and susceptible to manipulation.

He believes in one facet of something, and the rest follows. He can’t just take a sip—he downs the bottle.

Adam is a boy on a bicycle in November, needing to find Ronan alive so that he can hate him without feeling guilty about it. He never stops oscillating between resentment and love, reality and unreality, understanding and disappointment. He wants to be normal so that he can choose to be abnormal. Sometimes he wants the cards without the magic.

He closes his eyes and remembers a slumbering mouse against an angular cheek. He imagines Matthew like that, perpetually immobile, perpetually innocent, like a taxidermied puppy. The pieces of Ronan’s consciousness that will linger after his death, statues in a graveyard. Tamquam—tamquam—

What would Ronan be without his dreams? Here, Adam thinks. He’d be here.

He stays in bed for another wasted hour, and then stands up, disoriented, in the dimness of the room. Fletcher is snoring softly. Someone outside their cracked window is shuffling over the concrete stoop. His upstairs neighbour is playing tinkling soundtracks while he sleeps. Adam can’t be here anymore.

He plucks Fletcher’s laptop silently from its charging station, tucks his bare feet into stiff leather shoes, drags the cardigan from his desk chair, and lets himself out into the hallway. The glare from the overhead light pins him against the wall for a moment.

He shuffles half-blind down the hall and upstairs to the solarium, nearly losing one of his unlaced shoes in the stairwell in the process. The lights are blessedly shut off up in the attic, and he feels his way to the nearest of the tables hunched in the shadows. Aching with fatigue, he sits, unfolds his stolen laptop, and gets quietly to work.

He’s never had the time nor means to be truly proficient with technology, but he extracted a handful of leads from Mr. Gray, and he’s been in touch with a friend of Benjy’s—a computer science grad student and hacking hobbyist.

He chases key phrases down rabbit holes and assembles news articles, tracking Ronan’s movement by his “unexplainable” signature (code for mind-fuckery, joyful innovation, and dark humour). Adam is a practiced note-taker and serial obsesser, so it’s barely a strain to find Ronan—whom he knows better than anyone—cropping up all over the continental United States.

“What are you doing,” Adam murmurs. The sky lightens gradually to periwinkle. He has work today, but his shift doesn’t start until noon. His mouth is bone-dry, and his head feels cotton-stuffed the way it always does when he’s pushing his body to its limit.

When it’s late enough in the morning to be socially acceptable, he messages Benjy’s friend with the bare bones of what he’s looking for: a project under wraps, a lonely last name, a suppressed pattern. They correspond, remotely, until Adam is reading government files over watery coffee, wearing sweatpants, dress shoes, and a cardigan with cracked elbow patches.

He pores over it all, cross-referencing dates, and ignoring the widening sink-hole in his chest.

Industrial espionage isn’t at all Ronan’s usual brand of destruction. Highly controlled, not much up-front gratification. A little more political than Ronan usually leans. A lot more ambitious. Whatever their agenda, ley energy is flowing more easily now that it's unobstructed on such a large scale. Adam has been feeling its effects rippling all the way out to Boston, a persistent background pressure, unavoidable as a migraine.

It’s clear that the Moderators are desperate to eliminate Bryde’s party. Their reports are a comedy of close calls.

Slowly, Adam begins to understand the scope of things.

Billions of dollars in damages, manmade structures ripped from their foundations. Magical fugitives hunted by a team that specializes in murdering the targets they call Zeds. Visionary headlights pointed towards certain apocalypse. A world that is always awake, but always, always feels like it’s dreaming.

It’s pretty much exactly as he feared. Night terrors. The Lace. Beasts and legends. Adam holds his head in his hands. It’s more than what Ronan must be imagining. It’s more than Aurora waking happily in Cabeswater, powered by the swaying trees. It’s the indiscriminate waking of every incredible thing that’s ever been dreamed.

He’s struck by a wave of hopelessness that rushes all around him and tears at his hair. Ronan, dreamer of baubles that dispense music and light, cars that go very fast, and menageries of curious creatures, recruited to a cause that transmutes creation into chaos. Ronan, promising to wait, and then running full tilt at a future that can’t possibly keep Adam in it.

His dream half is going to destroy his human half, and he’ll take everybody else down with him.

If he could just see him, maybe—

His jaw creaks, teeth clenched tight against the emotional groundswell. The late morning sunshine strikes him, and he feel more like a vague, pale shape than a person. Like a dream, maybe.

Alter idem.

If Adam can’t reach Ronan, maybe the Moderators should.

He feels the weight of that awful thought burning a hole through his stomach lining. He can’t think about it. He needs to go to work.

_____

The next evening, he experiences a surge of power so acute that it nearly puts him in a coma.

It’s another Wednesday night, and another batch of his peers hitch polite smiles to his heels as he passes them by, winding his way up into the high, arched sunroom at Weld hall. They’re all wishing for magical solutions for their mundane problems, the opposite of Adam in nearly every way.

He bumps knuckles with Benjy and Eliot in turn, pulls up his chair, and knocks his last reading from Persephone’s deck, mostly out of habit. He consults his phone idly as his friends try to make pleasant conversation, holding up a finger when he finds a new batch of texts from Gansey.

John Amos power plant in WV shut down Monday

Intense. maura said she could’ve brought HER dreams to life afterwards

no word from Ronan yet? Leads from Declan? pls advise

I’ll assume no news is good news

He puts his phone in his satchel and fastens it closed. Every new scrap of information he gets feels like a stroll through Ronan’s security system at the Barns—hopelessness compounding and compounding until he staggers out the far end weeping.

He needs to focus on something productive. He nods at Benjy to start letting people inside, straightening the notebook where he usually scribbles his observations. Here, he is an adjudicator: powerful, organized, and reserved, tallying points and offering constructive critique.

His curious audience starts pouring in then, amateur wiccans and wannabe believers, aggrieved last-resorters and skeptics following friends’ recommendations. It’s a brighter collection of characters than Aglionby could ever have hoped to foster.

Gillian texts him to say that she just passed Weld and his line-up was out the door. He is a prim and unobtrusive con artist, a false prophet, and business is booming.

Eventually, a bespectacled girl who looks anywhere from five to ten years his senior sits across from him, tucking a bag armoured to the teeth with candy-coloured enamel pins between her feet.

“Hi,” she says nervously. “Anna.” She stretches her hands out in front of her, then thinks better of it and drops them into her lap. “I’m not sure how this usually goes, so you might have to hold my hand a little bit.”

“No problem,” he says smoothly, passing his deck across the tabletop. “Just go ahead and shuffle. Concentrate on what you want to ask the cards.”

She does as directed, struggling a little to keep the papery stack in check. Not a natural born card sharp, then. He studies her neat black shirt, tucked precisely into a plaid skirt. A Marilyn mole drawn on just above the corner of her mouth. A pride flag pin he doesn’t recognize next to a cat wearing a cowboy hat, and the word “rude” in cursive.

She holds the deck fleetingly to her chest, eyes squeezed shut like a child making a birthday wish, and then plops it in the centre of the table. A card slips near the top, slightly uneven, and Adam plucks it free.

He hums thoughtfully. “Eight of cups. Okay. So you’re having some trouble with letting go.” She frowns and nods once, quick.

He lays out the rest of a simple five card spread neatly between them. A couple of stray swords, the chariot, a wand.

“It seems like things are stagnating in your personal life. Maybe your friend group used to feel like your family, but you feel like they’ve lost interest in you. And you love them, but Anna, if you’re being honest with yourself, you’re pretty sure you were done with them before they even started pulling away. Right now you’re kind of just going through the motions. A couple of years overdue to convocate, right? Everyone else moved on to greener pastures.” He taps his thumb thoughtfully against the bones of his opposite wrist. “It’s not even the loneliness that gets you. It’s the not knowing. Are you supposed to chase after them? Is there another community out there for you? There is, you know.”

He notices another card spilling loose, and he grabs it without thinking. The Magician again. He thinks, huh, caught in the coils and dust of Persephone’s overturned cards.

And then the waking world disappears.

Adam is airborne, tumbling up into the atmosphere on a geyser of ley energy, whipped by branches and light. He throws his arms out to stop himself, but he’s only a projection, so his momentum doesn’t slow.

Something—Lindenmere? The cosmos?—shows him a series of images: an upturned nose made from oil and turpentine, a coiled old tree stump, a red-haired woman grinning toothily and then exploding, a rose the colour of warm dark skin, a pale scar-split hand cradling a silky head, the animal haunch of something black, a terrible voice booming turn back—

He skitters away, panicked, and bumps into his own body. Or not his own body. A double, blinking confusedly in the bathroom mirror.

His doppelgänger turns to leave, and Adam reaches after him, through the mirror, following himself into a version of Thayer which is not Thayer. Everything is alive, in this reality. Energy sings and saws its fingers together.

It’s a memory, but it’s also the present, and it’s also a nightmare. Wake up!

Obediently, the city wakes.

He gasps, although he doesn’t have a mouth. It’s the heaving first breath of a sleeping witch, like Gwenllian turning in her grave.

Adam struggles against the current of wild power, thick and pungent as gasoline. Everything feels more intense near magical artifacts, dream stuff, supernatural fault lines, and it is with great effort that he hunts for something familiar, something heavy enough to bind him. He was unprepared for this, and although everything around him is bitingly familiar, he's lost. He wheels around and around, reaching for his most trusted tethers—Gansey, Ronan, Blue, Persephone—

Persephone.

He follows the lingering perfume of her intuition, feeling blindly for those old handholds in her tarot deck, that familiar grip, like the hilt of a trusted weapon.

And then he finds himself looking again at the girl, Anna, her fate bunched around her narrow shoulders. And then at his own empty body, a glowing card clamped between his fingers. As soon as he’s aware of looking at himself, he’s looking out of himself, and he stands up quickly, overturning his chair.

“—Adam? Jesus Christ, are you okay?”

“What on God’s green Earth was that?”

A palm between his shoulder blades.

“Don’t touch me,” he chokes.

The hand retreats. A murmur: I’ve never seen him like this.

“Is it—is it bad? Am I going to be okay? Is it bad?” Anna keeps asking, horrified.

“You’re fine,” he manages to say. “I’m sorry.” The ‘o’ in sorry comes out a little wide and swerving.

“You went blank,” Benjy says, voice high with residual panic. “For like—ten minutes. Beyond hyper-focus.”

“I thought it was a gimmick,” Eliot says. “But a ten minute gimmick? What is this, Las Vegas?”

“I got carried away. I have to,” he swallows. “I need a minute. I promise everything’s fine.”

“Do whatever you need to do,” Eliot says quickly. “But, fair warning, I’m going to ask you a hundred questions when you get back.”

“And then I’m going to ask another hundred,” Benjy says. “Magic man.”

“A riddle, inside an enigma, wrapped in a sweater vest,” Eliot muses. He can tell they’re still shaken. He’ll have to deal with that, later.

“I'll be right back,” Adam says, touching them very lightly on the shoulder as he passes. The ley line is bursting, and he feels so flushed with its vitality that it almost makes him sick.

He stumbles past them, all the way out of the building and into the street. The winter air tears at his thin shirtsleeves, nips at his sock-less ankles. He shields his eyes against the sun, watching a bird swoop low overhead. A silvery, seagull-sized thing, but with knobby legs that taper into—he squints. Hooves?

He keeps moving, propelled by the mad urge to catch the bird, to pin the wild magic down so he can understand it.

Adam walks for what feels like a long time, trying to find the source of all of this haemorrhaging power. He spots a couple of fidgety-looking students, a few more curious creatures. Somewhere, faraway, there’s music crooning, and it sounds exactly the way a hot shower feels.

He stops in the middle of Oxford street, head cocked towards the natural history museum across the way, the orderly buildings, the sparse evening foot traffic. Business as usual. All of it screaming with energy.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a parade of scuttling creatures marching towards an invisible destination. Frowning, Adam crosses the street, chasing the peacock blue shimmer from an unfurled wing. He slows, stooping in the alley to pick one of the strange insects from the stream. He peers through a nail-sized hole in its head. Its spindly legs wave fearfully for a moment, and then it goes limp in his hand.

The ley energy punches out of him, and he sits back on his ankles, winded.

Adam gazes down at the jewelled beetle in his palm, its siblings scattered out like shell casings around his knees. Dreams, all of them. Briefly, impossibly roused in a dead city. He stands, letting the beetle drop from his hand and bounce across the concrete. He kicks them all hurriedly behind a nearby bench, mind racing. Bugs from an exhibit next door, no doubt. Dormant animals, transplanted from their habitats and pinned in place for decades.

What kind of ecoterror was wrought to bring about a flash flood of energy in a drought? How must Ronan be feeling, out there in the world, wracked with waking dreams? What unimaginable monsters were just stirring in the shadows because of him? Is Bryde one of them?

His lives are merging. The distant rumbling of thunder is overhead now, and the downpour is rolling in. There’s no way he’ll be able to keep dry.

Standing in that alleyway by himself, drained and ordinary again, he feels terribly alone.

He weighs his feelings against his logic for several agonizing minutes, standing still and watchful as a predator. He recalls the jarringly clinical accounts of Ronan's most intimate dreams, the sparsely encoded language in those government files outlining the world-ending dangers of something Adam had, for a long time, shared a bed with.

If something happens to Ronan now, it might kill Adam. If something happens because of Ronan, it might kill everybody.

Another minute, and he has his phone out and ringing.

“Hello?” Declan answers. Oddly, it’s not his usual prickly greeting. He sounds almost jovial.

Adam looks out into the darkening street, feeling like a death omen, a shadow across someone’s doorstep. “We really need to talk about Bryde.”

______

It’s the worst possible time for Declan to be withholding information from him.

Adam had graciously tipped his hand and Declan was, infuriatingly, holding back, as if this was a low grade in Ronan’s high school algebra class, and not the cataclysmic fuck-up of a powerful dreamer.

Declan, so uncannily like his brother in vulnerable moments like this, had thought of Matthew first. A world where dreams could stay awake, he’d marvelled. As if they could afford to think so small.

Once, Adam had awoken to find his arm glued to the bedspread. Ronan had dreamt a bee-less hive in the night, and it was oozing a steady stream of honey into the sheets between them.

“Score,” Ronan had said, when he’d rolled back into his body. “Sting-free. Fucking vegan.”

“What happens when we don’t want any more honey?” Adam had asked, critically. Ingesting dreams always felt like a slippery subject. “Does it shut off like a faucet?”

It didn’t. Ronan filled a dozen amber jars full, and then abandoned the hive in a dusty kiddy pool in one of the barns near the back of his family property.

A month later, Opal had crept in through a window looking for trouble, and emerged, shrieking, in a viscous flood of syrup.

Combing the mess out of Opal’s fur, her little legs slung across his lap, Ronan had complained about the magnitude of the clean-up job he would have to do, the special honey hoover he would have to create, what a waste of a dream it would be. Adam reminded him of his faucet idea.

“Too late for that, Parrish,” he’d griped.

It was their pattern. A marvel, too good to be true. Adam, the skeptic. Ronan, too in love with creation to care about consequences.

Eventually, it will all be too late.

Ronan will pursue this liberation fantasy, this golden daydream, even if it never stops oozing. Even if it makes the whole world uninhabitable.

______

That night, Adam tries to scry for the first time in months.

He gently pushes the crying club—only tenuously placated after the tarot incident—to have drinks without him, claiming stress-induced fatigue. He leaves his study notes open and blinking on the bed, lights a sad little tea light, and casts himself out into the ether.

Straining hard, he searches for the familiar contours of Ronan’s dreamspace, plucking the distant strings of the ley line and listening for the particular timbre of Ronan’s consciousness.

He doesn’t like walking this tightrope without a net, but Harvard isn’t exactly flush with psychic spotters. He keeps a delicate balance, far from his body, inching closer and closer to Ronan’s mind, the safe plateau at the end of this rope.

Eventually, he finds himself in a grey bedroom. It's full to the gills with water, there's a toy sailboat bobbing past at chest height, and storm clouds huddling nervously on the ceiling. Adam’s hair plasters instantly to his scalp.

“Ronan?” he calls, sloshing through the curiously luminous water. It starts raining harder. A familiar, curly-headed child stares at him through the darkness, eyes sharpened into silver points in the moonlight. “Ronan?” he asks again, gently this time.

A muffled sentence, a sad, crumpled expression, and then Adam is staring at a closed door.

“What—let me in! Ronan!” He pounds at the door. “Come on!” He can still feel rainwater, unnaturally warm on his neck.

A voice in his head, not Ronan, whispers, turn back.

“No,” he snaps, knocking harder. “Just let me—“ A sudden gust of wind in his sails, and he’s ejected from the dream altogether.

He pinwheels for a horrifying, weightless moment, struggling to tune back in to the feeble light from his stubby candle, and then dragging himself, hand over fist, back to his dorm room.

“Fuck, Lynch,” he says, when he has a voice. “Don’t be stupid.” He recrosses his legs, shaking off the pointless, clinging feeling of rejection.

When he tries to reach out again, searching, searching, Ronan’s expecting him. He never makes it past the threshold.

Back in his body, he knocks his candle over, relishing the controlled destruction, the spill of wax, the sizzle of the squashed wick. A fire he can actually put out.

______

The next time Adam scrys, Ronan looks like himself. Maybe a little scruffier, with what looks like a tunnel piercing on his right ear, and a rare openness to his posture. He’s lounging in a pasture up against a sleeping cow, boots up.

As Adam watches, he tips his shaved head back into its mottled hide, and the sun makes his eyelashes into lit matchsticks. He loves him very much. He’d almost forgotten.

“Don’t lock me out,” he says quickly. Ronan opens his eyes, and when he sees him he smiles instinctively.

“Adam,” he says, vaguely. And then he locks him out.

“No,” he cries. “Would you listen to me.” He feels for the fissure in space and time, the pocket where Ronan is dreaming, sweetly and inaccessibly, about the only home Adam has ever known.

Nothing gives. Nobody replies. He crawls back to Harvard, weak with misery.

In the next dream, Ronan is older, driving a boxy jeep over a foreign landscape. Rolling Irish hills, skies humming with artificial energy. A woman who can only be Jordan Hennessy, chattering in the passenger seat.

Then it’s Ronan with his head in his dead mother’s lap, stroking the downy wing of a black swan.

Then Ronan and Hennessy again, opposite one another in a sunny gallery. One of them examining an impressionist portrait no bigger than a postcard, the other examining the exit.

Then Ronan, discovering Matthew’s corpse in a dim hallway, blinking furiously at the stranger crouched over his prone body. “What did you do?” He sounds like a kid reprimanding his sibling for getting them both in trouble.

Every time Adam gets close, some defence mechanism stops him, like a firm hand against his chest, pushing him away again and again.

He doesn't know what to do except keep trying.

______

Blankly, he looks down at a sink full of tinfoil and uneasy water. In pieces, he becomes aware of his surroundings—green stalls and laminate countertops, a row of hundred-watt lightbulbs, and somebody rattling the locked doorknob.

“Adam, are you in there?” Fletcher. “We’re going to be late. It’s nearly ten. Adam?”

“Just a minute, sorry,” Adam slurs. He stares closely at his face in the mirror until he recognizes his own features. He has an exam at 10:30. He glances down at his watch. 9:52. He had been so sure that he could just drift for a few minutes, maybe catch Ronan before he woke up. That was almost an hour ago.

He drains the sink, hands shaking, cuffs getting damp. The lightbulb filaments float behind his eyelids when he blinks. He throws his satchel over his shoulder, smooths his hair up and out of his eyes, and rubs the bags under his eyes until they hurt.

When he lets himself out of the bathroom, Fletcher is directly outside, tapping a nervous rhythm on his hips. His hands fly from his body and into the air at the sight of him.

“Adam! Thank god. I’ll cancel the search party.”

“I got lost in my notes,” Adam says, as they both make for the stairs.

“Of course you did,” Fletcher says warmly. “A supremely Adam move. I just hope you’re taking care of yourself. Gillian thinks you might be—well—not spiralling, but—“

“I’m handling it.” He takes several mental paces backwards. “Uh—poorly, clearly. I’m sorry Fletcher, I didn’t mean to snap.”

Fletcher, to his credit, recovers quickly. “I can’t imagine going through my first semester of college and a break-up at the same time. You’re a stronger man than I.”

Adam rather doubts that Fletcher can imagine going through a break-up at all, but he nods conspiratorially. They hop down the last few steps and out into the chilly sunshine together.

“You’d be amazed what one can do out of necessity.”

“Too true. We all have our hidden depths, don’t we,” Fletcher says thoughtfully. For a moment, Adam considers telling him—something, looping him into this tangled web with him, but then he says, “now, chapter twenty-three wasn’t on the outline, was it? I beg you to say no. Lie, if you must.”

And Adam is a student again. He doesn’t have out of body episodes. He doesn’t carry wads of tinfoil in his trouser pockets. He doesn’t keep deadly secrets from people whom he is mostly pretending to like and understand.

They walk onwards, towards a test which Adam will rouse himself for long enough to ace. Then he will think of the next thing, and the next. Appease these school acquaintances of his. Tinker with finicky car engines. Make flash cards. Drift into the beyond using one of Fletcher’s three-wick candles from pottery barn. Text Declan, who activates Ronan’s accountability in a way that Adam does not. Call Gansey, if he can bring himself to face his disappointment.

And clear away his feelings, which keep pouring out of him like so much honey.

______

Ronan hangs up on him, and Adam holds himself in the biting wind outside the library for a very long time.

He’d thought, if he could only speak to him, that he could begin to undo Bryde’s poisonous influence. They know each other. They’ve known each other. Ronan would listen to Adam’s fears as he always does. Adam would appeal to Ronan’s heart, which tends to ache for helpless things. They would see how lost they had become without each other. Adam would be allowed back into Ronan’s dreams, and Ronan would be allowed back into Adam’s future.

Why didn’t you text back?

As if they’ve been suspended in time since Ronan’s last tamquam, and none of it—the running away, warding his dreams against Adam, abandoning his phone, trusting a complete stranger over his friends and family—had ever happened.

It’s absurd. He should have expected it. Ronan was searching for a reason to stay, and when he looked for his reflection, his second self, Adam wasn’t there. For a single moment, he wasn’t there, and now he’s paying for it.

Impatient, wrathful Ronan. Leaping from the moving vehicle because Adam was going the speed limit. Going rogue, and then calling Adam with all of these stinging accusations, like he was the one who’d been abandoned.

He thinks again of Bryde manipulating Ronan, preying on his loneliness, his love for his brothers, his fear of himself. This big bad rumour, older and crueler than the Lace itself.

And Ronan letting himself be manipulated, putting on blinders, using Adam’s brief silence as an endorsement for a glorified joyride with unthinkable global ramifications. Self-destructing because things got a little too quiet.

Adam feels hot rage taking ahold of him with its sticky fingers.

Then he thinks of Ronan saying I need to see you, his thin, frightened voice finding Adam from somewhere out there in the city, and his anger goes clammy.

There’s no way Ronan will call again. Negotiations were off as soon as Adam refused to house them both from the Moderators.

And now, without Hennessy, Ronan is the last arrow in Bryde’s quiver. He’s going to be the explosive that brings everything down. He’s going to be buried at ground zero.

If I'd replied an hour sooner, would he really have waited? If I’d gone to school closer, would I have noticed him disintegrating? If I explained that my dream isn’t what I thought it would be either, that he’s the only thing that feels real, would he have said it back to me?

After everything that’s happened, am I going to be the one who gives up on Ronan Lynch?

Everything is so fucked.

He calls Declan.

He picks up on the first ring. “Parrish—”

“He hung up on me,” they both say at the same time.

“Mother of God,” Declan moans. “Then there’s no hope. He thinks I sold him out to the Mods.”

“Did you?”

“No. I did exactly as we discussed. I negotiated for his safety. I thought—I mean, you said it yourself, Adam. Being anti-apocalypse is a pretty solid platform.”

He shakes his head. “Ronan won’t see it that way. He’s not like us. He doesn’t want to be moderated even a little bit.”

“Believe me, I know that. The way he was talking—about the world screwing them over, all of them, dreamers. That’s not the way my brother thinks. That’s all Bryde. And now he’s taken him—Christ—Christ knows where.”

“He wanted to see me,” Adam feels compelled to say. “He was trying to come here.”

“He said that? That's good,” Declan says, relieved. “Where—“

“I let him get away,” Adam says, through numb lips. “I let him go.”

______

He texts Gansey, things have gone south, and then he turns his phone on silent.

His puts his fingertips to the floorboards, a knobbly hand on either side of a scrying tableau: the leaping flame of a candle, a well-organized pile of cards, his overturned phone and discarded tie. He’s just finished crying, and he feels volatile and ill-prepared even as he ties himself to the flickering light.

His mind races through the night like a skipped stone. Vaguely, he pictures a vast body of water and a glittering mountain range, with no horizon line in-between. Darkness reflected in darkness.

“Ronan,” he calls. The dreamspace whirs and grinds its gears and won’t reply. “You know this is wrong. You know, or you wouldn't be hiding from me.”

It’s all water out here in this sublime mirror-space, but it’s also warm, like the steam rising from a hot spring. Something is moving, changing things on a chemical level.

For a moment he thinks he sees himself, a wan doppelgänger with its hands raised. But it’s not Adam. It’s Bryde. Cool, sturdy, a pale Atlas holding the dream together on his back. He recognizes him instinctively.

Adam deliberately throws his mind closer, into the terrible heart of this fire Ronan is creating. Smoke whispers and catches all around him, and it’s even harder to tell the difference between things now. No horizon, no seam, no reality, no death.

What have you done? What are you doing?

The heat is quickly becoming unbearable. Adam is stretched too thin, and the fire is fraying him, eating through each fibre of his connection to reality.

Ronan, please, I need you to stop. I’m losing my grip. Listen to me.

And then, without any warning at all, he collapses on his dorm room floor.

He hacks and retches, lungs full of phantom smoke. Everything feels very wrong. He thinks for a second that he’s blind, but it’s not his vision, it’s another, less tangible sense, it’s—

He scrambles backwards on his hands, heaving. He tries to pull himself up onto his bed, head first, then chest, but he has to stop with his face buried in the comforter.

Ronan is—he must be—he’s—

“God, no, oh my god, no, no.”

He needs to throw up. He needs to call somebody. There’s complete silence in his head.

He was slingshotted back to Cambridge, swatted back along the zipline to his body, because there was nowhere else for him to go.

He’s sure, in a very non-magical, intuitive way, that every dream in the world has just collectively collapsed. Adam staggers to his feet. There’s a smoke alarm going off, somewhere. A background hum of electricity groaning as it shuts off. A high, scared voice.

As if in a trance, he goes to the window.

There are five dead lightbulbs in the nearest row of street lamps, what looks like a sleeping child out in the middle of the square, and a woman clutching her chest and sitting slowly on a bench.

Panic is deadening his senses, crawling blackly into his mouth and nose and eyes. He thinks of Matthew sitting weakly by the window. Opal slumped over a stump in the woods. Chainsaw falling from the sky like a stone. Gansey’s Cabeswater heart decaying in his chest. Ronan, either dissolving into nightwash or felled by a Moderator’s bullet, dead, lost, or powerless.

Every morsel of magic, every innovation, every cherished friend, every sacred place, turned off like a faucet.

The world outside, drooping and disconnected, is now exactly as ordinary as Adam has been pretending it is.

The ley line is gone.

#mister impossible #the dreamer trilogy #mi spoilers #tdt #adam parrish #trc #trc fanfic #pynch #mine #my tfc besties...... soon #in the meantime. here's some adam pov please clap

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commander-diomika · 3 years

Text

Pairing: Azu/Cel Sidebottom

Word Count: 1900

Rating: Mature (for drug references and mild sexual content)

Additional Tags: Drugs, Sort Of, Kissing, drugged kissing, Kinktober, thembofication, Fluff,

Prompt: Bimbofication / Collaring / Cockwarming

Summary: “I don’t know…” Azu said slowly. She wasn’t even sure where Cel had gotten the Rod of Bestow Curse, and their plan to gradually zap their intelligence down sounded… dubious. But then again, Azu wasn’t exactly a science-minded sort.

“Even I’m not silly enough to try this solo, Azu, and don’t you think it would be fun to do together!” Cel brandished the wand with an alarming enthusiasm. “I was just thinking about it, because when I take these off-” Cel tapped their goggles with a crystalline ding, “-for a little while after I feel, inebriated but not quite, until I adjust again, so I’m just curious about what happens if instead of calibrating out of the feeling, I persist with it!”

“Please, Azu. For science.”

It was just like the time with the Mega-joos, Cel explained to Azu. They just wanted to try something out.

“I don’t know…” Azu said slowly. She wasn’t even sure where Cel had gotten the Rod of Bestow Curse, and their plan to zap their intelligence down gradually sounded… dubious. But then again, Azu wasn’t exactly a science-minded sort.

Azu crossed her arms across her unarmoured chest. She did suppose that Cel had a point. The idea had a similar air to when Azu wanted to take a mysterious potion just to see what it did. She didn’t really feel like she could argue against Cel’s logic. (A very familiar feeling.)

“And if it all gets too much, I know, you can just restore me! I won’t be in any danger, and you can keep an eye on me, just like how I observed you last time! And nothing bad happened then except for a bit of broken furniture, and I’m not even big enough to break anything. Unless I somehow beast morph whilst- no, I’ll leave all my gear outside of the room and perhaps it would be good if your first responsibility is just to keep me in the one place so I don’t do anything rash with my potions.”

That sounded… remarkably sensible. But still, doubt niggled in Azu’s chest. “What if you stay that way? Something might go wrong with the restoration.”

“I have every faith in your healing! Besides, I’ve examined the wand carefully, it will definitely do what I want and nothing more, and it’s a basic enough spell to fix this kind of thing! Zolf does it all the time!”

“Why don’t you ask Zolf then?” Grasping, she knew.

Cel pressed their lips together, suddenly looking sheepish. “I don’t- You know that I like Zolf very much, Azu, but he’s not as much- well, to be honest, I just thought it might be something fun for us to do together.” When Cel dropped their chin and a puppy-dog pleading entered their eyes, Azu knew that the battle was lost.

She sighed. “Very well. Allow me to prepare the necessary spells.” Glee spread on Cel’s face, and Azu felt her chest warm with the rewarding light she always felt when helping. “Do not start without me.”

…

Cel took their goggles off and gently placed them on a side table. They closed their eyes and sighed, swaying a little.

“See, this kind of thing feels like we should have some drinks, too, but that would be adding another variable.”

“It’s probably best if I don’t get drunk.” Azu agreed. Cel’s room at the inn was comfortable if not lavishly appointed, a friendly fire in the grate, a bed and several armchairs just big enough for Azu to feel comfortable in.

“Right! Here we go! My research says this curse will affect my mental faculties based on a percentage of the original capacity, that is, not in an exponential but rather linear fashion from the original-”

Azu simply settled into a chair to watch as Cel pontificated. In the several days of downtime the group had been afforded at the inn, Cel had grown a shadow of stubble for a change. It was quite endearing.

“- but I am curious as to whether the-” Cel stopped suddenly, squeezed the wand in one hand, steeling themselves.

“The time for curiosity is done! It is time for answers!” they announced dramatically, then cast the wand in a sweeping motion over their tall frame. A sickly energy throbbed in the room for a breath, then nothing. Cel simply blinked owlishly.

“How… how does it feel?” Azu asked slowly.

“Not sure yet!” Cel said delightedly. “Give me a minute!” They stalked around the room in an energetic lap, once, twice. “I don’t feel any different. I’m going to do it again.”

Before Azu could advise against it, there was another eerie pulse. Standing in front of the fire, Cel’s eyes fluttered shut as they swayed. Azu felt the muscles in her legs coil, ready to spring into action in case Cel toppled, but they quickly steadied and snapped their eyes open.

“Should I take notes? Nothing in my research said that my memory will be affected by this experience but there is every chance that the sensations I feel can only be captured in the moment?” Cel went over to their desk and pulled up a sheaf of paper and started scribbling, muttering to themselves, seemingly having forgotten Azu was even there.

This continued for the next half an hour, cursing themselves twice more. On the third grasp and wave of the wand, they laid their head on their desk and gave a groan.

“Ooft. Dizzy.”

Concerned, Azu came over. She looked over Cel’s notes. The writings were becoming increasingly garbled; not any less legible but written in a confusing mix of languages, and the diagrams were becoming more… well Azu wasn’t sure how to describe it, but there was something abstractly expressive in them.

“Are you alright?” Azu asked.

Cel lifted their head off the desk, a smear of ink on one stubbly cheek. “Yes! I’m just goingsdahfdg-” They raised their eyebrows. “I’m fiweuhadermersh.” They clapped a hand to their mouth, rubbing a little more ink onto their face and jumped to their feet, remarkably spry.

“Do you need healing?” Azu asked, concerned. She wasn’t even sure how they were doing that with their mouth.

Cel walked around the room again, shaking their head. Azu watched them, and slowly settled into Cel’s desk chair. Cel didn’t seem worried or distressed, in fact as they turned and stalked back over, there was something determined in their eyes.

“I’m ok! I just- I think I just had to learn how to speak again.”

Azu frowned as Cel slowly lowered to their knees and laid their head in Azu’s robe-clad lap. “Bit swimmy,” was all they managed, and Azu instinctively petted their hair.

“The experience is not dissim- dissim- that different from some of the psy-psy-psychoa- trippy, you know, the little ground fellows that make you see things that aren’t real.” Cel mumbled into Azu’s lap. Azu continued to stroke Cel’s hair, feeling alarmed and trying not to show it. Azu knew that when people were under the influence of the little ground fellows, you should try your best to be a calming presence.

“It’s kind of nice. I often feel like I have two or three voices, layered inside, you know the talk inside your brain?”

“Internal monologue?” Azu ventured.

“Yes! The inside voices, all talking over each other, saying pros and cons simul- all at once and now it just feels…” They gestured with one hand then brought it up to rest on Azu’s thigh. “Quiet. I think if this happened, some other time, somewhere else…. I would feel afraid. I’m not afraid. I’m safe. And it’s ok to just feel… quiet for a little while. With you.” They nuzzled their nose into Azu’s thigh, their gaze unfocused as though they looked through Azu to something distant.

Azu watched Cel’s face carefully; cheek still smushed into Azu’s lap, their eyes darted up, their pupils blown wide and dark. “Kiss me?”

Azu blinked, petting hands stilling. “No, Cel.” She spoke gently, as one would to a demanding child. “It wouldn’t be right. You’re not in your right mind.”

“No, no no,” Cel went to shake their head but was really just nuzzling more firmly. “It’s still me! Cel! I’m not any less Cel! I’m fully Cel! I’m just, I don’t have the layers of inside-thinky-brain-talk that always talk me out of saying something like ‘I think we should kiss and I think that would be fun and nice!’ I’m pretty much always thinking that kissing would be fun and nice but there are so many reasons why I don’t usu- don’t say it!”

Azu was flummoxed. Cel’s only rule had been “don’t let me mess with my potions.” Cel hadn’t set up a single rule about what happened if the increasingly uninhibited half-elf hit on them.

That felt like a huge oversight on both their parts, really.

But Cel was looking up so earnestly, tall hair mussed from rubbing on her leg, and Azu was inclined to agree that kissing was indeed fun and nice, and very rarely far from her mind, too. Cel was making an awful lot of sense, as they usually did, even in this state.

“Ok.” Azu said softly. “Just one kiss, for us, if you promise you won’t regret it later.”

Cel came to stand. Whatever was happening in their mind, their body was still perfectly coordinated as they loomed over Azu and took her face in their slender hands.

“Azu.”

It’s very nice to be loomed over by them, Azu thought, looking up at Cel’s inky face.

“Kissing is nice. I don’t ever think I should have not-kissed someone.” Cel said, and for all their clunky phrasing, their voice was steady, gaze intent.

Azu tilted up her chin in invitation, and Cel dipped their mouth to Azu’s. The kiss was warm, and easy, Cel’s lips parting, letting their tongue trail and explore Azu’s lips, her tusks. Azu barely opened her mouth and felt Cel’s tongue slip inside, curious and soft. She met it with her own, careful not to push or overwhelm Cel’s narrow mouth, feeling the soft stubble on Cel’s upper lip against her own.

When Cel sighed in pleasure, Azu gently leant back.

“I think that’s enough, Cel.” Azu’s heart was beating fast in her chest. She wanted to surge upwards, plunge her tongue into Cel’s soft mouth, squeeze them and unwrap them and run her hands over every inch of them. But not like this.

Cel pouted, then screwed up their face in a slightly pained expression. “That was very wonde- beauti- nice. Wonderbeautynice.”

“Would you like a hug?” Azu offered. That, Azu felt she could offer without the heat in her veins overwhelming her. She stood, spreading her arms, and Cel wordlessly melted into them.

“I think I’d like my words back now, Azu. My inner words too. It was wonderbeautynice without them with you, though.”

Holding Cel her in arms, Azu let her heart open to Aphrodite’s light and lifted the curses on Cel. They sighed, squeezing their arms even tighter around Azu’s broad frame.

“That was such a kiss, Azu!” Cel leant back from the hug, not taking their arms from around Azu’s shoulder’s. Azu was relieved to see the sparkle in their eyes returned. “But you know, I don’t think I have quite enough data to say what kind of kiss it was, and I was wondering, if you would indulge me just a little further tonight, could we do it again?”

“For science, I take it?” Azu asked through her smile. With the light of Aphrodite and Cel’s bright gaze on her, Azu felt warm from crown to navel, fiery heat below that. She lifted her hand and rubbed tenderly at the smutch of ink on Cel's cheek.

“For science, absolutely.”

#hank writes #kinktober #rqg kinktober #nsft #rqg azu #cel sidebottom #ok so yesterday was ''grizzop fucked until he's facedown in a puddle of his own spit''#and today is tooth rotting fluff #even /I/ am reeling from that tonal shift #rqg #rqg fan fic

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scripttorture · 4 years

Note

Do you have advice on portraying mental disorders to the public in a way that makes sense? How does one portray multiple disorders at once while making it clear they’re the result of torture? Do you usually name them in the story? I can portray disorders + symptoms that come with mental health problems resulting from torture, but I feel like I’m battling public ignorance before even getting to debunking myths about torture. I have the information, but I don’t know how to portray it organically.

I can tell you what I do, but I think that whether that will work for you or not partly depends on how you approach writing.

If what I say doesn’t fit with your writing style that isn’t a failing and it doesn’t mean you’re ‘doing it wrong’. I don’t think there is one sure fire way to write a complex topic well. And honestly the fact that you’re putting in the time to research and practice is probably more important then any advice I have to give.

I don’t always name mental health problems in my stories. I appreciate that some people think you always should. Usually because they say if you name a disorder the readers can’t deny it or pretend it’s something else.

I have a friend in one of my writing groups. He’s writing a wonderful adventure story with a Deaf protagonist. He repeatedly describes the character as Deaf and all of her communication is in sign language.

He has still had feedback from people six chapters into the story saying they did not realise the character was Deaf.

Here’s my take away from this: While it is important to try your best with anything you portray it is also important to accept that some people just Will Not Get It despite your best efforts.

Shout out to the person who thought I was discussing trans people when I spoke about historical pre-pubertal eunuchs.

Start by thinking about who you’re writing for. What does your ideal reader look like? Whose feedback do you hope for?

Because I think there’s a big difference in how we approach the story/conversation when we’re expecting to talk to people with experience vs people without.

Most of the time I’m writing for trauma survivors. I hope I’m writing stories that other people will enjoy. But I accept in the writing that a lot of people without experience of these things might not… quite connect the dots.

It sounds like you want to write for people who aren’t survivors. To educate. That is just as valid and valuable. It’s a very different approach though.

When I think about naming a mental health problem I think about how that name fits into the story. The main character in my current story is about 11-13. She’s spent a fair amount of time with two adult survivors. But I’m not sure if she has the knowledge or vocabulary to label what she’s seeing and I’m not sure if anyone else would say it to her.

So I put those mental health problems in to the way these characters behave and the way their daughter talks to her friend about her parents.

That approach may not work if the majority of your intended audience have no knowledge about mental health.

And for me in this story that’s part of the point. I expect that a lot of readers will be taken aback when they find out what these characters have lived through and realise that what they’ve seen up to now are symptoms not ‘quirky character flaws’. I expect that to prompt some thought and questioning*.

Linking these illnesses to torture was easy in this particular set of stories because the readers will (eventually) see the characters before and after torture. The change happens in front of them.

Generally I think that’s a good way of establishing the link: explicitly showing the character before and after trauma and highlighting the changes. That can be directly as part of the story, but it can also be done through other characters talking about the past (which can help establish relationships and characters) and by having the survivors themselves reminisce about ‘before’.

It’s also important to remember that you can show symptoms developing without showing torture itself. There’s nothing wrong with choosing to show quiet moments with the character in a cell, even if we’re told they’re cliché. Use every moment that you can make powerful.

There’s also nothing wrong with jumping around in the time line and telling a story in a non-linear fashion. My general point here is that there are a lot of ways you can bring up the character’s past and how they’ve changed.

You can also have a character explicitly state that these symptoms are expected, normal responses to a horrendous situation. Any characters who are doctors, mental health professionals or some types of social workers would be good fits for that. Depending on how you structure the story religious figures (who may be involved in anti-torture work or helping survivors) could work.

If there are other survivor characters then having a discussion between them about what it changed could be a good organic way to bring that up while bringing the characters closer together.

Circling back to writing mental health problems- I do think sometimes a lack of an explicit label can help communicate the experience. I think sometimes people get so caught up on the diagnosis and what they think it means that they don’t engage with anything that goes against that preconceived notion. But… whenever you don’t make something explicit in the text you’re leaving it up to the reader to decide how to interpret it. You’re taking a risk to trust this stranger who picked up your story.

I get the feeling the main thing here is writing it all organically and the fear of messing up.

That’s understandable. Any writing already asks that we juggle. Adding in torture and mental health problems and committing to doing them well adds a lot more implements into the air.

And I guarantee that practice will help. It always does.

Personally I’ve been writing mental health problems for so long that a lot of it has become instinctual. It’s an ingrained part of how I write (for better or worse). Making symptoms an organic part of the character is about making them a part of every aspect of a character’s life.

Which sounds harder then it is. It’s about thinking things through and filtering them through the character’s personality/motivations.

Because as much as we can hope to get a message across primarily we are telling stories. And everything needs to serve that.

Let’s have some examples. I’m going to use two characters from two different stories, Kibwe and Ilāra. Kibwe made a full physical recover from torture. Ilāra ended up with a single below knee amputation. And while there is some overlap in the symptoms I chose for them they’re very different people.

Kibwe’s long term symptoms are memory loss, intrusive memories, hypervigilance and chronic pain and I’m toying with the idea of adding in inaccurate memories as well.

His memory problems are an integral part of his character arc and motivation through the stories he’s in. Despite knowing intellectually that they are a normal response to trauma Kibwe sees them as a personal failing. They made it impossible for him to bring charges and that fed into feelings of guilt and self-blame.

Which is what drives him to stand up for other people.

Every heroic action he takes in the story, every time he puts himself between someone else and harm, is coming out of his own experience of memory loss and possibly inaccurate memories. It’s all because trying to do the sensible thing and report what happened to the police left him feeling useless, powerless.

His intrusive memories feed into this as well. They serve as constant reminders that strengthen his resolve.

In the parts of the story from his perspective all of these memory problems and the effect they have are obvious and there inclusion is natural. Because they colour every single thing he does.

In the parts of the story that are from other perspectives it’s less obvious what the problem is but there is still clearly A Problem.

His intrusive memories are pauses in the middle of doing or saying something. They’re the moments when he screws his eyes shut and breathes deep and has to ask the other characters to repeat themselves. They’re the way he flinches at ordinary things and the way he flies off the handle anytime someone brings beer into his workplace.

His chronic pain is in the days when he can’t do his job. When his hands shake and he snaps. When he takes his frustrations out with the wrong words to the wrong people. And in the distant, awkward way he tries to make amends afterwards.

Internally he barely acknowledges his hypervigilance. But externally he always positions himself so that he can clearly see anyone else in the room. He can always see the exits. He twitches, he turns his head a lot to keep other people in view. And if he can’t see everyone, can’t see a way out then his speech starts to get biting, his anger leaks through.

In contrast Ilāra is very very aware of their own hypervigilance.

They track the people around them and the terrain and rationalise it as sensible. As a precaution. As keeping themselves and others safe. So a portion of any part of the narrative from their perspective is about that: Ilāra's internal paranoid risk assessments.

They also have learning difficulties, which are more obvious from outside perspectives. Because Ilāra has a proud streak; they’re not stupid, they can get by just fine. They’re just letting their friends/found-family help out because it makes them happy. Ilāra does not actually need help.

Contrast with the perspectives of the other characters who are very aware that Ilāra can’t manage a budget. Without help they really can’t manage their own money well enough to keep themselves fed, housed and clothed. Because they never learnt how.

And again this comes up organically because it’s a big part of Ilāra's relationships. There’s a strange push-pull: Ilāra's hypervigilance internally rationalised as protecting these few valued people and those same people stepping in to do the things Ilāra can’t.

They also experience chronic pain. Though I’m unsure whether this is primarily because of torture or because they lost a limb. And in a way the distinction doesn’t matter. Regardless of the cause it is there.

They’re actually a lot better at dealing with it then Kibwe, because they’re much better at lying, acting and disguising their own distress.

Ilāra's other symptoms are less immediately obvious in the narrative but again, they underpin everything.

Ilāra struggles to relate to people, to really value them as people and they are incredibly socially isolated. Their entire social circle is essentially their family and their work colleagues and there is a lot of overlap in that Venn diagram.

They don’t know how to honestly relate to other people. They play parts, putting on masks to get by.

And this comes into the story with every interaction they have. It’s the contrast between their attempts at calculation around outsiders (and how often they’re rejected/dismissed) and their incredibly intense attachment to this small circle of people.

I’m not sure what the end point of Ilāra's character arc is yet. But one of the things that keeps coming up is the question of who they are away from this small circle of valued people. And whether they can value their own life when they can’t ‘protect’ the people they love.

Writing all of this out has made me realise something: it’s a lot easier to bring up symptoms organically when those symptoms become an intrinsic part of the character.

And that can be difficult to grasp at the first attempt. Or the tenth. Or the hundredth.

We are taught to assume health, be it mental or physical. That people have two legs and functional pancreases and don’t relive violent attacks every time they smell beer.

Part of writing these things organically (for me anyway) is breaking that internal image. It’s… building a mind that’s a different shape.

For both of these characters their symptoms are tied to important parts of the long term plot as well as their everyday experience.

Kibwe would be a different person without his memory problems. They inform what he values, how he acts and the ethical lines he draws for himself. His intrusive memories impact his daily life and so does his chronic pain and hypervigilance. And this in turn impacts his relationships with the other characters, some of whom are more forgiving/understanding of his ‘moods’ then others.

Ilāra is driven by their isolation and struggle to connect to others. It leads to them putting incredible weight and value on the few relationships they do have. And that drives them to act, to take risks. Fundamentally they fear loss and however calculating and cunning they can be that fear makes them do some idiotic things. Things that effect the plot and every other character.

Hypervigilance and learning difficulties are their everyday experience. The tension they feel in crowds. The way they assess unfamiliar environments. The way they’ll hand over their pay check to a daughter-figure with a joke and tell themselves that she’s just fussing. The way they’ll get up in the middle of the night and count every item of food in the house.

Writing mental health problems in an understandable way is like writing any other disability. It’s making it part of the character without it being the whole of the character. It’s recognising how any condition limits a character and having a clear view of when those limits are internal (ie the condition itself) versus external (societal, behavioural expectations, other people etc.)

Including these things naturally means constructing scenes that are working at multiple levels. If symptoms impact how the characters relate to each other then they fit naturally into any important relationship moments. If symptoms impact the character’s everyday life then it’s natural for the character to consider them before taking an important action.

When symptoms are related to a character’s long term motivation then it doesn’t feel jarring that they’d come up over and over again. In the same way that bringing up a character’s big-brother figure feels right when you’ve established they have an important, character defining bond.

It takes practice. Writing is work and it takes a lot of skill to make it look effortless.

Right now I think the most important thing to take away is this: keep trying. Write and write and write. Don’t let the fear of getting things wrong stop you from getting better.

I hope that helps. :)

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

*Yes I expect a lot from my readers.

#writing advice #tw torture #writing survivors #writing torture #writing recovery #writing symptoms #choosing symptoms #mental health #mental illness in fiction #disability

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spevonnie · 4 years

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The Butterfly's Always Bigger in Somebody Else's Mind

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Of course Connie had heard the term before, her mother was a doctor. And it was certainly no surprise when her boyfriend was diagnosed, of course. It wasn't exactly a secret, and anyone could see how the weight that had been put on Steven's shoulders could cause such a breakdown and such a condition. Years upon years of shouldering the weight of his family and friends’ emotional well-being and the fate of the universe itself sinking heavily into his psyche.

Being impressed, Connie thought to herself, is not always a positive thing. Many were impressed that it had taken this long for Steven to crack, though this didn’t mean that anybody was proud of the fact that he had hidden such a large part of himself for so long, it was merely a shock, acknowledging that it must have been incredibly difficult rather than admiring the feat that had taken such a toll on him.

Recovery, or stabilization at least, was not linear, and she knew that. There were ups and there were downs, and while her lover was participating in therapy now, and taking his meds rather consistently, she knew that she couldn’t expect things to just magically get better as they had so many times before. And this, perhaps, was why she was now pacing around the kitchenette of her and Steven’s small apartment, her phone in her hand as she massaged her temple anxiously. Her dinner, which was a styrofoam cup of packaged noodles as opposed to her usual broccoli and oven baked chicken breast, sat on the counter, cold to the touch. Her fingernails, however, had been reduced to little nubs.

Connie finally flopped onto the little love seat in the main area, curling up tight with Steven’s sweater, which she had pulled out the moment she came in from school. It was getting chilly outside now, especially at this time of day. The night was seeping in, melding with the sunset as if the moon were drinking away the last of the sunlight through an invisible straw. Steven had a busy day today, she knew. He had a shift at the pizza place down the street, and then Lion was bringing him over to visit Little Homeworld to fix up some problems they had been having with training and to visit with the gems of course, but he had to make it back for therapy that night. This was what worried her really, the fixing and then the therapy--She expected Steven to come home worn out, emotionally and physically, and to need lots of affection and care. She was happy to give this to him, of course, but it was a fine line that she tried to walk carefully. Showing Steven love, of course, always came with the risk of admitting that she was constantly haunted by her own nightmares, her own flashbacks, her own paranoia. It wasn’t about the war, though. No, her stress was all around Steven.

For months after the war, especially when Steven had had his break, Priyanka had plagued Connie with questions about how she was doing, how she was feeling, if she was alright. Each time, Connie patiently assured her mother that the war was stressful, but it wasn’t really following her the same way it followed Steven. The strangest part, she had realized, was that this was true. It wasn’t the war. The battles, the fighting, even being held prisoner by the Diamonds. All of it had been terrifying, and it the fear had clung to her like a thick slime for weeks after, as it had with almost everyone involved. With good self care and some mandated therapy from her mother, she was able to put most of it behind her. She just considered herself lucky, or chalked it up to having expected some big battle when she had first started training with the gems and Steven. But there was still a lingering feeling like a chilling force starting at the very core of her being, and it only worsened when Steven began showing symptoms--It was then that she realized she, much like him, had been shouldering her own weight. And, much like Steven, it was the weight of someone else’s well being.

When Connie had first started training with Pearl, she was still a bright-eyed, sharp-minded twelve year old girl, and she longed for connection and friends. Steven had given that to her happily, just as eager for his own connections. Of course, they had both made other friends since then, and they never once regretted becoming friends, or thought that they were only friends as last resorts--They truly loved each other, and that just made it all the more difficult as Connie continuously watched her goofy, care-free, cheeseburger-backpack-wearing best friend turn into a literal monster created from suppressing his own trauma.

Deep down, She thought to herself as she cuddled on the love seat, chewing her nails once more and glancing at her phone. I sort of always knew it was happening. She was right, of course. And subconsciously, she had always tried to help. She knew, when she had started, that she was signing up for a battle. She didn’t know that she was signing up to have to sit back and watch, feel helpless despite all her training, as the one who had brought her into this was torn into again and again by a blade whose wound could be healed with no amount of magic.

It became evident to her that nobody else knew the extent of the trouble when they had fallen off the battle arena after accidentally unfusing in another panic attack, and she, despite falling to her own death, comforted the crying boy. Sensible through the panic, thereby saving them both. She still woke at night with a falling feeling, causing her far more panic than it would anyone else who felt the typical falling-as-you-drift-off sensation. She still spent sleepless nights staring at her snoring lover, watching him breathe, and snore, and sweat, just to know he was alive as haunting images of his half-dead, limp body laying in her arms wavered through her mind. She still would crawl on top of him in the night to prove to herself that he was no longer the huge, pink monster that destroyed himself and their city, and he was simply her loving boyfriend, who could still fit in her arms. She never told him this of course, for fear that he would once again try to fix everything for her at the expense of his own health, which was doing so well at the moment. She could never-

“Connie?” Steven’s voice sounded through the thick fog of thoughts, and Connie opened her eyes, seeing him crouching in front of her.

Steven was looking at her with a gentle sort of concern, and he reached out to wipe tears from her face that she didn’t even notice had fallen. She shuddered.

“Steven! Hi, I’m sorry, I--When...When did you get back? I didn’t hear the door.”

“Connie,” He said gently, giving her a little look. He sat on the love seat and pulled her into his lap, hugging her tightly. “It’s okay. I’m here, and I wanna help, I-”

“No!” She interrupted, wiping her nose. Steven looked taken aback. “I-I know you wanna help, Steven, that’s what I’m worried about! I’m perfectly fine, I-I just...I messed up on a test.”

“Um...Connie..? We both know that’s not it, honey.” He said gently. “I...I promise, whatever it is, we can handle it together.”

“Steven,” She shook her head. “It’s not a big deal. You need to focus on yourself and what you need.”

“Mmm,” He nodded, giving an air of thoughtfulness. “Yep. What I need is to give my beautiful girlfriend a kiss-” he paused and kissed her hand comfortingly.

She smiled a bit, despite herself. Sniffling, she leaned against him, hugging him.

“There,” He said quietly, hugging back. “I’m not gonna push you, Connie, but I’m always here...Whenever you’re ready.”

“But...You have your own things to work through.” Connie said quietly.

“Well of course I do, Nini, but why should that mean that you don’t either? We can do this together.”

Connie smiled a tiny bit, and Steven smiled back. They snuggled together on the seat for a long while.

Finally, Connie said, “Okay...”

“Okay?” He said quietly as the dark seeped around them like a dab of watercolor.

“I’m ready to talk.”

And the young couple talked until the sun rose, and when the light finally crept up, back into the sky, a very calm, loving Stevonnie lay in the small twin bed that they shared, the same sweater Connie had been cuddling wrapped around them.

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wirsindkrieg · 3 years

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Regarding Permanence

I’ve had a lot to (metaphorically) chew on lately. Let’s talk about permanence.

As usual, due to the length of this essay, the bulk of it is under the cut.

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen a fair number of posts from various blogs saying that being otherkin is something that is absolutely inherent and permanent, something that is always with you and always will be. (I’m not naming names; basic courtesy there.) There’s also a consistent thread of these being spiritual beliefs, with being otherkin a matter of one’s soul, rather than one’s mind, and as such one cannot become otherkin. Either you always were, or you never will be.

I’ve got some major problems with that.

Let’s start with the biggest one. I am a child of Chaos in something vaguely resembling the old Greek sense. From that Chaos, I came to be, and when I am done, to that Chaos I shall return. It is an inherent, permanent part of me, one that I will always carry with me. There’s a very important facet to my being a child of Chaos that stops me from trying to say that this is the only way to be otherkin: I am not static.

The only constant is change, and by virtue of the origin of my being, I am part of that change. Stagnation is worse than death, and as such I am in a constant state of flux, changing, adapting, and molding myself around my environment. The only permanent things about me are the things I choose to keep. (While there are things about me physically that I cannot change, this body and this lifetime is temporary; it too shall fade in time.)

Who are you to tell me that I can only ever be what I’ve already been? Who are you to tell me that I am immutable? Who are you to tell me that I must stay as I am forevermore, in defiance of my very nature? My existence alone is proof that permanence is not mandatory. Nothing is forever.

There was a time and place when I wasn’t an angel. Then I incarnated as one, and I still carry that with me to this day. There was a time and a place when I wasn’t a demon. Then I incarnated as one, and I still carry that with me to this day. Incarnation is not the only form of becoming, however. I am not static, and if my soul were to shift into a different form without my conscious will behind that change, I would become something new. To deny that is to deny the truth of my existence, and I shouldn’t need to say how disrespectful that is.

Moving beyond my soul and my truth... Spiritual causes are not the only possible root. The terms we use are not defined by our origins, but by our experiences. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if someone is other’ because of the shape of their soul or the shape of their mind. What matters is that they are other’, and that they experience being other’ here and now.

The mind is a very mutable thing. It changes, adapts, molds itself to one’s environment as a matter of course. Some of those changes are conscious, yes, but many, many more aren’t backed by conscious will. Or to put it another way: Some changes in the shape of the mind are entirely involuntary. If you can accept the existence of psychological ‘kin (and I know that may be difficult), then it follows that one can accept that some psychological ‘kin become not as a matter of incarnation or birth, but as a matter of involuntary change in the shape of their mind.

Maybe there was a time when “otherkin” was understood to be a solely spiritual phenomenon, but all things change over time. The existence of psychological ‘kin isn’t some sudden new event trying to muscle into our community. They have been with us for a long time now, and the community as a whole is growing more accepting of their experiences, and recognizes that our similarities are more significant than our differences.

I can’t understand what it’s like to be a therian, because I am not one myself. But that doesn’t mean that I have any right to disbelieve their experiences entirely. The same applies to spiritual ‘kin who cannot understand psychological ‘kin and vice versa. It doesn’t matter where we came from, how we came to be, or even when we came to be; what matters is that we are here now, living a nonhuman existence in a world built around humanity.

And if you really need a spiritual explanation to accept this: Let’s talk about non-linear time.

Our common perception is that time exists as a constant and linear flow from past to future. Cause comes before effect, and some events cannot be undone. (Learning more about entropy is left as an exercise for the reader.) There is no reason to assume that linear time is a universal constant, however. And there especially isn’t any reason to assume that linear time is the only way that time can function once you go beyond this current reality.

Once you accept that non-linear time is possible, then it follows that souls may be able to function, even if only temporarily, within non-linear time. That means that, from our current viewpoint within linear time, effects could occur before their causes. A soul that is here/now could radically change based on events that, from our limited perspective, are in the distant future. An incarnation that you have yet to experience could reshape your essential nature, causing you to become something you weren’t before (again, from our limited perspective) even while still being incarnated here/now.

If you must rationalize all experiences through a metaphysical lens, non-linear time explains the possibility of someone becoming other’ in a logical, sensible way that doesn’t invalidate the idea that being other’ is an inherent part of one’s soul. It simply requires you to accept that we, as three-dimensional beings experiencing time as a constant and linear flow, have only a limited ability to perceive things outside of that framework. None of us are omniscient; it’s not a stretch to say that there are things we simply cannot understand from here.

Tl;dr: Saying that being other’ can only ever be a permanent state of being is disrespectful to those of us who don’t have static souls. Psychological ‘kin are an established phenomenon, and the mind is not a static thing, either; it too can change over time involuntarily. And if you must fit everything into a metaphysical framework, the existence of non-linear time provides a logical, sensible way of understanding and accepting that even souls are subject to change. Ergo, there is no reason to insist that being other’ is something that you either always are, or never will be.

#otherkin #otherkind #fictionkin #fictionkind #essay #rant/rave #I've been a bit of a metaphorical salt mine recently #Ask box is open if you wanna start something

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innuendostudios · 5 years

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Thoughts on Obduction

[no proper spoilers, but the game is best when you go in cold]

Hey y’all I got a new laptop, and, for the first time in... ever, I could afford to make it a pretty good gaming PC. Now, maybe you get your first proper gaming PC and think, “Hell yeah, I’m gonna play that new Star Wars game, I’m gonna play Modern Warfare, let’s take this baby out for a spin!!”

I’m the guy who says, “I can finally play Obduction!”

Obduction marks the professional reunion of Rand and Robyn Miller, the brothers who founded Cyan and created Myst and Riven. Rand wrote and designed it, and Robyn wrote the music and plays the central NPC. Moreover, Obduction serves as a kind of spiritual sequel to the Myst series. I backed it on Kickstarter ages ago, but the Mac build took forever to come out and my computer’s dated specs and the port’s horrendous bugginess made it unplayable. So, naturally, it was the first thing I downloaded on the new machine.

The game’s premise is very “as Myst as you can get while being technically not-Myst.” Instead of stumbling onto a book that transports you to a fantastical world, you are touched by an alien seed that transports you to a fantastical world. Instead of finding more books to more worlds, you find more seeds to more worlds. And, instead of these worlds being constructed by a magical writer, they’re natural, alien landscapes that have been put in contact for unknown reasons. It still all feels very Myst-y, having a central, familiar hub world with a lot of overlapping designs and styles, and mysterious links to stranger worlds with their own rules.

I will say, they seem to be leaning into what makes Cyan Cyan. What if Myst, but instead of the worlds being discrete they overlap? What if Myst, but you take some of the surrounding terrain with you when you link to another world, and something from that world goes back to where you were? What if the membrane separating worlds were a puzzle mechanic? What if linking books were puzzle mechanics? What if where a book is left when you link through were important?

The worldbuilding is also a bit more... anthropological this time, where the Myst series felt architectural. Myst and Riven were very interested in how a world was built, how it fits together, how it was first imagined and then colonized by its writer. And each world was cordoned off from the next, with only select outsiders traveling between them. Obduction’s worlds, by contrast, before coming into contact existed independently of each other, having their own species and cultures. Many of the info dumps are about how these different cultures learned to coexist, how they learned to communicate, the different ways of thinking and types of technology they brought to each other. This narrative focus on complex communities makes the emptiness you find when you arrive more dissonant, but also more haunting. Call it an even trade.

Now, I could talk about design gripes. Rand is a fine designer but I’ve always preferred Robyn’s sensibilities, which took the lead on Riven, aka the best game Cyan ever made if you ask me. There’s nothing as brainmeltingly obtuse as Riven’s fire marble puzzle, but, at the same time, there’s nothing so deeply stitched into the the game’s world and narrative as the fire marble puzzle. Riven also had a lever that very obviously goes up that lets you get stuck for hours and hours if you don’t notice that it unobviously also goes down, and I can now confirm that this kinda thing is a Cyan design staple. (They also repeated their “opening a door closes off a passage you didn’t know was there and you’ll never find it unless you close the door again which you have no reason to do” trick, damn them.) In fact, every time I looked up a hint it was for something that was simple, straightforward, and poorly-clued, the kind of thing you would have spent days not knowing what to do and finally stumbled onto by accident. (This is a roundabout way of bragging that I did all the hard puzzles on my own, by the way.)

It’s also a bit less open this time around. You have to spend a lot of time in Hunrath before you find your way to Kaptar, you have to do a lot in Kaptar before you can get more than a few feet into Maray, and you have to have spent time in all three before you can get to Sorai, so, while there’s technically a stretch of the game where you can be doing puzzles in all four worlds, odds are your experience will be fairly linear. Not sure if that’s a problem, just an observation.

And there’s other stuff. I forgot that Cyan isn’t great with building to any sort of climax. You explore these fascinating worlds, figuring them out, and then, at some point, you realize... oh, I guess I’m in the endgame. You feel a sense of exploration, but not one of narrative tension; outward momentum, not forward momentum. And it’s sometimes unclear what's environmental storytelling and what’s flavor text, so, come the ending, I got answers to things I didn’t realize were questions and found some answers I’d expected weren’t coming. The natural arc of the ending is: cutscene, then credits, then visit the wiki.

But, all that being said... can I just talk about how good it feels to be in a Cyan world again?!?! For all the folks who bit their style, they remain peerless. Nobody builds environments like them. They’re beautiful and enigmatic and drenched in mystery. I spent 14 hours in this game and at least half followed a steady progression of “aha” moments. But not even “aha” moments, more like “what the hell?!??!” moments. The narrative is doled out much better than in Myst or Riven, so every few hours I’d realize the world is more complicated and interesting than I’d previously thought. You see the game with new eyes at regular intervals. Truly remarkable.

Sometimes a game you played at a young age has been in your memory so long it’s hard to remember what it actually felt like when you played it the first time. Spiritual successors are a way of recapturing that feeling, and that’s not always a good thing. Thimbleweed Park, for instance, reminded me how frustrating Monkey Island 2 was. But Obduction does the opposite, in the best way possible: it reminded me how wonderful Myst and Riven were.

I can’t wait to see what Cyan does next.

#capsule review #obduction #adventure games #cyan

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liskantope · 4 years

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Some not-so-brief reactions to major Disney films 1968-1988

A little while ago I wrote another collection of quick commentaries on major Disney films (which I’m watching one by one through Disney+) from their inception with Snow White in 1937 to The Jungle Book in 1967. I was planning to round off my next collection at another 30-year mark, but the little mini-reviews I’ve been writing are beginning to look so long-winded in aggregate that tonight I decided maybe I should stop at this point. Also, last time, without fully being aware of it, I stopped at the end of what is considered Disney’s Silver Age (coming after Disney’s Golden Age, also included in the last set of commentaries), and apparently 1968 to 1988 is considered Disney’s (Bronze and/or) Dark Age (the Disney Renaissance kicking off with The Little Mermaid in 1989), so there’s another reason it makes sense to cut it off here.

I’ll keep watching the major Disney features, one a day, through the 90′s works, but whether I’ll find time to keep writing about my impressions of each film I watch, I can’t guarantee anything.

The Aristocats, 1970

This is a beloved favorite of mine. I got the video in later childhood, having previously admired the main number “Everybody Wants To Be a Cat” (still the highlight of the movie, from my adult point of view) and having read the story in a Disney book. After seeing it many times in childhood, I rewatched it only a few years ago when it showed up on Netflix. Around that time (or maybe just afterwards), I noticed that my favorite cartoon/Disney reviewer YouTuber Phantom Strider occasionally mentions that he dislikes The Aristocats -- he doesn’t put it on his top 10 worst Disney movie list or anything, but he’s made some disparaging remarks without going into detail. Watching it once again this month on Disney+, my verdict is that, yeah, it’s subpar in quite a few ways, but my more critical adult sensibilities will never override the fond feelings I have for this movie.

Since this is the next movie on the list after The Jungle Book, I couldn’t help constantly comparing the two, and I did see some parallels. In both cases, the story is pretty weak: this time, a family of cats gets kidnapped and stranded far from home by the greedy butler villain and have to pass through several adventures to get back to their owner. In both cases, the plot is a very linear one involving small adventures and minor characters having little bearing on the overall arc (this is perhaps slightly less the case with The Aristocats, where the new acquaintance Thomas O’Malley stays with them the whole time, and at least Scat Cat’s gang makes a return at the end -- minus the unfortunate and entirely unnecessary character of the Chinese cat -- to fight for the protagonists). In both cases, the voice acting is great and includes Phil Harris and Sterling Holloway. In both cases, the villain’s motives are rather flimsily stated -- the butler villain is more comical and slightly more rounded out, and the fact that his motive doesn’t make a lot of sense is perhaps meant to be part of the comedy. The Aristocats has far more filler material, including a useless but somewhat amusing and ultra-cartoonish sideplot about our butler villain losing his hat and umbrella and having to return to the countryside to get them (it’s more amusing than it sounds, trust me).

The Aristocats is simply weaker in almost every way than The Jungle Book. Although I like all the music, including “Scales and Arpeggios” which I only just learned was written by the Sherman Brothers and I appreciated a lot as a kid who practiced the piano every day, the only truly memorable song was “Everybody Wants To Be a Cat” (not written by the Sherman Brothers), whereas in The Jungle Book there are multiple numbers of that caliber written by the Sherman Brothers at nearly the top of their form. This film can also be compared to One Hundred and One Dalmatians and again comes out looking worse -- Dalmations sort of perfected the whole “animals coordinating a rescue” type plot, and The Aristocats only seems to make a feeble attempt at it.

One interesting thing about the pacing of the film that as an adult I’m a bit taken aback by is how quickly the ending of the movie runs. I was shocked when I rewatched this for the first time as an adult on Netflix, got to the ending of “Everybody Wants To Be a Cat”, and saw that there were only 15 minutes of running time left: that includes the late-night discussion between the romantic leads, the arrival at their home, Edgar re-kidnapping them, Roquefort going for help and nearly getting himself killed by Scat Cat’s gang, the whole action sequence of the actual rescue, a final scene with Madame welcoming O’Malley and rewriting the will, and the final song. We don’t even get to see Madame’s reaction at seeing her beloved cats alive and well, which is one of the ways this movie compares unfavorably with Dalmatians. There is some real artistry in The Aristocats, but the amount of effort put in is clearly not up to the standard of Disney’s finest.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks, 1971

I mainly knew this movie through the song “Beautiful Briny Sea” growing up. Eventually I did watch the film one time; I also read the book it was based on (I can’t remember which came first). I remembered very little outside of that one song, the fact that the characters travel in a bed, and David Tomlinson (who I knew well as Mr. Banks) being in it as an jarringly un-Banks-like character. I had entirely forgotten the fact that the story takes place during World War II and that this is crucial to the plot. I knew this as the Disney movie that tried to be Mary Poppins and failed to be anywhere near as exciting or resonant. However, I was still very curious to rediscover, two decades later, what the movie was really all about.

The story is really quite good on a level that appeals to grownups as well as children -- not as deeply as Mary Poppins, mind you, but distinctive and captivating. (I think this has something to do with the story being as much to do with the adult characters as with the children.) The acting is also solid. It only increased my respect for David Tomlinson’s versatility as an actor, in fact, and it was fun to see the likeness of the dignified and proper George Banks display so much awkward vulnerability and eventually get himself into so many slapstick situations. Unfortunately, the only memorable song is “Beautiful Briny Sea” -- I mean that quite literally, as sitting down to write this a couple of weeks after watching, I’m finding it hard to remember much about any of the other songs.

Also unfortunately, the song “Beautiful Briny Sea” is sort of a beacon in a murky area as, halfway through the film when we switch to the animated portion, the movie suddenly gets... quite bad. The live-animation hybrid is consistently done to weak effect, first of all. For some reason, only Mary Poppins made this effect believable, ahead of its time. Secondly, I understand that we have to suspend our disbelief to enjoy a children’s fantasy film, but having the group plunged into water without themselves or their book appearing wet or having any issue breathing is pushing this a bit far. Thirdly, the writing gets rather silly. As soon as they come across an animated codfish who welcomes them to the area, the oldest kid Charles (always the skeptic) says, “Now I’m hearing things! Fish don’t talk.” Nor do fish “walk” along the bottom of the sea with a cane while fully clothed and smoking a cigar, Charlie, so what was your first clue that you’re in a story where things you thought impossible are happening?

The whole crew later gets up onto the animated island of Naboombu, where Mr. Banks Professor Browne is forced to referee a soccer game between teams of anthropomorphic animals as part of his efforts (somehow) to get his hands on the lanyard of the island’s arrogant monarch (who rather resembles Prince John from the next film on this list) which winds up evaporating as soon as they get back to their own world anyway. The ensuing soccer match is by far the most bizarre part of the film, or of any of these films really -- it feels much more like some wacky Saturday morning cartoon than Disney animation. Browne the referee winds up getting (literally) dragged into the game; the live/animation hybrid is done especially poorly here. Once the characters get back to the “real” world, however, the movie becomes good again, with a fantastic climactic conclusion that left me smiling at the overall effect of the film despite its weaknesses.

Robin Hood, 1973

This was a Disney classic that we owned from the time I was fairly small, and that I watched more times than almost any other one, with Alice in Wonderland being the only possible rival I can think of. I went what was probably close to a twenty-year period without seeing it or missing it until a couple of years ago, on a transatlantic flight when it was one of the movie options on the plane. I was taken aback on that rewatching by the fact that... Robin Hood just isn’t that good. When I later saw my parents (I think this was on the way to visiting them), I told them of this revelation, and they told me, “We never thought it was that good either, but you seemed to like it.” I guess I can see some of the appeal to my much younger self, but less easily than I can see the appeal of the some of the other so-so films like The Aristocats -- there is something about Robin Hood that is eye-catching on the superficial level but ultimately shallow. At the same time, I’ll always have to feel a bit sentimental about this one because of the role it played in an early period of my life, introducing me to words like outlaw and in-law and taxes (I vividly remember thinking in early watchings that Taxes was just the name of the unpleasant wolf character), helping to develop my understanding of what poverty looks like, and also introducing me to the concept of political satire (under an anti-free-speech monarchy no less. The scene shown in the video just linked is my favorite scene of the movie, by the way.)

I think my main criticism of Disney’s Robin Hood could be summarized by saying it oversimplifies what could have been a nuanced story, way more than it needs to. This shows most starkly in its clearly-marked division between good characters and evil characters. Naive Good-vs.-Evil plots are very much part of the Disney brand, but I can’t think of any of their other films which takes that aspect to this much of an extreme in developing the characters, so that the entire cast is very openly divided between the white caps and the black caps and (this is the most important part) to the detriment of individuation between the characters. The personalities of all the characters on the Good Side seem pretty much interchangeable throughout the film. Oh sure, Robin Hood has Plucky Hero stamped on him with Designated Sidekick Little John, and Maid Marian has Love Interest stamped on her, and so on. They get into different situations because they all play different roles in the community. But there are no deeper differences between them. Friar Tuck, for instance, is the local religious leader, and you think he might present a more thoughtful, pacifistic, and spiritual point of view to his comrades and enemies. But no, he shouts at the Sheriff and chest-bumps him out of the church and engages him in physical combat just like all the other characters do. All of the people on the Good Side are in complete lockstep throughout, and this makes their part of the story deeply uninteresting.

King Richard is never developed as a character; he is a faraway abstract entity throughout the film, which makes his sudden appearance at the end (which is what really saves Nottingham and finishes the story) very ineffective. (Let’s not get into the fact that he’s described as heroic for going off to participate in the Crusades -- “While bonny good King Richard leads the great crusade he’s on” -- talk about sugarcoating history!) This is part of what I mean about oversimplifying: they could have injected some complexity into the political story beyond “usurper taxes all the money out of the people because of his personal greed until the real king returns and makes everything lovely again”. I strongly believe it is possible to present real issues in a way that is both mature and engaging to children and that it has been done even in other Disney features. Disney didn’t try very hard to do it here.

I’ll give the writers credit in that the three main bad guys, Prince John, Sir Hiss, and the Sheriff of Nottingham, are somewhat individuated, partly I think out of necessity because the Bad Side of any story has to consist of people who quarrel amongst themselves. Prince John is actually well enough developed as an insecure, petulant child with no idea what it means to lead a country that I enjoy watching him even as an adult. The parallels between him and President Trump are unmistakable, and I’m surprised that I haven’t seen more memes about this. Still, by the end of the film, even he was starting to wear on me.

Another aspect of the movie that bypassed my attention as a child but bothers me as an adult is its blatant American-ness in retelling a very old, extremely British story. As in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, all of the accents, except for those of two of the main bad guys, are American. The rooster narrator of the story sounds particularly American and plays folk music throughout of a style that strikes me as the epitome of American.

The way the script and animation deal with bodies and obesity is particularly interesting in this one. Four of the characters I can think of are portrayed as fat, including one of the main bad guys (the Sheriff “Old Bushel-Britches” of Nottingham) but also three of the good guys. Minor quips are made about this by some of the characters, but overall it could arguably be considered a rather positive, good-natured treatment of this issue for its time. It is the source of some physical humor, and some of the body-related physical humor in general slightly raises my eyebrows as an adult -- there is a boob grab, for instance (well, fake boobs as part of a disguise, but still).

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, 1977

I had avoided watching any Disney rendition of Pooh for a long time before watching this one last week. I got to see a lot of Pooh in earlier childhood because of videos given as gifts by other kids’ parents, which my mom (who loves the original books by Milne and hates Disney’s interpretation of them) let me watch only with great reluctance. I soured to the Disney Pooh franchise as I got older and remember in high school getting sick of how many things were decorated with animated Pooh characters, and how few people knew the original books.

Starting to watch this film, I had no idea which of the Pooh stories would be included or whether I would remember seeing them before. As it turned out, I remembered almost none of it: I knew the theme song well and was slightly familiar with the early song about Pooh climbing the honey tree (it must have been on one of the Disney Sing-Along videos) but didn’t remember anything else until vaguely recalling some of the later Tigger stuff (I remembered, before it happened, that Tigger escapes from the tree by sliding down a paragraph of text in the book, one of many instances of extreme fourth-wall-breaking that runs as a theme throughout). As it happens, although The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh seems to go along pretty smoothly given that it makes no pretense of having a unified story arc -- something I give it credit for -- it is actually composed of four short films produced throughout the decade beforehand. This explains why I only remembered the Tigger stuff near the end: we must have had the quarter-length film Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too at my house for a while, but not the other three. (What I actually watched the most, I think, was a video of TV episodes called “Newfound Friends”, which I’ll look up on Disney+ out of curiosity but probably won’t include in this list.)

I remain anti-Pooh[Disney_version], but this anthology film wasn’t as bad as I had thought it might be. The first story about Pooh and the honey tree was actually pretty good. I am not opposed to Sterling Hollaway’s portrayal of the title character. Eeyore’s voice is way too flat, but otherwise most of the characters are portrayed okay. I distinctly remember reading Rabbit as a female character as a kid, and on hearing his voice again I suppose I can understand why. Tigger is the most offensively adapted: he is one-dimensional in a very obnoxious, not-so-amusing slapstick way. His portrayal would have come off better if they had given him more of a child’s voice, which is more appropriate to the book version of his character anyway. The gopher character is pretty annoying as well; he’s rather useless and unnecessary given that he’s not in the books (he even has a fourth-wall-breaking line about not being in the book). Some of the stories from the book are meshed together in a way that does a disservice to each of them, and the movie might have been better if it had committed to adapting fewer of Milne’s chapters. The story about Pooh getting stuck in Rabbit’s front door is done in a distasteful way, with Rabbit turning the back half of his body into part of the upholstery (an idea that Walt Disney had himself when he first read the book!). The songs weren’t great, and I wish that some of Pooh’s poetry from the books had been adapted to song instead.

Leaving those details aside, this is an earnest attempt at turning Pooh into an animated feature which turned out to be not too terrible given my low expectations.

The Rescuers, 1977

I remember watching this once as a kid and almost nothing sticking with me apart from the fact that the main villain (who I remembered nothing about, not even really the gender) had two pet crocodiles. I watched it a second time on Netflix a few years ago, I think within the same week of watching The Aristocats on Netflix.

I have one word for this Disney animated classic: weak. The story is not all that interesting. Having watched Dalmatians and The Aristocats in the few weeks before hand, coordinated animal rescue plots were starting to wear on me. There is no music except for a few forgettable songs not sung by the characters. Eva Gabor makes Ms. Bianca a beguiling character, but the rest of the characters are completely forgettable. The main male character, Bernard, has the blandest voice ever. Even the little girl being rescued, while sympathetic, is not very unique or interesting. (There is something subtly heavy and haunting about having her teddy bear as her best friend through most of the film, though.) At the time of writing, I’ve already halfway forgotten what the villain’s sidekick was like. There are a bunch of other animals who are fun to watch in animation but don’t stick in my mind, apart from Pat Buttram’s drunken rat character (because it wouldn’t be a Disney film of the 40′s-80′s without some alcoholism in it).

The villain, Medusa, is a particular fail here. She is basically a lame Cruella de Vil 2.0: modern, non-fairy-tale-ish, greedy and materialistic, drives like a lunatic, etc. After watching, I found out that the story writers initially thought of simply bringing Cruella back as the villain in this movie, but decided against the idea of it being in any way a sequel to Dalmatians (remember that at this point no Disney sequel had ever been done -- the 1990 sequel to this film was the very first!). I think they should have gone with that idea: bring back one of the most celebrated Disney villains, rather than come up with a new one who is a lot like her but with subtly less pizazz.

Random observation: this has to be one of the only classic Disney stories where the animals can talk to exactly one sympathetic human (the girl) but no other human. If I remember right, I don’t think even Cinderella can understand the words of her mouse friends.

Anyway. Some people say the sequel is much better than the original here. I haven’t seen The Rescuers Down Under yet, but I hope it’s true.

Pete’s Dragon, 1977

This is the first movie on this whole journey that is so obscure that I don’t think I’d even heard of before, let alone seen, and that’s despite the fact that there was a remake in 2016. (The one thing that rang a bell for me while watching was the idea of a dragon playing tic-tac-toe on its belly, an image I possibly saw in an isolated context.) I questioned whether I should watch yet another 1977 Disney film at all, when it would be mostly live-action and was obviously so obscure. In the end, I’m glad I watched this, partly because the story did grip me on some level, but mostly because this film is so very entertaining in how badly done it is.

Pete’s Dragon, in almost every way, is bad -- hilariously bad -- the sweet spot of Bad: the kind of bad that’s actually interesting to examine and yet also shallow enough to make for good Bad Movie Night watching. It’s hard to know where even to begin. The consistently terrible acting of almost everyone, especially in every single line of the boy protagonist (I hate to trash a child actor like this, and part of it was probably bad direction: for instance, someone should have taught him to go easy on the pointy finger). Almost none of the right emotional notes are hit at the right time in what is a very heartfelt story. Only Helen Reddy as the female lead and Jim Dale as the charlatan doctor strike me as good actors doing the best they can with a terrible script and bad acting around them. Then there are the cheesy, poorly-written, often poorly-sung songs. (Did I mention that in one song, each of Pete’s main abusive guardians continue to sing, each in an unperturbed, full-throated voice while being flung in the air by an invisible dragon and plunged into the water?) The awkward choreography. The weak visual effects (as with Bedknobs and Broomsticks, they really didn’t know how to pull of hybrid animation well. I’d go easier on them for this if Mary Poppins hadn’t nailed it 13 years earlier.) I could go on and on.

It made a lot of sense to me when I read afterwards that Pete’s Dragon was originally written as a stage musical, because there is something unusually stage-musical-ish about how the songs are written (for instance, having subsets of the ensemble throw out response lines in unison) and the way the choreography is done. I’ll say as someone who has been in stage musicals that these elements can feel a bit awkward even on the stage; they look to me more awkward in the medium of film; and they’re especially awkward when the songs, choreography, etc. is as poorly written as it is in this film -- someone who hates musicals wanting to teach a friend to hate them too might well choose to show their friend this movie and pretend that it’s a representative example.

Even through all this, I was able to appreciate that the story is pretty good, and I came to care for the sympathetic characters, however badly acted they were. I also enjoyed the atmosphere of a small coastal village in northeast US (called Passammaquoddy, apparently a real bay in Maine). So, by the time I was partly through watching this (fairly long) movie, I felt very committed to continuing, enjoying it as I was just as much for its entertaining badness as for anything else.

I want to end by mentioning one musical scene in the movie that took me by surprise because it was actually good, and funny and catchy and overall entertaining. It’s our introduction to the charlatan Dr. Terminus, and so it’s self-contained. If you want a taste of a part of the movie that I think is head and shoulders better than the rest while reflecting exactly what I mean by a stage-musical-style musical number (not making any claims about how good in absolute terms this scene is, though), here is a YouTube video of it (the song “Passammaquoddy”) (warning: mildly off-color taste on body type and disability stuff). I would actually enjoy leading a song like this in a musical.

The Fox and the Hound, 1981

These more obscure Disney films are getting more and more interesting. I distinctly remember knowing about this one as a kid, seeing VHS boxes of it at friends’ houses, etc., but I never had much interest in actually seeing it. I watched it for the first time on Disney+ with great curiosity, coming in knowing literally nothing about what the story would be about except “a fox and a hound are friends”. I was pleasantly taken aback by the new setting of backwoods American farmland and by unusually quiet, low-key tone.

The main thing I can say about this movie is that it’s far and away the least Disney-ish of the animated ones I’ve seen so far. If nobody had told me which company made this movie, it would never even occur to me that it was done by Disney, except for the presence of Disney icon Pat Buttram’s very recognizable twangy voice (perfect for this movie, not really appropriate for the setting of Robin Hood). It’s hard to explain just why I feel this way. Maybe it’s something to do with the pacing and the sort of quiet story. Or maybe it’s the fact that none of the animals seem to be drawn in the traditional Disney fashion (that is, we’ve seen fox and owl characters before in Disney, and for some reason their counterparts in The Fox and the Hound aren’t recognizable to me.) Or maybe it was the almost complete lack of songs. Honestly, trying to write this, I can’t quite pin down what made this a slightly offputting Disney-watching experience.

Despite feeling affection for the characters from the get-go, I actually found myself rather bored throughout the first half of the slowly-progressing movie. Then I perked up in the middle, actually thinking there might be a death, and of a rather morally ambiguous character too (this didn’t feel like a Disney film, so it might break the rules?). After that I felt enthralled to the point of breaking down and finishing it after having previously decided to leave a bit left over for the next day. I’m really not used to not having any idea how stories will end when going through Disney movies, and I guess I couldn’t handle even that small bit of suspense.

In the end, I thought the story, and how the story was rendered, was pretty good -- not stellar, but genuine. I don’t know about how overly-neatly everything was wrapped up with the main antagonist Amos Slade doing a complete 180 at the end, but after all this is Disney even if it doesn’t particularly feel like it and I shouldn’t be surprised at a happy ending.

Random side note: I wonder if Big Mama (the owl character) could be criticized as sort of an African-American stereotype and thus what Disney+ would call an “outdated cultural depiction”, or if it will be in another ten years.

The Black Cauldron, 1985

We continue with our sequence of more obscure Disney flicks. I guess this era is called the Dark Age of Disney for a reason, and one could say that this movie epitomizes such an era both in its role in the evolution of Disney and in its actual content. I don’t recall even hearing about this one as a child. I’ve heard it referred to as an adult only in the context of its successor being advertised as fun to provide a contrast with the overly-dark box office failure that had just come out, so I came in expecting a not-very-worthwhile movie that would be uncharacteristically dark and un-fun.

All I can say is, wow! The Black Cauldron, while indeed uncharacteristically dark (in ambiance at least, less so in subject matter), is genuinely, seriously good!

Within literally the first two seconds of the film, I knew that I was in a Medieval setting (not having known anything whatsoever about the story prior to watching) both from the music and from the backdrop. This remained the case throughout the movie. Everything in its style is boldly, wholeheartedly Medieval, not like some other Disney movies where the Medieval setting is watered-down and phony *cough*swordinthestone*cough*robinhood*hack. The only other movie on this list so far which comes close to succeeding at this was Sleeping Beauty, but that is such a different type of film, with such a different animation style, that comparing the two is like comparing apples to oranges. Honestly, I don’t think that the flavor is so thick even in Sleeping Beauty. The art of The Black Cauldron actually feels closer to that of Magic the Gathering than anything else I can think of from Disney. The effects of the animation are absolutely gorgeous -- in a rather dark way, mind you, not bright and colorful like what is usually associated with Disney.

The story is complex by Disney standards and I had zero familiarity with it beforehand, so for the first time I actually had to check myself to make sure I was paying attention. The characters are reasonably developed with engaging dialog (though slightly hesitant and sparse, with unusually little humor). It was a little jarring to hear “the Forbidden Forest” mentioned by one of the characters and remember that Harry Potter wouldn’t be around for over a decade. The main villain is one of the scariest ones of Disney and I would imagine may have been somewhat influenced by Ian McDiarmid’s Emperor, who had made his debut only a couple of years earlier.

I said that the last film on this list seemed distinctly un-Disney-ish, and I can say the same about this one in its own way -- maybe this was an experimental trend at Disney studios during the first half of the 80′s. The Black Cauldron has even less music in it than The Fox and the Hound and may be the only animated feature I’ve seen here with nothing resembling a song at all. One strong impression I got throughout, especially when the dungeon sequence started and the princess was introduced -- and this isn’t exactly a compliment -- is that something about the pacing, dialog, body movements, etc. seriously makes this movie feel like I’m watching a video game. (For personal context, I’ve never been a gamer, and most of my exposure to video games comes from watching college roommates play during the late 00′s.) I can’t justify exactly where I get this feeling. Also, the princess is strangely voiced and feels particularly like a non-player (video game) character somehow. I’m now curious as to whether there have ever been any games based on this movie or whether it had faded too much into oblivion by the time gaming reached the right level of progress.

Anyway, The Black Cauldron may not be especially fun or enjoyable to kids, but for an older person in the mood for some spooky Medieval fantasy animated entertainment, I recommend it as a fine movie.

(Fun trivia: I had believed that the successor on this list was the first animated feature to use computers to assist in animation, in the clock/gear sequence, but apparently this one actually was. Also, to date it was the most expensive animated film created.)

The Great Mouse Detective, 1986

Now for a classic that I had been greatly looking forward to. We didn’t have The Great Mouse Detective at my home growing up, but I know I saw it a number of times and later remembered liking it so much that on a whim in college, around the time I revisited Mary Poppins, I borrowed it from the local Blockbuster. I distinctly remembering feeling a little sheepish checking it out, but the young guy at the register actually said something like, “Yeah, that’s one of the best ones.” Years later, one of my best friends during graduate school was hanging out at my place and the conversation went to us agreeing on how excellent The Great Mouse Detective is and musing over the fact that nobody ever seems to talk about it, and we decided to watch it together as it was on Netflix at the time. We didn’t bother to log out of my roommate’s Netflix account to watch it, and he was later very irritated at me about the fact that Netflix was now constantly offering him children’s animated features. Anyway, it seems I’m far from the only one who has often viewed this one as perhaps the most underrated Disney classic of all time. (Further evidence: it comes second in WatchMojo’s list, with their winner being its predecessor!)

The Great Mouse Detective was billed as “All new! All fun!” to assure audiences that it would be a departure from the heavy seriousness of its predecessor, and in this it generously delivers all the way through. It’s based on the just-silly-enough-to-be-delightful premise that in late Victorian London there was a mouse version of Queen Victoria living in Buckingham Palace and a mouse version of Sherlock Holmes (our title character) living under the human Holmes’ flat in Baker Street. Our villain, the dastardly Ratigan, is hatching a plan to take over all of Mousedom via a plot which is incredibly silly, but the movie, which is consistent in its unpretentiousness, is able to pull this off just fine. All of the characters are nicely fleshed out (there’s a case to be made about Fidget’s character reflecting ableism but let’s leave that aside). Ratigan is the juiciest villain we’ve seen since Cruella de Vil. The plot is actually pretty complex, not at all like the predictable fairy tale / fantasy type plots we’ve often seen, yet not so complicated that it would lose the audience (or if it loses some kids, they will still be entertained by the great voicing, music, and animation). The action is, bar none, the very best I’ve seen so far on the animated movies of this list, and the movie is somehow packed with action -- every single sequence of it is superb, and the climactic scene inside of Big Ben is a revolutionary masterpiece of animation (by the standards that existed at the time). The abrupt transition to that scene, beginning in near-silence, is one of the more delightfully, deliciously chilling Disney moments for me.

This is not one of the great Disney musicals, but all three of its three musical numbers are still very enjoyable. I remember learning in college that the same person wrote “The World’s Greatest Criminal Mind” and “Goodbye So Soon”, but I only just now internalized that the composer was Henry Mancini who I love from The Pink Panther and Victor Victoria. There is a certain type of wit and humor in the lyrics of both of those songs which I don’t know how to characterize in words except to say that it’s sprinkled with phrases either containing self-contradictons (“You’re the best of the worst around”, “You’re more evil than even you”) or redundancy (“No one can doubt what we know you can do”) or just plain wordplay (“Even meaner? You mean it?”, “With time so short I’ll say so long”). None of it makes a pretense of being extremely witty or anything; it’s just mildly dry. I don’t know what to call this kind of humor and can’t think of another example of it, but it consciously (though subtly) influenced the vibe I was going for with the section headings in certain of my earlier Wordpress essays.

Perhaps Lady and the Tramp can make a case for winning the Most Underrated Disney Animated Feature prize, as it seems more mature and elegant, but I’m not ashamed to say that I find The Great Mouse Detective every bit as enjoyable and that I still have enough inner child in me that I can rewatch the movie in my early 30′s and come out of it smiling broadly.

Oliver and Company, 1988

The first major Disney feature that came out in my lifetime! As with The Fox and the Hound, I always knew about this one growing up but was never really interested enough to watch it (even despite the fact that it was somehow loosely based on Oliver Twist, whose musical adaptation I was raised on pretty heavily) -- at least, I don’t think I ever saw any of it until one day in my young adulthood cable days when I caught it on TV. By “caught it on TV”, of course I mean that I probably didn’t see all of it, and it was interrupted by commercials and I was probably doing something else at the same time and not paying much attention. Literally the only thing I could remember was the line “Don’t want to mix with the riffraff?”

It’s just as well because in the grander progression of Disney creations, Oliver and Company turns out to be pretty skipable. Now I will say that I appreciate the variety of locations and cultural backdrops in Disney films and the amount of effort the creators put into carrying them out (something that was mostly lost on me as a kid). In this case, we are transported for the first time to contemporary New York, and it’s clear that the writers, voice actors, and animators went full throttle on making everything seem as in-your-face New-York-ish as possible. I don’t fault them for doing this, but it’s all done in a slightly brash way that doesn’t at all attract me to late-80′s New York culture.

I was struck in the first few minutes by a change I don’t quite know how to describe in words, except to say that the animation and even more the music feel palpably distinctly more modern than anything I’ve visited so far. The animation is simpler and more generic (luckily I have a fondness for kittens and they do succeed in making Oliver look adorable, but otherwise the visuals left me cold), and the music is a sharp reminder of the blander forms of pop music I remember growing up hearing. “Why Should I Worry?” triggered a recognition of the song that I had long forgotten -- apparently I used to know it very well but I’m not entirely sure how. The other songs are forgettable enough that I’ve already forgotten them. Interesting to find out that the principal voices were done mainly by Billy Joel and Bette Midler, marking another step on Disney’s road towards featuring more big-time celebrities in their voice acting (culminating in Robin Williams’ role in Aladdin several years later).

The story is very watered down compared to either the book or the musical version of Oliver -- understandable, I suppose, but I didn’t find it very interesting. The characters were lackluster, and the main villain Sykes managed to be even more forgettable than What’s-her-name from The Rescuers. This movie normalizes hitting on women by making catcalling noises, as done by two of the non-evil characters -- I wonder if this was put in because it’s considered a distinctive feature of New York culture, but either way I found its presence in the film obnoxious. I will say that the character of Georgette (played by Midler) stood out as very funny, and I enjoyed all of her scenes, but I don’t have much else positively positive to say about this one.

#disney films #the aristocats #bedknobs and broomsticks #robin hood #body issues #winnie the pooh #the rescuers #the black cauldron #Harry Potter #episode vi #the great mouse detective #ableism #oliver twist #catcalling #Our Current president #alcoholism

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virtual-lara · 5 years

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GameSpot UK Adrian Smith Interview - Part One - Tomb Raider Chronicles

Interview appeared on Gamespot UK website, dated to 12th September 2000

In part one of our interview, Core Design's Adrian Smith talks about Lara's last adventure on a current gaming platform, Tomb Raider Chronicles.

GameSpot UK:

So tell us about the Tomb Raider Chronicles?

Adrian Smith:

It's the fifth in the series, I'm sure you know that, but it follows on exactly from the end of The Last Revelation. The Last Revelation for us was the last of the story of Tomb Raider and we ended TLR intentionally with Lara Croft missing, trapped in a pyramid in Egypt and presumed dead.

That gave us a clean sheet to start working with the next generation of Tomb Raider Games, which we've been working on for some 18 months now. So for a long time our focus has been with not only the current TR, but also with the future of the series, which may not even be called Tomb Raider at all, but may be called something entirely different.

GameSpot UK:

So what's the storyline behind Chronicles? Isn't Lara supposed to be an ex-Tomb Raider?

Adrian Smith:

The whole idea of Chronicles is to continue on with this premise that Lara is dead, which meant that we could have a little fun. The fact that Lara's body has never been found is the starting point for Chronicles and the game picks up three or four days after Lara's supposed death in the pyramids of Egypt.

There's a memorial service for Lara outside of Croft Manor and there are some very familiar faces there. There's Father Dunstan the family's priest, Pierre, Jeeves the butler - all the characters from the old series of Tomb Raider games. Everyone's there at the memorial service for Lara Croft sitting around a table, talking about her life and experiences. These stories form the four episodes of what player will actually play in Chronicles. The whole focus has been to do four episodes, four adventures from Lara's life. So you will have four very different looking and very different playing games. Each of these adventures is standalone and linear in so far as you start it, you finish it and the overall game is roughly the same size, which is about 15 - 20 levels. It's no smaller than we've done before - we've just done it a different way.

GameSpot UK:

Where will these four new adventures take place?

Adrian Smith:

We start off in Rome. It's a very familiar Tomb Raider game and the Rome level actually starts as a training level and then moves into a little adventure in its own right. The game mechanics are just as we know them, Lara running around doing what she's always done: running, jumping, climbing and looking for artefacts.

The next level is in a Russian submarine base and this whole section of the game is based around Lara being a little bit stealthier. It's not actually solving so many puzzles - it's more moving around trying to evade people using her wits and skills and then shooting them. So it features new weapons and it's more action-focused.

The third level is actually in Ireland and it features young Lara. So there's a whole episode played with young Lara which is something we've never brought in before - we had the training level in TLR but that was a very small part of the game. But, this whole level, you take control of young Lara and play her from beginning to end and it brings a different kind of game mechanic to it. You haven't got any weapons, so she has to use her cunning and agility to evade and trap all the baddies.

The fourth and final level is in an office tower block and again it's very different to the other three. It's got a different look, a different feel and very different game play. It's a very hi-tech level and this time Lara has a companion called Zip. Zip is there to guide her, give her information and help her through the levels and again it draws on using elements of stealth and the new AI. There are quite a lot of areas where she can't take guns because of X-ray machines and stuff, so Lara will be able to sneak around behind people more easily and knock them out, as opposed to running in all guns blazing.

GameSpot UK:

Why did you take this very different approach?

Adrian Smith:

The four levels are very independent and stand up on their own. Chronicles is also about combining all the elements we had in all the earlier TR games. I am pleased to say this will be the last one on the current technology. The reason being that, for the PC people, we will actually include all the level editors and all the tools we used to use to create the Tomb Raider series so far. So the consumers will be able to create, share and even pass around the internet the levels that they have created. We'll also be able to give out some of our favourite levels on the website that have never been seen and some of the old levels from previous games.

It is going to be the last game and is the focus of all the games combined together. This is not a new game - the new game is Next Generation. It's an evolution of TR4 into Chronicles. On the PlayStation we've pushed the technology forward, not so that the average consumer will see, but Tomb Raider experts will notice a difference. We've changed what was sensible to change and improved what we can.

GameSpot UK:

What major gameplay differences can we look forward to in Chronicles?

Adrian Smith:

In the game itself we've put in a couple of new moves for Lara. There's a tightrope walk, which we'll see in a moment, so Lara can actually negotiate her way across a tightrope. We've put in some parallel bars swinging so she can use parallel bars. We've put in a lot more interaction with the environment. She has new weapons. She has a grappling hook so she can throw the hook into the scenery and then grab the rope and scale it.

What we've also introduced is a lot more things that Lara can use and interact with. So she can go through drawers, she can open filing cabinets, she can look in cupboards and she can search all these items. The baddies have far more interaction with the environment too. They will walk round, sit down, move chairs and furniture. They might sit down and go to sleep, giving Lara the opportunity to sneak up behind them and maybe chloroform them or pull out the cosh and knock them unconscious.

We have also focused a lot on the inventory system. It was introduced in the Last Revelation but we've tried to make more use of it in this game. There's far more combining of items, collecting of items, looking at and investigating items and seeing how they can be put together and used. An example: getting some chloroform, retrieving a cloth, putting the chloroform on the cloth and she knocks them out rather than shooting them.

GameSpot UK:

Will there be much difference between the versions on different formats and will they be released simultaneously?

Adrian Smith:

Most of our focus has been around the PC version and the Dreamcast version. By virtue of all the changes for the PC version it means we're going to bring a much better Dreamcast version to the market. I should just say that it will be a simultaneous launch for the PC, PlayStation and Dreamcast, which of course it wasn't last year. You should expect to see it around about November 18th, Thanksgiving weekend in the US.

GameSpot UK:

So the big question is: is Lara really dead and will Chronicles resolve that issue after we've seen the first four episodes?

Adrian Smith:

I'm happy to say that at the end of the game we're going to have someone like a crony of Von Croy's come dashing out of the pyramid with some artefact of Lara, her rucksack or something, just to sow the seed that she isn't really dead. Which funnily enough leads me right on to Next Generation, which we think is going to be very different to what you'd expect to see.

Join us for the thrilling conclusion when Adrian Smith fills us in on the next generation of Tomb Raider games in part two of this interview.

All rights belong to GameSpot and/or their affiliated companies. I only intend to introduce people to old articles and preserve them before they are lost.

#Tomb Raider Chronicles #TRC Interviews #All Interviews #VL Posts

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spamzineglasgow · 4 years

Text

(REVIEW) All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything To Everyone, by Joe Dunthorne

Is it fiction, is it poetry, is it truth — what are the rules here? Kirsty Dunlop tackles the difficult, yet illustrious art of the poet bio in this review of Joe Dunthorne’s All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything To Everyone (Rough Trade Editions, 2018).

Whenever I read a poetry anthology - I hope I’m not the only one - I go to the bios at the back before I read the poems…it’s also a really strange thing when you publish a poem…you brag about yourself in a text that is supposed to sound distant and academic but is actually you carefully calculating how you’ll present yourself.

> It’s the middle of a night in 2019 and I’m listening to a podcast recording from Rough Trade Editions’ first birthday party at the London Review Bookshop, and this is Dunthorne’s intro to the reading from his pamphlet All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything To Everyone (2018). As I lie there in that strange limbo space of my own insomnia, Dunthorne’s side-note to his work feels comfortingly intimate because it rings so true (the kind of thing you might admit to a friend over a drink after a poetry reading rather than in the performative space of the reading itself). Like Joe, and yes surely many others, I am also fascinated by bios - particularly because I find them so awkward to write/it makes me cringe writing my own/this is definitely the kind of thing you overthink late at night. Bios also function as this alternative narrative on the margins of the central creative work and they do tell a story: take any bio out of context and it can be read as a piece of flash fiction. When we are asked to write bios, there is this unspoken expectation that we follow certain rules in our use of language, tone and content. Side note: how weird would it be if we actually spoke about ourselves in this pompous third person perspective irl?! Bios themselves are limbo spaces (another kind of side note!) where there is much left unsaid and often the unsaid and the little that is said reveals a lot. Of course, some bios are also very, very long. Dunthorne’s pamphlet plays with this limbo space as a site of narrative and poetic potential: prior to All The Poems, I had never read a short story actually written through the framework of a list of poet bios. The result is an incredibly funny, honest and playful piece of meta poetic prose that teases out all the subtle aspects of the poet bio-sphere and ever since that first listen, I can’t stop myself re-reading.

> This work is an exciting example of how formal constraints in writing can actually create an exhilarating sense of narrative liberation. I see this really playful, fluid Oulipo quality to the writing, where the process of using the bio as constraint is what makes the rollercoaster reading experience so satisfying as well as revealing a theatrical stage for language to have its fun, where the reality of our own calculated self performance can be teased out bio by bio. The re-reading opens up a new level of comedy each time often at the level of wordplay. I’ll maybe reveal some more of that in a wee bit.

> It’s a winding road that Dunthorne takes us on in his narrative journey where the micro and the macro continually fall inside each other. So perhaps this review will also be quite winding. Here is another entry into the text: we begin reading about the protagonist Adam Lorral from the opening sentence, who we realise fairly quickly is struggling to put together a ground-breaking landmark poetry anthology. His bio crops up repeatedly in varying forms:

‘Adam Lorral, born 1985 is a playwright, translator and the editor-publisher of this anthology.’

‘Adam Lorral is a playwright, translator and the man who, morning after morning, stood barefoot on his front doorstep […]’

‘Adam Lorral is a playwright, translator and someone for whom the date Monday, October 14th, 2017 has enormous meaning. Firstly Adam’s son started smiling.’

The driving circularity of this repetition pushes the narrative onwards, whilst the language is never bogged down: it hopscotches along and we can’t help but join in the game. Amidst a growing list of other characters/poets- that Adam may or may not include in this collection he seems to be pouring/ draining his energy into, with just a little help from his wife’s family money- tension begins to build.

> Although Adam is overtly the protagonist in the story, to my mind it is, in fact, Adam’s four-week-old son who is the real heroic figure. Of course this baby doesn’t have a bio of his own but he does continually creep into Adam’s (he’s another side note!). He comes off as the only genuine character: there is no performance, no judgement, he just is. Adam is continually amazed by his son’s mental and physical development which is far more impressive than the growth of this questionable anthology. The baby is this god-like figure, continually present during Adam’s struggles, with the seemingly small moments of its development taking on monumental significance. Adam might try to immerse himself fully in this creative work but the reality of his family surroundings will constantly interrupt. This self-deprecating, reflective tone led me to think about how Dunthorne expansively explores the idea of the contemporary poet and artist identity through metanarrative. In Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016), he writes ‘There is embarrassment for the poet – couldn’t you get a real job and put your childish ways behind you?’ In a recent online interview with the poet Will Harris[1], when asked about his own development as a writer, he spoke about how the career trajectory of a poet is a confusing phenomenon and I’ve heard many other poets speak of this too: there are perhaps milestones to pass but they are not rigid or obvious and, of course, they are set apart from the milestones of more ‘adult’, professional pursuits. I think Dunthorne’s short story accurately captures this confusion around artistic, personal and intellectual growth and the navigation of the poetry community, through these minute, telling observations and the rejection of a simplistic narrative linearity. The story doesn’t make any hard or fast judgements: like the character of the baby, the observations just are. Sometimes, it feels like this project could be one of the most important aspects of Adam’s life (it might even make or break it) and we are there with him and at other moments it seems quite irrelevant to the bigger picture, particularly as the bios get more ridiculous. Here, I just have to highlight one of the bios which perfectly evokes this heightened sense of a poet’s importance:

Peter Daniels’ seventh collection The Animatronic Tyrannosaurus of Guadalajara, is forthcoming with Welt Press. He will not let anyone forget that he edited Unpersoned, a prize-winning book of creative transcriptions of immigration interviews obtained by the Freedom of Information Act, even though it was published nearly two decades ago. His poetry has been overlooked for all previous generational anthologies and it is only thanks to the fine-tuned sensibilities of this book’s editor that has he finally become one of the chosen. You would expect him to be grateful.

> Okay…so I said above that there weren’t hard or fast judgements; maybe I should retract that slightly. The text definitely doesn’t feel like a cruel critique of poets generally (its comedy is too clever for that) but, yes, there are a fair few judgements from Adam creeping into those bios. I am so impressed with the way in which Dunthorne is able to expertly navigate Adam’s perspective through all these fragments to create this growing humour, as the character can’t help inserting his own opinions into other poets’ bios. Of course, we are also able to make our own judgements about Adam and his endearing naivety: shout out here to my fave character in the story, Joy Goold (‘exhilaratingly Scottish’) who has submitted the poem, Fake Lake, to the anthology. Hopefully if you’re Scottish, you can appreciate the comedy of this title. Adam Googles her and cannot find any trace of her, which feels perfect…almost too good to be true.

> Dunthorne plays with cliché overtly throughout the text. You could say all the poets in this story are exaggerated clichés but that certainly doesn’t make them boring: it just adds to the knowing intimacy that, yes, feels slightly gossipy (which I can’t help but enjoy). For example, there is the poet who has:

[…] won every major UK poetry prize and long ago dispensed with modesty […] Though he does not need the money he teaches on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His latest collection is Internal Flight (Faber/FSG). He divides his time between London and New York because they are both lovely.

I am leaving out a fair bit of this bio because I don’t want to take away some of the joy of simply reading this text in its entirety but it is one of many tongue-in-cheek observations that feels very accurate and over-the-top at the same time (I feel like everyone in the poetry community knows this person). It is also even more knowing when you consider that Dunthorne actually has published a collection with Faber, O Positive (2019), a totally immersive read that also doesn’t shy away from poking fun at its speaker throughout. I always like seeing the ideas that repeatedly crop up in a writer’s work and explorations of calculation and cliché are at the forefront of this collection. I keep thinking of this line from the poem ‘Workshop Dream’:

We stepped onto the beach. The water made the sound: cliché, cliché, cliché.

Interestingly, there is this hypnotising dream-like quality to O Positive - with shape shifting figures, balloonists, owls-in-law – in contrast to the hyper realism I experienced in the Rough Trade pamphlet. However, like All the Poems, in O Positive, we’re always one step inside the writing, one step outside, watching the poem/short story being written. It’s this continual sensation of being very close to failure and embarrassment/cringe. (I can also draw parallels here between Dunthorne’s exploration of this theme and the poet Colin Herd who speaks so brilliantly about the relation between poetry and embarrassment- see our SPAM interview.) Failure is just inevitable in this narrative set up. It makes the turning point of the narrative- when it arrives- all the funnier:

As Adam typed, he hummed the chorus to the Avril Lavigne song–why d’you have to go and make things so complicated?–and smiled to himself because he was keeping things simple. Avril Lavigne. Adam Lorral. Their names were a bit similar. He was looking for a sign and here one was.

> If it isn’t clear already, this is a story that I could continually quote from but to truly appreciate the work, you should read it in its beautiful slim pamphlet format created by Rough Trade Editions. For me, the presentation of this work is as important as the form: this story would have a different effect and tone if it was nestled inside a short story collection. I think a lot of the most exciting creative writing right now is being published by the innovative small indie presses springing up around the UK. Recently I listened to a great podcast by Influx Press, featuring the writer Isabel Waidner: they spoke about both the value of small presses taking risks with writers and the importance of recognising prose as an experimental field, rightly recognising that experimental work often seems to begin with, or be connected to, the poetry community. Waidner’s observation felt like something I had been waiting to hear…and a change that I had noticed in writing being published in the last few years in the UK. I could mention so many examples alongside the work of Rough Trade Books: Waidners’s We are Made of Diamond Stuff (2019), published by Manchester-based Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Eley William’s brilliant Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press, 2017), the many exciting hybrid works put out by Prototype Publishing, to name just a few. There is also a growing interest in multimedia work, for example Visual Editions, who publish texts designed to be read on your phone through their series Editions at Play (Joe Dunthorne did a brilliant digital-born collaborative text with Sam Riviere in 2016, The Truth About Cats & Dogs, I would highly recommend!). But this concept of combining the short story with a pamphlet format, created by Rough Trade Books as part of their Rough Trade Editions’ twelve pamphlet series, feels particularly exciting to me and is a reminder of why I love the expansive possibilities of shorter prose pieces. Through its physical format, we are reminded that this is a prose work you can read like a series of poems without losing the narrative tension that is so central to fiction. The expansiveness of the reading possibilities of Dunthorne’s short story also reminds me of Lydia Davis’s short-short stories. Here’s one I love taken from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Penguin Books, 2009):

They take turns using a word they like

“It’s extraordinary,” says one woman. “It is extraordinary,” says the other.

You could read this as a sound bite, an extract from an article, a writing exercise or a short story, the possibilities go on; there is a space created for the reader and consequently it encourages the unravelling of re-reading (which feels like a very poetic mode to me). Like Davis, Dunthorne’s work also highlights how seemingly simple language can be very powerful and take on many subtle faces and tones. I think short forms are so difficult to get right but when you encounter all the elements of language, tone, pacing, style, space, tension brought together effectively (or calculatingly as Dunthorne might say), it can create this immersive, highly intimate back-and-forth play with the reader.

> All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything to Everyone. The title tells us there is a collection of poems here that are hidden: the central work has disappeared leaving behind the shadowy remains of the editor’s frustration and the marginalia of the bios. We feel the presence of the poems despite not actually reading them. The pamphlet’s blurb states that this: ‘is the story of the epiphanies that come with extreme tiredness; that maybe, just maybe the greatest poetry book of all is one that contains no poems.’ The narrative, as well as making fun of itself, also recognises that poetry exists beyond the containment of the poems themselves: it can be found in the readings, the performances, the politics, the drafts, the difficulties, the funding, the collaboration, the collectivity, the bios.

> A friend of mine recently asked me: Where are all the prose parties?…And what might a prose party look like? We were chatting about how a poetry party sounds much cooler (that’s maybe why there’s more of them). I think prose is often aligned with more conventional literary forms, maybe closed off in a way that poetry is seen to be able to liberate, but I think Dunthorne breaks down these preconceptions and binaries around form and modes of reading in All The Poems. I want to be at whatever prose party he’s throwing.

[1] University of Glasgow’s Creative Conversations, Sophie Collins interviewing Will Harris, Monday 4th May 2020 (via Zoom)

Text: Kirsty Dunlop Published: 10/7/20

#review #reviews #Rough Trade Books #Joe Dunthorne #Kirsty Dunlop #poetry #poet bios

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bluepenguinstories · 4 years

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Happiness Overload Chapter Fifty-Two

Did I lose them? I looked back. No one in sight. No naggy woman calling for me to get back there.

Well, it’s not like I WANTED to lose them, curiosity just got the better of me. But after a bit of wandering around, it was starting to get boring. Yeah. I probably could’ve walked back to them, I bet they were even waiting for me and everything. No, they’re sensible. They’ve got a mission and stuff, right? I mean, mission...miss them. Fuck. But it was okay. It would be okay. Maybe it wouldn’t be, but if I told myself enough times, I was pretty sure that I’d be fine.

Those two, Velvet and Coriander (though I met her as Birch, and honestly, she could’ve been like a long-lost cousin several times removed or something. I wouldn’t have even questioned it) were quite the pair. While I wasn’t sure what they would do after all this, it seemed like the likely scenario was that this ship was going to be my home now. There might be them, but there might not. The inhabitants of the ship, where would they go? Also a good question.

Yeah. That was another thing, wasn’t it? Uncertainty. Well, it would’ve been the same thing whether I stayed on Earth or went here. Guess I made my choice. So did he.

I knew when that stranger Verse barged in that things were about to get real weird. Well, okay, so things were already weird. I mean, roadkill apartment being eaten by crows? Some kind of evil organization in a literal “middle of nowhere”? Yeah. Should’ve seen it coming. But just the talk about how the world could end or we could go on this ship and possibly face being killed once aboard, I could tell there would be trouble.

Treetrunk could tell as well. Oh, I guess I never really called him that anymore, huh? Well, okay, then. Trent could tell things were bad news. His face was all “buuuuh”. That was the thing, huh? I wasn’t always the best at reading a room or listening to people. Sometimes I could take a joke too far. Sometimes when people would cry I would laugh, but I didn’t mean to make fun of them, but then it probably seems that way because I start telling jokes and...yeah. Moving on.

While I wasn’t the best at people sometimes, it was interesting how people would try to hide things or try to be all discrete and others would be fooled even though it ought to be so obvious. It could have something to do with living with someone who tended to go around with a poker face and be a bit of a pushover, let’s be honest.

Later at night, I knocked on his door and entered. He was just laying in bed and reading a book. Guess there wasn’t much else to do since he became out of a job.

“Sooo...got any pop-tarts stashed in here? I know you do. Don’t hide ‘em.”

“What do you want?” He replied, sounding rather annoyed. The gall.

“Pop-tarts. I just said, didn’t I?” I rummaged through that little bedside table where there was a drawer and found a package. Hard to tell the flavor from outside the plastic, but as long as it wasn’t brown sugar flavor, all would be good. But, as I got up and made my way to the door, I closed it.

“I know that talk bothered you earlier,” I got right to the point. Never said I was good at segues. “I mean, when you got those options, really hard to choose I imagine.”

“I knew this wasn’t about the Pop-Tarts,” he side-eyed me.

“What?! Of course it is!” I struggled to open the plastic. “Munchies are serious business! But...ahem! Yes. You’re freaking out, I can tell.”

“Right now? Maybe if you were a stranger sneaking into my room and stealing my food, then yes, but –”

“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, the whole die or die thing. It’s like you either die or you die.”

“Not much of a choice, if you ask me.”

I shook my head. “It’s pretty outrageous, too. But all these crazy things have been happening around the world, and there’s less and less people by the day, so the world could very well be ending.”

“Aren’t you scared, too?”

“Sure,” I shrugged. “Shitless. But if there’s a chance to live longer aboard a ship, even if it might be pretty lonely, I’ll do it.”

“Yeah. I’d like you to live.”

“That’s too bad because I was thinking of jumping into a lava pit.”

He glared at me.

“Oh, alright. But don’t you want to live, too? I mean, there is that whole thing that Verse lady said, too, how it’s probably super dangerous and stuff. I guess there’d probably be a buncha guys with guns and action movie shit. Ooh,” I nudged. “Yeah, you should come along. You’d be all into that.”

“I’m just not sure. What if things get better here? What if I could make things better here? But what if I can’t and I’d have better uses there. But then, I don’t think I could stand to do it. The idea that I have to stay inside, that there is no outside, and if I try to go out, I could put others in danger.”

“Then you just gotta do what’s right for you.”

“But that’s the thing: what’s right for me?”

I shrugged. “Beats me, but it’s okay whichever you choose, because I could probably understand.”

“Would it be okay to leave you behind, though?”

“I’m an adult.”

“Yeah, but I’m worried about you.”

“I’m worried about you too, that’s why I came in here.” Oops. Now he knew for sure it wasn’t just for snacks. “I’m going to miss you if we part and I don’t see you again, but I doubt it’ll set in right away. It’ll probably take a while.”

That’s what I told him. He nodded, but didn’t make a decision that night. I let him think on it, and I just tried avoiding thinking about it all together, because that made it easier to deal with. But we both had to deal with it, didn’t we, and he was back on Earth and I was in some ship thingy.

But as for missing…

It felt weird already. Like, I didn’t think it would set in so fast, but damn, it sure did; my stomach started to growl and I had nothing to snack on. No muffin, no banana. No banana nut muffin.

“Buuuh, is it too late to go back?” I whined, my hand on my forehead. Nah, I wouldn’t want to, anyway. I mean, I kinda did. I could’ve brought some goodies with me to play with, or a keepsake. “Dammit, this is so stupid. Why’s the world gotta end?” Oh, right. I didn’t even bring a change of clothes. Gross.

Room after room, I tried to open the doors and find one that I could actually get into. So far, they all turned out to be locked. The most surprising bit, or at least to me, was that a lot of those doors had handles. I imagined something more like a super top secret base with doors you needed hand scanners for, but nope. Well, I guess some had those. Probably the super important ones. I recall passing by some here and there.

But damn, between the running and being hungry, I really just needed to get to a room and take a break. Just to sit down and rest.

I huffed, my hands over my knees.

“Why…” I wanted to finish my sentence, but I was still trying to catch my breath.

...Why do you have to be so damn fast?

No. I was never built to run. I’ll be the first to admit. Yet that’s what I did for years, didn’t I? How? I wanted to know how. There was a hunch I had, the possibility of there being a difference between running to something and running from something.

For years, I had ran from these people, my fate, and for years, I had thrown away several identities, my emotions, so I could live to see another day, free from capture. Somewhere along the line, however, I got tired, and stopped running.

“Where could you have gone?” I found the myself ask, in a manner that was rather unbecoming of me. My voice sounded weak, distressed. Something I never wanted to be.

It was a linear yet winding hallway, so it seemed, anyway. If I kept moving, I should have come across her sooner or later.

Why do you care, anyway? You let yourself get distracted from your goal. You should leave her be and do what you set out to do.

The silky, sultry voice reared its ugly head. It was beginning.

“Do you even know what my goal is?” I seethed. I could already feel the taste of blood working its way up to my mouth. My stomach started to turn. The consequence of no longer being on that dying planet.

I hobbled forward, afraid of what might come were I to run.

“A healthy body...keeps me happy…” I told myself, almost in a chant. In that instant, the pain was gone. For now.

A healthy body cannot fix an unhealthy mind.

That much was true. I couldn’t keep myself focused on positive thoughts, and for that, I was being punished.

I slammed my fist against the wall as teardrops fell from my face.

“Why does nobody listen to me? Why can’t they see I’m trying to do the right thing?”

We were supposed to stick together. I was going to set aside my selfish desires to help others. I was going to protect everyone, but instead I was alone again.

Just like I wanted to be.

I took a glance at my wrist which held the bracelet and recited its message in my head. Then, I nodded, and ran forward once again.

That’s right: I can still try. I know this can be a dark and dangerous place, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late. I can find her, I can bring her back to Coriander and Velvet. She would be in more capable hands with them.

My heart raced against my pace; if I could catch back up, maybe I could find her in no time at all. But I got lost in my hope that I failed to notice what was in my peripheral vision. I ended up bumping into someone.

“Ow,” he cried out. “Watch where you’re going.

I backed up. Lab coat. I could tell it was someone who worked there.

“Are you lost or something? Why are you running in the halls?”

Did he think I worked here? Maybe I could use that to my advantage…

“I usually work in a different department,” I tried to explain. “I just thought I could take a shortcut and found my way here. Could you tell me where the Perfume Department is?” I tilted my head, smiled, and kept my voice soft.

“The what? There is no Perfume Department. Do you even work here?”

Shit.

“You must be tired. It would please us both if you got a good rest. Wouldn’t you say?” I continued to keep my demeanor calm and pleasant.

“What?” I watched as he reached into his pocket.

He could be pressing a button to send back up. I can’t have that happen. I should murder him. No. He didn’t resort to shooting. He must just be a lowly lab worker. All I can think about is pain. The pain this company has caused me. But I won’t just take it out on anyone. He just needs to take a little nap and forget he ever saw me.

I grabbed his arm.

“I strongly urge you to take a nap. You can’t be a good, hard worker if you’re not at your best,” I hissed in a low whisper, but kept my smile up. “Wouldn’t you say?”

Surges of electricity escaped from my arm and transferred onto his. It was just a quick jolt. Not enough to for him to scream or cry out for help. He fell to the floor. Nary a sound.

I stared down at the passed out figure in front of me and released a powder out from my fist above their head. It sprinkled down and I walked past.

“When you wake up, you won’t remember anything,” I turned my head behind me, as if he could have heard me.

I knew sooner or later, I would find something within the empty halls. I just hoped that whatever it was, it would be one of the things I wished to find and not a horrible outcome.

Finally! One of the doors opened and I slipped in.

It was just a little office, some workstation, a desk. Nothing so “whoa, mega cool!” But at least it was a place I could lay low and sit. In fact, there was a bench right beside the workstation.

I sighed. “I didn’t think I’d ever manage to sit down.”

“Really? That’s all I ever do.”

I turned. Oh, right. There was someone sitting by the workstation. Working on something. I really should have paid better attention.

“Oh hey, there! What’cha working on?” I got up and leaned over. He looked up with a dead expression. He was some guy with scruffy, dark hair.

“Marketing. Allegedly. They said when I was picked for this department that I’d have an important role in the company’s image, but most of the time I just look at emails or sit in on virtual meetings. Often I don’t even do anything in them. I’ll try to propose an idea and then the committee pretends they didn’t hear me and discuss other things.” He sighed with every few words he spoke, as if he was just eternally exhausted. “What are you doing with that wrench, by the way?”

Oh, right. I could’ve put that in my pocket the whole time, but I didn’t. Silly me.

“This?” I brought it up and pointed at it. “I’m the maintenance person. I got a ticket from my boss to work on this office. Now, where’s the leak?”

“Are you really?” Once again, he sounded dead as he spoke, as if he didn’t care what my answer was.

“Yeah, no.”

“Oh. That’s a shame. Could’ve fooled me.”

“Wait, really? Then I totally am!”

He shrugged. “I don’t care, either way. Whether someone shows up in my little room or not makes no difference to me. I’ll still be here, still with the same issues.”

Oh. Damn. I kinda felt bad for the guy. Was I supposed to?

“Yeah, that’s tough, dude. I’m kinda new here, myself.”

“You are, are you? So what does that make you, an intern?”

“Yeah! Totally! I’m going to learn intern things!” I tried to sound enthusiastic, as if I really wanted to be such a thing.

“Good luck with that, miss. I bet they talked you up about how great the company is and how you’ll be making such a big difference.”

“You make it sound like you don’t like it here.”

He shrugged. “It is what it is. They pretty much don’t care what I do, since they don’t care about my input, so I get plenty of time to do whatever I want. Only problem is I don’t really want to do anything most of the time.”

“That’s too bad,” I sat back down and slouched. “I get it, though. To be cooped up in one place all the time. I mean, I guess now that I’m here, it’s not going to be all that different. But still, where I came from before, I don’t think I could have stayed there forever. Sure, I had someone who cared about me and I’ll miss them, but was knowing that enough? So I came here. Because I figured out what I wanted to do.”

“I’m afraid you got duped. Interns almost never move up, and often times they get killed by people thinking they’re playing hero. They’re even lower on the ladder than me, and that’s saying something. Well, that’s not the only reason interns rarely move up, but I think often times, it’s just a matter of chance. Oh, and just a head’s up, the bosses here are pretty evil.”

“So I heard! I even heard rumors that there are people who might want to take out the higher ups and overthrow the whole company,” I realized I might have said too much. “But you know, just a rumor.”

“Eh,” he shrugged. “Wouldn’t be surprised. Happens all the time.”

“But aren’t you worried? It’s your company at stake.”

“My company?” He must’ve been confused. “I don’t own jack. Do you know what the Marketing Department does? You’d think advertising, right? Or spreading the word? But we’re a secret organization. So what do I do, recruit people? No. There’s a department for that, too. I think this is really the ‘Sit In Meaningless Meetings and Act Interested’ Department, but that isn’t a very short name, is it?”

“So what you’re saying is…?”

“I couldn’t care what happens to this shithole. I mean, as long as I have a job, I’ll be here, but that’s it.”

“Yeah, but these people could be dangerous. You might wanna watch out for ‘em. Just sayin’.”

“Look, there’s been many attempts to defeat this company. It has never worked out.”

“But what if they succeed?”

“Cool. I won’t have to work anymore.”

“Damn, that bad? Is there nothing else you like about working here?”

“I mean, the health benefits are fine. Don’t have to pay a thing. Probably a matter of convenience, because they don’t pay us, either. Though it doesn’t include dental.”

“What? They don’t even give you dental?”

“Yeah. Well, we’ve got the best technology in the universe, so there’s that, too. But most of it was stolen, and besides, most of us can’t even access such tech.”

“Aw, but that’s what I was looking forward to the most!” For real. That was the only reason I ran off in the first place, was so I could see some cool stuff.

“Get used to disappointment. This is your home now.”

“You’re telling me…”

There was a few minutes of silence. My stomach growled. He didn’t pay any attention. I thought to speak up to break the silence, but I couldn’t think of anything.

“Say, what made you choose to come here, anyway?”

“It was better than the alternative,” I cleared my throat. “There had been something spreading where I came from that was making a lot of people sick. There were a lot of deaths. Those of us who survived just tried to get on with their lives and adapt with the times. We were telling ourselves ‘this won’t be forever’, and ‘I can’t wait until everything is back to normal’. I admit, I had those thoughts, too. It’s hard to accept a situation, even worse, I started thinking that maybe there would be no ‘back to normal’ and just because I wasn’t catching what others had didn’t mean it wasn’t affecting me.”

He didn’t say anything for a bit, just turned in his chair and faced me.

“I mean! It’s not that bad, though! Now that I’m here, it’s like a new opportunity for me!”

“That was some heavy shit,” then he turned back to face his computer. “Not that I’m not used to it. You kinda learn to just tune out these things. Anyway, I’m a little busy.”

“Is that what you want to be busy with, though? This whole time I’ve been in here, you’ve seemed pretty disinterested.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t always get to choose your department.”

“But what if you did!” I found a burst of positive energy burst out. “You must have joined for a reason! Maybe it was like me, some heavy shit! Or maybe it was something else!”

“Yeah. You’re right. I didn’t start out like this. I wasn’t forced into this or anything, I just wanted to make a difference. All these problems humanity faces and I thought I could help make the world – all of them – a better place. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? They say we exist to improve humanity, but how are we supposed to do that by micromanaging everything to oblivion? Not only that, but who’s ever heard of the ones in power doing anything to help those they oppress? All I see this company doing is amassing more power all while they wonder why things aren’t getting any better.”

“Fuck work, am I right?”

“What? You can’t just say that! I bet they listen in on all our conversations! They’ll probably kill me on the spot!”

“Dude. Duuuude. Dude! You just said all that to me and I bet you’ve been thinking those things for a while, too, right?”

“I mean…”

“They probably think you’re so useless that they don’t care what you think or say because they think you’re too weak to do anything. Right?”

“Uh...when you put it that way…”

“I’m just saying, like, if they don’t care, then why not just say fuck it and do something you’re passionate about? There’s gotta be something.”

“Yeah. I used to have passion for things.”

“Well, sorry, bud, but I’m still passionate about something and I’m going to hold on to that passion.”

“What are you so passionate about?”

“Simple: I wanna find a nurse-like woman with a tough exterior, but soft inside who would be willing to get rough with me.”

He looked at me with a blank expression. I expected him to burst into laughter, but instead, he spoke in an evened tone.

“I think I know someone like that. I hear Dr. Nightingale in the Medical Department is like that. Not that I’ve ever gone, but I just hear things.”

“Great! I think I’ll go there!”

I got up to go to the door.

“Wait. Before you go.”

“Hm?”

“...Graphic design is my passion.”

“Oh, no way! That’s wicked cool! Show me something!” I ran back to his computer. He pulled up an image of a poster with a frog jumping on the screen.

“It’s not advertising anything, but I enjoy it.”

“Hey, it doesn’t have to advertise anything! I’m proud of you for showing me that!”

“Can I show you another one?”

“Sure!”

Next up was a poster of a giraffe surrounded by a field of french fries. I didn’t know what kind of emotion it evoked, but it reminded me how hungry I was.

“Aw, man. My stomach just won’t let up.”

“They should have some snacks at the medical department.”

“Right! Thank you!”

“Yeah, it was nice to have some company for a change, so...yeah. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it! I like chatting with others!”

“I’m not used to it, myself. I mean, every now and then I’ll get encrypted e-mails from my pen pal over at the Design Department. Sucks that he got the job I would have loved to do, but I also think it’s great, because he’s passionate about it, too! Also he sent me selfies in ASCII art, and let me tell you,” he coughed. “I’d love to meet him in person. He even told me his name, it’s Dr. Oz! We talked about how we might have feelings for each other, it’s –”

I shushed him.

“Say no more!”

“Sorry.

“No! Don’t apologize!” I declared. “Go for it! Get your gay love!”

He smiled.

“Thanks. Say, what’s your doctor name? Mine’s Dr. Phil.”

Oh. I didn’t think this one through, did I? Everyone used doctor names, but I never even took classes at community college! What could I say for myself?

“I’m, er, Dr. Juniper!”

“It was nice to meet you. You get your gay love, too, Dr. Juniper!”

“I better!”

I exited the room and ran off once more.

Still no sign of her. I was at wit’s end. It was only a matter of time until things grew dire and I wasn’t any closer to a conclusion.

I slammed my fist into the wall and yelled. Then, the inevitable happened.

Alarms blared.

“Oh, come ON! You didn’t go off when I knocked that guy out!” I was fuming. I mean, it was bound to happen eventually, but I really wish it didn’t have to. I stood in place to weigh my options, though considering my mental and physical state, it would be very tough not to get violent if they send soldiers to my location.

“Let’s see...if I kill them all, that would solve my problem rather fast, plus it would satisfy the bloodlust, but if I don’t, they’ll probably kill me…to be honest, I’m not too fond of killing anyone, but...these are the people who have caused me so much pain and I could take out a lot of my anger on whatever soldiers they send...but it would also leave a lot of bodies...which would only make them send more…”

That was how it was now, wasn’t it? There must have been a time when I didn’t have to think so hard about all the options, but now, even with my enemy, I had too many doubts.

Before long, they had arrived and I was surrounded. Black garbed soldiers, gas-masked helmets. Heavy artillery weapons. I drew a breath. They all opened fire.

Shadowed thorns shot out from my back. At first, they shielded me on all ends, and, as the soldiers reloaded, they shot forth and changed their tips to scythe-like blades. Each thorn chopped off the hands of the soldiers and broke their weapons in half. Then, they went for the head.

All the while, I stood still.

Four soldiers on each end, eight in total, were on the floor, decapitated. Lifeless dolls.

“This won’t do,” I shook my head and muttered. “Maybe if you had let me talk this out, you all wouldn’t be in this position.”

I knelt down and held the helmeted head of one of them by the chin. “I really didn’t want to do this. I don’t even feel pleasure from it. But I’m not ready to die here.”

That alarm was still going off. If I didn’t do something about it, more would be sent my way, and then a pile of corpses would prevent me from venturing any further.

I reached into the pocket of one of the soldiers, pulled out a radio. On it, a button flashed, with the word ‘alarm’ printed above it. I clicked it and spoke.

“We took care of the disturbance in the area,” I imitated the voice of the soldier, something which even though it was in the realm of my abilities, was nonetheless difficult with the burning in my throat. The metallic taste, it was on my tongue.

“Good job. I’ll turn off the alarm at once.”

“Thank you.”

It stopped blaring. Thank goodness. I pocketed the radio, then I went to another soldier and grabbed another. If I found Velvet and/or Coriander, I could give them one so at the very least, we could keep in touch.

Now what to do about those bodies? If someone comes by and sees the mess, it will just repeat the whole process over again.

Simple.

I clapped my hands. Shadows fell across each corpse and encompassed their form before dragging them against the walls and dissolving them. Rather than become liquid, they all turned to shadow. Once those shadows faded, it hit.

I covered my mouth, yet it still forced its way out of me, getting all over my hands.

I ran into the nearest room. It would have been locked, but I needed to get in to feel better. Inside, it was empty. If I needed it to be empty, it would be. In fact, it was a restroom.

I coughed up the contents into the sink. It spilled forth until the sink was clogged up with the thick, red liquid. I turned on the faucet, watched it all wash down the drain. Some traces remained on the rims of the sink. Seemed I couldn’t get rid of it all. Alas, I should have known.

After I washed my hands and wiped my mouth, I left the room. There was still much work to do and even as my body continued to punish me, I would continue forward.

Let’s see: we’ve encountered nothing and no one had tried to stop us. In fact, we encountered no one as well. Did it bode well? Unwell?

“Hm...should I say the ‘too quiet’ line?” I wondered aloud.

“No,” Coriander stopped me. “Because we have nothing to worry about.”

Wow, she sounded rather confident. More than usual. She was usually all “assess the reality of the situation! You’re going in blind, you idiot!”

“Don’t we got a ton to worry about? Aren’t you going to tell me how we got no plan, no idea where we’re going, and no weapons?”

She laughed. “Look at you, the great and mighty Velvet! For once it seems you need me!”

“Actually, yes.”

“WHAT?! WHAT’S WITH THAT ‘ACTUALLY’?!”

She regained composure. “Anyway, as I was saying,” she grabbed that little cube thing that was her workstation from out of her pocket. “Behold!”

She clicked.

...Nothing happened.

“Huh? That’s not right.”

She clicked again. I looked down at it.

“It should work! I know it should work!”

Her triumphant demeanor faded to one of frustration.

“No! I can’t be powerless! Not like this! Come on!”

I checked my phone. Not only no signal, but no power as well. I didn’t expect a signal. As for me keeping a phone, not to worry; it was a burner from years ago. It would never have service on it, anyway.

“There’s no power.”

“What?!” She looked at me.

“Our devices have no power here.”

“What then? How is the enemy able to use electronics?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. They’re either using a different energy source, or they generate their power inside. That’s my only guess right now until I can figure out more.”

“I don’t want to be useless...I’m nothing…” she started muttering, her demeanor dropped. “If I can’t build...if I can’t prove myself…”

I placed my hand on her shoulder. “Let me correct you: we have nothing right now, but we are not nothing.”

“Not you, me,” she thought she was correcting me.

“You don’t have to prove a thing to me! I know you’re not useless, you’re not nothing! And before you say it, no! You aren’t a burden!” I took her hand and put it on my chest. “And neither am I, so forget about all that negativity! We’re going to work together, we’ll protect each other, and we’ll both be badass!”

I took a deep breath. My voice shook the whole way through. I was so afraid of her emotions running too high. That if she were to have a breakdown, it would start up again. But there was nothing. Instead, she smiled.

“You’re right. It’s just that ever since this morning…”

She leaned in closer and broke down.

“I’ve been feeling strange. Like, I really feel better than this. But it’s so loud, and different from before.”

“How?”

“I want to be happy, but it doesn’t feel like I can. It’s not what you think – I’m not afraid of what would happen if I was, rather it feels like it’s missing.”

I wasn’t sure if that was better or worse for her, but there was something else.

“You said the word.”

“Oh fuck. I did?”

She looked around. “I’m fine.”

She blinked, another pause, and then reached over for a tight hug.

“I’m fine,” she cried. “But I’m not. I’m scared. It’s like deep down, I’m so glad to be okay and not alone, but it’s so loud. Deep down, I know I can still be. I think it will just take some time before I can still express myself fully.”

I nodded. I didn’t understand, but I think she was more aware of herself than she used to be. So, in a way, it felt like I knew, too.

“It will take some time, but I know you’ll get there.”

She let go and nodded as well.

“I’m still going to make your life a living hell,” she grinned. Wow, she recovered fast.

“See? You have a use after all.”

“Hey! Just for that I’m going to bite your neck later!” She shot back.

Then, an alarm sounded. Flashing red lights illuminated the halls where we stood.

“Crap! Were we spotted?” I cried out.

“How the hell should I know? I was lost in the moment! This is your fault!”

I looked around. There had to be some place for us to go. Near us were a couple of doors. Both of which looked to be the type to require key cards.

“Got anything to hack a door?” I asked.

“No! Isn’t that your thing?” I looked around. No vents. If there were, I could’ve told her to crawl into one of those while I ran off. That would have at least bought her some time. Hmm...the ceiling? I couldn’t see a ceiling. It just looked like a big, black, nothing. I was sure there was one, otherwise we’d be suffocating in the vastness of space (or the vastness of a space between spaces?) but it must have been so tall that it was out of view.

“I got it: we run.”

“They’ll kill us both if they catch us, moron!” She shouted.

“’Til death do us part, right?”

“I didn’t think you meant we were literally going to die!”

We ran, though, and as luck would have us, we found a bathroom.

“Well, thank goodness a place like this has public restrooms!” I rejoiced.

“Is that really such a good place to hide?”

“Pick a stall and hide in it!”

We hid and heard the running of what must have been guards or soldiers or something pass us by. After we could no longer hear the sound of movement, I lifted my head up above the stall and saw nothing.

“They’re gone.”

“Psst, Velvet. I wanna do something reckless,” Coriander emerged from her hiding stall and whispered.

“What? Isn’t that what I should be saying to you?”

“I wanna follow those guards.”

“Really? I’d have just bolted in the opposite direction, so I guess even I’m not that reckless.”

She shook her head. “They ignored the bathroom. I bet if they were really surveying the area as a whole for intruders, they would have looked in here.”

It clicked.

“I get it. They’re only interested in one place. So if we follow their trail…”

She nodded. “Worse comes to worst, we’ll just use one of the guards as a human shield, then steal their uniform or armor.”

I burst into laughter. “Just like old times!’

We walked, not ran, in the direction that the guards went. I imagined they were all some super tough mercenary types. Or, they could have been like the Prinnies. Either way, we had to be careful.

“When we come across one,” I turned my head to her. “We’ll both jump them at once, that way they’ll be sure to go down. Got it?”

“Yeah, and then we loot them while they’re down. I bet they got keycards on them and have special permissions to get into certain rooms. So we’ll find a room with a buncha hardware that I can take apart and repurpose, then I’ll be ready to take on anyone!”

Whether things would work out that way or not, I was glad she had some motivation again.

“Yeah, and I bet I could probably find some software and run a buncha malicious bugs throughout the headquarters,” I added. Then, we bumped into someone.

“Aaa!” We scrambled. “We’ll kill you! We’ll beat you senseless!” Coriander yelled and got into fighting position.

“No! It’s just me!” We looked up at who we bumped into. It was just Verse. “Please, I’m fragile!”

“Finally! Glad we found you, now we can get back to working as a group!” I snapped my fingers and smile.

“I still think I should be allowed to get one punch in. Just one,” Coriander growled.

I ignored Coriander’s remark for the moment.

“So did you see those guards?”

She shook her head. “They must have gone in a different direction.”

I let out a sigh of relief and laughed. “Thank goodness! You’d have been no good in a situation like that! You couldn’t even hurt a fly!”

“Indeed…” She looked away and muttered. “Did you...er...did you see Juniper anywhere?”

“Oh crap! No!” I totally forgot about her. Well, to be honest, I forgot about Verse, too. “You think the guards killed her?”

I shouldn’t have said that out loud. I expected her to snap. I think I would’ve been distressed to have something suggested like that to me, as well.

“Let’s hope not,” was all she said instead. “This is a dangerous place.”

“Yeah!” Coriander jumped in. “So enough funny business!”

“Velvet,” she looked down at me. “Hold out your hand.”

“Oh wow. Um. Just so you know, I kind of have a thing going here with Cori...and...er...um…”

“Quit it! Just do it!”

I looked away and cupped my hands together. I felt like some beggar kid asking for some coin or bread. What dropped in my hand was a small device.

“A radio?” I looked puzzled. “I mean, it’s better than nothing. Where’d you get it, anyway?”

“I found it. On the ground.” There she went again, being so suspicious and vague.

“Maybe it’s better if I don’t ask…”

“I wasn’t lying when I said I was fragile. But I’m not harmless, either.”

“Wait! That means!” I just pieced it together. Why was I so slow when it came to her? “You DID come across those guards, and you even held your own, didn’t you?”

She nodded. “But let’s not go into details. Keep that radio on you, that way we can keep in contact.”

“What do you mean? You’re just leaving again?!”

“Indeed.”

“See?! This is why we can’t trust you!” Coriander shoved past me and pointed at Verse. “I’ve lived with Velvet long enough to know when someone’s hiding things! If you can’t be honest, why should either of us take you at face value?”

Where was this anger coming from?

“You better tell us, no, you better tell ME why you can’t stay with us!”

“I have to find her,” Verse replied.

“Big deal! We could look for her as a group! Didn’t you say it would be easier to keep us all safe that way?”

“Now that she’s run off, she could be anywhere. I have to find her before she runs into something she shouldn’t. This is something only I can do, but I promise, I’ll return to help you if I can.”

“If? What would prevent you?”

“I don’t know yet. But as I said before, this place is worse than somewhere that you could die in. They could still use your body, experiment on you. I don’t want it to come to that. I’m afraid for her. Don’t you realize there was a reason I didn’t want to bring anyone here?”

“Okay. Fine. I’ll take it for now. Go.”

Coriander still seemed pissed, for reasons I wasn’t really sure of. To think I could read her so well.

Just as Verse walked away, Coriander stomped up to her again. She grabbed Verse’s sleeve and yanked her down. “One last thing before I let you go,” Coriander fumed under muffled breaths. “You’re going to look me in the eye and answer me one last thing.”

“Why do you feel so entitled to my answer?” Verse replied. I was pretty sure I had no place getting involved. I’d walk away if I could, but given where I was…

“You really do have something to do with Etna, don’t you?”

I froze.

“I assure you, I’m human.”

“Don’t evade the question!” She tugged tighter. “Velvet was right to suspect something when we first met you, didn’t she?”

“I –”

“Don’t play dumb! Just answer. Yes? Or no?”

“Yes.”

My heart pounded, my eyes widened. “Y-yes?”

So all this time were we hanging out with the enemy? Was everything just an act? No. I didn’t need to have so many doubts. I already knew she was putting on a face half of the time, but I thought I saw the real her that night when she got drunk. I thought she really was someone well-meaning.

“But so does she. That’s why I wanted to prevent her from being here.”

“So that means you knew her before, then, too?”

“Different versions, yes. It’s better to think we don’t know each other. She deserves a better life. That’s why I need to find her and bring her back to you guys. She’ll be safer with the likes of you two.”

Coriander let go. “Very well.”

Verse stood back up and wiped off her sleeve.

“Wait!” I called for her. “I have a question as well.”

“Hm?” Verse faced me.

“If you knew Juniper before, then what was she to you?”

“Just an innocent life who happened to pass by.”

“I understand. Good luck, okay?” Good luck? What was I saying? She could have been evil, just like Etna. “I mean, get good!”

Coriander nudged me.

“What was that for?”

“Really? ‘Get good’?”

I shrugged as I continued to watch the one who called herself Verse fade from view. “I don’t think she’s evil, even if she doesn’t think she’s very good.”

“I never said she was evil, I’m just questioning your choice of parting words. What do you think this is, a video game?”

I didn’t have a rebuttal. We continued on, but Coriander turned to me.

“You should have went with your gut.”

“What?”

“You had the right idea when you thought she was Etna.”

“But she isn’t, is she?”

“I think it’s a good-twin, evil-twin thing.”

“How did you even know she might be related?”

“I had my suspicions, but I had little evidence to go off of besides looks and I already knew you decided the two weren’t related by looks alone, so you dismissed the whole thing. Then, this morning pretty much confirmed it.”

“What do you mean?”

“When she said she wanted to help me, then I fell and started to feel empty, that wasn’t a dream.”

“I thought –”

“I know. It’s not that it hurt, it’s that she wasn’t honest about it. That’s what gets me. Like I said, I don’t know what she did or how she did it, and I don’t think she had evil intentions, but it was similar to the types of things Etna could do.”

“Is that all?” It wasn’t that I doubted her reasoning, rather, it still seemed loose at best. Too easily explainable.

“There’s something else: I remember from my past life as Mavis, right before I passed through that elevator, there was something Etna said. She probably thought it would go unnoticed. She said that she thought she saw her other half or something, but that it was probably just an illusion and her other half may never show up in this universe. It would be real fucking convenient if I forgot all about that, but I didn’t.”

“Wow. You remembered that little detail? You must have a terrific memory.”

She shook her head. “The only reason I remembered the discussion with Etna before I became a new person was because she allowed me to remember. I think her reasoning was that remembering such painful things would torture me. Even when she seems her nicest, she’s really a fan of the illusion of mercy over anything else.”

“But you managed to make it through all that and you’re a better person in spite of her trickery,” I reassured her.

“I already know that, you idiot.”

“So ‘Verse’, or whoever she might be, is her ‘other half’?”

“I don’t know the details, obviously. Don’t you know Etna used to be human?”

She made it sound like such an obvious fact. I knew all those things about the angel and the outbreak and there she was, finding a way to one-up me.

“Well, she’s an AI, so that’s a little facetious. More, her appearance was based on someone who was human. Apparently her personality was, too, but I think only initially. I think she developed a personality of her own.”

“Ah, classic rogue AI stories.”

“The things I know for sure, I only learned from memories of my past life when I would dig things up in secret at Area 51. The things I pieced together just now was built on a hunch, but she admitted it, so no longer just a hunch.”

“See? How can you think you’re useless when you figured all that out? I couldn’t even figure that out.”

“You’re right, but I still don’t know what we’re going to do going forward.”

“Neither do, but I’ll just do what I always do and improvise!” I gave a thumbs up and winked.

“Hell yeah! We’re going to kick some ass!”

There were still many things I didn’t understand, like what Juniper had to do with everything.

I thought she was just any other person, although much kinder than I could ever hope to be. She’s normal, though, isn’t she? She’s ordinary. She’s innocent.

I decided to leave things be, as in the end, Coriander and I still had our mission. There may be more secrets about Verse yet, but I at least trusted that she was sincere when she said she wished to protect Juniper.

Medical Department. That was my destination.

...If only I thought to ask where that was! Ugh! I could already imagine how it would go if I returned to his office, though:

“Hey Dr. Phil, where’s the Medical Department?”

“You’re on your own. Here’s your L.”

Yeah, no. I couldn’t go back and ask for directions. It couldn’t be too hard, anyway, right? Besides, maybe I could find some other cool places to check out along the way.

That was the spirit! All I had to do was keep that in mind and everything would go A-OK!

Not even too long after walking down the halls, I stumbled upon a large set of lab doors with the title over it ‘Morale Research’.

“Huh. That sounds interesting.”

Not only that, but the door was open just a crack. That was all the permission I needed to enter. Still, I tried to be quiet about it. I opened the door a little wider, squeezed in, then closed it, but not all the way, to give off the impression that it was just how whoever left it as.

Inside, I was amazed by all the gadgets and devices. There was a large screen on the far end of the wall to my right, though it was turned off. There were all these things on the ceiling, as well.

“Whoa!” I exclaimed. “Wonder what all this was used for.”

As cool as it all was, it looked old. Not outdated, just like it had all been used before, but not in a long time.

“Curious? I could tell you, if you want,” came the voice of a man.

I turned around to see who entered: a somewhat paper thin man of average height who donned a tuxedo and monocle, but if I had to guess, he was probably only in his 20s or 30s. Then again, if he worked here, it was hard to tell what constituted age, anyway. His hair was a slicked back brown, and he smiled and kept his eyes closed.

I wondered if I could talk my way out like I did with Dr. Phil, but it may not have been so easy.

“Is that really okay? This isn’t my department and I know they like everyone to stick to their own departments and I just got distracted so sorry I think I should go and –”

“Nonsense,” he sounded warm and pleasant. Maybe most members of The Flashbulb weren’t so bad. “I never was much for those rules. Besides, this department was recently shut down after it failed to give the intended results.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. What was wrong about it?”

He walked over to one of the devices in the room and pat it. “This here was a generator, used to give life to the electronics here. The intended purpose of this department was really one of the more simpler ones: just a desire to improve the overall mental wellbeing of humanity. But there were some missteps along the way. Its leader lacked proper care for humanity, something which we didn’t expect. Her methods were a little...forceful, you could say.”

“Well-intentioned, but bad methods?”

“You could say that. Or maybe the methods were fine, but the lack of aftercare was atrocious. Still, the damage was done, and although I was disappointed with the situation, it wasn’t my department, and the overseers of the project ceased to exist.” He ran his finger through the generator. “That is why you and I are able to be here despite not belonging to this department.”

“Do you think it could have worked with more humane methods?” I wondered.

He stood up and grinned. “Of course I do!”

“So maybe…” I put a finger on my chin. “Someone could take what they learned on what went wrong and create something better that actually helps people.”

He clapped his hands. “I’m so glad you agree, Juniper!”

“I...what…” How? I didn’t tell him my name.

I jolted and took a step back, a nerve having been struck. Although I couldn’t place why, I felt a sudden feeling of being on edge.

“Such a shame the other one didn’t show up. I was hoping we could start over and just adjust things slightly. Ah, well. Maybe it’s for the best.”

“What are you talking about?” I spat. “I don’t even know you! How do you even know my name?”

“Ah, you see, this is your first time meeting me, but I’ve met you several times over. Although I had always been an observer, I’ve seen the potential you possess! You can provide the care humanity needs, as the ruler of the revamped Morale Department. You may be lacking in intelligence, but that’s only a minor detail. Intelligence can be programmed. It’s the personality that matters most.”

“Are you crazy?! I was just curious about this room! I don’t want to be some ruler of humanity!”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a stick, which he then expanded until it became more like a steel rod.

“Don’t worry, you will,” he walked toward me. I started to back away, but I didn’t see where I was going, and soon found myself against a wall. “Once I kill you and transfer your consciousness to the AI.”

I watched as he raised the rod over his head and I knew he was about to swing down. I should have fought back or something, but I was too scared, and instead held my arms over my head to try to protect myself. As he swung, I started to think that my arms wouldn’t protect me and it really would be the end. After everything, I just had to let my curiosity get the better of me, and now I was too afraid to act.

Instead, I heard him grunt.

I uncovered my arms and opened my eyes to see a familiar figure in front of me with her legs bent and blocking the rod with her hand. It looked different, however, like her fingers had become talons.

“What were you doing here?!” I heard her yell at me.

I was at a loss for words. I fell to the floor, in shock.

“Never mind that, you should go! This place isn’t for you!”

It looked like she was still struggling against the rod.

“Just in time,” he laughed. “How poetic. Once again, you come here to defend that which you love.”

She pushed forward and got him to drop the rod from his hand. He too was pushed back, and soon, she stood up.

“Verse? Is that you?”

She ignored me.

“Love? You think this is about love? I’ve thrown that away long ago!” Her hair changed to a crimson red and her skin grew more tan, like it was burning up. “This is about protecting the innocent!”

I didn’t understand what was going on at all, and I knew it was dangerous, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t bring myself to move. All I could do was watch the scene unfold between the two and wonder how I factored into all this.

#happiness overload #dramedy #scifi #horror #stories #fiction #yeah im kind of just embracing the dramedy label now #action #badass #juniper #etna #morale #cliffhanger #hopefully the end of this chapter is a good spot to end on #it did get pretty long #and the next chapter follows right after

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fremedon · 3 years

Text

I posted 554 times in 2021

163 posts created (29%)

391 posts reblogged (71%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 2.4 posts.

I added 416 tags in 2021

#brickclub - 171 posts

#other people's meta - 74 posts

#barricades - 37 posts

#barricadescon - 29 posts

#les mis con - 25 posts

#fic by me - 20 posts

#retrobricking - 16 posts

#a heap of dreams - 15 posts

#asked and answered - 15 posts

#ahod - 14 posts

Longest Tag: 128 characters

#i absolutely headcanon him as writing some piece of monarchist glurge before he learned to make his satire visible at 1000 paces

My Top Posts in 2021

Brickclub 3.4.1, Almost Historic, 3/?

Where do you even start with Combeferre?

All of which is to say--while she can fight me over “chimeric,” I do like what Donougher does with “the good must be innocent”:

33 notes • Posted 2021-09-07 19:32:17 GMT

OMG we have a website!

41 notes • Posted 2021-05-16 20:27:42 GMT

Brickclub 3.4.1, Almost Historic, 2/?

I don’t even know where to start with the character introductions. I feel like I need to have A Definitive Post on each of the Amis, and that’s clearly impossible. And unnecessary, since almost every chapter from here to the sewers is going to include some Amis meta.

So I think in most of these I’m going to fall back on something that’s been on my mind a lot--the space between what we’re told about characters as we meet them, and what we later see.

Donougher is not at her best in this chapter, and “sacerdotal and warlike nature” is rather clunky and “both ministering and militant” even clunkier, but I like how she unpacks that in the following clause: “in the immediate context, a soldier of democracy; above and beyond present circumstances, a priest of the ideal.”

Hugo tells us three times, in slightly different wordings, that Enjolras is a priest AND a soldier, he’s both things, both sets of images are in play. But the second part of that tends to get lost or elided in translations, and it’s important--he’s a soldier now, because the moment calls for soldiers; in other circumstances, he’d still be a priest.

(And tied to that--he’s a soldier of democracy, but a priest of the ideal; democracy is the immediate battle, but not the end goal.)

(This is why Javert, the other character who gets the priest imagery to this extent, doesn’t get the military imagery--Javert doesn’t have goals.)

I’m going to keep coming back to “priest of the ideal”; there’s a lot to unpack. In this introduction, it’s largely connected to Enjolras’s celibacy. But I feel like all the classical references are priming us to remember, later, that celibacy is not a universal requirement for priesthood and only incidental to the job.

A priest, above all, is someone who offers sacrifices.

Back to the classical refs--I’m going to drop in TLB’s meta on the bare bosom of Evadne, which unpacks most of them.

I am still trying to figure out why Antinoüs, though, besides as a facecast. He works as a facecast because Hadrian commissioned umpteen thousand statues of him when he had him deified, and I feel like there’s something going on there with Grantaire’s “What fine marble!” and his story about the statue beloved by Brutus--that same juxtaposition of worship and objectification, of in one motion being raised to a god and reduced to a thing. Of being something you believe in with à instead of en.

But he’s Antinoüs, farouche. He may look like a god or a statue--but he’s not going to go along with being treated like one.

49 notes • Posted 2021-09-06 19:35:58 GMT

Today’s brickclub reading sent me down a wikipedia spiral on bog bodies (it made sense at the time) and I cannot believe that people are still repeating, let alone taking seriously, any speculation about reasons bog bodies were found naked.

*gets up on soapbox*

*bangs on saucepan*

MOST BOG BODIES ARE PARTIALLY OR COMPLETELY NAKED

BECAUSE PEAT BOGS DISSOLVE PLANT TISSUES AND PRESERVE ANIMAL ONES

THAT’S ALL

You read a little further down and every time, “naked” gets corrected to “naked except for a fur armband,” or “except for a leather belt,” or a wool cape or some other accessory. Because everything they were wearing made from linen, hemp, nettle cloth, bark, or straw was EATEN BY THE BOG.

Like, how much cotton are you wearing now, compared to every other kind of material? If someone threw you in a bog today, the cotton would be gone, and APPARENTLY someone would be speculating about the ritual uses of the spandex in your panties, the underwires of your bra, and the rivets in your jeans (and then admitting six pages later that you were also wearing leather shoes--oddly, with no laces or socks).

Want to speculate about the social / economic / ritual reasons someone might not have been wearing wool, leather, or fur? Go right ahead; I am all ears. Want to speculate about why the body was clearly stripped naked before it went into the bog? GO TO THE BACK OF THE CLASS.

/psa

67 notes • Posted 2021-07-16 17:43:38 GMT

Announcing a new Discord server, 2460Con, for the purpose of planning and launching an online-only Les Miserables convention in 2022: https://discord.gg/PJApYbCbnU. We, the inception committee, will be holding a series of public planning meetings on the server to gauge interest, refine plans for programming and guests, finalize the dates, and recruit volunteers and members of the convention committee (concom).

The initial planning meeting is Sunday, 17th January at 5:00 pm UTC (see when this is in your timezone). If you think you would have any interest in attending an online Les Mis con, come join us! We’re looking for volunteers at all levels, and for input from anyone who might attend.

Even if you’re not sure about attending the con, we’d love to see you on the server to chat about Les Mis. Are you a fan—of the Brick, the musical, or other adaptations? Are you a media fan who enjoys Les Mis (or had a fannish fling in 2013) and would like to find out more? Are you interested in attending or presenting programming on history, literature, media studies, fan studies, translation studies, or any other relevant disciplines in our academic track? (Independent scholars at all levels are welcome and are encouraged to submit.) Then join us at https://discord.gg/PJApYbCbnU!

Feel free to signal-boost the link to anyone who might be interested--organizing a great convention means pulling together as wide and diverse a membership as we can.

The Inception Committee:

Ellen Fremedon @greenleaf-starbright @synteis @badlesmisimaginesofficial @midautumnnightdream @byjuxtaposition

230 notes • Posted 2021-01-11 20:04:22 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

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alphawave-writes · 5 years

Text

Predilections (NSFW Sigrold)

Summary: It's Thursday night, which means it's time for Siebren and Harold's weekly 'bedroom activities'. But it's different this time. Back on Earth, they've got access to a few more toys, and Harold's eager to have Siebren try them out on him.

Read it here or find it on AO3. For more Sigrold content, check out my Sigrold discord server or find me on twitter at alphawave13

If someone were to ask Siebren de Kuiper what his plans were for the night, he’d say he had no idea. And this was true, because he had made no concrete plans at all, because he already had a schedule of events in place. He was going to read a few journal articles on Schwarzschild black hole metrics, make himself some lentil soup for dinner, have a shower, and go to sleep. Like every professor, his life was carefully structured, with any plans set out ahead of time on his calendar. That night, there was nothing. It was just going to be a typical night at home. Just him, the soothing melodies of the Omnic pianist Virtuose, and his research.

The presence of Harold Winston at his front door was just the first of many spanners in the works.

Harold’s cheeks and nose were red from the frost, his body bundled up into an excessive amount of sweaters and coats. In his gloved hand was a rather large but cheap tote bag made of canvas. Harold’s smile is always warm, but when they’re alone, there’s always a hint of mischief.

His smile only widens when he sees Siebren’s confusion.

“What are you doing here?” Siebren asked.

“Didn’t we say we were going to meet today?”

“Today is Wednesday.”

Harold’s brows furrowed. “It’s Thursday, Siebren. Date night?”

Siebren paused, fumbled around his pockets to retrieve his phone, and checked the calendar. It’s indeed Thursday, which meant that this was Thursday night. And every Thursday night on the dot, he had only one thing on his calendar. Make love to Dr. Harold Winston.

It had become a schedule for him and Harold to make love on Thursdays, not necessarily because Thursday nights were one of the few nights in which they’re definitely free, but because their sexual desires seem to awaken on a weekly basis, peeking on Thursdays for some inexplicable reason. But that was back on Horizon One, and their schedules back on Earth were a bit different now while they’re on vacation. Siebren had offered his apartment to Harold when they both touched down in The Hague, but Lucheng Interstellar had already gifted Harold an expense-free hotel room near the city center.

Now that Siebren knew what the day held, he felt the sparks of desire flicker in his chest. His mind was a mess, his thoughts flying from Pavlov’s theory of classical conditioning to the frigid chill coming from outside to Harold’s bedroom eyes, gazing intently at his lips.

“You’re still up for tonight, are you, Siebren?” Harold asked.

A daring little smirk peeked from Siebren’s lips, returning Harold’s stare with a smoldering gaze. “I don’t know,” Siebren purred. “Why don’t you come on in and find out?”

Harold’s smile widened just a fraction as he crossed the threshold. Siebren closed the front door behind him, watching and waiting as Harold removed his coat and jacket and hung it carefully on Siebren’s coat hanger. Harold turned around, and without a word, he closed the distance between their two bodies, grabbed Siebren’s face with both hands and gave a long, passionate kiss.

It was far too easy to submit to Harold’s kiss. He was precise with his words and lethal with his tongue. He knew all the right places to attack to make Siebren weak and wanting. A flick of the tongue up to the roof of his mouth, then the vibrations of a soft moan, then his tongue caressed Siebren’s in a playful jab. It’s totally unprecedented, and the fact it caught him by surprise made the pleasure all the more potent.

Harold was breathless at the end of it, smiling ever so seductively. He was observing him, gauging him like he would gauge the gorillas back on Horizon One in order to determine if they were fit and willing for treatment. Siebren’s sure the experiment Harold had in mind right now was of a far different nature, if the flames in his eyes said anything.

Harold’s hand was on Siebren’s chest, fingertips tracing over the rough material of his sweater. “Do you have anywhere you need to be tonight?”

“N-no,” Siebren shivered.

“Tomorrow morning?”

Siebren smirked knowingly. “What do you have in mind?”

“It depends on what you feel like doing tonight. We can do what we normally do,” Harold suddenly put his hand down to open the tote bag, “or you can indulge me in something a bit…kinkier.”

Siebren’s eyes widened as he glanced at the contents of the bag, which revealed themselves to be sex toys of various makes and description. Some of them looked innocent enough, like the pair of fluffy handcuffs, but others were a lot more risqué, like the fleshlight toward the side. And then there were a few other things that were a complete mystery to him, especially the piece of fabric folded at the bottom.

“You came here with all this in your bag? On public transport?” Siebren asked incredulously.

“We don’t have to use them, Siebren. I don’t want to do this if you’re not going to be into it.” Harold blushed brightly. “I’ll be happy with anything, just as long as it’s you.”

Siebren knew enough about Harold’s predilections to know that Harold meant it sincerely. He’s made it clear in the past that he liked a bit of experimentation in the bedroom, and that he was a firm believer of giving as much as he received. If Siebren wasn’t comfortable or ready for what Harold had in mind, he was more than happy to go with what Siebren wanted.

Siebren glanced at his computer, still on the physics database. His empty soup bowl sat still on his kitchen table. Harold was staring at him with the intensity of a black hole, waiting for the both of them to push past the event horizon and get sucked in to a place where time and space were no longer linear.

Siebren suddenly smirked as he tugged Harold forward by the collar of his turtleneck, pulling him to his lone bedroom. He didn’t turn his head to see how Harold reacted, but he heard a barely repressed giggle of excitement from behind and he figured he must have done something right. If he was being totally honest to himself, he was also excited.

He flicked the lights on with one hand, still holding Harold’s collar in the other. His bedroom was a mess, papers strewn over his desk, his bed unmade, but the curtains were closed and his pile of dirty clothes was localized to one corner near his wardrobe and Harold was nearby, here for him to touch and taste as he pleased. He pulled Harold in for a searing open-mouthed kiss before pushing him onto the bed. Harold was overeager, stripping Siebren’s turtleneck sweater far too quickly, discarding it on the bed. Before he can lift the shirt off, Siebren placed a firm hand on his shoulder.

“Strip,” Siebren commanded. “Slowly.”

Harold’s eyes flickered with fire, and then he nodded. Carefully, he took the glasses off his face and placed them by his side. Smiling in approval, Siebren let his hand drift away, taking a step back from the bed to watch. Harold slid his hands down his chest and stomach, resting on the edge of his sweater. He slid it up, pulling it up and over his shoulders, flinging it off. He must have just realized that Siebren was watching, because his cheeks flushed all of a sudden, a nervous smile spreading over his face.

Siebren loved it when Harold stripped for him. It’s when Harold was at his most vulnerable, when the haze of lust hadn’t yet overcome his sensibilities. Siebren loved the soft gasp that escaped Harold’s lips when Siebren began to touch himself, palming his half-hard dick over his pants, giving Harold a taste of what to come. There was something so erotic about the shake of Harold’s hands, the silent reprimanding he’d give himself as he forced himself to slow down, to move at a slower, more seductive tempo.

When Harold got the rhythm right, it was intoxicating. When Harold stared at him with the tiniest flutter of his eyelids, it was maddening. He slipped the shoes off his feet and slid his pants down one leg at a time. He pulled his legs up closer to his chest as he finally, achingly, pulled his boxers down.

Siebren’s finger reached for his own sweater, ready to give Harold a show of his own, but there’s a call for him to wait. “Stay clothed,” Harold said, eyes flicking down to Siebren’s bulge. “It’ll be sexier that way.”

Siebren raised his eyebrows, smiling softly. “You know, you never told me what you want me to do to you.”

“I think I’ll let you make that decision.” It was a dare, edging him to be creative.

Siebren flipped the bag open and retrieved the items one by one. As he correctly guessed, it included a fleshlight and a pair of fuzzy handcuffs, which, funnily enough, still had the price tag on it. He ripped it away and peered at the remaining contents. Harold had also brought lube and condoms—an unnecessary action because they both knew Siebren had plenty in his bedroom drawer, but it was still appreciated. Then there was the final item that Siebren couldn’t identify.

He held it up in the light, unfurling it for the both of them to see. It was a long, rectangular piece of black cotton fabric. Harold licked his lips anxiously. It seemed this item in particular was the one Harold desired the most.

“A blindfold?”

Harold grinned. “Thought it’d be a nice little touch.”

“You barely can see as it is. What difference will this do?”

“Hopefully there will be some difference. Otherwise I wasted 2 euro on it.” Harold’s hand slowly crept down his chest, pumping his dick slowly. “Maybe you can make it worth the price tag.”

Siebren knew Harold was teasing him, but seeing Harold touch himself like that made his breathing stop for just a second. Siebren sat down on the edge of the bed and roughly pulled Harold onto his lap, smirking as Harold gasped into his neck. Harold rocked his hips slowly, his erection pressing into Siebren’s belt, staining his shirt. The friction was light, dulled by the fabric of his pants, but it was maddening. He could only imagine how much more intense it must be for Harold, naked and wanting, uninhibited by stubborn clothes.

Siebren leaned forward so his lips grazed over the shell of Harold’s ear. “Is that a challenge?”

Harold chuckled lightly, a little flighty thing that fluttered in his chest. “What if it was?”

“Then I’d have to show you what happens when you challenge me.”

Siebren nibbled lightly on Harold’s ears, teeth tugging on his earlobes with the utmost care. His lips flowed down Harold’s neck, a trail of kisses left in his wake. His fingers pressed firmly on the compliant flesh, one hand wrapped around Harold’s back while the other rested on Harold’s thigh, forcing him to stay still.

Harold grunted in light frustration as he tried to rock his hips once more, to no avail. Siebren’s hand is firm, his fingers tapping rhythmically at his inner thigh.

Harold’s eyelids fluttered. “Come on, bǎobèi.”

“Now, now,” Siebren laughed, licking a slow stripe down Harold’s clavicle. “You can be patient, can’t you?”

Harold groaned. Siebren chuckled into Harold’s skin as his hand wrapped around Harold’s half-hard member, stroking it slowly.

It was beautiful how Harold reacted, head tilted to the stars, mouth agape, a low groan spilling from his lips. He couldn’t count how many times they have been intimate together like this, but it never got old seeing Harold like this, skin slick with sweat, eyes dazzling with the heat of a solar flare. Siebren could feel his own erection growing, tenting his pants, a dark flush creeping up his cheeks. Any other night he would lean his head down into Harold’s lap, nose brushing over Harold’s cock as he devoured his entire length, but tonight was about Harold’s desires, Harold’s fantasies. There were plenty of opportunities to do that later.

The hand stroking Harold’s cock went lower, swiping a thumb over Harold’s puckered hole. His eyes widen slightly when he felt a distinct wetness on his fingertips. The unmistakable texture of lube.

Siebren smirked at Harold, masking a microscopic shiver. “Eager, aren’t we?”

“If I let you do it, it’ll take us all night, wouldn’t it?” Harold smiled knowingly.

Siebren pressed his thumb in to the first knuckle, making Harold moan softly. He can’t deny that there was something undeniably erotic about Harold preparing himself for tonight. He wondered whether Harold used only his fingers or if he used toys to better open himself up. The slide of his thumb was almost too easy. He could feel his brain overheat as he imagined Harold work himself with a dildo as he thought about the ways Siebren could have him, moaning Siebren’s name so eagerly.

Siebren took his thumb out and pressed it to his bottom lip, dragging it down to give Harold a glimpse of his long, thick tongue. It was supposed to be a seduction move, but his eyes widen in surprise. The flavor is not at all what he expected. “Which one is this one?”

“Stroopwafel.”

Siebren stared at Harold.

“Don’t look at me like that. The store I went to get all these things had some pretty weird flavors,” Harold blushed. “Did you know there’s gravy flavoured lube? I’m not even kidding when I say this was the least weird flavor.”

Siebren made a mental note to tease Harold about stroopwafel flavoured lube at a later date. Right now, however, he scraped a bit more of the excess lube with two fingers and pressed them onto Harold’s lips. Harold took them into his mouth eagerly, his tongue swirling over his fingers before dipping into the sensitive webbing.

Siebren sucked in a breath. It was getting harder not to moan. Harold was so good with his tongue, and they both knew it. “Think of me when you prepared yourself?”

“No, I was thinking of the Eiffel tower.” He pressed a kiss to the center of Siebren’s palm. “Of course I was thinking about you.”

“Thinking about what we will do tonight?” Siebren licked his lips.

“I was thinking about how old you’ve gotten,” Harold teased, “but tonight’s activities certainly sprung to mind.”

Siebren can’t help the chuckle that escaped his lips. He nipped lightly on the sensitive flesh on Harold’s neck. “You know, for someone who gobbles romantic literature by the dozen, you sure don’t know how to be romantic.”

Harold giggled, cupping Siebren’s face in his two hands. “I love you too, Siebren.”

It’s those final words that ignite the fire inside Siebren. His hand went up to Harold’s chin, capturing his lips in his own.

Their heads tilted as their open mouths met, hot and wet. Tongues explored the cavern of each other’s mouths. Siebren knew all the places that Harold liked, his tongue pushing into his throat before flicking upward, the tip grazing over the roof of Harold’s mouth. Harold’s moan rumbled deep into Siebren’s throat, making him shiver.

His hands reached for the fuzzy handcuffs and tugged at the chain experimentally. He watched as Harold’s eyes flicker down, his tongue dragging a slow trail over his lips.

“Turn around,” Siebren breathed.

Obediently, Harold sat himself up and faced away from Siebren, leaning forward. He pressed his hands on his back, wrists together. Siebren smirked. Harold must be eager if he didn’t feel like playing games. He set the handcuffs on Harold’s wrists and turned the lock, pocketing the key in his pants.

Harold tugged experimentally at his bonds. They held strong, clattering metallically over his wrists. A microscopic shiver ran all the way down his back. Smiling to himself, Siebren felt for the black fabric of the blind fold and pressed the material to Harold’s eyes. He gasped in delight as Siebren tied it up into a tight knot, carefully checking to see it was not too tight or too loose.

Siebren put his hand in front of Harold’s face. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

After a few seconds, Harold answered, “Three?”

“One,” he smirked.

Harold huffed. “I hope it wasn’t the middle finger. I actually want some fucking to occur.”

Siebren chuckled lightly, watching as Harold tried to rock his hips to no avail. Without his hands to steady him, his attempts were shallow. Siebren stared at Harold’s back, twinkling with spots and moles. It was then that Siebren understood the appeal of the handcuffs. Harold couldn’t touch him, but more than that he couldn’t stop him. With the turn of a key, Harold gave all the power away to Siebren. He can touch and lick and kiss Harold as much as he liked. He could be as gentle or as rough as he wanted. He could enact his darkest fantasies and only the safeword could save Harold now.

Siebren smiled to himself as he placed a warm hand on Harold's hip. It was a good thing he was a gentle lover.

Seizing his opportunity, Siebren pressed light kisses on the moles dotting Harold’s back before sliding up, sucking on Harold’s shoulder until it bloomed rouge. Harold’s breathing hitched as he shivered, but he was otherwise quiet. Siebren made a few more hickeys on Harold’s shoulder and neck. They should be easily covered by a turtleneck, but there was no denying the dark thrill of knowing this will last beyond the morning, a signature left on willing flesh. He wondered if Harold will ever see them in the morning and be reminded of tonight? Will his fingers brush over the bruised flesh with tender care? Will he fantasise about tonight like Siebren had fantasised about their previous nights together?

Siebren let his lips drift away, waiting for his own breathing to calm. Images of him ravaging Harold into a complete wreck filter in his mind, tempting him. Harold was still in his lap, still and patient, hands clasped behind his back. An image of propriety in any other situation, in the realms of the bedroom it spoke silent words of Harold’s own desire.

“You want this,” Siebren breathed.

“And you don’t?” Siebren could practically hear the smirk in Harold’s voice.

“Of course I do, my love, but I want to hear you say it.” He sent a flurry of kisses down Harold’s spine. “I’m not as imaginative as you. Tell me what you want me to do to you. Tell me what you desire.”

Harold shivered, fingers twitching in his bound wrists. His head ducked down to his chest as his body blushed. “I…I want you to keep on kissing me there.”

Smiling, Siebren let his lips continue their feverish journey across Harold’s back. His lips curled into a smile on Harold’s skin, a silent plea for Harold to continue.

“I want you to…to bend me over something. Maybe the bed. O-or your desk. Just something.”

“My, you are kinky,” Siebren teased. With his hand on Harold’s wrists, he pulled them both up and adjusted their positions. He pushed Harold’s chest down to the edge of the bed, legs spread, ass held high. Siebren grinded his hips into Harold’s, biting his lip to stifle his moan. He couldn’t get as much friction with his pants still on, but he might be able to soon. His hands fumbled for his belt, then his zipper, as he pulled his pants down to his ankles. He took his throbbing cock out through the hole of his boxers, breathing heavily as the cool air hit his sensitive flesh.

Siebren took his time putting on the condom and lubing up his cock. With every second, Harold’s legs would quiver a little bit more. Soon, a frustrated sigh escaped Harold's lips. “Come on, tiger.”

“You haven’t told me what you want,” Siebren teased. His hand went up to cup Harold’s ass, kneading softly.

A groan spilled from Harold’s lips. “I-It’s so embarrassing to say.”

“Do you know what is embarrassing? Me, in the next ten seconds, when I have to waddle to you like a penguin with my pants around my ankles.”

Harold giggled quietly, sounding a little less nervous. “I guess it’s a bit silly.”

“It’s not silly,” Siebren said. His hand drifted down to Harold’s hips, rubbing in small circles. The persona he made for the bedroom was slipping, but he was sure Harold wouldn’t mind. “Don’t be embarrassed to tell me what you want. I want you to tell me all of your heart’s desires.”

“Then…what if I asked you to pleasure me with the fleshlight while you…” Harold trailed off.

“While I what?” Siebren asked quietly.

After a pregnant pause, Harold said, in a whisper, “…while you make love to me.”

Siebren took in a shuddery breath. He reached for the fleshlight and observed it carefully. It was clear, and rather inexpensive, with a clear plastic shell and a silicone inside. It was double ended, though he didn’t think that feature will be of use today. Seeing how Harold quivered beneath him, Siebren pressed a quick kiss to Harold’s spine. He squirted up his hand with lube and slid it up and down Harold’s cock, coaxing him back to full mast. One hand rubbed circles on Harold’s hips while the other positioned the fleshlight right on the tip of Harold’s cock.

Harold gasped obscenely, his whole body shaking. Siebren couldn’t remember Harold reacting like this, so desperate and eager. Tension rose up in his chest, constricting his breathing. There was a part of him that strived for perfection in every single thing that he did, to not accept failure or second best. Sometimes it was difficult to remind himself to relax, but tonight was not one of those nights. Harold was here, his head pressed onto the bed, lips pressed into a tight smile in eager anticipation. Despite Siebren's inexperience, no matter what he did, Harold was always satisfied with him. Tonight will be no exception.

The fleshlight finally slid down Harold’s cock. Siebren’s reward was a drawn-out moan that fizzled warmly in his groin. Tempted by Harold’s sounds, he continued on.

The pace of the fleshlight was even and steady, but not particularly slow. Despite appearances, Harold could handle things rough, not that their sexual escapades ever went so far as to push Harold's limits. Siebren liked to be rough with Harold, but only when Harold wanted to things to be rough. He didn’t need words to let him know what Harold wanted. The hypnotic way he gyrated his hips was all Siebren needed.

Harold’s fingers flexed and gripped, his wrists rattling the handcuffs. “Yes, Siebren, mmmm. Bit faster. Just a bit.”

Siebren quickened his pace slightly, making Harold shudder lewdly. Siebren bit his lip tighter to stop another groan, his hips jerking forward, grazing over the cleft of Harold’s ass. The contact lasted microseconds, but it sent a jolt of pleasure up his spine. His body sparked with white hot energy.

“Mijn schatje,” he shuddered.

“Do it,” Harold whispered, a gentle smile caressing his face. “I want you, bǎobèi. Want you so bad.”

There was the thump of Siebren’s racing heartbeat, the wet noises of his cock slowly penetrating Harold, and then a low, muffled cry. It was so hard to tell if it was his own voice, or if it was Harold’s, or maybe if perhaps this melody he could hear was in fact the noises of two voices harmonizing together. Pleasure surrounded his body in a warm glow, his nails digging into Harold’s hip as he slowly sunk deeper in.

There was the noise of another cry. Siebren knew it was his own because Harold’s fingers curled into fists behind his back, panting hard, desperate to touch.

“Yes, Siebren. Right there. I want it there.”

It took a few thrusts, but he knew he hit jackpot when Harold’s back arched again, a low mewl dripping from his lips down to the covers. Siebren buried himself as deep as he could and then withdrawing until only the tip was inside Harold, giving little room to breathe before he plunged in again. He repeated this, relishing in the gasps and moans that filled the air. These were different to the sounds Harold normally made when they made love. Darker, more desperate, more gratifying, more, more. It made Siebren’s head swim in ecstasy.

“You’ve wanted to do this for a while,” Siebren whispered into Harold’s ear. His chest was pressed onto Harold’s back, his other hand reaching for Harold's stomach. “What do you want me to do?”

Harold buried his face into the covers as best as he could, but it was no use. His smile was wide and nervous and breathtaking all at once. “Start moving. The fleshlight, I mean.”

Siebren couldn’t help but chuckle. The hand holding the fleshlight began to move once more, following the same unhurried tempo as his hips. “Is this good?”

“Yes, oh god, yes,” Harold said.

Harold began to move his hips in tandem with Siebren, thrusting forward as the fleshlight moved down his cock, then arching back as Siebren filled him completely. Only when Siebren was sure Harold was comfortable did he increase his pace, pressing faster, stroking faster. Harold felt so warm and tight on his cock and he was reacting so gorgeously, blushing madly as he breathed out stardust. Siebren’s mind was no longer on math and physics and science. It was all on Harold, wonderful Harold, gorgeous Harold.

It was getting hard to manage this pace, so Siebren flipped Harold onto his back and pulled his arms to rest over his head before hoisting his legs up onto Siebren’s shoulders.

“So sexy,” Siebren breathed.

Harold turned his head away. He bit lightly on his swollen lower lip to hide his bashful smile. He tightened deliciously around Siebren’s cock. “I-I’m not.”

“You are incredibly sexy, mijn schatje.” Siebren leaned over to press a kiss on Harold’s chin. “I wish you could see yourself through my eyes.”

Harold mewled weakly, rolling his hips feverishly. Beads of sweat rolled down Siebren’s forehead onto Harold’s warm stomach, making his skin glisten in the light. There were words to describe how sexy Harold was, but his mind couldn’t recall them. They didn’t exist in English, didn’t exist in Dutch, just existed as sensations Siebren felt on his body. The heat on his skin, Harold’s moans echoing seductively in his ears, the coil in his stomach winding tighter and tighter.

Siebren was so close to the edge, forgoing his gentle and slow pace for a rapid onslaught on Harold’s body, fucking Harold hard with both his cock and the fleshlight. Noises were growing in volume, the heat was rising. Harold’s fists are clenched above his forehead, sweet nothings gasped like they were oxygen. Siebren was so close, but it wasn’t quick enough, not fast enough. He wanted to cum with Harold. It had to be the same time.

His hand reached for the blindfold, pulling it down to Harold’s neck. Harold made a surprised sound before his brilliant dark eyes are brought to the light. He blinked harshly, tears stinging his eyes. With his free hand, Siebren wiped the tears away. When his eyes got accustomed to the light, Harold stared doe-eyed at Siebren with all the love of the universe. Siebren couldn’t help but stare back with wonder. Nothing seemed so beautiful as Harold’s flushing face, starry eyes gazing back at him, the fire of a thousand suns blazing in every little touch.

“I love you,” Harold shuddered.

“I love you too,” Siebren gasped. Light was filling his veins. His vocabulary was slipping away. English could never describe this swirling, ecstatic nothingness in his head. “Ik hou van je. Je bent zo knap. Je zorgt er voor dat ik een betere man wil zijn.”

Siebren pumped the fleshlight as fast as his hands would let him. His hips shoved as deep and hard into Harold as they could until finally he stilled as a deep, low groan left his lips, cumming deep inside Harold. Harold screamed in pleasure as he came into the fleshlight, staining the silicone inside a creamy white.

Siebren collapsed onto Harold for a few seconds, letting himself rest for a while before slowly pulling out. He fumbled for his pants, still wrapped around his ankles, and retrieved the key, unlocking Harold’s handcuffs. Sweat had stained his clothes, so he finally stripped them all off and joined Harold in the bed, discarding the condom quickly before moving up to rub Harold’s wrists with lotion. The skin was pink where the handcuffs bit into Harold's wrists, but they should fade away come morning light. At least, Siebren hoped so, for his peace of mind at the very least.

Harold smiled warmly upon him, tired but very much pleased. When Siebren was done massaging his wrists, he flipped the two of them over, kissing Siebren with his open mouth, his hands exploring Siebren’s body reverently.

It’s minutes before Harold finally separated, allowing them to breathe. Between gulps of air, Siebren chuckled, a hand running down Harold's matted hair. “How was it?”

“As fun as that was, I don’t think I’m the BDSM type,” Harold laughed. “I didn’t know how much I wanted to touch you until I couldn’t. Didn’t know how much I wanted to see you until I couldn’t. I think it'll be a while before I bring either of these bad boys out again. That is, unless you liked it.”

Siebren could feel the fire crackle beneath his skin as Harold licked his way down Siebren’s chest and stomach, lips hovering just above his quivering cock, still half-erect. It didn't show any signs of softening. In an instant, all of his fatigue vanished into the night.

“I’m assuming you’re up for round two?” Harold purred.

Siebren nodded sheepishly, eyes flickering down to his groin. “It would appear so.”

Harold laughed melodically. He shifted his body, sliding down so his head was resting on Siebren’s hip. He nuzzled into Siebren’s groin, his smile wicked in delight as his hand surrounded Siebren’s shaft. Siebren sucked in a breath, boneless and trapped under Harold’s piercing gaze.

“You better not have anything planned for tomorrow,” Harold whispered, stroking Siebren’s cock back to full mast, “because I don’t think either of us will be able to walk when tomorrow comes.”

It’s a challenge, but it was one Siebren was sure Harold will make into a reality. He relaxed into Harold, loosening up as he allowed himself to get absolutely ravished, succumbing himself to Harold’s will.

#Overwatch #Sigma #Siebren de kuiper #Harold Winston #Sigrold #MORE spicy Sigrold fics? By the same person? It's more likely than you think #I can't believe this is now my 9th Sigma fic and my 5th Sigrold one #Time sure does fly #We got blindfolds and handcuffs and the sexiest thing ever #consent #Consent is sexy damn it #And I hope to prove it in this fic

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