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theanimeview · 27 days

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[Theory/Analysis] Musical Literacy Between US and Japan + [Review] Solo Leveling’s Album

Source: https://www.play-asia.com/solo-leveling-original-soundtrack/13/70gxob

By: Peggy Sue Wood | @pswediting

I participated in choir for close to six years, but despite that lengthy involvement, I must clarify that I lack musical literacy. Sheet music remains a mystery to me, and I’ve lost my ability to carry a tune. The instructions from my choir instructor have faded from memory, except for the general notion and knowledge that I somehow allowed myself to navigate through choir for that time. I was relying on sheer determination rather than musical prowess, until my parents allowed me to finally pursue my true passion—watching anime.

However, this doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten everything. I retain enough to appreciate content such as Mother’s Basement’s breakdowns of anime theme songs and Sideways’ analyses (though I wish he would return to YouTube, I understand his reasons for not doing so). These channels attract a wide audience, many of whom, like me, may not grasp the intricacies of music theory. Yet, what resonates with me are the segments reminiscent of how my choir teacher used to deconstruct songs, explaining the significance of high and low notes.

On that note, it has made me want to discuss, with what limited understanding I have to offer, the very real cultural difference between the US and Japan regarding musical literacy.

In Japan, musical literacy isn’t just a skill; it’s a cultural cornerstone. From a young age, Japanese children are introduced to the language of music through compulsory education programs that emphasize the importance of reading musical notation. This early exposure lays a solid foundation for understanding and appreciating various musical genres, from traditional Japanese melodies to contemporary pop hits.

One striking aspect of Japan’s musically literate culture is the accessibility of sheet music. Unlike in the United States, where finding sheet music for a specific song might involve scouring the internet or specialized music stores, Japanese bookstores often dedicate entire sections to sheet music and, in fact, it is so common that one can sometimes find sheet music in convenience stores.

This is not just about accessibility though, it’s about investment. Japan boasts a thriving music industry through J-pop supporters and, because the population is so musically literate, animation producers often invest a high budget into the musical ensemble for the work.

On the other hand, in the United States, while there’s no shortage of musical talent or passion, the emphasis on musical literacy seems to have waned in comparison. With the rise of digital streaming platforms and the popularity of synthesized sounds, the art of reading sheet music has taken a backseat for many aspiring musicians. While this shift in focus has undoubtedly led to innovation and experimentation within the music scene, it also risks disconnecting musicians and regular audience from the rich tradition and depth that musical literacy offers. I believe it’s also lead to the decline we’ve seen over time with music in US animation.

Let’s consider the case of Adventure Time, a series renowned for its musical elements. While the music was a prominent feature, it often fell short. Although some tunes were pleasant and the lyrics sounded appealing, rarely did a song effectively serve the narrative. Take, for instance, “Everything Stays,” a highly popular song upon release. Despite its pleasing melody, its lyrics lacked coherence within the storyline.

In context, the song fails to fulfill its intended role as a comforting piece for a child. In fact, let’s examine the entire piece:

“Let’s go in the garden You’ll find something waiting Right there where you left it lying upside down When you finally find it, you’ll see how it’s faded The underside is lighter when you turn it around”

In the episode where this song/scene takes place, the characters involved (Marceline and her mother) are not depicted as moving towards a garden, either physically or metaphorically. Marceline’s mother imparts a troubling lesson by stating that things will remain where they are left. This lesson is particularly ill-suited for Marceline, who, being a half-demon/vampire, is likely to live indefinitely, far outlasting her human mother. Additionally, items left exposed to the sun for extended periods will inevitably fade on the side facing up, not upside down.

What exacerbates the situation is that the song is intended to be a source of comfort, akin to a lullaby, for Marceline, as her mother recognizes her own limited time to provide solace to her daughter. As the song progresses into the chorus, the messaging becomes even more distressing given this context:

“Everything stays right where you left it Everything stays But it still changes Ever so slightly, daily and nightly In little ways, when everything stays”

As history has often demonstrated, things don’t tend to remain in the same place where they’re left. While this might hold true within the confines of your home, it’s not applicable outdoors where weather, wear, and tear are factors. The lines “But it still changes” and the subsequent few lines after in this verse do make sense within the song’s narrative. However, they become disjointed from the following lines, which I don’t believe were part of the original iteration of the song but certainly appear in its final version:

“Go down to the ocean The crystal tide is raising [sic] Waters’ gotten higher as the shore washes out Keep your eyes wide open, even when the sun is blazin’ The moon controls the tide, it can cause you to drown”

The initial part, “Go down to the ocean / The crystal tide is raising [sic] / Waters’ gotten higher as the shore washes out,” while not inaccurate, lacks thematic or contextual connection to the preceding verses. Furthermore, the final two lines pose issues. “Keep your eyes wide open, even when the sun is blazing” appears to offer advice that could inadvertently lead a child to stare at the sun, risking blindness. Similarly, “The moon controls the tide, it can cause you to drown” carries a poetic allure but lacks substantive meaning. As per the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “The moon is a significant influence on Earth’s tides, although the sun also exerts considerable tidal forces.” Additionally, the use of “it” in the dependent clause seems to refer to the moon rather than the tide, aligning with grammatical clarity and logical causation, implying that the moon poses the drowning risk rather than the rising tide itself.

The song then ends with a return of the chorus, “Everything stays, right where you’ve left it,” which I’ve discussed already.

The song sounds pleasing to the ears, with poetic lyrics and a soft, flowing melody reminiscent of a lullaby. However, upon closer examination, its quality falters as the lyrics lack coherence and detract from the narrative. This issue isn’t exclusive to a single instance but rather a recurring problem across various forms of US animation, spanning from high-budget blockbuster children’s films like Disney’s recent movie Wish, to adult animated productions, like Hazbin Hotel‘s “Out for Love.”

That’s not to say US animation can’t kick out some really great songs. I mean, Rapunzel‘s “Nothing Left To Lose” is a great antagonist song, I’ve played Hazbin Hotel‘s “Loser, Baby” on repeat so many times I’m pretty sure that my Spotify app is tired of it, and who can forget the choke hold “Let It Go” had on us years ago? However, it’s undeniable that Japanese animation consistently delivers exceptional music, often with multiple standout tracks on nearly every album release, far exceeding the occasional hits produced by US animated works.

Upon reflecting on US animation and Japanese anime, it’s evident that instrumental music isn’t as prevalent in American animated media as it once was. While it still finds its place in older productions like DreamWorks’ How To Train Your Dragon or contemporary live-action films, the gradual buildup of music and emotion seems lacking in much of today’s US animation. It’s either a full-blown musical number or silence. Furthermore, even when instrumental tracks are utilized, they’re often omitted from the album listings, making them challenging to track down.

In my understanding, the stark contrast in musical literacy between the two cultures directly influences how songs are created and received in animation. In Japan, where musical literacy is deeply embedded in the cultural landscape, anime serves as a testament to the nation’s musical prowess. The songs featured aren’t merely background accompaniments; they’re integral components of the viewing experience, helping to build emotional resonance and set the tone, much like we see still in US live-action productions. Japanese composers meticulously craft compositions that mirror the mood, tone, and narrative arc of each series, heightening the audience’s immersion in the story.

Conversely, in the United States, although animated cartoons have produced memorable theme songs and occasional hits, the musical impact tends to be less enduring. Often, songs are either standalone musical numbers or disconnected from the overall soundtrack, lacking the cohesive thread that binds them to the narrative fabric of the works they accompany. I truly believe that due to fewer opportunities for formal music education and a cultural preference for visual entertainment over auditory artistry, American animated series often feature catchy yet simplistic tunes that serve more as background filler than integral storytelling devices. This creates a noticeable lack of emphasis on music within animation as a whole.

Moreover, the disparity in music budgets between Japan and the United States exacerbates this divide. Japanese anime producers allocate substantial resources to hiring top-tier composers, orchestrators, and performers, resulting in high-quality soundtracks that enhance the viewing experience. Meanwhile, American animated series often contend with budget limitations, particularly for smaller productions, which restrict their ability to invest in original compositions. This often leads to reliance on pre-existing tracks or generic stock music, or the creation of music and lyrics by showrunners and creators who may lack musical talent or understanding of music’s impact within the work itself.

When examining the musical disparity between anime and animated cartoons, it’s crucial to acknowledge the influence of this cultural context on artistic expression. Japan’s musically literate society not only enriches the creation of anime but also fosters a profound appreciation for music as an art form. Conversely, in the United States, there exists an opportunity to reignite interest in musical education and elevate the role of music in animated storytelling, with anime serving as a potential model.

We ought to celebrate the rich tradition of music and musical literacy that has long been integral to Western culture, even as it faces challenges from advancing technology and a building tolerance for lower-quality productions. By investing in the development of compelling songs, US animation has the potential to create works that resonate across continents and generations, just as it has done for decades before now.

youtube

Title: “Kill or Be Killed | Solo Leveling” by Crunchyroll | Source: https://youtu.be/HI7k2FqPxfM?si=nlFm0ErOIq2ZkE1B

With that in mind, I’d like to briefly discuss/review Solo Leveling‘s album.

To briefly discuss the anime too (since I’m here discussing the album) I love the anime series in addition to the novel and comic. Were there some significant changes in terms of narrative order? Certainly, but these alterations make sense for its adaptation into a new medium. It’s worth considering that many anime fans who will encounter this anime before the comic/novel might be unfamiliar with concepts like dungeon break worlds, and may not grasp why various elements are significant or how they intertwine so the change in narrative structure to present information to the new/different audience makes sense. Furthermore, within the limited 12-episode run, certain details may not be presented in the same order as they are in the original medium. The showrunners are handling this aspect admirably, and fans of the manhwa/webnovel should bear in mind that a new medium entails a new storytelling approach.

Setting that aside, Episode 6 features one of the best songs anime songs I’ve heard in a few years, DARK ARIA <Lv2>. It’s truly remarkable because it’s a high-energy song introduced in a series that typically doesn’t incorporate lyrically dense songs, except in the outro and intro/theme. Yet, as our main character’s power surges while he confronts his first human adversaries, the lyrics of DARK ARIA begin playing and blending in with the SymphonicSuite-Lv.2. Initially, this caught me off guard given that it has been instrumental music all throughout the series thus far, but then I realized that it’s more than just a song. The lyrics in DARK ARIA are intended to represent the system overlapping with Sung Jin-woo’s thoughts. It’s akin to a siren song, enticing and persuading Sung that this is his duty and his resolve, and by the end, he is convinced that it’s not just the system forcing him to choose his life over the lives of others. While this may contain mild spoilers, it’s an incredibly compelling aspect of the adaptation.

I wholeheartedly endorse the Solo Leveling album. It’s truly exceptional, and I must say, Hiroyuki Sawano has done an outstanding job with the entire series. The carefully crafted compositions and the seamless integration of music into the narrative elevate the emotional resonance of each action scene, making it a worthwhile addition to any fan’s collection. After watching episode 6, I promptly purchased the album from Apple Music, and in my opinion, it’s absolutely worth the almost $11 cost since I’ve been listening to it on repeat while studying.

Well, that was a long post… Thank you for reading!

Copyedited by: Krow Smith | @coffeewithkrow

Updated: 4/8/2024 – Revised title of post.

#ANALYSIS #ANIME #CULTURAL DIFFERENCES #FEATURED #MUSIC #REVIEW #SOLO LEVELING #Youtube

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talenlee · 1 year

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Cancon 2023 Wrapup

As I write this, I have gotten home from Cancon 2023. The day started at around 7 AM, then started on the con floor at 8:30, and following that we had to pack down at 12:30 and finally got ourselves on the road at 1:30. It’s now many hours later than that and much of my time has been spent recovering from the drive and the weekend of standing on my two feet and shouting at people a lot. What follows is memories constructed, as best I can, from the notes I took of the time, and the information present to me now.

First things first, this is a convention that differs from most I do by being so far away from my home that I have to sleep near the event. This year, we got lodgings in someone’s spare room, with myself, Fox, and the driver who took us. That driver, who I won’t name on this blog so as to not blow up their spot, was super helpful the whole time, didn’t have to be there and was generally 100% great. I do not know how to repay them the effort they put forth to help us get the convention run.

But anyway, we drove down on Friday morning; this gave us time to get to the convention centre, register our presence, then set up our table area and the display of our goods. Our displays this year featured three 3-meter long tables arranged in a L shape, and we had some card tables as well, that put some of our stock out away from us, and meant that you didn’t have to approach us as people to look at the products we were selling. I thought this was a bad idea because I thought our most useful tool for converting attention to sales was me, talking to people, but I also didn’t think it was good to argue about it, so I just let it go.

Turns out I was completely wrong: By having the table there, we invited people to stop from the flow of traffic, then I saw them slip in closer to avoid being an impediment, then they’d come to the table and just… buy things. Just buy them! No explanation, no hard sell, no rules explainers, just… they’d buy them based on the boxes.

That’s weird enough as it is, but know what made it weirder? The things they chose to buy. There are a bunch of games I sell that are, in my opinion, aggressively weird. Some of our games have a great clear aesthetic that pulls the eye – games like You Can’t Win, Hook Line & Sinker, and The Botch and The Botch Is Back are all based around clear and bright designs that I think hold attention. But Winston’s Archive is a game I made with an incredible niche theme: Sorting books. What’s more, Winston’s Archive is a game where, thanks to trying to incorporate dysexic-free fonts, the cover kind of looks a bit… drafty? Like a first draft. Like the things that would normally make it look more interesting make it harder to read, so the result is a box cover that I feel a little awkward about.

We have one copy of Winston’s Archive left.

I have no story about it, no viral hit, no explanation from some source about a game that infected a group and then they all came back to play it more. I have no story about that. I just know that somehow, left to their own devices, a bunch of people looked at this game box and went ‘oh yeah, I’ll have that for $15’ and they just straight up bought it. That’s really exciting!

Another memorable thing is that on the first day, I wore my This Shirt Says Trans Rights shirt. I did this because I figured it’d be the busiest day and if I was going to get into a fuss over it, I’d rather get it over and done with. What I got instead was a consistent response from strangers, even people I walked past, complimenting the shirt, which was really nice. What’s more, I wound up having a lot of conversations with queer gamers and parents of queer gamers who wanted to be able to connect to people, and also get games that didn’t seem they were going to be likely to shock anyone with anything upsetting.

It reminded me of that awkward phrase I don’t like, ‘find your tribe,’ where the whole point in our disconnected landscape of socially unmoored people-bubbles, there are definitely factors that let us anchor ourselves to one another, and bereft of anything else, finding one another is helpful, it’s a way to be able to say ‘I can connect on at least this.’

We sold a bunch of Queer Coding too; a game that I think of as just an icebreaker, something you want for cons and meetups where you’ll be dealing with people you don’t know. Similarly, Senpai Notice Me flew off the shelves, but it always does: people love a meme and this one is also very pretty. Finally, You Can’t Win continued its weird presence selling itself, because despite the game being very clear about how hard it is, people kept buying it.

The other thing I usually bring back from Cancon, aside from stories of people I yelled at and a sore throat, is a haul of games I bought, and this year I didn’t buy any. It was a conscious decision: I was busy, and afraid of spending money at first, but then as things became more relaxed, and the large stall I was excited by dropped their prices more and more, I found myself nonetheless deciding to instead not buy new games this year. This wasn’t a wholly painless choice: What I wanted to ‘buy’ effectively, was more space in my house; by not buying new things until I had exhausted what I owned, I was making sure I didn’t have an ever-growing stack of games I didn’t know if I wanted any more.

There are a few things I kind of wish I had picked up, but not enough to have actually done it; Red Rising was down to $20, B’Twixt: A Game Of Thrones is a game I want to have a copy of but not a Game of Thrones copy, and that’s all we have so far. Wise Guys, a $100 big box game, was going for $10 and I passed it over, and I even saw games on my wishlist – like Not Alone and Fog Of Love at steep discount, and decided to not get them.

I am thinking about this feeling, this decision to do things this way and about how excited I was to see how many of the games I took to the Bring-And-Buy had sold. I want to make sure I’m not focusing on acquisition and instead on what board games are; Experiences.

The last story of Cancon – at least for now, as I remember it – is of my Tyranids. I have some Tyranids, a whole army’s worth, from 2004. I have played with them once, and then they sat in a drawer, in a box. I decided this year to try and rehome them, to put them in the bring-and-buy and sell them on to someone else. Since it’s a whole army, it’s expensive, and people interested in the field have told me it’s a good price for them… but also someone needs to want to buy a whole army’s worth of Tyranids, even retro metal ones.

They didn’t sell, but I’m not upset about it. I want them to go to someone who wants them, not someone who was afraid of missing out. We’ll try again at MOAB and maybe if they don’t move after enough tries, we’ll find some other place to put them. Who knows, maybe the spaces for play will have opened up enough that I get to play with them. I know One Page Rules is a cool looking system with something Tyraniddy in it. Could be useful there!

But this is the joy of material games: They are material. I can share them with people and I can give them away and nobody controls the central authority on how people play with them.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Diary

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n0stalgicv0id · 18 days

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Where is Trieste? my geography is bad

I like that!! it sounds seriously cozy, would love to have a place like that where i live but sadly our country is generally boring. And no worries, ramble away!

EXACTLY,, i was there but i didnt feel present at all. It was all seen through a blurry view and i didnt experience it .. i hate it. im gonna go to a doctor on friday and ask about help for it. maybe theyll find out if i got smth more if i can get the proper help bc, sure i can research the whole system thing but its not super obvious and idk if its bc im so disconnected from myself at all times or what

i can Feel them .. and sometimes i can feel what they wanna say. but i cant hear them often,, theyre not that strong yk? and i generally dont remember things but i dont feel like i have amnesia where i lose time? i just dont remember anything thats happened in x amount of time. i couldnt be able to tell u more abt my day than one thing and yesterday is already forgotten about💀💀💀 so yeah,, idk haha i rAMBLED , sorry

- 🌸

I updated my last message after sending so you probably didn’t saw my edit but Trieste is a city in Italy, so yes we are italians.

It happens to me often when I feel blurry, especially during stressful times like when my deadlines are overlapping. It may don’t help but usually when things like that happen I stop doing whatever I’m up to and breathe? But it doesn’t help much of the time, I just continue with my routine and call it a day. The best you can do at your scheduled doctor’s appointment is coming out as straight and direct way possible. Explain all the symptoms you’re having and don’t forget anything. And if you have an hard time recalling them perhaps you can write them down.

Our host had the same problem and in general some of us have problems at hearing voices. Maybe you’re shutting them down involuntarily and because of that you can’t hear them. Regarding the whole memory loss I feel like the gatekeeper is behind that and maybe he’s trying to feed you delusions into thinking you’re not actually missing some parts of your days. Also don’t worry if you don’t remember, myself I’m not the best with memory so that’s it.

I hope I helped somehow? I’m not the best at explaining

#letterbox .𖥔 ݁ ˖#🌸anon

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rainswept · 5 months

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I conur. On-screen death has the added benefit of the watcher being relatively disconnected from everything. But, death is still death, no matter how much you try to soften it. It's still one less person in the world, and a life which was cut short.

Would you really know though? You said yourself that Forget-Me-Not doesn't tend to pry into your affairs, and it seems like you extend the same courtesy to him. You don't trust him fully anyway, so who's to say. Just a thought.

It's funny. In so far as I'm worried about myself, because like it or not, every human has some aspect of self-preservation where staring down death. This is just funny to me because you haven't realized the obvious contradiction.

Let's take your train of thought - Say, you are special to them. But you don't know why. You don't know how. And you don't know about it. Suffice to say, keeping a subject in complete ignorance isn't a bad thing just for ordinary humans like myself, but doesn't that hurt you too? Especially after you went through such lengths to claim that you were above such blantant manipulation. Ignorance of the facts can only be a shield for so long.

"They don't want to cause a mass extinction. [..] Isn't this better than nothing at all?"

Based on my research, The Storm seems to essentially be a bunch of little contradictions and changes to the timeline that add up over time.

If they don't want a mass extinction, Why not just do the obvious thing and nip the Storm at its source? Why must The Storm even be a thing? Why not stop rewinding?

Unless of course, there's some reason they can't. Or won't.

As for your answer, you don't. But you can tell a lot about a person based on how they conduct themselves over a card game. And it provides a welcome respite from all of the heavier topics, don't you think?

I won't force you to believe me.

Like, I said before, my cards are all on the table.

So, I'll stand.

Let me know when you're ready to show your hand.

one less person in the world, but are fictional characters really people? no. no, it’s one less figment of imagination, really. maybe it was a memory, a person born of pain and nothing but it. maybe their death is cathartic. maybe their maker laughed.

all humans have some sense of self preservation in the face of death, you’re right — but some more than others. i, for one, would not mind if i was taken by the storm. i would welcome it, really, if that was what fate had planned for me. who am i to try and tell it no? if i somehow, against all odds, succeed, it will only leave me with scars i’d rather die than have.

hurt me? i’m afraid i don’t know what you mean. i said i was above your manipulation — or, at least, i hoped i was. i never let my guard down around the manus, and i never will, not enough to let them hurt me. they are not my enemies and they are not my friends — it’s more of a .. partnership, really. a deal. i don’t trust them, not fully. but even that is saying too much.

the storm is not something that can just be resolved or fixed. don’t you think we’ve tried? we have. this is the best solution.

cards. this game. does it provide a welcome respite, really? or does it just add a more tense atmosphere in general? why, i’m quite worried about what will happen if i lose.

hit.

#⟢ ✉️ ⊹#—ebg.#lockedebg

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gayjameswilson · 1 year

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Yep, same anon. I'm also psychotic and wanted to know if you had seen those movies because they have potentially triggering material, and I wanted to know if they were safe to watch from your experience. I'm so sorry to bother

Ohhh okay!! That’s totally alright, I was just confused at first lol. I’m always happy to help out others like me. I haven’t seen birdman, so I’m not sure about that one (although it sounds pretty… disconnected from reality, so I’m unsure about watching it myself) but I have seen a clockwork orange (somehow it’s one of my brother’s favorite movies.)

clockwork orange deals with Very heavy themes (also I saw this movie like a year ago and my memory is kind of hazy from around that time so bear with me.) There’s rape/sexual assault shown on screen, and im pretty sure two people are killed onscreen? The main character is of course a terrible person, but he does get arrested and his free will is basically taken away via brainwashing. so that general sense of a loss of reality and loss of control/free will could be triggering to some. The movie is definitely not made in poor taste and has some kind of message. I think it kind of asks the question of is someone still bad if their ability to commit these bad things is taken away. Or something. But the material is still sensitive. I would also recommend checking out doesthedogdie.com for warnings. So the movie was kind of a hard watch for me in terms of content/dissociation.

I hope this helps ^-^ my inbox is always open if you have other questions about movies or anything

#asks

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s11e17 · 3 years

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fic prompt: mary and cas have a conversation... about potentially anything you want Really but i'd love it if it was centered around jack somehow / their experiences of being Parents. i just think their dynamic is so interesting and underexplored

[shows up 5 years late with starbucks] [dates myself by making that joke] i hope this is to your satisfaction anon thank u for the prompt <3 <3 <3 i totally agree that mary & cas's dynamic is underexplored!!! i wish we had more of them (esp the s12 hiatus mary-and-cas-looking-for-sam-and-dean vibes those were so fun).

---

“He’s doing pretty good,” she says.

Castiel looks at them. Dean and Sam and Claire and Kaia, attempting to teach Jack how to play basketball. Unsurprisingly, there have been more basketball-to-face impacts than Castiel thinks is standard.

“Yes,” Castiel says, settling into his bench against the gym wall. He hopes that the proposed gymnasium expansion at the Lebanon community center goes through, so that Jack can play somewhere with windows.

Mary settles in next to him, watching them. There’s a confusion of generations here: Mary, ostensibly older than all of them except Castiel, but for the fact that Castiel and Dean and Sam are raising Jack together, and the fact that Mary is, by most metrics, only just turned thirty.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” Castiel says.

“He didn’t grow up with you,” Mary says. Castiel looks at her, and she clarifies, “Not— I mean, of course he did. But you didn’t see him when he was a child. He came to you, sort of… fully… formed.”

Hm. “You’re right,” Castiel admits, thinking of the few infants he has had in his care, who were certainly different from his son. Jack has never been dependent in that way. He was never a curious four year old, never a bratty pubescent tween or an angsty teenager. He has always simply been Jack.

Mary sighs. She asks, “How do you feel… connected to him?”

“Do you feel disconnected from your sons?”

Mary pauses. Castiel waits, and watches. Out on the floor, Dean tosses a basketball over Jack’s head to Claire, who scores while Sam halfheartedly tries to block her.

“I don’t even know how old I am,” Mary says softly, and Castiel turns back to her. “Yeah, I feel disconnected from them, but I feel disconnected from everything. I feel disconnected from my own body. Y’know, Cas, I don’t even menstruate anymore.”

“Oh.” Castiel frowns. That seems… early. “Yes. I can see why this would be… disconcerting.”

“Ha.” Mary leans back, crosses her arms over her chest. “Anyway. They grew up good, with or without me.”

“Some days, I think your memory raised them more than John Winchester did,” Castiel says, perhaps more aggressively than he meant to. Mary flinches, and Castiel sighs. “I didn’t mean— well. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“You don’t have to—” Mary frowns. She leans forward, puts her elbows on her knees as she stares out at the basketball court. Eventually, she says, “Giving birth isn’t some holy experience. It’s the opposite. It’s incredibly painful. It’s the realest thing I’ve ever done.” And she turns to him, and says, “You can be real with me, Castiel. I’m not very delicate.”

Castiel thinks over that one as Mary looks back to the court. Jack is watching Claire and Kaia’s friendly trash talk, wide-eyed. Dean catches Castiel’s gaze over their heads, while Sam jokingly tries to break the girls up. Castiel smiles a little, and Dean flushes, looking away at once.

“He gets that from his dad,” Mary says softly. “The shyness. John was like that too, when we met. Could barely get a sentence out our first date.”

Castiel thinks of saying, Dean isn’t shy — Dean is afraid. And yes, Dean gets that from his dad, just as Sam did. They inherited a fear that makes the both of them flinch when Castiel flexes his fingers in the wrong way, a fear that makes them angry. A fear that makes Dean shrink away from Castiel’s hands when they’re in public, a fear that makes Dean pale when Jack talks about having crushes on boys, a fear that makes Dean kiss Castiel’s ribs and slide his hands up Castiel’s chest and offer his mouth before Castiel can think to leave him.

But Mary isn’t here for Dean, really. Or if she is, she shouldn’t be. She’s here because the Darkness brought up from out of the earth a woman who’s been dead for thirty-five years and delivered her as a gift and then left her alone.

So Castiel returns to her first question. “I feel connected to Jack because I see how special he is. I see how he brightens every room he’s in. I see how he cares for his family, and I see what I love in all other people when I look at him. Jack is… Jack is the best of both your sons, I think. I feel connected to him because I love him.”

“Well, if it’s that easy,” Mary says, and then she laughs at herself. “I mean. Maybe I just need to get to know them.”

“That’s a good first step.”

Mary stands up. “Better put myself in, then,” she says. “You coming?”

Castiel counts the number of people playing. “It’ll be an even number if you join alone. You can have three on each team.”

“Since when has our family ever cared about the rules?” Mary says.

“Oh.” Castiel says, “Yes, you’re right.” So he takes off his coat, and joins his family on the basketball court.

#agoodsoldier fic #asks

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baezdylan · 3 years

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Scrapbooks Of Flowers

the fifth photograph: scrapbook of poppies

"When the lights go out, will you take me with you?"

- Summertime, My Chemical Romance

"That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be who they really are. Most people love you for who you pretend to be."

- Jim Morrison

They run through endless fields of gold which are nowhere near endless or golden, but they choose to believe how they are. All four seasons splash into one and Dorothy’s choice of clothes finally seams rational, with her gloves and short sleeves and waistcoats made out of various colorful materials that shouldn’t make sense, but do. An eternity of memorable every day moments meet up under gloriously ordinary circumstances which all lead to Revelius feeling like he’s finally found himself in a happenstance worthy of a book dedication or a songwriting experience. He lifts up his arms as he runs thinking about the way his life during this very hour must look like from a foreign point of view. He hopes it looks like a painting.

What can he say, he loves it when the reflection compliments the original creation, whatever it might represent.

Simply put, he likes to see the beauty in things. Including the parts in which they are broken. Light always finds a way to slip through the cracks. You just have to turn it on.

So, he runs. Scraped-up knees and all.

Dorothy has somehow managed to get away from him. She's so far into the field, the sun complimenting her, embracing her features as if it was always meant to hold her. Her and no one else. It makes him question his sanity, which he, for the record, does a lot of anyways, no matter the circumstance. Today's dilemma consists of wondering if he was running in the first place. Dorothy positions herself on the grass, her back the sole part of her that he can actually see. A strange fear blossoms inside of him, spreading its petals, tickling his sides. Teasing him. What if she doesn't look back?

But she does look back and then, he's already close enough to touch her. He doesn't. He takes a few steps forward and she lies down completely on the grass in return, staring at him from her flowery kingdom. He stays where he is, smiling from the above, not quite certain if he should put his hands in his pockets or not. There are moments like these, when he feels entirely disconnected from his body, when he wishes to observe and observe only, without the burden of existing and following people, endless parts of himself, around.

"Pass some of that magic to me, will you?"

He hears it as a joke, but it rings in his ears like an echo. Probably because he should pronounce it back.

"All of this must look a lot prettier to you than it does for me."

Yeah, pretty in its most enchanting form. The kind that makes you dizzy.

"I would paint you a picture, but I know I would never be able to finish it, so what's the point?"

"And I would never be able to feel. Not like you do."

It. Feel it. But she doesn't end the sentence like that. An image of a tree, with an incredible amount of tangled branches and flowers growing from each and every of its corners, pays a visit to his head. That's how Dorothy's mind looks like, he thinks. His own is more of a train. List of a thousand blurry places, an object trapped in motion. For her, everything is spinning around. For him, everything is moving forward.

"You wanna know how this feels for me?"

She doesn't respond, just in case he doesn't actually mean it, just in case it was a slip. She's giving him the space to drop the subject. He probably would've, if the day wasn't endless and the fields weren't gold.

"It feels like,... like when you dream and you know for sure that you are dreaming, but you choose to dream some more because you don't want the dream to end even though you know that is will... End."

"A comfortable illusion."

The wind that might have been there or might have been not says hello to his hair and ruffles it a bit. Revelius closes his eyes to welcome it, just in case it is there because he knows it would have been much prettier if it was.

He likes to see the beauty in things. The trick is, often times, he doesn't. So, he adds glittery fragments of the things that he does like to his surroundings, hoping that the world might show him some love in return. When it does provide him with anticipated pleasantries, he is never certain of their authenticity. Or their ability to occupy the delicate presence of air, for that matter.

"What do you think about getting gold lockets?"

"Like, for us?"

"Well yeah, but also no. What do you think of the concept? In general, I mean. What do you think of it?"

"I think it's a complete waste of time. If I love someone, I'm pretty sure I can rely on my ability to pick up on the sensation myself. Why would I need a reminder? Everything's already there, in my head... Where is this coming from?"

"Where's anything coming from, Dorothy?"

He appreciates the lack of scientific explanation on her part. Revelius has a special fondness for dramatic pauses. Dorothy usually allows him to pursue that passion. There's also the opportunity to delve deeper into the context of his last sentence. Neither of them pushes the topic any further. Good. He doesn't quite know where he was going with that. It can remain a lousy joke, if it ever gets transported to pages. You know, in case they aren't on those very pages right now.

"What do you think?"

"Huh?"

"What do you think of them? The gold lockets?"

"I'm not sure. It just feels appealing to me. Having a piece of somebody else, somebody that's not you, around your neck, resting on your heart, at all times. Something that's physically there. I like that."

He stops to take a breath. Dorothy tugs on his sleeve a little, almost unnoticeable, she now sitting up. He translates the gesture as an invitation and then allows himself to sit beside her on the grass. Home at last.

"She keeps putting herself into these golden, heart shaped lockets that she later attaches to people, people who offer as little, as much, as a handshake born out of nothing other than politeness."

"Who said that?"

"Nova. The sister! The wizard! School essay or something. I don't know what to do with it."

"She really likes your poems, you know."

"The situation called for silence Dorothy, you should have allowed it." he mutters with a laugh which earns him an annoyed glance and that strikingly familiar eye roll. And a smile. Lip-gloss smile at that. But Dorothy would rather leave it unmentioned. He allows it.

"Maybe we should skip the running part this time." Dorothy proposes only a second before he intended to do the same. The great, the funny, the consuming universe and its tricks.

"Yeah, let's do that."

***

He blinks. One. Two. Three. He blinks and he is still there. And he is still him.

He blinks and rain comes falling down.

Somewhere in the middle of somebody else’s life, Revelius found himself walking into his own. It’s sort of like a collection of countless little glass pieces belonging to various glorious, glorious and dusty, nameless mirrors. The portrait of chaos.

And still, the rain is falling down.

He walks home, chest full of memories that he can't possibly hold, but does; city lights and strangers behind him, their voices now forever engraved on his skin. The mirrors, the reflections, the portraits. Each shadow that crosses his path.

Right there, right beside his former high school (the keeper of life, the home of some of the mirrors) is a little store. He enters it empty handed, exits with a companion, a little paper bag barely grazing the end of his seemingly endless scarf.

When he pulls out the locket and tucks it under his shirt, it rests surely against his heart.

"I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember: somewhere inside of me there will always be a person I am tonight."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"He, like me, is haunted by his heart."

- Mahmoud Darwish

#my writing #scrapbooks of flowers #flowers #art #writers on tumblr #quotes #1989 polaroids #taylor swift #writing #coming of age #youth #editing later #too tired to do it now #my original work #original stories #original characters

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abloodymess · 3 years

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I am a music person. One of my earliest memories is listening to Patti Smith's Horses with my Mom as we washed dishes. The Velvet Underground, weird Jazz, Chicago Blues, 70s Soul, along with all the heavy hitters of classic rock (Stones, The Who, Beatles, Kinks, etc) were always coming out the stereo my entire childhood. As a child my Dad took me to see and meet all sorts of old blues guys, he also used me to sneak back stage, it was a good gimmick and I have fond memories of standing just off stage as Bonnie Raitt was about to take the stage, and her taking a shine to the 7 year old roaming around.

Anyways, I thought this was how all kids experienced music. When we moved and I started a new school (big 4th grade) and I tried to communicate my love of music, kids my own age had no idea what I was talking about. My first sense of a disconnect between myself and my peers of this farm town. Reading Thrasher and watching skateboard videos sure planted the seeds of a whole world of modern music I had not experienced yet.

I did not come online as a modern music fan until 91. My cousin noticed I was getting drawn into metal and hard rock; he took me aside and showed me this new band called Nirvana. He had Bleach and showed me it, "you like this?, they are playing in two weeks in Chicago, want to go?" Not sure how we got my mom to say yes, but my first concert without my folks was seeing Nirvana at the 1200 person club The Metro just before the Teen Spirit video broke. I honestly was kind of scared, but the energy and the feel of the electricity in the room changed me. I knew this is something I wanted to be part of. Are there more bands like this?

91-95 felt like it should have been a lifetime, looking back its crazy how small that window really was. How fast the mainstream was able to pounce on underground bands with really progressive ideals and just decimate them. They either died (literally or financially), went back to the underground, or imploded as the machine found copies of copies that could fit in the box but were easier to deal with. If Nirvana was a Pixies rip-off, I am not sure what you would call Days of the New when they showed up in 97. God bless REM for soldiering on. (I am generalizing here because there was A LOT of music that got marketed as “Girl Music” your Tori Amos, Fiona Apples, Natalie Merchants, all of a sudden this was music for girlfriends and should be separated to the Lilith Fair while “real music” was Creed or something? and I am not even touching Hip-Hop here) There was a moment though in the early/mid 90s where it was perfectly normal to see Cibo Motto on the same stage as Soundgarden, then something changed.

“Grunge” or whatever you want to call it was hollowed out and the imitators were fizzling out (some great singles in there but very few career groups), there was a push by radio to somehow hybrid cool DJ/Rave culture with rock culture and you got “Electronica” which was kind of soulless, but the good and pioneering electronic groups got a place in the sun. Rock though, it got hyper masculine (and not that Grunge wasn’t, but there was a sincerity and fragility that was removed) and fucking dethatched from any other feeling but anger, anything else was viewed as a weakness, there was no longer a sense of queerness or the feminine.

By 96 I was out, I wanted nothing to do with what was going on, so I turned inward and got real into early Emo bands and old Goth records, I was a full on punk with metal leanings. Screamy boys and girls who had nothing but “feelings” and sincerity bubbling out of themselves. We formed our bands and locked ourselves in basement across the country with our own shows and did our own thing, ignoring what was going on above ground. A nice deep sub-genre of a sub-genre to keep myself with not having to associate with what I saw as the meatheads taking over. (Again, not that there wasn’t dreadful misogyny, racism, and shitty shit going on where I was).

When I watched the documentary it was incredibly depressing. I can’t say if the documentary itself was good or bad, but the ideas presented, the where we were at that time and how we got there just kept rolling over and over in my head and how fast it happened from 94-99 a complete sea change happened. I don’t really have any insight to that, but its just staggering to go from waiting for a concert to start and having Food Not Bombs handing out flyers and a few short years later it is Girls Gone Wild getting girls to show their boobs (AND IT WAS THE SAME BAND just 2 years later and a really different fan base and energy).

Clearly the promoters of Woodstock 99 were at best evil dummies, who after all this time showed zero reflection and just wanted to blame women and Mtv or the bands or anyone but themselves. I do not think the documentary sides with them, but presents that is what these men believe. Honestly if anyone sides with those dudes, get some help. Corporate rock sucks and even the most well meaning bands get put in horrible positions time and time again. I will never understand how Rage Against the Machine is always at the most corporate shit-shows standing there like a bunch of assholes.

Anyways, sorry, I just needed to vomit out some words about this. I am just glad I wasn’t there, didn’t see myself reflected back, or see any of my friends.

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lingthusiasm · 3 years

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Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 52: Writing is a technology

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 52: Writing is a technology. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 52 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about writing as a technology. But first, do you wish there was more Lingthusiasm to listen to? Even though this is Episode 52, we have almost a hundred episodes of Lingthusiasm. Some of them exist as bonus episodes over at our Patreon.

Gretchen: If you want to listen to those and have more Lingthusiasm in your earballs, you can go to patron.com/lingthusiasm. This also helps keep the show ad-free. If you like listening to a show without ads, help us keep doing that.

Lauren: The Patreon also fosters this wonderful linguistics enthusiastic community. In fact, we have a Discord server, which is basically just a wonderful chat space for people to talk about linguistics. There are over 350 people on the Lingthusiasm Discord right now.

Gretchen: If you wish you had other lingthusiasts to talk to to share your interesting linguistics anecdotes and memes and general nerdery, and you want more people like that to talk to, you can join the Patreon to also get access to the Discord. We launched the Discord community just a year ago, and it’s been really fun to see it grow and thrive and take on a life of its own since then. If you are already a patron, and you haven’t linked your Patreon and Discord account together, it’s there waiting for you. Feel free to come join us.

Lauren: We have Patreon supporter levels at a range of tiers. Some of them include additional merch. One of my favourite perks is the very scientific Lingthusiasm IPA quiz where we send you a short quiz and then we give you your own custom IPA character which is enshrined on our Wall of Fame.

Gretchen: It’s a fun quiz. We have fun looking at people’s answers.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode is a collection of some of our favourite anecdotes from interviews and from other episodes that didn’t quite make it into the original episode. We’re delighted to share those in that bonus episode.

Gretchen: You get to see a bit behind-the-scenes with that episode. Also, do you want more linguistics on your favourite other podcasts?

Lauren: Always.

Gretchen: Constantly. We’re also very happy to do podcast interviews on other shows about various topics. If there’re other podcasts that you like that you wish would do a linguistics episode and interview one of us, you should tell them that! We’re happy to come on. Tag us both or something on social media or tell your favourite podcasts that they could do a linguistics episode because we’d be happy to do that.

[Music]

Lauren: Gretchen, do you remember learning how to read?

Gretchen: Not really. I mean, I remember encountering the alphabet chart in my first year of school, but I already sort of knew the alphabet at that point. I guess there was some point when I didn’t know how to read, and there was some point when I did, but I don’t really have concrete memories of that. Do you remember learning how to read?

Lauren: I feel like I have more memories of learning how to write, just because that’s such a mechanical thing. I remember sitting there writing out a row of As. I definitely wrote the number “five” backward for way longer than I probably should have, which is a really common thing that happens when kids are learning to write because it is a combination of brain skills and fine motor skills. But reading in English is something I feel like I’ve always just been able to do. I mean, I guess in comparison learning to read Nepali, which is written in a different script – it’s written in the Devanagari script – I have more memories of that because I did that in my 20s. Even now, I still feel the real disconnect between being relatively able to chat and really struggling to read and write. I still have to put my finger under the words as I’m going through, whereas with English it just feels like the words are beaming straight into my brain because I learnt to read that language so early in my life.

Gretchen: Yeah, I read at this automatic level. I can’t see a sign that says, “Stop,” on it and not read it in Latin script. But in undergrad I took both Ancient Greek and Arabic. In Greek, I got to the point – because the script is sort of similar enough and I was familiar enough with the letters previously-ish – that I got to the point where I could very slowly sound out words as I was reading them out loud because we had to do a lot of reading aloud in Greek class. But in Arabic, I was very much at that hooked on phonics level where you’re like, /p/-/t/-/k/-/a/. There are a few words that I have as sight words in Arabic. One of them is the word for “and,” which is “waa”, and one of the words for “the,” which is “al”, and one of them is the word for “book” because “kitaab” just shows up all the time. But most of the words I had to painstakingly sound out each letter and then listen to myself as I was saying them. I’d be like, “Oh, it’s that word,” even if I knew it, which is this process that I must’ve gone through in English, but I don’t remember doing it for the Latin script.

Lauren: I think that is one of the things that makes it really hard for people who grow up in highly literate, highly educated societies to tease writing and reading apart from language. But actually, when you step back, you realise that writing is actually super weird.

Gretchen: It’s so weird! It’s this interesting – it really is a technology. It’s a thing you do on top of language to do stuff with language, but it’s not the language itself. There are thousands and possibly millions of languages that have never been written down in the history of humanity. We have no idea. We’ve never met a society of humans, or heard of a society of humans, without language. But those are spoken and signed languages, which are just kind of there. Writing, by contrast, was invented somewhere between 3 and 4 times in the history of humanity.

Lauren: That we know of.

Gretchen: That we know of.

Lauren: There might’ve been a society that did a very ephemeral form of snow writing that we have lost forever. But we have records of 3 or 4 times.

Gretchen: It’s been invented a handful of times. There are a few other cases where there are scripts that haven’t been deciphered by modern humans. Maybe they’re scripts, maybe they’re not – it’s not quite clear. But it’s definitely a handful of number of times. And then once other cultures come in contact with the technology of writing, they’re like, “Oh, this is cool. Let’s adapt this to our linguistic situation,” and it gets borrowed a heck of a lot. But it only got cemented a few times.

Lauren: It’s worth saying that “3 to 4” is a bit squishy because it’s not entirely clear if cuneiform, which is a very pointy form of writing from Babylonia, somehow inspired the Egyptian system that became what we know as the hieroglyphs or if they just happened around the same time by coincidence are something we may never really fully put together. That’s a very contested situation. That’s why we can’t even pin down the number of times we think it was invented.

Gretchen: Cuneiform is the one that’s made with the sharpened reed that you push into your clay tablets or, if you’re some people on the internet, into your gingerbread because there’s some really excellent examples of cuneiform gingerbread tablets people have made, which I just wanna – yeah, it’s really great. The Egyptian hieroglyphs people have seen. But yeah, it’s unclear whether they were in contact with each other and kind of heard of each other in a very loose sense and were inspired by each other because there was some amount of contact between those two areas, or if that was elsewhere. The other two – one is in Mesoamerica, in modern-day Mexico and that area, where they had a writing system there that, again, developed into lots of different scripts as it got borrowed from different areas, of which the best deciphered is the Mayan script from the 3rd Century BCE. There’s also the Olmec script, which is probably the oldest. The Zapotec script is also really old. There’s a bunch of scripts in the modern-day Mexico area that also developed independently.

Lauren: Then the final system arose in China around the Bronze Age a couple of thousand years BCE. Because this script was mostly found in its most earliest forms on oracle bones, it’s known as the “oracle bone” script.

Gretchen: What is an oracle bone?

Lauren: They are turtle bones that are used in divination.

Gretchen: Oh.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And, again, the Chinese script, once it developed further, it was also, yeah, influenced a bunch of the other writing systems in the area.

Lauren: I find it super fascinating, with absolutely no historical knowledge or insight to bring to this, that in these three different places that were completely separate and going about their own cultural lives writing arose at a similar time around 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.

Gretchen: Yeah! You wonder what was in the water or something. Well, and it’s partially, I think, that there’s a certain level of writing makes it easier to do things like administrative bureaucracy if you’re trying to keep track of whether people paid their taxes or – it’s a very empire-y thing to have is to develop a writing system.

Lauren: Oh yeah. And it’s absolutely worth stating that it’s not like three people in these three different locations all woke up on the same Tuesday 4,000 years ago and were like, “I’m gonna write a long letter to someone.”

Gretchen: Did they have Tuesdays 4,000 years ago?

Lauren: What you see is this emergence of, “I’m just gonna make a couple of notes so I know how much money you owe me.” Some of the earliest cuneiform tablets we have are just, like, beer supply stock takes.

Gretchen: Like, “Three oxes and this many baskets of grain” or whatever.

Lauren: I feel like it’s very human to be like, “We love writing because it’s poetry, and I can send letters to people I love,” and it’s like, no, it’s actually, “I just wanted to know how much you owe me.”

Gretchen: The king just wants to know if these people have paid their taxes.

Lauren: So, what you get is – although I’m like, “Oh, it all happened within similar millennia,” it is actually centuries of development from just keeping tabs on a few items to a fully fleshed out written system.

Gretchen: What types of things people thought were important to write down – things like legal codes and stuff like that – one of the interesting things that I came across when I was looking this up was that there’s a person named Enheduanna, who is the earliest known poet whose name has been recorded. She was the high priestess of the goddess Inanna and the moon god Nanna in the Sumerian city-state of Ur. There we go. But authorship shows up much later than some anonymous civil servant keeping track of who’s registered which grain or some anonymous priest or something keeping track of who’s made various offerings. This idea of like, “Oh, you’re gonna write poetry,” is a step later.

Lauren: Filing your tax is what is actually one of the best links you have to those ancient civilisations.

Gretchen: There’s this Egyptian named Ptahhotep – that’s “Pta,” P-T, even though I know I’m not pronouncing it that way – he was a vizier in Egypt. He’s also one of the first named writers, the first book in history – or people call him the first book in history – because he wrote these Maxims of Ptahhotep. There may have been people who were writing on more perishable materials that didn’t get recorded and stuff like that. It’s this whole process of, “Okay, I’m going to draw these little diagrams of oxen or something or draw these little diagrams of this plant or this animal or whatever to record what types of things get recorded.” But then in order for it to actually become a writing system, there’s also this step of abstraction that has to happen. This is when you start saying, “Okay, well, the word for this very easily visualisable thing” – so I’m thinking of oxen because the word for “ox” in one of the Semitic languages, I think, was something like /alef/. And so, this “ox’s head” gets transformed into, “Okay, what if this is the sound at the beginning of the word for ‘ox’s head,’” which is /alef/, and it gets transformed into our modern letter A, which is “alpha.” “Alpha” in Greek is just the name of the letter. It’s not “an ox’s head” in Greek anymore because the Greeks borrowed it form the Phoenicians. This level of abstraction that has to go from, “Okay, I’m gonna draw an ox’s head” – if you turn a capital A upside down, it kind of looks like an ox’s head.

Lauren: It’s got its little horns, which are the feet of an A.

Gretchen: Yeah, and there’re all these related languages. You know, Arabic’s got alif at the beginning, even though it doesn’t look like an ox’s head anymore. Hebrew’s got an alef, and Greek’s got an alpha, and all of these alphabets that begin with A. It’s this level of abstraction where you can use this thing to stand for this thing that was associated with an ox.

Lauren: There’re a couple of main different ways that you can relate these abstract images that you’re putting down in writing to the language that you are trying to capture. Of course, being a linguistics podcast, I was gonna bring this straight back to the structure of language.

Gretchen: Well, I think it’s interesting to look at the structure of languages in different areas of the world, and how people reflect those in the writing systems that are developed for those languages. When they borrow a writing system for a language with a very different structure, they end up doing certain adaptations to account for not just like, “Okay, languages have different sounds,” but also those sounds are organised and structured in different ways with relationship to each other. The writing systems often reflect some of that history.

Lauren: The Latin alphabet that both of us are most familiar with has a very approximate correspondence between each character of the writing system and a sound in the language. And I say “approximate” because English spelling is a wonderful historical record of how some of those sound changes have changed over time. I’m just gonna keep this upbeat. You can fall down a giant well of English writing system problems, but to get to a point where the majority of letters have a pretty stable correspondence to sounds that we recognise as phones in the language, and that allows us to write out the words of English.

Gretchen: One of the things that’s true about a lot of the Indo-European languages is that they have a particular ratio between consonants and vowels in the words, where they have a fair bit of consonants in relationship to their vowels but not a ton. You can see this in the writing system because the writing system represents consonants and vowels separately. And yet, when the Greeks were borrowing the alphabet from the Phoenicians – Phoenician is a Semitic language like modern-day Arabic and Hebrew – that alphabet only had consonants in it – letters for consonants – because the vowels were not that important. This is still true of modern-day Semitic languages is they’re often written in writing systems that don’t represent the vowels or kind of optionally represent the short vowels, or sometimes they represent the long vowels, but they’re often written in writing systems where the vowels can be omitted. That’s not really a thing you can do very well in Indo-European languages and still have things understood because the vowels carry enough information that you need to represent them somehow.

Lauren: Even when you have a phonemic script, it’s not necessary to always represent all of the sounds to convey the language.

Gretchen: Right. Then conversely, there are other languages where the vowels are even more important and, in fact, every consonant comes with a vowel or virtually every consonant comes with a vowel. In those, you often get what are called “syllabaries,” where they represent one syllable at a time, because why bother with representing each of these things separately when in every context where you have a consonant there’s gonna be a nearby vowel – or in virtually every context there’s gonna be a nearby vowel – and so you can have a symbol that just represents the whole syllable there. That’s also a structure that doesn’t work very well for Indo-European languages because they don’t have that many vowels. There’s this spot of like they have important enough vowels that you need to represent the vowels somehow but not so important are vowels that you have to represent lots of vowels all the time, whereas languages like Japanese or Hindi – well, Hindi’s Indo-European, but it’s got more vowels, I guess.

Lauren: The Devanagari writing system is inherently focused on the syllable, which is a very different approach to reading. Each character of this writing system, if there’s no vowel specified, it just comes with a bonus vowel. It’s like, “Buy this consonant, get this free letter A sound.”

Gretchen: Right. That’s partly a feature of the writing system, but it can only be a feature of the writing system because it’s already a feature of the language. A similar thing goes for a language like Chinese, where a lot of things are based around a syllable.

Lauren: Then you can go a level of abstraction further where your character in the writing system represents a word-level thing and doesn’t have a direct relationship to the sound correspondence, which is what happens with the Chinese script.

Gretchen: I think it’s important to recognise that there is a phonetic component to Chinese characters. They often make use of – especially for words that are more abstract – it’s not just like, “Oh, here’s a bunch of little pictures that we’ve drawn,” because that’s not capable of conveying abstract concepts like grammatical particles and words for things that don’t come with easy pictures. And so, making use of, “Okay, a lot of our words are one or two syllables long, so here’s a word that’s relatively easy to visualise that sounds very similar to a word that is not as easy to visualise.” We can just add a thing to be like, “It sounds like this, but it’s got a meaning more related to this,” and you can be like, “Oh, it must be this more abstract word.” The classic example, which I’m definitely gonna do the tones wrong on, is that the word for “horse” is /ma/, and the word for mother is also /ma/ with a different tone, and you can add the little horse semantic component with the woman semantic component and be like, “Oh, it’s the word that sounds like ‘horse’ but has to do with something with a woman,” and then you end up with “mother.”

Lauren: This works for languages in China because they tend to be not as long as words in English. We like to add all these extra bits of morphology within our grammar, whereas, again, you get – not a direct rule force – but you get this general tendency where the writing system kind of fits with the vibe of the grammar of the language.

Gretchen: One example of that is in Japanese where they were heavily influenced by the Chinese script, but Japanese actually does have suffixes and other little grammatical words and things you need to change about words. They made some of the Chinese characters that had formerly only had semantic things into just like, “Oh, this makes this sound, and this makes this sound,” because they needed to be able to represent that morphological information that’s not super important in Chinese but is very important in Japanese. You end up adapting a script into something else when it gets borrowed in a different context. Another interesting example here is Farsi or Persian which is an Indo-European language that’s conventionally written with the same script as Arabic except it’s also had a couple of additional letters added because Persian has a P and Arabic doesn’t. They had to create a symbol for the sound P, which is why you get “Farsi” instead of “Parsi” because Arabic doesn’t pronounce that P. So, it makes the P into an F. Sometimes you get people adding additional letters like adding a letter for P. Sometimes you get adapting whole sets of a script.

Lauren: Sometimes you lose letters. English had distinct characters for /θ/ and /ð/ until it was technologically easier to just use the characters in the printing press that English had borrowed. It’s makes me a little bit sad. But also, it makes international people – maybe it’s a little bit easier.

Gretchen: We used to have a thorn for the /ð/ sound, but those early printing presses from continental Europe didn’t have thorns on them. I mean, Icelandic still has thorns. One of the things that I think is more interesting in the closer to modern era – not strictly modern era – is cultures and peoples that are familiar with the idea of writing yet take the idea of writing and say, “We’re gonna make our own homegrown script that actually works really well for our particular language.” One of my favourites is the Cherokee syllabary, which was invented by Sequoyah, who was a Cherokee man who didn’t know how to read in English, but he’d encountered the Latin-based writing system in English. He thought it was cool that the English speakers had this, and so he locked himself in shed for several years and came up with a syllabary for Cherokee. Some of the symbols on the Cherokee syllabary look something like Latin letters, but they stand for completely different things because he wasn’t just learning to read from English. Some of them are completely different. This became hugely popular among the Cherokee in the area. There were newspapers in this in the 1800s. There was very high literacy in Cherokee country. It was really popular. It’s even still found on modern-day computer keyboards and stuff like this. You can get Windows and stuff in Cherokee. It’s this interesting example of that’s one where we can say a particular person was inspired by writing systems but also created his own thing that became very popular.

Lauren: The thing that makes Cherokee so compelling to me is not only did he come up with an incredibly elegant, well thought out, suits the language system, but that he actually got uptake as well – that the community decided to use this as the writing system that they would learn to read and write in, and that it had uptake. It’s very easy to come up with ways of improving the technology of writing but, as I think you’re fond of saying, language is very much an open-source project. You can come up with really elegant solutions, but if no one else is gonna take them up, that’s not gonna be very helpful. So, Sequoyah’s work is doubly amazing for that reason.

Gretchen: People actually made printing presses with the Cherokee symbols and were using those. Another interesting case of this disconnect between a person or people coming up with a system and actual uptake of it is Korean, which has what I think linguists generally agree is just the best writing system.

Lauren: Yeah, we’re like, “Writing as a technology is amazing. All writing systems are equally valid. But Korean is particularly great.”

Gretchen: “But Korean’s really cool.” The thing that’s cool about it from a completely biased linguist perspective is that the writing system of Korean, Hangul, the script, is not just based on individual sounds or phonemes, it’s actually at a more precise level based on the shape of the mouth and how you configure the mouth in order to make those particular sounds. There’s a lot of, okay, here are these closely related sounds – let’s say you make them all with the lips – and you just add an additional stroke to make it this other related sound that you make with the lips. Between P and B and M, which are all made with the lips, those symbols have a similar shape. It’s not an accident. It’s very systematic between that and the same thing with T and D and N. Those have a similar shape because they have this relationship. It’s very technically beautiful from an analysis of language perspective.

Lauren: I love this so much that when we were prototyping a potential script for the Aramteskan language for the Shadowscent books, when I was constructing that language, I also started constructing a script that we never used anywhere, but it was helpful to think about how the characters would write and what writing implements they would use. If you look at the script, you’ll notice that the letter P and B are very similar, but B has an additional stroke. T and D are very similar, but D has an additional stroke. Very much feature driven. And then for the vowels – it’s roughly a quadrant in the writing space – the /i/ vowel is in the top left of the quadrant, the /u/ vowel is in the top right of the quadrant, the /a/ vowel is in the bottom left of the quadrant.

Gretchen: So clever!

Lauren: It was actually just for really selfish reasons that I decided to go with a feature-based system, and that is that it was easier for me to remember if I used the features of the language and made sure that the voiced sound was always identical to the voiceless one but just with an additional stroke. It meant that I only had to remember half the characters.

Gretchen: That’s very elegant. The easy to remember bit is also true about the Hangul script because it’s got so much regularity. The famous quote about Hangul is something like “A wise man can learn it in an afternoon and a foolish man can learn it in a day.”

Lauren: So catchy!

Gretchen: There’s probably a better version of that quote. What’s interesting about it from an adoption perspective is that Hangul was invented by Sejong the Great.

Lauren: Appropriately named.

Gretchen: Who has a national holiday now because of the script. But it was created in 1443. It’s not quite clear whether it was him personally doing everything or whether he had an advisory committee of linguists, but it’s really extremely well-adapted to the linguistic situation of Korean in particular. Even though it’s just also really cool for how it represents the inside of the mouth, but it’s really well adapted for Korean. It was invented in 1443, but it wasn’t popularised in use until several centuries later because for a long time Korean was also using, like Japanese, this adapted version of the Chinese script or adapted version of the Japanese script because of the cultural influences. In the early 20th century, they were doing a much bigger literacy push in Korea to be like, “What want everyone to learn how to read.” And they said, “Okay, we’re gonna have an orthographic reform, and we’re gonna use this script which has this very nice historical pedigree but also is much easier to learn than this complicated thing that we had done that wasn’t really designed for Korean.” It’s got this historical antecedence but also it came back in the modern-day. Now, everything in Korean is written in it. It’s because it’s really easy to learn how to read and write in. The historical uptake wasn’t immediate. It wasn’t during King Sejong’s lifetime where they were like, “Oh, yeah, now we’re all gonna use his script,” people were like, “Okay, king, you’ve got this hobby,” but it wasn’t popularised until later.

Lauren: Even when there is really strong abstraction, humans have this unavoidable tendency to think about the relationship between sounds and other senses. In sound-based writing systems – Suzy Styles, who has been on the podcast before and works on perception across the senses, did an experiment alongside Nora Turoman where they looked at whether people can guess, for writing systems they’re not familiar with, which character was the /u/ sound and which character was the /i/ sound. They found that for a whole variety of scripts there is a much higher than chance – because there’s only two choices. If was completely arbitrary, it would be 50/50. But people do tend, across the evolution of sound-based writing systems, to have /u/ that has a more rounded, bigger sound has properties in the writing system that re-occur. People continue to unavoidably link the sounds of the language to the written properties of the script in a very low-level way. I’ll link to that study. It’s really great.

Gretchen: That’s interesting. It’s not gonna be 100%, but there’s this slightly better than chance relationship.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Visual representation of physical information is also something that shows up in ways of writing signed languages.

Lauren: Yeah. Everything we’ve talked about so far, I think, we’ve talked about for spoken languages, but it is possible to write signed languages as well.

Gretchen: There are several different systems in place. Some of them are language-specific like, “Oh, this is the system for writing ASL in particular,” and some of them are kind of like your linguist, International Phonetic Alphabet trying to provide a language-agnostic way of writing signed languages for research purposes but, in a way, that’s sort of impractical, like the IPA for general use. There’s an interesting set of systems. There isn’t as much agreement among representers of signed languages in writing which amounts of information are crucial information that has to be written down and which are optional bits of information that the reader can fill in from their own knowledge of the language and the signer.

Lauren: I think it’s worth flagging that that’s not just a discussion that arises for signed languages. It’s just that those conversations got thrashed out for spoken languages four millennia ago, and we weren’t around when people were arguing about whether intonation had any role in the – or people probably were arguing because it was an emerging thing.

Gretchen: Well, when people were arguing about like, “Do we write vowels or not,” which was a big thing. Do we write vowels? Do we write intonation? And punctuation followed quite a bit after – you know, punctuation wasn’t as much of a thing for several of the early centuries and millennia of writing. They didn’t do punctuation. There’s some level of ongoingness that’s still there. If you think about the internet efforts to try to write tone of voice very precisely and communicate sarcasm and irony and rhetorical questions very precisely, there’s some level of ongoing debate that’s still happening in the spoken language context but not nearly as much as is still happening in the signed language context.

Lauren: Also, just because of the way that signed language communities tend to be embedded within larger spoken language communities, people who sign as a primary language tend to also be educated in the mainstream spoken language, and so literacy gets developed in, say, a language like English.

Gretchen: I think that’s the case for a lot of smaller spoken languages as well where sometimes there’s this imperative of, “Okay, we want to be able to write things to each other” or something, but if there hasn’t been a history of a lot of published literature in that language that you’re trying to read, then it becomes a question of, “Should we teach this in school,” because there isn’t literature there, even though there would be oral literature. It becomes a chicken and egg problem of which comes first, or which do you start teaching first, when you’re constantly comparing stuff against a few very large spoken languages that have this very long writing tradition. It shows up in languages with a newer writing tradition.

Lauren: Education systems have a massive influence there. My grandmother, actually her strongest written language is German. Even though she and her sister speak to each other in Polish, they would write to each other in German because that’s the language they had been educated to write in. Even with people who don’t speak minority languages, the influence of the education system there is so massive.

Gretchen: Reading and writing, they’re separate skills even though they’re often taught together. Sometimes you can read a language that you can’t write or something like that. But it’s a big question. With signed languages, because video technology is now available, if we’d had good audio recording technology 4,000 years ago, the pressure to develop writing systems for spoken languages might not have been as strong – probably wouldn’t have been as strong – even though there are other useful things that writing can do even in the audio-video era. It’s easier to be like, “Well, you can just make a video of the signer,” and then you’d know exactly what they were trying to say and exactly how they wanted to say it. You wouldn’t have this level of abstraction of are you gonna try to write it down in a way that imperfectly represents what a person is gonna do when they’re producing it. It is still interesting looking at some of the signed language writing systems. Some of them, like Stokoe notation and HamNoSys, which stands for “Hamburg Notation System,” they try to very physically represent the characteristics of the signer – where their hands are, where their face is, and things like that. There’s another one that I can’t find the name of that is based on the ASCII alphabet, so you can type it into search engine boxes, which has some advantages as well but represents things more abstractly. It’s got this link with Korean, which was representing this very physical aspect of what the mouth is doing. Several of the signed language writing systems like Stokoe and HamNoSys also have this very physical representation what the body’s doing when it’s being produced. But I think they’re more popular among researchers than they are among actual D/deaf users who tend to use video a lot.

Lauren: I encounter Stokoe and HamNoSys in the gesture and signed linguistics literature. I haven’t really seen them too much outside of that.

Gretchen: I think that it’s easy to conflate a language with its writing system because we’re so used to thinking of English as sort of inextricably linked to the Latin alphabet. But there isn’t a reason, in theory, why you couldn’t write English in the Greek alphabet or in the Arabic alphabet or in a very adapted version of Chinese characters where you’d have to do a lot of adaptation. The same thing is true when you write languages that don’t originally use the Latin alphabet and you have romanisations of them. Writing systems are just as much political and contextual. Some of them have this very tight structural relationship to the properties of the languages they represent and some of them have looser relationships because they’ve been adapted to it later.

Lauren: It’s this slightly looser relationship to language as it’s spoken or signed that means that linguists don’t always include writing systems in, say, an Introduction to Linguistics course. We don’t often talk about writing systems. But when we were putting together the Crash Course series, we ended up making writing the topic of our final episode for the series.

Gretchen: I think partly because people are really interested in it, so why not do something about writing, and also because I think that you can use writing systems as a window into some of the interesting structural features of different languages and how the writing systems represent that. As somebody who’s really interested in internet linguistics and the rise of informal writing and how we represent tone of voice and things like that in modern-day writing, and that’s still a moving target evolutionarily speaking, I think it’s interesting to give that linguistic lens on writing systems even though they are imperfect representations of the languages that they represent.

Lauren: “Writing Systems” is Video 16 of Crash Course linguistics, which is wrapping up this month. If you’ve been holding out to watch all 16 of those episodes, you’ll be able to do so very soon or perhaps even now thanks to the temporal vagueness of podcasts.

Gretchen: Crash Course is the YouTube series that we’ve been working on basically all of 2020. It’s especially popular with high school or undergraduate teaching. If you know people that age, or who teach people that age, that may be a useful thing to send to people. We hope that people find it useful as a resource for self-teaching or for instructing in various capacities.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, “Not judging your grammar, just analysing it” mugs, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and book about internet language is called Because Internet. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes and you wish there were more? You can access to 48 bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chat room to talk with other linguistics fans – like, do you remember learning how to read – and other rewards as well as helping keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include an AMA with a lexicographer and our favourite stories and anecdotes that we just didn’t have time for in some of the earlier episodes. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you could recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life. And, hey, tell your other favourite podcasts that they could a linguistics episode, and get us on! It’d be fun.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #lingthusiasm #language #episode 52 #transcripts #writing #writing techonology #cuneiform #chinese oracle bones #scripts #orthography #technology #cherokee syllabary #hangul #olmec script #mayan script #stokoe notation #hamnosys

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xenodelic · 3 years

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I used to call myself a dakotaraptor therian. When I finally came to terms with being an alien after being in denial my entire life, I continued calling myself a dakotaraptor therian alongside being alienkin but I dropped the former label because it somehow just didn’t feel right anymore.

I chose a raptor as my fursona when I came out as trans and I think that because I created that representation of myself at such a critical turning point in my life that I formed a very strong bond with the species, and realistically at this point I would probably call it a linktype that’s dissipated. A big part of it is because I’ve mostly lost interest in the furry community at large (I still love anthro art and such, I just prefer to keep the a small niche community), and felt very disconnected from my fursona as a result. Not to mention that I was having a major identity crisis due to discovering my plurality around that same time.

On the flip side of things, coming to terms with my extraterrestrial nature made me feel extremely isolated from Earth in general, to the point where I found myself wanting to disconnect any association I have with it. In a weird way I almost felt like I had to, like I have to be so alien that I can’t relate to anything of this planet. But that’s obviously not the case. I’m here, and I’m here to stay for this lifetime and I have an inherent connection the creatures that inhabit this planet.

I’m coming back around to exploring therian identities. I know at this point I’m pigeonhearted as they are my family, but I relate a lot to therian posts about certain animalistic instincts. This is something I’ll have to explore, but the funny thing is that despite my kintype being spiritual, I’m almost certain my therian experience is psychological. I can draw my animalistic behaviors all the way back to my childhood. In fact they’re some of the only memories I have from that time, and the only good ones at that. That’s probably a big part of why it cemented itself so deeply.

This is mostly just personal ramblings, but don’t feel bad about changing labels and exploring yourself. but also don’t forget to take your time. its taken me a few months before being ready to start exploring this part of my identity again. I just wasn’t there yet, but I feel a lot more comfortable with it now.

#personal xechos #therian #otherkin #alterhuman #nonhuman

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crushing-on-nico-di-angelo · 3 years

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Seven Nights in Cabin Thirteen

I’m inspired by another post I saw here that I didn’t wish to hijack lol, and OP deactivated or else I’d link their account here. credits to @the-ghost-king for the idea of a demigod therapy/Will being a past drug addict on this post. Yes this is a bad fic. It’s also my first fic ever. Please criticize if you see anything

Will never thought that he would ever appreciate his first monster attack. He was seven years old, and in hindsight his teacher probably only worked there to prey on young demigods (at least, that’s why he suspects the attack happened so early in his life compared to other demigods). But when Lee Fletcher sat him down 4 years later and told him that he was trans and would now be known as Lee instead of his birth name, Will knew that everything happened for a reason.

After many conversations with Lee about how he knew (gods bless that man’s patience) and with an older Athena camper who’s special interest dealt in psychology, Will realized the reason that he always felt disconnected from his mom and sisters in Austin was because he was like Lee. He was a boy.

Telling people wasn’t easy. Of course his older brother had to know; he was the one who introduced Will to this concept. Telling the rest of camp was as easy as telling Chiron, who told Dionysus, who always threatened to turn anyone into a dolphin if they talked shit about any trans kid. Telling his mom... that had to be the hardest part. How was he supposed to tell them? The only similarities they all had were that they were all musically inclined and that they were all girls.

Apparently, Will forgot that Naomi Solace was a musician. The music industry has more queers than an all girl’s school GSA. Her only questions were “Alright, what’s your name then, kiddo?” and “When do you want to set up an appointment with a therapist?” As for his siblings, well, let’s just say the oldest, Frankie, always knew. And it didn’t take long for seven-year-old Mickey to cut her doll-that-somehow-looked-exactly-like-Will’s hair and change his notes from high to low when she accompanied his singing on violin, as part of voice training.

Four years has passed since then and Will can hardly believe it. He’s stealth back at Austin because it’s just easier that way, but since a quarter of the camp knew him since he was seven, he figured there was no point; it isn’t like anyone treated him as though he wasn’t a man-- er, boy-- at camp anyways. So, life went on. He got his period for the first time during the Battle of Manhattan, that was no fun, but luckily Thalia was cool about it and made sure not to tell anyone. He started binding shortly afterwards, got a couple bruises hear and there. Kayla yelled at him for a week for that one, he remembers fondly. Discovered why it’s better to take off your contacts in the shower... that day isn’t such a fond memory. That was the first and last time he ever made himself bleed. Although, he will say that’s what sparked his interest in medicine and what made him the best doctor Camp Half Blood had seen in decades at the mere age of 15 years old. Life at camp was good, if a bit dull. He got used to the routine and the constant influx of damaged campers, the siblings and friends, and the always-perfect Texas Barbecue and Coke.

That is, until the War Between the Camps happened. Lou Ellen woke Will up before sundown that day and told him their plan. They were to hide in the tall grasses and wait for Camp Jupiter to show their ugly faces. Cecil had the genius idea to paint their faces and arms black so they’d blend into the night better, and Will supposes in the hubub of everything they forgot that his hair nearly (”nearly”) glows, even at night. Until Mr. Nico “I’m so smart, I nearly killed myself shadow travelling” di Angelo pointed it out. Whatever, it made sense at the time. They won the war against Gaea, not without sacrifice, and they finally, finally got past all the wars and destruction and health issues that they were able to just hang out and get to know each other as friends.

And boy, was their friendship amazing. Nico had the best taste in music from Will’s eyes, and that’s saying something because Will is a music snob. Nico could be a little stubborn at times, but that’s alright because so was Will (”Gods damn it, Nico, if you don’t take your medication right this second I will-” “You’ll what? Hm? You’ll force it down my throat? Last I checked that was abuse.”). They fit together so perfectly and became fast friends.

It wasn’t always sunshine and lollipops, though. What is, for a demigod? Will relapsed once and passed out right in front of Nico’s cabin. He was crashing from an exciting high that he hadn’t experienced in so long, and he felt so tired and ashamed of himself. Methamphetamine was a goddamned bitch, so while he was coming out of withdrawals, he made Nico promise not to let him leave the cabin for a week were simmering down. He had to make sure something like this never happened again. They Iris Messaged Chiron and explained the situation, and he understood. He made sure to contact the older son of Dionysus who had been Will’s therapist in the past and said what had happened and they agreed on a session for soon after Will got mostly over his cravings.

So now they had a week of downtime together. Awesome.

“Solace, do you need anything? Are you okay?” Nico asked towards the end of the first full day that withdrawals were over.

“I’m-- fuck. I’m fine. I swear.” He responded unconvincingly.

“That’s not what you said last night... no offense, but I’m not fully inclined to believe you when you look like shit.”

“It- It... it’s not something I’d like to talk about, if that’s alright. And... don’t tell Clarisse, please.”

“I’m not going to tell anyone, don’t worry. But I would like to know if this is going to be a common occ--” Before he could even finish asking, Will was already shaking his head and responding.

“One-time thing only, I promise. Gods, I’m sorry I showed up here at all.”

“Woah, buddy. That’s not what I was saying at all. You’re my best friend, I’m glad you came here.” Will almost couldn’t believe what Nico was saying. Then again, did Nico have very many friends? Nico himself certainly didn’t seem to think so. “In any case, you don’t have to explain what happened, or what led up to this, or anything like that. I don't need to know. What I do need you to do, however, is take a shower. I’m sorry to say so, but you smell like ass.”

“Yeah well, I’m…” He couldn’t finish his sentence. How do you explain to someone that he still wanted his drugs, and he didn’t want to leave the cabin because he knew he would leave to go find some before he would even think about going to his own cabin at this point.

“You don’t have to leave,” Nico said, perhaps sensing his agitation. “I have a shower in the cabin.”

“What the fuck do you mean you have a shower in the cabin?” The shock of this knowledge get him out of his stuck mind. “How did you get plumbing in here? How did Chiron allow this?”

“I helped design my cabin, and while I may not have all the experience in architecture that Annabeth does, I do know a thing or two. I did meet with Isambard Kingdom Brunel, you know.”

“I did not know. You- Who is Isambard Kingdom Brunel?” Will asked

“Oh, some civil engineer who is like a million years old.” Will scoffed at that.

“You’re one to talk,” he teased. He was never going to let go of the fact that Nico was technically like 80 years old.

“Oh hush, William.” William… never Will, like most people. William… like he was something special, something that deserved three syllables. “Anyways, like I was saying: take a shower. You look like you were up mowing all of camp with a flashlight.”

Knowing Will’s reaction to drugs, that wasn’t unlikely. He stood up. “Lead the way? I’ve never been around your cabin before.”

Nico’s cabin was unlike any others. Using some sort of Doctor Who-like technology, there was a living room, a kitchen, and one room. Surprisingly, the walls were all light or pastel, a stark contrast from Nico’s general (and unintentional) punk-rock appearance. However, the furniture was all a deep black. Nico led him to his room, a minimalistic one with a bed, a desk, and a lamp. Will wondered where all the personalization was, but made no comment.

“Here’s the shower,” Nico pointed to yet another room in this somehow huge cabin. “If you see something amiss or odd… ignore it.” Will didn’t want to think of the implications of that sentence.

He stepped in the shower and oh my gods, watching the dirt and grime wash off him after his 8 hour high-- which he did not want to think about (and not just because the author doesn’t want to taint his search history), it was too embarrassing-- was a wonderful feeling. He was still tired. He didn’t know why, it didn’t used to be this hard. However, he was pretty sure that he tried to clean the entire outside of the hypnos cabin before going over to the Hades cabin to do the same. This was the first and last time Will would ever thank the gods for Nico’s poor sleeping patterns, he had heard him outside and came to get him before he tired himself out more.

He nearly passed out in the shower again but managed to make it out. He looked around the well-stocked bathroom and realized something that he probably should have bothered to notice before: he didn’t have any clothes with him. Fuck. He wrapped a (black) towel around his chest because he didn’t think his body could take anymore binding and prayed to Dionysus that Nico didn’t notice that his chest wasn’t exactly male.

Luckily, the first thing Nico did say was “Is that a tattoo?”

Will looked down at his sun. “Yeah, it is,” he smiled. He remembered the night he did it, it was kind of hard. He ordered a tattoo gun off amazon and had Frankie do it for him shortly after the Battle of Manhattan. Some people might think it’s in honor of his dad, which is fine. It was really for Lee Fletcher, though. His mom totally freaked, for a really long time, but after his C-PTSD diagnoses she realized that whatever works for him works as long as it isn’t drugs or self harm. He knows she wants a future for him that doesn’t involve music, and that’s why she freaked. She thought it would ruin his chances. But it’s right on his shoulder, only visible in tank tops or no shirt.

"It… its to honor the man who taught me I could be myself." Will said after a small pause.

"That's a very lovely sentiment. If he made that much of an impact on you, he must be a very cool person."

"He was." Will knew that Nico heard the was by the way that Nico nodded solemnly. "I uh… I don't wish to be more of a bother, but do you mind if I go to bed now? That shower really helped."

"Yeah, of course. I can take the couch, you know where my bed is-"

"No, absolutely not." Nico sighed softly, as though he expected this. "I can sleep on the couch, in Austin I actually prefer it to my bed."

"That's-- no offense William, but that's weird."

"It feels less lonely to me," Will protested, then let out a huge yawn.

"Alright cowboy-" Will smiled at Nico's nickname for him "-get some sleep. I'll see you in the morning."

"Nighty night, Neeks. Love you." he didn't miss the small smile on Nico's face before he walked away. Will has always been very loose with his 'I love you's like that. He figured it's better to say it too much than not enough.

He had found his old stash the night before, the one that Clovis had helped him forget about. He couldn't stop himself from thinking about last nights events. At the time,he told himself that he shouldn't do anything with it, and put it out of his mind for about a week, but eventually his urge to smoke overcame his self-control. He went on a rampage of cleaning and was absolutely certain he looked like a madman. The worst part is, he didn't even know why he did it. It was as though his rehabilitation hadn't even happened, as though this was something that was as natural as getting a cup of coffee in the morning. He was so mad at himself, so embarrassed.

These thoughts occupied his mind until he fell asleep about an hour after his last words to Nico. He slept with no dreams, for the first time in about a month.

word count: 2,245

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triforce-princess · 3 years

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well, i finally 100% completed hyrule warriors age of calamity in its entirety, including post game content, so i’m finally going to write a full review. beware this review will contain every spoiler imaginable so please do not click the read more if you haven’t finished the game yet and don’t want to be spoiled!

tl,dr; this game is a lot of fun despite some of its shortcomings and it’s really nice to see characters get the development they needed in breath of the wild. also a huge improvement gameplay-wise from the first game. if you’re a fan of breath of the wild it’s worth a try, just don’t expect breath of the wild style of gameplay! and if you’re a fan of the original hyrule warriors, you are going to love this a lot. ok now to get into the details. this is extremely long;

about the gameplay; it took me a while to fully adjust to the new controls and mechanics, but once i finally understood it it was so much fun. i originally wasn’t crazy about the sheikah slate runes since it was difficult at first to remember that a. i had that ability, and b. when the proper time to use it was. but when it finally clicked for me it brought a whole new interesting layer to the gameplay that challenged my memory in a fun way. it took me even longer to learn what the use of the rods were but those were great in a pinch once i figured it out. i also loved the flurry rush mechanic since dodging is a pretty important aspect of the gameplay. all these new layers added to this gameplay makes me wonder how i ever put up with the original hyrule warriors gameplay lol. something i wasn’t entirely crazy about was the wall jumping and paraglider stuff? i never really found it useful and it always just became a problem when i was trying to dodge and i’d be confused about why my character was slowly flying around at critical moments.

the camera in this game was pretty frustrating. with the more organic map & lots of tight spaces (which i’ll get more into later), the camera would get stuck a lot and you’d be unable to really see what’s going on and it got pretty frustrating at times. i wish there were some way they could fix that but i’m not sure what they could do without having the camera go out of bounds & show the edges of the map. maybe they could’ve made some of the objects that are in the middle not be things the camera get stuck on though.

i also felt like there were too many special effects going on with some enemies and attacks, sometimes it would cover up large parts of the screen & you wouldn’t be able to see what you were fighting and that was pretty stressful (i found myself frequently yelling “i can’t see!!” when i’d defeat a guardian or something in a room with lots of other enemies. this only became an issue in the later parts of the game though.

now about the maps, i do love how much more organic and natural they are. it’s a big upgrade from the original which had a lot of wide corridors leading into square rooms which were allied/enemy basses. but unfortunately, this causes issues with navigation and the camera getting stuck (like i mentioned before). i had a lot of problems where the map was too natural and i was confused about why i was getting stuck on level geometry when it looked like i could walk through there. i think the breath of the wild style makes this confusing too because you can’t really undo a thousand hours of being able to walk through nearly everything. but also it was just really unclear what was a wall and what wasn’t sometimes. i was surprised i actually had to zoom in on the mini map and look at that to move around at times. definitely an ambitious aspect of the game & i appreciate the effort and detail, but i don’t know if it works that great for this style of gameplay. i also don’t know why they bothered putting so many small details on the ground if they’re just going to pop in so close to the camera. it was kind of awkward when you cleared out all the enemies & were traveling to another location and it was the only noticable thing on screen.

speaking of ambitious, we can’t ignore this game’s framerate issues. it’s the first thing on everyone’s minds when talking about this game. most of the time, it was pretty acceptable. but they definitely pushed this game farther than the switch can go and it shows. i really appreciate the love they put into making this game as detailed as they did, but i don’t know if it was worth it in the long run. there’s only a couple times i can think of where the framerates got absolutely unacceptable, and it always seemed to be when there was a lot of electricity and enemies on screen at the same time. it happened once during the final vah naboris mission and another time where there were a ton of electric lizalfos all shooting electricity at once at the same time you have to fight an electric lynel. but, i’m not the kind of gamer that loses my shit over dropped framerates, i grew up with the n64 & have had to put up with poor early emulation many times in my life so framerates don’t really phase me until it just gets unplayable.

wasn’t crazy about how many late game missions were just boss rushes, but that’s pretty standard hyrule warriors fare. at least it was more fair in this game where most of the time you only had to fight one boss at a time and the next boss wouldn’t spawn in until you beat the first one, so there was no risk of accidentally aggro-ing a boss in another part of the map & have an unfair fight on your hands like in the first game. it was pretty anti-climactic how the seemingly final mission which had the highest recommended level was just another boss rush, and not even the hardest one (it was just a bunch of regular malice bosses in a row).

bit of a side note but i didn’t like having to grind for materials and find koroks for 100%. the koroks weren’t nearly as bad as breath of the wild though, thank god.

i’m pretty disappointed that some content that’s clearly in the game isn’t unlocked in the base game, it’s looking pretty likely that they’ll add it as dlc later & pretend it’s new content to make the game relevant again...i’ve always firmly believed dlc should be extra content that’s added in later. hopefully they’ll add some really cool stuff as dlc alongside the stuff that’s in the game & it won’t be so disappointing. there’s two characters i was sure would be unlocked as playable characters (sooga and astor) but i found it weird that you don’t get them in the post game and instead you get to play as the egg guardian (terrako) and calamity ganon???? talk about subverting expectations. also really frustrated to learn that zelda’s royal dress isn’t available in the base game but its in the files & is just missing one body part?? really hope that’s just a free update and not like, paid dlc. kind of dumb that they didn’t give the devs one extra day to model feet on the character.

about the story; the story starts out really strong i feel, i loved seeing characters get the development they didn’t get in breath of the wild and this game’s story makes breath of the wild’s story feel even more incomplete than it did before this game came out. and actually seeing the story play out in chronological order in real time without link having amnesia gave the story so much more feeling and connection. this is probably my favorite aspect of this game because i was always so disappointed with how disconnected you feel in breath of the wild because of the way the story is told. and it does so much of a better job illustrating link and zelda’s feelings. i’m probably the single most difficult person to convince when it comes to link and zelda being in a relationship or having feelings for eachother and i thought this was quite possibly the best master sword scene in any zelda game;

in previous games link has always had to prove his courage in a variety of trials spread across the land and to me its really boring, especially after how many times its been done. the thing that gets me about this scene is the master sword deems him worthy because of his desire to protect zelda even when he’s been beaten down & disarmed. that was a really beautiful moment to me & i’m glad they wrote the scene this way.

speaking of being worthy of power because you want to protect someone, i wasn’t really that crazy of zelda unlocking her power just because she loves link but honestly this game illustrated it in a much better way & i’m more down with it now. i loved this shot how it really captured what she was feeling;

it’s also in general awesome to see the champions in action, both in gameplay and in cutscenes. i remember being in awe the first time i got to play as urbosa. it feels like we finally really got to know them and how powerful they really were, instead of breath of the wild just telling us they were cool & we just had to believe it.

now for the part i know people say this game is shit because of; the time travel aspect. yeah, it’s a little silly and nonsensical, but honestly, it was kind of fun. and i don’t get how a time travel plot is somehow weird for the zelda series. the most critically acclaimed game of this series, ocarina of time, is entirely revolved around a time travel plot & the heroes would not have won if it weren’t for time travel in that game. yeah, it’s goofy, but this series is known for its nonsensical aspects & plotholes. there’s always some kind of unexplainable magic in this series that solves problems. i don’t think that makes this game shit. plus i was kind of starstruck when i first got to play as sidon lol. i was thinking to myself, man, who would’ve known 3 years later we’d get to play as sidon! crazy! none of the champion descendants were really my favorite to play as but it was still cool to see them & play as them.

something i didn’t understand was why kohga and the yiga clan joined zelda’s cause? i feel like a vital scene got cut. i don’t get why he’d join even when astor betrayed him, considering his group’s ambitions and how many times they tried to kill zelda. and where’d sooga go? the scene of astor betraying them kind of implied he was going to die but we never got confirmation of that, and he even shows up in a post game mission as an ally (no cutscene, just one line of dialogue during gameplay)

as for the ending, i guess it was alright? astor was a really lazily written villain and i just did not care for him at all. kinda don’t even care that we don’t get to play as him (yet, probably). calamity ganon’s design in this game was terrible. and i guess it would’ve been hard to make it work, but no beast ganon? just felt a little to easy to wrap up. despite this i guess it was nice to see hyrule get a happier ending even if it was a bit nonsensical at times. also this is just a bit of a personal thing for me but i liked seeing hyrule before it was destroyed. it always bums me out when you find a locaiton in game that’s been destroyed & you can only think about what it mightve looked like before. this is something that’s bummed me out since wind waker (was always disappointed you don’t get to see what greatfish isle is like!!) and breath of the wild gave me so much disappointment in that aspect lol.

one final thought but it was odd to me how many lines revali got & how often he interacted with link lol. was weird to see him slowly warm up to link a little towards the end (but of course he’s still a little mean...). no other character acknowledges link as much as revali. this scene confused me the most??

there were so many other people revali could’ve spoken to. he barely even acknowledges teba who was the one who specifically came to his aid!! and the way link looks at him with big puppy eyes?? link barely makes a facial expression at anyone else! and how revali expresses gratitude for the first time in his life after looking at link’s stupid cute anime face and smiles (but he turns around because he would be too ashamed to smile at link i guess)

anyway that’s it, i finally got out all my thoughts about this game. this went on way longer than i intended and i’m sorry if you read the whole thing & it took forever lol. this game is fun, get it.

#legend of zelda #hyrule warriors: age of calamity #breath of the wild #text #hwaoc spoilers

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athenasbloodyspear · 3 years

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Say Something to Stop Me: Chapter 7

Writing Master List | Say Something to Stop Me Master List

Please note: This fic describes depression, anxiety, panic attacks, past/referenced non con and domestic violence. Please read at your own discretion.

Explicit Sexual Content. 18+

For the second time since Bucky had entered your room, time stood still. The world around you seemed suspended in space.

For the second time, you fell into the endless whirlpools of Bucky’s eyes. The shades of blue spinning and spinning until you felt hypnotized.

The world held its breath as you both stared at each other. Sound had been ripped away. The only thing you could hear was the thudding of your heart in your chest. The only thing you could feel was Bucky’s arms where they wrapped around your shoulders and the warmth of his legs underneath you.

There was nothing else outside of this spot where you were tangled together on the floor. The only thing that existed was blue eyes, strong arms and shallow breaths.

Neither of you moved for a very long moment. It felt fragile somehow, like if all of the fibers of the universe didn’t align in the correct way, you would both cease to exist in this moment.

When Bucky finally moved to cup both sides of your face in his hands, it happened in slow motion. Like both of you were moving through molasses towards each other.

When his palms connected with your skin time came whipping back in full force.

He slammed his lips to yours.

Your entire body burst into flames.

Every single cell in your body was alight.

The kiss seared your senses from head to toe.

He stole every molecule of oxygen from your lungs, but this time it felt so delicious to be suffocating.

A pleading moan was ripped from your lungs as you shifted on his lap to straddle him, your hands reaching around his shoulders to pull him closer to you. You wanted every inch of him against every inch of you.

He answered with a groan of his own as he slipped a hand around the back of your neck and slid it up to the hair at the nape of your neck and grabbed on, like he was worried you’d slip away from him. His other metal hand slid down to wrap around your lower back, yanking you against him.

You tangled one of your hands in the ends of his hair where it laid against his shoulders while the other grappled for purchase against his shoulder. You needed something to hold on to or you’d float away.

You were moaning into his mouth involuntarily as every movement of his hands against your neck and back caused shivers to run down your spine. He slipped his tongue between your lips to open your mouth for him.

You needed more.

More more more.

You reached down to grab the hem of his shirt, ready to tear it up and off his shoulders. Maybe you’d just tear it in general. You’d buy him a new one.

Suddenly, Bucky grabbed your wrists to halt your hands where they were, tangled in the hem of his shirt. His mouth still seared to yours, he bit your bottom lip and sucked softly before pulling back and releasing your lip with a soft pop.

You whined, desperate to feel the soft skin of his chest and to feel his lips on yours again. He let out a low groan and rested his forehead against yours, panting. “You’re killing me sweetheart.”

You didn’t respond, you just grappled a bit with his hands, trying to release his grip so you could snag his shirt again.

“Stop babydoll. You have to stop.”

You just pushed your bottom lip into a pout. “Why?”

“Because,” His breath was ghosting across your collarbones, causing you to shiver. “I refuse to go there with you on a day ruined by that son of a bitch.”

Your only response was to grind your hips against his, where you could feel exactly how much he wanted this.

“Ah, fuck princess.” He growled. Without releasing your hands, Bucky tugged you forward to seal his lips over yours again.

You both tumbled into it for a few more moments, your hands fighting his grip as you tried to release his hold. You needed to card your fingers through his silky hair, or tangle them in his shirt or rub them along the groves of his muscles. You needed to touch him.

You rolled your hips against his again, hoping to distract him long enough to loosen his grip.

Without warning, Bucky quickly stood up, hauling you up with him. He set you on your feet before tearing his lips from yours and taking a step back.

You both stood in the center of your bedroom, staring at each other, panting.

“Bucky…” you whimpered. Already you felt cold in all the places his body had been pressed against yours.

“No. Not like this.” Bucky breathed, his eyes flashing as he looked over every inch of you. Your thighs were trembling where you stood, your body flashing with heat. “I want it to be perfect.” Bucky murmured, stepping toward you to tuck a piece of hair behind your ear.

“No pressure.” You muttered.

Bucky chuckled. “It’ll be perfect in our own way.” He grabbed both sides of your face before placing a chaste kiss against your forehead. “You need sleep.”

“I need you .” You whispered softly. Bucky groaned again, a pained sound from the back of his throat.

“Soon.” He whispered, kissing the tip of your nose then. He backed away from you toward the door, only turning once he’d reached the frame. He began closing the door, looking you over from head to toe one more time before whispering “Goodnight.” And closing the door behind him.

You stood in the center of your room, trying to calm your racing heart and cool your body temperature down.

You saw Bucky’s shadow hover for a long moment outside your door before he finally stepped away.

Goodnight indeed.

~0~

The next two weeks passed you in a blur of activity. Bucky was called away the next morning to survey a few buildings in Europe with Sam.

Before he left, he’d found you in the halls of the compound. He’d been fully suited up, with all his weapons strapped to his back when he cornered and kissed you so thoroughly that you completely forgot where you’d been heading in the first place.

He’d lingered for a moment, staring at your face, scanning over your features and looking back and forth between your eyes.

You suddenly realized you were in his arms, your legs wrapped around his waist.

When did that happen?

You heard Sam’s voice down the hall, telling Bucky to hurry his ass up or he’d take off without him.

Bucky had slowly lowered you to the ground, given you one last lingering kiss before whispering “I won’t be gone long” and disappearing as silent as smoke.

That had been 12 days, 15 hours and 26 minutes ago. Not that you were counting or anything.

They’d been snowed in at their safe house, somewhere in the Alps. Whenever Bucky got service in the storm he’d call you, even if the line could only stay connected for a few minutes.

You’d talked about everything and nothing.

You’d finally shared everything you’d shared with Bucky, and more, with your therapist.

“I know now that he was controlling me and who I saw because he was cheating on me and projected that on me. I know it’s not my fault that he was a bastard who manipulated me because he knew he could. But that doesn’t stop me from hating myself for letting it happen. I mean… cmon Bucky I’ve been through a million trainings on hostage situations and surviving torture and all of those things. I’m a goddamn super soldier and I let that worthless piece of shit chew me up and spit me out. It’s not what he did to me that’s fucked me up so much, it’s that I fucking let. It. happen.” You’d spewed out on the phone to him one night after a particularly eye opening session with your therapist.

“I know.” His voice was crackly coming through the earpiece of the satellite phone. “But you are strong. It’s not going to fix itself overnight sweetheart.”

“I know.” You sighed.

“I’m going to be there every step of the way, got it?” Bucky said. The line was getting more and more staticy as he talked.

“I know.” You repeated.

“Hey, Y/N?” Bucky started. He sounded almost nervous.

“Yeah?”

“I uh…” he heaved a huge sigh on the other line. “I guess I probably shouldn’t say this over the phone…” He muttered, like he was talking to himself and not to you.

“Say what?” You whispered.

“I…”

Just then the line disconnected. You laid in your bed, staring at the screen of the satellite phone, wishing it had stayed connected for just ten more seconds. You wondered what he was thinking, what had he wanted to say?

~0~

The next day he’d called again and you’d chatted about the mission and how annoying Sam was getting after a few days locked in a tiny safe house with him.

Bucky opened up to you about how being snowed in like this was bringing back memories of Siberia that he would prefer to forget about. He said he was having a hard time sleeping again.

You’d stayed on the line as long as you could after you heard his breath evening out, hoping that just having you on the phone would help him sleep for a bit longer. You stayed until the line cut out again.

~0~

So now here you sat. On the couch in the family living room, staring at the satellite phone.

It was about 2 am in New York, which you estimated meant it was somewhere around 8 or 9 am wherever they were in the Alps. You’d hoped he might try to call when he woke up that morning.

You were physically exhausted due to a few hard days of training with Natasha. You were trying to work on your flexibility and agility and Nat was running you into the ground.

Despite that, you felt like you were finally swimming out of this huge ocean of grief and pain toward shore. You were healing, however slowly. You were focused on breathing and feeling the sun and tasting the wind.

You had your friends again, your family. You had Bucky. They would all help you keep your head above water when you couldn’t anymore.

So you sat on the couch, and waited for Bucky to call. You didn’t know if he would, he might think you were asleep.

Suddenly, you heard a low rumble coming from the direction of the landing pad outside.

Could they have finally made it through all the snow?

You ran, your feet carrying you through the halls, down the stairs and out the door like the wind.

As soon as you pushed the door, you saw him.

He was walking down the ramp of the quinjet. When he saw you, his face lit up and he smiled.

It felt like your heart might explode.

You squealed. You couldn’t help it. You had missed him more than you would care to admit out loud at the moment and you felt pure joy bubble up in your chest as you ran headlong toward him.

You were both laughing as you flung yourself into his arms, wrapping your arms and legs tightly around him. You buried your nose in his neck and took a huge inhale. The smell of Bucky instantly mellowing you out. It smelled like home.

“Hey gorgeous.” Bucky whispered into your neck.

“What the hell?” Sam called from behind Bucky. You lifted your head from his neck to see Sam standing at the top of the ramp with his arms crossed in front of his chest. “Optimus Prime here gets a gorgeous girl wrapped around him after days of freezing his ass off in those mountains and I don’t even get a hello?”

You blushed a bit. You’d never really covered with Bucky what was really going on between the two of you, or if he wanted anyone else to know about it.

“It’s my reward for not killing you in that cabin and leaving your body there, Wilson.”

Sam rolled his eyes.

“Hi Sam.” You said, giving him a little wave over Bucky’s shoulder.

“If you ever get bored with metal-man gorgeous, you know where to find me.” Sam smirked at you.

“I can still kill you right here, Sam.” Bucky called over his shoulder as he started to walk toward the compound.

Sam cackled before calling “You wouldn’t! It would require you to let go of your girl!”

You felt Bucky’s chest rumble with laughter against yours.

~0~

Bucky never put you down as you walked through the compound. He occasionally peppered kisses over your face as he walked, only pulling away to grab door handles or press elevator buttons.

When the elevator opened on the residential level, Bucky smirked at you with a mischievous glint in his eyes before murmuring. “Your place or mine?”

You blushed from head to toe, your whole body going to molten against his. Bucky huffed a small laugh before rubbing his nose against the tip of yours and whispering. “Yours then. It’s closer.”

He sealed his lips to yours as he walked you backwards and into your bedroom. Your hands were in his hair as you kissed him, you pulled his bottom lip into your mouth and bit down gently. He groaned softly as he kicked the door shut behind him.

Suddenly you were falling. He dropped you on the mattress and you bounced twice, staring back up at him where he stood at the end of the bed.

“I missed you.” He said softly. His eyes were scanning your whole body, head to toe, and you felt your flush deepen as your body temperature continued to climb. A pulse of heat started deep in your abdomen as you stared at him.

You bit your lip and batted your eyelashes at him before whispering “I missed you too.”

He groaned and let his head drop back to stare at the ceiling.

“What?” You asked, propping yourself up on your elbows. Was he okay?

“You look like a dream.” He said before dropping his eyes back to you. “I just can’t believe I’m standing here.”

“I can’t believe you’re still just standing there.” You murmured. You stretched your arms above your head, knowing it would give him a peek of the band on the Calvin Klein underwear you’d thrown on under your sweats as well as lift your t-shirt up to reveal your stomach.

“Is that a challenge?” Bucky smirked at you. He wrapped both hands around each of your ankles and yanked. Your body slid down the center of the mattress a few inches toward him and you let out a giggle.

“Maybe.” You murmured, biting your lip again. “I’ve been getting very impatient. It’s not very polite to leave a woman wanting.”

“Did you think about me while I was gone?” Bucky murmured as he placed a knee between your knees, leaning down to place a hand on either side of your head. His gold chain sliding out from under his shirt to dangle down from his neck.

You reached a hand up to trace the length of the chain where it ran along his neck and down to where it dangled above you, hooking your finger in it and tugging gently. “Every night.”

Bucky let out a soft laugh that morphed into a moan as he leaned down over you and kissed you deeply. The cool length of his chain pooled between your collarbones.

The only places he was touching you besides your lips was the soft brush of his chain on your chest and the tickling of the ends of his hair where it framed your face. You wanted more.

You whined his name as you lifted your hands up to tangle in his hair.

“What do you want sweetheart?” He murmured against your lips.

What did you want?

You wanted him inside you immediately.

But you also wanted him to do this every night. You wanted to wake up like this every morning, with him above you and his smell all around you. You wanted to spend more days in Brooklyn together, without unwelcome interruptions. You wanted to spend your life fighting at his back, protecting him. You wanted it all. You didn’t care if the road was rough, you wanted to experience it all instead of keeping your head under the water like you had for the last year.

“I want to feel everything with you.” You whispered.

You weren’t sure if he would understand what you meant. That you wanted to keep swimming toward the shore. That you wanted to not lose another moment with him to the panic. You wanted to feel every brush of his fingers on your skin. You wanted to feel the wind whipping through your hair while wrapped around him on his bike.

You should have known he would understand how deeply you meant that. He pulled back from you slightly then, to look you in the eyes. He gave you a small smile, but one that held volumes. You felt the impact all the way down to your toes.

He knew you and understood you in a way you had never felt before.

“Tell me to stop if I’m doing something you don’t like.” He whispered, placing his warm hand in the center of your chest softly. His fingertips brushing along your collarbone.

“Okay.” You whispered back.

He slowly dragged his fingertips down the center of your chest to your sternum before moving them softly over to your left breast. His fingers drawing slow circles.

Your breath caught in your throat. He was still holding his body above yours, so his slow moving fingers were the only point of contact on your body, but you still felt like you were burning alive.

You started to reach your hands up to wrap around his neck and pull him down to you when he snagged your wrists in one hand. “Just let me touch you.” He breathed. “Please.”

How could you deny him anything when he said please like that?

He took your hands and gently extended them so they rested just above the crown of your head. “Leave those there for now babygirl.” He murmured softly, before pulling his hand away to resume the path it had been traveling in circles on your chest.

You are powerless now, completely at the mercy of his fingers as he trails them slowly down your chest to the hem of your t-shirt, pushing it up until your breasts are exposed to the cool air of the room and the heat of his gaze.

Bucky let a low moan escape him as he took in your chest. His hand sliding back down your chest to cup the weight of your left breast softly. “God you’re incredible.” Bucky groaned, leaning down to place open mouthed kisses along the bottom of your other breast.

“Please Bucky.” You whimpered. You squeezed your thighs together only to remember he still had one knee between your legs. You arched your back, trying to gain some friction against his muscled thigh. He chuckled darkly and lowered his hand down to your left hip. He wrapped his hand around your hip bone and pushed it into the mattress, halting the movement of your hips. “So impatient.”

“Too patient.” You whined back at him.

He chuckled before sliding a thumb under the band of your underwear, tracing the line of your hip bone slowly. You roll your hips in time with the sweep of his thumb. The molten ache between your thighs ratchets up in intensity and you have to fight with every muscle in your body not to move your arms from where they’re positioned above your head.

Bucky leans down and places an open mouth kiss right against the point of your hip bone. You suck in a breath at the feeling of his mouth on your body. So close to where you need him but still too far away.

You yelp as Bucky sinks his teeth into the skin around your hip bone, not enough to draw blood, but enough that you know you’ll likely have a bruise in the shape of his mouth tomorrow. The thought of him marking you causes every muscle in your abdomen to squeeze, but there’s nothing for you to hold on to. Not with your thighs or your hands. You’re completely at his mercy.

Bucky drags his tongue from your hip bone across your lower abdomen to right below your belly button. He places soft kisses on the swell of your belly as his hands grip either side of your waistband and tug, sliding your sweats and underwear slowly down your thighs and shins until he’s finally shuking them off.

He leans back again, and stands at the end of the mattress, taking you in.

Your hips rest about six inches from the edge of the mattress, your feet rest on the edge, allowing your thighs to bare yourself totally to his baby blues. Your shirt is pushed up above your chest and your hands are still exactly where he placed them.

You heave breaths in and out of you as you watch him survey you. His eyes tracking from your hands above your head all the way down to the apex of your thighs on display for him. You feel like you’re burning alive in your own skin.

He stands at the end of your bed and looks like Adonis himself. The lamp on your nightstand casts golden light across the planes of his stomach and his jawline. His blue eyes flicker like the very tips of a flame as he licks his lips. He reaches behind him to grab the top of his t-shirt at the nape of his neck and pulls it up and off his chest before flinging it to the side. The only moment his eyes leave your core is when the fabric covers his line of sight.

He looks predatory, like he’s been tracking an enemy for weeks and finally has them in his crosshairs. Your inner muscles coil at the dark look in his eyes.

He sinks slowly to his knees in front of you before wrapping both hands under your thighs and giving you another quick tug so your hips lie closer to the edge of the mattress. The cool touch of his metal hand on one thigh and the warmth of the other sends a thrill up your spine.

“Fucking please. ” You whine again. It’s desperate this time but you don’t care. You’ll do anything to get him to put his mouth on you right now.

Bucky’s tongue draws a line along your inner thigh, running from your knee along the sensitive flesh and stops about an inch from your core. “You’re fucking beautiful when you beg for me sweetheart.” He growls.

And then his mouth is on you.

He licks a stripe straight up the center of you until his lips wrap around the tiny bundle of nerves that make up your clit. You cry out at the sensation. You feel like you might combust right then and there. Every part of you is a living flame as he sucks and licks against you. So painfully slowly you nearly scream.

He pulls his warm hand away from your thigh and slowly inserts one finger as he continues to slowly swirl his tongue around your clit. “So wet for me babygirl.” He murmurs against you.

The vibrations have you clenching down around his finger and he hums against your clit. “Good girl.”

He inserts a second finger then and pumps you slowly for a few moments, his tongue never leaving your clit.

He pulls away from you to stand again and you groan. You will actually lose your mind if he doesn’t keep touching you.

Bucky reaches for the clasp of his pants as he scans up your body and meets your eyes again.

He looks wrecked, like Thor just beat the shit out of him at the gym. His face is flushed and there’s a soft glisten on his chin where his face was buried in you. His blue eyes are alight with awe as he takes in your body spread before him. He looks more beautiful than you could ever dream.

“I’ll take my time with that later.” He whispers.

“Not so patient after all.” You whisper back.

Once he’s freed himself of his combat pants he leans down and grabs the front of your t-shirt where it’s bundled against your chest and tears it straight down the middle and off your chest. “I’ll give you one of mine.” He whispers.

He kisses you again then, the taste of him mixing with the taste of you and you arch up against him. He places the elbow of his metal arm down next to your head, and cups the back of your head with his palm. His warm hand snags your chin and forces your eyes to meet his. “Keep your eyes on me, Doll.” He whispers. “I’ve got you.”

Then he’s reaching between you and lining himself up with you, you let your thighs relax a bit so you are even more open for him. Your whole body is aching with need and you swallow a whine as you try to hold his eyes.

The moment he enters you feels like magic. Like every moment in your life and every choice lined up in a row so you could make it here. To be underneath him and completely at his mercy.

You’d do it all again for this moment.

When he bottoms out in you, he lets his head drop to the crook of your shoulder and releases a moan that comes from deep in his chest. His right hand comes back up to brace himself next to your head. It almost sounds like he’s in pain he is so unleashed and uncontrolled.

You can’t stand it anymore, you release your hands from their position and slide your fingers into the hair on the back of his head and grab onto him. Your chests are melded together and your hearts beat in time together.

You both take a moment to breathe and adjust to each other. He lifts his head to lock eyes with you again. His right hand comes up to brush a few strands of hair off your face before he tucks them behind your ear. The backs of his fingers brush along the line of your jaw.

He rubs the pad of his thumb over your bottom lip and you nip at his fingertip, earning you a chuckle from Bucky.

“I don’t deserve you.” He whispers, pulling his hips from you until he’s nearly all the way out of you.

“That’s my line.” You murmur back.

He smiles at you then.

It’s exactly like you had always dreamed. His face above yours, bathed in golden light, with the most beautiful and heart shattering smile on his face.

You simply must have died and gone to heaven.

He rolls his hips into you again, hitting a spot that you had no idea even existed, pulling a long keening sound from your throat. You throw your head back against the pillow, arching into him. His warm hand snakes up your chest, drawing a line between your breasts and comes to rest softly around your throat. He doesn’t apply any pressure, but just the feeling of his hand resting around your neck makes you squeeze around him.

He drops his head to the crook of your neck again and grunts, his hips pulling out and snapping back into you almost involuntarily.

“You have no idea.” He murmurs into your neck, punctuating the words with open mouthed kisses against your pulse, right by his thumb. “No fucking idea how many nights I’ve laid awake, dreaming of getting you underneath me like this.”

He puntuates that thought with another quick thrust of his hips, his thumb pushes softly against your chin, forcing your neck to elongate for him. He pulls his head back up so he can look at you, slowing down to an even roll of his hips. He groans when he bottoms out again. “Fuck” he chokes out “No matter how vivid my imagination, I never knew how fucking perfect you’d look.”

“How long?” You gasp. He knows immediately what you mean.

“Since that first night in Budapest. You drove me fucking insane.” His grip tightens around your throat slightly to force your eyes to meet his. “I’ve been slowly going mad ever since.” He shudders and groans as he pushes into you again, the pleasure was so acute you actually whimpered, it felt like you might cry.

You remember that night. Had dragged him to a bar around the corner from your safe house, saying that you wanted to celebrate being on ‘vacation’ together. He had just let you call the shots, pulling him along as you skipped into the dingy bar.

It was right after that blow out fight with Elijah. The beginning of the end.

You’d been melancholy the whole trip over. As soon as you had started wandering the streets Bucky had found a way to make you laugh, and you’d decided right then and there that you were just going to forget about Elijah for a month, and figure out what to do when you got back.

So you’d lugged Bucky down the street to a bar, gotten yourself good and drunk, and then jumped up on the bar. Someone had put “I Ran” by Flock of Seagulls on the radio and you had just decided that you needed to dance. Immediately.

So, you’d hopped up there and started shaking your ass. A few other ladies in the bar had joined you and soon enough you had the whole crowd singing and dancing. You were dancing and grinding and genuinely just letting loose when you had glanced over to where Bucky still sat, nursing his vodka on the rocks in a corner booth.

You hadn’t recognized it then, but you knew now the dark look on his face matched the one he was wearing now.

“I wanted to pick you up off that bar, throw you over my shoulder, walk back to our apartment and fuck you into the floor.” Bucky rasped, snapping his hips against you again. He was still holding your chin so you couldn’t move your eyes away from him. You closed them, the pleasure was so much you couldn’t take it.

“Look at me.”

You opened your eyes. His eyes were so clear and so blue looking down at you. It sent a sharp zing of pleasure up your spine. His gold chain dangled down from his neck, brushing along your collarbones and causing your whole chest to break out in goosebumps. Your hips rolled on their own, desperate to feel him hit that spot deep inside you. He growled.

“And then we had that mission in Croatia.” He groaned, moving both of his hands to either side of your head so he could piston his hips into you a little bit faster. “And you looked so goddamn good in your suit, beating the shit out of those guys.”

A giggle bubbled up out of your chest. You remembered the way you had caught him staring in the conference room that morning.

He was panting now as he thrust into you a little harder. It was becoming nearly impossible for you to keep your eyes open. “When you wrapped your thighs around that guy's head to tackle him...god I’ve never wanted to be someone else more than I did in that moment.” He accented that statement with an extra hard thrust of his hips. You were so close now. You whined.

“Oh fuck Bucky, I’m so close.”

He wrapped his warm hand around your throat once more and applied just the tiniest bit of pressure to the veins on both sides of your neck. You felt like you were going to explode.

“I know baby, you’re being such a good girl.” He growled. That was it. You could feel every muscle in your abdomen start tightening as you teetered on the edge of orgasm. “Look at me when you come, I wanna see you.”

Your body felt like a supernova.

You forced your eyes to meet his as your whole body seized in pleasure around him. His hand on your neck released and he snagged a handful of hair at the nape of your neck as he continued to work you through your orgasm. It was so strong, and so liberating to finally feel this.

You felt tears come to your eyes.

Bucky’s hips kept pounding into you, his eyes locked with yours, the biggest smile you’d ever seen on his face. A small drop of sweat rolled down his temple and across his jaw. He was whispering. “I got you. I got you. I’m right here. You did so good for me baby.” Over and over.

You let out a small choked sob as emotions overwhelmed you.

You loved him. So much it was physically painful. You felt like every nerve in your body was firing at the same time. Every thrust against you made your brain repeat “I love him. I love him. I love him.” You had to press your lips together to keep it from bursting out of your mouth.

You were whining underneath him, the bliss of your orgasm running longer than you’d ever experienced as he increased his pace inside you. He buried his head in the crook of your neck.You squeezed your eyes shut against the onslaught of sensations and emotions.

Suddenly, Bucky thrust hard and you felt him pulse as he orgasmed. He let out a groan from deep within his chest.

He stilled above you, his chest finally collapsing against yours. Both of your heartbeats thudded against your ribcage like the organs wanted to rip out of your skin to be closer to each other.

There were still tears streaming down your face and you were holding a sob in your chest. You were so unbelievably happy, you didn’t want him to get the wrong impression that you were upset. You were the farthest thing from upset you could possibly be.

He lifted his head off your neck and propped his other elbows behind your head, shifting a bit to his left side so he could use his warm right hand to stroke your face.

“Hey. Shhh. It’s okay. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.” He said between breaths, “You’re perfect, sweetheart. That was everything I could have ever dreamed of and more. I’m never letting you go, okay?”

You sobbed then. You couldn’t help it. It was heart wrenching to hear him say those things to you. You wanted that more than anything, you didn’t even know if you could express it to him. You wanted to crack open his ribcage and crawl inside so you never could be separated.

“Oh sweetheart.” He whispered and buried his head in your neck again. “You’re okay. It’s okay. Let it out babygirl.”

“I’m sorry.” You whispered. “I’m not upset, I’m so fucking happy I don’t know why I’m crying.” You chuckled a bit. You felt insane.

“Well, you did just come so hard you nearly went cross eyed. I assume that’s a pretty emotional experience.” Bucky grinned, lifting his head back up so he could look at you.

“I went cross eyed?” You shrieked, covering your face with your hands. Oh my god you were never going to look at him again.

You felt his chest rumble against yours. “No, princess. Stop. Don’t hide from me.” He hummed while he used his right hand to peel your fingers away from your face. “It was the single hottest thing I’ve ever seen.”

You revealed your eyes to him, but kept your hands on your cheeks to try to hide the blush. You didn’t really know why. You were, in fact, fully naked underneath him and he was still inside you for god's sake.

He just kept smiling at you as he leaned down to kiss the tip of your nose. He took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s get cleaned up and then go to sleep. Sound good?”

“Um…” You mumbled. “I honestly don’t know if I can walk.” Your legs felt like jello and there was still a resounding pulse echoing between your thighs in time with your heartbeat.

Bucky dropped his head back and laughed. You shoved a bit at his chest. “Don’t go getting a big head now.”

“Oh I’m never going to ever forget that you said that. I want that engraved on my tombstone. Or tattooed across my chest.” He said, leaning down to kiss you on the forehead. He pulled out of you slowly, you flinched a bit at the feeling of him pulling out. You really wished you could just sleep like this, him flattening you into the mattress like the warmest and nicest smelling weighted blanket on the market.

He scooped you up and carried you into your bathroom before plopping you down on the toilet. You giggled. “What are you doing?”

“You have to pee. I don’t want to be the reason you get a UTI.”

“How the hell do you know about UTI’s? I’m assuming that wasn’t part of sex ed in the forties.”

“Let’s just say I brushed up on my education recently. Wishful thinking.” Bucky winked at you. “Now pee. I’ll come grab you in sec.”

He snuck out the door and closed it behind him, leaving you in privacy to use the bathroom.

You placed your face in your hands and just giggled to yourself. You were so giddy. He was just… perfect. It was perfect. Everything you had always wanted.

How sweet that he carried you to the bathroom?

After you finished, you stood up to wash your hands, genuinely shocked at how wobbly your legs were. You felt like a newborn calf with knobby knees. Bucky ducked back into the bathroom when he heard the sink turn on. He had put his boxers back on.

He came up behind you and snaked his arms around your waist. He placed a soft kiss on your shoulder before resting his chin in the same spot. He looked up in the mirror. You lifted your eyes to meet his in the mirror.

There you were. Fully naked in the bathroom, with an almost equally naked Bucky wrapped around you. It felt so surreal to see the image in the mirror. It was confirmation that you weren’t dreaming. It was really happening.

He was really here.

Normally you would have avoided looking at your body, but you couldn’t help but look at where his arms wrapped around your waist. You noted that there was indeed the beginnings of a purple mark on your left hip bone in the shape of his mouth.

You lifted your arms to wrap over his, and leaned back into his chest. You felt his voice rumble against your back as he spoke. “You’re perfect. I still feel like at any moment I’m going to wake up alone in my bed across the hall.”

“I’m here Bucky. I’m right here.” You said as you squeezed his hands.

“I know.” He whispered. You closed your eyes, taking in a deep breath and trying to memorize the way his body felt against yours. The way his heart beat against your back. The way he smelled. The sounds of his breathing. The feeling of his breath ghosting over your shoulder and across your collarbone.

Suddenly he scooped you up again, earning him a little squeal from you. When he reached the edge of the bed he let you go and you bounced against the mattress, giggling.

“Be right back.” He grinned.

Before turning he combed his fingers twice through your hair, from your scalp all the way to the ends, before going back for his turn in the bathroom.

You rolled over onto your side, letting your heavy eyelids close.

As you drifted off to sleep, you felt his arms wrap around you again, his metal arm instantly soaking in the heat of your skin. His ankles tangled with yours.

You fell asleep to the sound of his breaths.

#bucky x reader #bucky barnes #bucky barnes x y/n #bucky barnes x you #bucky x you #bucky x y/n #bucky #bucky fic #bucky barnes x female reader #female reader #bucky x female reader

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tenderloincherub · 3 years

Text

Giovanni’s room (James Baldwin)

Before anything, I want to say, I’d been reading a lot this summer, but at the same time I felt like I couldn’t connect with the books, I didn’t feel them as I usually do, I don’t know, like, some part of me was always thinking about something else, and I also wanted to connect with the books but it just didn’t happen. So I was sort of desesperate for a book that grabbed me, I missed the feeling and I needed it. I don’t know if this book did it, I felt it more deeply than the rest of the books, but some part of me was still holding back, I’ve been weird lately so, I read the first chapter like 2.5 times, and I felt that this was the book, or at least, I wanted to believe so.

*Warning: spoilers ahead*

First of all, generally, Baldwin wrote this book beautifully. It created such a heavy atmosphere, you felt like you were witnessing things but that you weren’t really there. Which was the point, everything that happens in the book is told by David as a memory, while he stands in an empty house in the morning before Giovanni’s execution. So, you see these memories, but it feels like you’re not inside them.

My heart broke with each boy that David restrained himself from loving due to his inhibitions, but specially with Joey. I feel like Joey was his purest love, because, being his awakening, the first boy he ever loved, he was the only one that, at the very beginning, David loved without guilt, without feeling dirty, without feeling shame. The night he shares with Joey is the only night in his whole life where he’s not scared to love a boy, he just gives in to this feeling, the terror (which would accompany David for the rest of his life) didn’t arrive until the next morning. So, I think Joey was the one that felt the greater lost. I don’t know if I’m explaining myself: Giovanni, from the very beginning, never reached David fully, he only half lost him; but Joey knew, for one night, a David that completely surrendered to love, so when he lost him, he lost all of him, he didn’t lose a restrained love, he lost a complete love.

Going back to the atmosphere, as I said above: yo feel like you’re not really there. I think this reflects two things: a) that David actually is not there, he’s just remembering things, b) even when he lived all of this, David himself felt like he was not there, he was somewhere else, he couldn’t connect with Giovanni (because he couldn’t accept his love for men) and neither with Hella (because only wanted to love her, and didn’t really do so)

It was heavy, I felt complete despair and loneliness and restraint while reading it. David’s restrain is present in the whole narrative. I read in some comment about the book online, that David was so judgemental of everyone around him because he couldn’t stand people that were so open about their sexuality, a sexuality that he shared but made him feel ashamed. I think this quote represents that:

“There was the boy who worked all day, it was said, in the post office, who came out at night wearing makeup and earrings and with his heavy blond hair piled high. Sometimes he actually wore a skirt and high heels. [...] People said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way taht the sight of monkeys eating their own excremente turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not -so grotesquely- resemble human beings.”

He insists on calling him grotesque, but David is only upset because this boy is an echo of himself. Maybe is because he feels uncovered, somehow naked around people that display so comfortably parts of him that he denies and intends to hide. He feels uncovered.

The relationship with his father, I think, is the first symbol of his disconnection. He’s always around people that don’t reach him and that he doesn’t reach either. That is his loneliness. There is something that always stands between him and others, and that something is the shame he feels of his own sexuality, his denial. With his father, David knows that he’ll never know him deep, so he stands like in the middle. He isn’t rejected nor accepted by his father. His denied sexuality divides him from his father and Hella, and wanting to deny it divides him from the boys he loves and from Jacques.

There is despair, I read somewhere this sentence: “Giovanni’s room ends as it began.” And that’s it, basically. You’re powerless the whole time, memories will remain unchanged, Giovanni will still die in the morning, David will still be alone. And he doesn’t even come to accept himself, by the end he just tries to bury everything deeply-er: the guilt, his body, his sex. And he tries to convince himself that there’s hope of “redemption”.

It’s really devastating in an extense, not so intense, way. It’s like a heavy that remains and persists, not hitting at once, just pressing and pressing and pressing.

Jacques got some good dialogues, insight dialogues. I don’t know, I’ll just write the scenes here because they got me. (It got too long, so it’ll be in another post).

I keep coming back to David’s restraint. He didn’t allow himself to feel love, not pain either. He felt so empty because his whole life was a denial, so what he did was just a lie he told himself. He convinced himself of feelings he didn’t not have, and pushed too deep inside the ones that he actually had. I think, this book takes it time to hit, because everything David really feels is underneath. It’s not told directly, it’s told in the way he lived his life: without living really, living everything around life itself, if that makes sense.

I haven’t even talked about Giovanni, but this got too long already, so I’ll write another post late ‘cause I’m hungry.

#giovanni's room #giovannis room #book review #books #book quotes #thoughts on books #james baldwin #books i'm reading #thanks for reading #this got too long #i know #it still hurts #it's actually just starting to hurt

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isitgintimeyet · 4 years

Text

Just a Friend

Sorry you’ve had to wait a few more days. i had a much needed few days holiday in Devon. And I realised it was the first time since February that I’d travelled more than 20 miles from home!

Anyway, we’re on to chapter 7. Thanks for reading and hope you enjoy

Thanks to @wickedgoodbooks for the beta.

AO3

Chapter 7: From Feedback to The Force

I can see it clearly in my mind’s eye. A converted barn, situated at the end of a leafy country lane, surrounded by fields full of cows and maybe a horse or two. Jamie’s office will be at one end— all exposed beams with classic mahogany and leather furniture. Perhaps chickens will be roaming around outside as tractors pull up to deliver vegetables straight from the neighbouring fields.

This image begins to fade as I follow my Sat nav instructions and take the next junction off the motorway. Country lanes look to be few and far between in this urban sprawl. Signposts along the tarmacked road point to a series of industrial estates. At the fourth such sign, I’m instructed to turn left and in three hundred yards will have reached my destination.

Having parked up, I make my way towards the large, uninspiring building which resembles some sort of aircraft hangar. Its grey concrete and corrugated iron walls match the overcast sky and the roughly surfaced car park. The only colour in this landscape is provided by the bright orange FraserFood logo emblazoned above the loading bays.

There’s a single door to the right with an intercom. I press it and wait a few seconds.

“Hello, there.” A cheery voice greets me. “Can I help ye?”

“Yes. Hello, I’ve an appointment with Ja— Mr. Fraser, Jamie. It’s Claire Beauchamp.”

“Aye, come on through. Jamie is expecting ye. Down the passage and third door on the left.”

I step into a long corridor, painted an unoriginal white. Fluorescent strip lights hanging from the ceiling cast a harsh brightness. The floor is covered with grey carpet tiles.—the same as in thousands of other working offices across the country.

What sets it apart and brings character to the otherwise anonymous environment is the artwork. Colourful photographs line the walls — a bowl of strawberries, their red glossiness accentuated by the white porcelain; a perfect corn on the cob, rivulets of melted butter flowing around the kernels; a plate of steaming tagliatelle, the parmesan shavings falling gently onto the pasta. Then, as I move further towards the office, the photographs change to a series of images that I instantly recognise, La Boqueria, one of the food markets in Barcelona.

I pause for a moment in front of a picture of one of the stalls selling spices. Strings of different chillies cascade down from the metal frame of the stall. The vibrancy of that market was intoxicating, the noise, the colours, the aromas. I remember wandering from stall to stall snacking on fat, juicy olives, slices of spiced ham and wedges of refreshing melon, just soaking up that atmosphere.

My stomach automatically rumbles at the memory just as Jamie steps into the corridor.

He laughs at this unconventional greeting. “And good day tae ye too. Ye found us alright then?”

“No problem. Sat nav brought me straight here. It’s—“ I stop myself before I say any more, but, as usual, my glass face gives me away.

“C’mon. What is it? It’s no’ what ye were expecting, is it?”

“No— yes—no. It’s fine. It’s just, well, I was expecting something more, er, rural… rustic, you know.”

He sighs, but I can tell that he’s not offended. “What, ye mean like on a farm? Wi’ chickens running around? And tractors bringing the vegetables straight from the fields?”

I nod, feeling not a little bit foolish.

“And down a wee winding country lane, that yer lumbering great vans and lorries have tae drive along? Wi’ no easy transport links fer all the deliveries? And having tae deal wi’ all the food hygiene standards in some great old barn?” He laughs. “Trust me, it may no’ be photogenic but it’s the best place fer the business.”

He takes my arm. “Let’s go intae ma office and I’ll make ye a cup of coffee.”

My stomach rumbles once more. “Don’t suppose you’ve got any of those lovely Spanish biscuits too, have you?”

*********

The display of colourful photographs continues in Jamie’s office. I don’t recognise the scenes, but, I’m guessing these are more local— fields of corn bordered by old drystone walls, hedgerows bursting with dark jewel-like brambles. I pause at a picture of an ancient stone mill, the calm water of the mill pond reflecting the rundown building perfectly.

“That’s a bonny picture, is it no’?” Jamie’s voice is low in my ear.

I turn around. He is standing behind me, gazing intently at the picture.

“It is. Where is it? I’m guessing it’s somewhere here in Scotland.”

“Aye, it’s the old mill at Lallybroch.”

“Where you grew up?”

He nods. “Generations of ma family used that mill tae grind flour fer them and their tenants. It’s empty inside now. The wheel has long since rotted away. Jenny and I would escape there whenever chores were tae be done. She took the photo, weel, most of the photos here actually.”

I study the photograph more closely. “She’s very talented as a photographer. Is that her job?”

“She’d love tae have done that, but once she married Ian and the bairns started appearing, she hasna got the time. Mebbe one day.”

He moves past me towards his desk and I catch a hint of his musky cologne. I find myself comparing it to the slightly synthetic cologne that Frank always favoured. I decide that Jamie’s is preferable. It’s more real, somehow, earthy and, well, more masculine.

“... does that sound ok?”

I realise that whilst I was considering male scents, Jamie had been asking me a question. “Er, sorry, I was miles away. What did you say?”

“Am I really that boring tae ye?” He laughs. “I said I would make ye a coffee and invite Rupert tae come in and join us. He’s our Head of Product Development. Will ye no’ take a seat?”

I sit down on one of the chairs arranged around a circular meeting table and take a good look at the office while Jamie makes a phone call. The walls and ceiling are the same uninspiring white, livened up by all the photographs. There’s a couple of framed photographs near Jamie’s chair that seem to be more personal. I’m too far away to be able to see clearly, but they look like children... his nephew and niece perhaps?

Jamie’s ‘L’ shaped desk is made of grey wood, as is a tall bookcase and this meeting table. Simple, but clearly a considered purchase, no haphazard grouping of random furniture. The desk itself is remarkably free from clutter— just a laptop with two huge screens and a black leather document wallet. The contrast to the clutter on the desks in my office and home couldn’t be greater. Not that my clutter isn’t important to me—a collection of pots and dishes from my uncle’s archaeological digs plus a paperweight and letter opener that I remember, as a young child, at my parents’ house. Then I realise, looking at the family portraits surrounding Jamie’s desk, that he doesn’t need to gather mementoes from the past. He has a living, breathing close knit family creating memories all the time.

I’m well aware that most of my friends have more of a family than I have, or have ever had, and generally I’m fine with that. But every now and again it hits me right in the gut—this pang of...not loneliness, but more of being disconnected, rootless.

Before I can dwell on this, there’s a faint tap at the door. It opens immediately and a woman stands in the doorway. She’s easily past retirement age, quite short and… is sturdy a polite descriptor? Well, short and ‘motherly’ in appearance.

She’s very smiley too. Her eyes crinkle as she grins broadly before speaking. “Jamie, lad. I’ve come tae see if ye both want a coffee. I dinna mind making it. And mebbe a few biscuits?”

Jamie steps away from his desk. “Ah, Mrs. Fitz, how d’ye always ken what I want? Coffee would be grand. And fer ye Claire?”

“Coffee, please. Lovely. White, no sugar. Thanks.”

She looks at me for a moment before Jamie makes the introduction. “ Claire, this is Mrs Fitz. She’s worked wi’ me since I started and I dinna ken what I’d do wi’out her.”

He reaches across and pats her arm gently.

“Mrs. Fitz, this is Claire, a friend of mine. She’s been trying out our Spanish dinner party menu and has come tae meet wi’ Rupert tae give him her opinions.”

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Fitz.” I hold out my hand.

She takes it in both of hers. “And it’s lovely tae meet ye too, Claire.”

She turns away and heads out the door.

“Right-oh. Two coffees it is then,” she says clearly, then carries on muttering under her breath as she leaves. “Friends, is it, then? A bonny lass, sure enough…”

Jamie smiles apologetically. “Mrs. Fitz can be a bit, weel...she’s been working with me a long time. She’s like a second mother tae me…”

He leaves the sentence unfinished, but I know what he’s thinking. Why can’t people understand that we’re friends, that’s all?

*******

Rupert is a complete delight, but somehow not what I was expecting. He rushes into the office just as Jamie and I are drinking our coffees. Nearly as tall as Jamie but quite a bit broader with a large beard, like an overgrown teddy bear, and clad in a sweatshirt and baggy ill-fitting jeans, he looks as if he would be more at home on a rugby pitch rather than in a development kitchen. With Jamie now standing next to him, the office suddenly feels rather small.

Jamie makes the introductions and we settle once more around the table. Rupert places his notebook and pen on the table.

“Ye dinna mind if I take a biscuit or two, do ye?” He asks, with a smile. He knows how tasty they are.

Jamie and I shake our heads and Rupert reaches out and takes two in his large, fleshy hand. He starts to eat, sprinkling crumbs all over his notebook.

“Ye canna take me anywhere,” he says as he tries to sweep the crumbs into his hand.

Jamie laughs and playfully punches Rupert’s shoulder. “Weel, ye can… but only the once, mind.”

There’s an easy camaraderie between the two of them. I’m guessing that Jamie has worked with the same people for quite a while. It’s good to see.

Rupert swallows, picks up a tissue and wipes the stray crumbs from his beard. “Right-oh. So, Claire, thanks fer doing this—“

“No, I should be thanking you. It was a great meal.”

“Weel, glad tae hear that, but I would appreciate any improvements we could make. Is there anything we need tae change?”

I’ve been racking my brains all the way here, trying to think of something constructive to say rather than just reeling off a list of compliments, nice as that would be for Rupert and Jamie. And, honestly, I don’t know what more I can add. The food was excellent, the wine matched perfectly and the olives were a thoughtful addition.

I tell them all this and Rupert solemnly notes it all down. Sitting there, side by side, elbows almost touching, they look for all the world like two proud parents being complimented on their child’s talents. But they have every right to be proud.

“And nothing else?” Rupert persists. “Nothing we could do better?”

“Well, a couple of tiny suggestions. Maybe a few more pictures with the recipes would help. I’m not the most gifted cook.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I notice Jamie trying to suppress a smile. He’s never seen me in the kitchen, maybe he’s imagining me as some sort of culinary disaster area. I vow to prove him wrong at some point.

“And,” I continue as Rupert scribbles in his notebook. “Perhaps add a couple of suggestions to complete the Spanish night. I made sangria to start the evening. Could you add a recipe for that?”

Rupert closes his notebook with a flourish. “Right then. Thank ye sae much fer that. Glad yer friends all enjoyed the food.”

He stands up, shifting the table as he does so.

“Weel, bye then, Claire. Lovely tae meet ye. Hope tae see ye again.” He shoots a quick look across at Jamie before leaving.

“Rupert’s a lovely guy,” I comment as the door shuts behind him.

“Aye, he is that,” Jamie shifts in his seat. “Listen, I need tae ask ye a favour.”

“Another one,” I joke. “Wasn’t the dinner party enough?”

I add a sigh, purely for dramatic effect.

“Ye can say no if ye want tae,” he continues. “But I was wondering… weel... Ian, that’s Jenny’s husband, his rugby club is having a charity dinner dance a week on Saturday. Jenny’s bought two tickets fer me and a plus one. D’ye fancy it? It would help me out of a wee bit of bother with ma sister.”

Now I’m intrigued about his “wee bit of bother” with Jenny. I don’t want to end up in the middle of some sibling squabble.

“How so?” I’m not giving an answer straight away. At least not until I know what the bother is.

“Jenny bought the two tickets fer me a couple of months ago. I think she was assuming I would bring Laoghaire. But ye ken what happened there. Anyways, she asked me yesterday about it, and ever so casually suggested I might bring Kelly— that was ma date the other night.”

The pattern of Rupert’s crumbs on the table appears to suddenly be of great interest to him. He studies them intently as he talks, his ears turning slightly pink as he does so.

“And?” I prompt him.

“And, I told Jenny that after Laoghaire and I broke up, I didna want tae disappoint her about the dinner and so I’d already asked ye tae come along. As a friend,” he hastily adds the last part.

So, what do I decide? I do love the opportunity to have a bit of a dance and rugby club dos are usually a bit of a laugh, in my experience. And of course, I know Jamie is offering as a friend, so I’m not worried about that.

“Why don’t you want to ask Kelly then?” I want the full story before I give him my answer.

“She’s a nice enough lass but I didna think we had any spark. Plus she was trying too hard. Fer example she asked me what films I liked, then when I told her, she was all ‘no way, they’re ma favourites too’.”

He adds gestures at this point, to demonstrate Kelly’s actions, one hand flapping excitedly, the other resting on my sleeve, lightly stroking through the fabric of my shirt. It feels—

“Apparently we have exactly the same taste in films, music, food, drinks, television and holidays,” he continues as he sits back and folds his arms.

“Sounds like a match made in heaven to me.” I joke. I can still feel the sensation of his hand on my arm.

He looks up at me and frowns. “I’m no’ joking. Ye would be helping me if ye came as ma plus one.”

“Ok then. I do know that I’m not on call. I can come and be your wingman, if you like. Just one question. What are your favourite films?”

“Star Wars.”

This wasn’t the answer I was expecting. He doesn’t seem like a typical fan. Maybe he has a dark side that I haven’t yet seen, with a secret stash of Star Wars figures and multiple light sabres.

“I’ve never watched any of them.” It’s true. I seem to be in the minority but I just don’t get the appeal.

“And I can tell from yer face exactly what ye think of them. But they’re classics, weel most of them, anyway,” he starts to enthuse.

I shake my head. I can’t see that he will ever convince me.

“Well, Sassenach, have I got a treat in store for you!”

And, worryingly, it seems that he’s up for the challenge.

#outlander fanfiction #outlander fanfic #Just a Friend #James Fraser #Claire Beauchamp #Chapter 7

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