#so here is it now whoops mea culpa

[theodore-sallis]

Giant-Size Man-Thing (Vol. 1/1974), #1.

Writer: Steve Gerber; Penciler: Mike Ploog; Inker: Frank Chiaramonte; Colorist: Petra Goldberg; Letterer: John Costanza

[eolewyn1010]

badly summarized WIP game

More than a month ago, @chucklepea-hotpot tagged me for this... mea culpa, I shouldn't have put it up for so long; it's such a fun concept.

Rules: Pick a bunch of your WIPs and summarise them as badly as possible, then ask your followers to vote on which one they'd most like to read.

Has anyone not done this yet? Uh, I'll hazard a few no-pressure tags: @str4wanzerin @chrisoels @carlomenzinger @mutantenfisch @krejong @awordwasthebeginning

[jurijurijurious]

Writerly ephemera meme

I was tagged by @thisbluespirit in this rather intriguing meme!

Find five bits of yourself that you gave to your fiction (memories and places and phrases and things into our stories), post and tag five or more writers to share as well.

Now I know I do write bits of myself and my experiences into my stories, one way or another, I think everyone does, but it doesn’t half put you on the spot when you have to try to remember where you’ve done it!

1) I know that recently I wrote Walsingham passing out at the end of a scene in “Mea Culpa”. The entire description is based on personal experience. I went through a scary few years as a young teen where I would pass out for little to no reason, usually at school where there were lots of people watching to cause me huge embarrassment, which then almost gave me a form of PTSD. I was constantly anxious about fainting, it was not good, and we never found out why it happened. But that’s another story... I still occasionally pass out but it’s usually for a reason, after having a vaccine or blood taken or something, but the whole process of fainting, though horrible, is like an old nemesis to me, uncomfortably familiar. I generally feel intense sickness in my stomach, my vision is puckered increasingly with white dots, my entire body comes out in a sweat, and I hear a high pitched whistle-type noise as I lose consciousness. And so since that is my experience, it became Wals’s too:

His palms sweated, his pulse raced...  He shuddered and emitted another strangled breath, fingers white where he clutched the window sill, body trembling.  He needed rest.  Ursula's voice was becoming distant, the room was swaying like the deck of a ship caught in a storm.  He felt a sudden nausea in his stomach, could hear a high pitched sound in his ears, a siren's wail beckoning him into the abyss.

“I am sorry.  So very sorry,” he whispered, though he knew not exactly who he was addressing.  His own voice now sounded as if it was coming from underwater, far away; he was drowning and could resist no more, slipped where he stood and descended into the open arms of oblivion.

2) This is another Walsibeth example I’m afraid because I haven’t written anything else for about a decade! So... Though the pandemic and my lack of funds has put a temporary hold to my hobby of horse riding, I am a half-capable rider and love tearing across country if opportunity allows on horseback. I can thus write people riding horses (English style, anyway) with a degree of accuracy. So in my smutty one-shot fic “In perpetuum et unum diem” (the one which is mostly a pastiche of the raunchy finale of “The Tudors” season 1, and also an excuse for me to write shameless sex), I began the ficlet with a bit of a horse-race between Bess and Wals to get the blood up (a scene that in itself mirrors Elizabeth’s racing with Raleigh in TGA, I later realised). Though I personally haven’t raced a person on horseback per se, I have done beach rides and also ridden on a horseback safari in Africa where you gallop as a group, and “giving your horse its head” is the order of the day! So a lot of this passage is me:

She turned her head back over her shoulder and caught Francis’ eyes.  His lip quirked slightly at the corner but otherwise there was no change to his countenance.  But that was enough.  Her smile deepend as if to invite him to race her and she turned her head back around, gave her dappled grey mare its head and pressed her calves to its flanks.  And the beast responded, driving its legs harder, faster, into a gallop and flew like a falcon through the trees.

...

As the wind flew in Elizabeth’s face, making her eyes water, a great whoop of exhilaration escaped her.  There was nothing but her and the horse, and the knowledge that her blackguard of a lover galloped behind her.  This was what it should feel like to live, even in tragically brief snippets; to feel the blood in your veins, the air in your chest, and the sun on your face, wild and free.

They then jump a tree trunk which I’d love to say I’d do, and I might, but most of my falls have been from jumping so I’d probably wimp out and go the long way around... ;)

3) Annnd another one from my Walsibeth fic “Mea Culpa”, just because it’s fresh in my mind. When I was driving to work last winter, there was one Sunday morning which had a jaw-droppingly beautiful sunrise. I tried to take a photo of it but could not do it justice. I did find a photo of Lincoln Cathedral on instagram from the same morning though which captured the sky perfectly. It literally looked like the sky was on fire, or something, and I immediately worked this memory into my story! I felt that a sky like that would make the perfect backdrop for a single, forlorn, broken bastard riding his horse in a clear, freezing morning:

There was a strange light in the sky as the sun began to make its ascent.  It turned a deep crimson then lifted to shades of rich amber and gold; this combined with the few grey clouds passing overhead gave it the illusion of a huge fire, as if a great furnace now filled the heavens.  Some might have called it beautiful, others would see a grim omen.

4) I had a look in my dreaded old fic archive, so full of cringe, and I found this from the end of my Doctor Who fic “Choices”, which I reckon I wrote between 2005-2006, possibly finishing it later than that. This scene right at the end (told from the perspective of Rose and the ninth Doctor’s daughter, Hope) is literally my old senior school - the class length, the finish time, the uniform was what I wore, and my history teacher was Mrs. Gaskin, and my mum would be waiting in her car to pick me and my sisters up:

By a quarter-to-three in the afternoon, she was in another History lesson with Mrs. Gaskin, and was spending another forty-five minutes hearing about the Black Death, the plague doctors, and the red crosses that were painted on people’s doors. It was fascinating, but Hope’s concentration wasn’t there. She kept looking out of the window at the school yard, noticing the little details that other days she would take for granted - like the way the trees swayed in the wind, the way a crisp-packet rolled across the concrete, and the pure azure-blue colour of the cloudless sky. Something was afoot but she had no idea what it was, or why she was feeling this way.

The bell rang finally at the end of the lesson, as the clock read three-thirty, and the class disappeared swiftly out of the door. It was home time! The voices of myriads of children echoed and shrilled down the corridors, and desperate feet, eager to get home, pounded down the stairs, making for the exits. White shirts were un-tucked from trouser and skirt hems, blue-and-red ties were loosened from about shirt collars, and black blazers were thrown off and carried over shoulders as the mass of pupils took flight.

Hope, however, took things slowly, almost as if she might never see them again, picking up on every smile, every individual laugh, and every joke pulled on every unsuspecting victim. She waved goodbye to friends, hitched her backpack over her shoulder, and made her way out of the school gates toward the spot where her mum or Uncle Jack would usually be waiting to pick her up. As she turned the corner onto Petunia Grove, though, she stopped and sighed. The car - either her mum’s or Jack’s - was not there.

Hope pursed her lips and shrugged, taking another good look around just to make sure that she hadn’t missed it, but there wasn’t a familiar car in sight. She thus let her bag slip off her shoulder, and she perched her backside on the street sign, swinging one of her feet back and forth as she waited for the arrival of her escort.

In the meantime, she couldn’t help but let her mind wander again, as it had been doing often throughout the day, and looked around the street. There was a blue tit on the hedge over the road, stood near a couple of sparrows and a robin. The front door of house number five was a brilliant shade of red, something which she had never really noticed before, and there was some graffiti on the road sign on the opposite side of the street. It read ‘Bad’ something or other, but she couldn’t read the other word since it was blocked off by the blue box.

Hope blinked and slowly rose to her feet. It couldn’t be…

5) And for number five, this is a short extract from the an unpublished Star Wars fic I wrote around 2010, where I tried for what must have been the third time to re-write the Star Wars nonsense I wrote as a teenager, all starring my very Mary Sue OC, Nadia, who became Vader’s apprentice and was mentored by Veers. I have here again worked my experiences of passing out into the story - a psychologist would have a field day with me. Nadia’s thoughts about showing weakness were also real fears of mine - I never liked to be weak, to be ill, to be a burden, and my character was the mouthpiece for my own self-disgust. It’s written in the first person with Nadia narrating in this scene where she accompanies General (Maximilian) Veers to the Kaminoan’s cloning facility to review further batches of troops and is taken ill by the experience of seeing the thousands of farmed foetuses:

Max nodded whilst I remained breathless and shaky in his shadow. I could not get those tiny, wriggling foetuses out of many head - they floated upon my consciousness, their inhuman eyes glaring into my face and their tiny hands reaching out toward me. I tried to rid myself of these infantile phantoms, but I could not, and I suddenly felt quite ill.

“We shall need many more in our next delivery,” Max told the creature, who began to babble on about the problems of this request, but was halted mid-sentence when Maximilian wheeled about and grabbed me, saying my name over and over. He disappeared amidst the snowstorm of white dots that littered my vision, however, and I collapsed upon the floor.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a bright, white room. The walls dazzled me for a moment and it took my eyes and my mind time to adjust and to recognise reality. I looked slowly at the plain walls, finding myself alone upon a bed with my hands by my sides and a drip feeding liquid into my arm. This seemed quite surreal - I knew I was not ill enough to warrant this - but I resolved to stay put until someone came to me. I felt extremely tired and I thought that I may as well take advantage of the rest.

I fell back to sleep again and, when I next woke, I saw Max sat in a chair beside me. I glanced about the room - we were alone. I looked at him uncertainly, my visage undoubtedly betraying the signs of my mortification, for he first said: “Do not worry, Nadia, I am not angry with you. It cannot always be helped.”

...

I wanted to defy him, to be strong, but no, I just showed him weakness and insecurity. What indignity was this?

Thanks for the tag, that was fun! I can’t think of 5 writers to tag but off the top of my head: @feuillesmortes, @robins-treasure and @captainofthegreenpeas? Have a go if you fancy.

[lfthinkerwrites]

Meanwhile, Back at Gotham Academy

...So, I haven’t been linking the last few chapters of this to my tumblr. Whoops.

Let’s get caught up a bit.

Previous chapters: 1/2/3/4/5/6/7

Meanwhile, Back at Gotham Academy...

"Attention, students. This is Principal Hugo Strange. Classes are now over for the day. Those students serving detention will remain on campus until 2:30 and those attending club meetings may remain until 3:00 pm. All students must be off campus by 3:30 pm or face severe consequences. That is all."

Harley took her seat at the head table in the chemistry lab and clapped her hands. "Alright! Everybody's here! Did you all bring the stuff?"

Kristen nodded in the last seat on the left. "I've got the graham crackers."

To Harley's left, Pamela put a box of chocolate bars down on the table. "I brought free-trade chocolate."

Next to Kristen, Selina put a wine bag down. "I brought the wine."

"And I've got the marshmallows and toothpicks!" Harley cheered. "Girl's Day is on!" She lightly jostled Penelope, who was sitting to her right. "And ta think, you wanted to stay in your office and work! Aren't ya glad ya came here instead?"

"We'll see," Penelope said, still looking a bit unsure. "How exactly are we going to make smores?"

"Oh, that's easy," Harley said. She reached to a bunsen burner that was set up in the middle of the table and turned it on. "Ta-da! Instant indoor campfire!" She stuck a marshmallow onto a toothpick and held it over the blue flame. "Come on, Penny! Grab a marshmallow!"

"Maybe later," Penelope said, her eyes wide at the open flame.

Pamela scoffed. "One would think with how many 'conferences' you've been to that you'd be used to these sort of shenanigans."

"Well, we've never had an open flame at the 'conferences'," Penelope muttered. "Not yet at least. Anyway," she said in a clearer tone. "What are our plans today?"

"You're looking at our plans," Selina said, pouring wine into plastic cups and passing them around the table. "Wine, smores-"

"And gossip!" Harley said. "It'll be just like a slumber party!"

Penelope and Pamela exchanged a look, then took a long sip of wine. Heavy footsteps alerted the women to the presence of another person in the room. Principal Strange had appeared in the room and was giving each and every one of them a disapproving look. "Ladies, and I do use that term lightly."

Harley gave him a cheeky wave. "Hiya, Hugie."

Strange's left eye twitched. "You know I detest nicknames, Ms. Quinzel."

Harley frowned. "Hey! That's Dr. Quinzel! I didn't go through med school just to be called 'Ms.' Quinzel!"

Strange sucked in a breath between his teeth. Escaping punishment from Superintendent al Ghul had emboldened the faculty to the point they were no longer intimidated by Strange. More was the pity. "Excuse me, 'Dr.' Quinzel." He turned his gaze to Kristen. "I am leaving for my meeting with the school board. I trust that everything will be taken care of in my absence, Ms. Kringle?"

"Yes, Principal Strange," Kristen answered while opening her box of graham crackers. "I can more than handle the administrative duties. I'm also in communication with Vice Principal Gordon regarding the trip."

"Excellent," Strange nodded. Then he turned his cold gaze to the three Sirens. "Coach Bolton is handling the students in detention. Under no circumstances are you to interfere unless at his request. In return, he will leave you to your own devices. Is that clear?"

"Crystal, Strange," Pamela said with a mocking salute. "Run along now. I'm sure the school board is waiting."

Strange's face colored, then he recovered. "Ladies. Enjoy your 'girl's day." He stomped out of the room. As soon as he was gone, Harley blew a raspberry.

"Well," Selina said. "Now that he's gone, what's on the agenda first, girls?"

A buzzing sound from Penelope's phone answered that question. Pamela rolled her eyes. "Edward?"

"Yes," Penelope answered, reading the text. "Oh my. It seems that Neil ate a rancid spanakopita and vomited on Karlo, which then caused their second fistfight of the day. Mockridge has given them fast passes so they can go on rides for the rest of the day."

Selina poured herself some more wine, then lifted her plastic cup up. "A moment of silence for the poor boys on the field trip today."

"Hear hear!" Harley agreed, raising her glass. Kristen, Pamela, and finally Penelope followed suit. She watched as the other four women lowered their glasses to take sips, then dissolved into laughter. She bit her lip.

"Selina?" she asked. "The three of you didn't cheat to stay at the school together, did you?"

Selina put a hand to her chest in mock affront. "Us? Cheat! Why we never!" Then she smirked and gestured to Kristen. "The keeper of the straws on the other hand."

Kristen laughed. "Mea culpa."

Penelope shook her head and took another sip of wine. She made a note to herself not to tell Edward about this. As insufferable as he could be when he was proven wrong about something, he was even worse when he was proven right. She looked back up from her cup to see that the other four women were looking at her, Selina, Harley, and Kristen with curiosity, Pamela with something that looked almost like pity. "What?" she asked.

"Speakin' of Eddie," Harley leaned forward. "You're up first for gossip, Penny! You and Eddie are gettin' pretty serious now, aren't ya? Do ya think you'll get married?"

Penelope felt her face flush and she took a larger gulp of wine. She almost wished she'd gone along on the trip.

Coach Bolton walked up and down the length of the detention room, looking over the three boys in his custody. Lonnie Machin, Jason Todd, and Roy Harper. Troublemakers, all of them. Spoiled little rich boys who thought the world owed them something. He'd bring them in line if it was the last thing he ever did. Finally, he walked back to the front of the room and behind his desk. "Do you three know what you need more than anything?"

Jason leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head and regarded Bolton with cold contempt. "To get out of this school?"

Bolton banged on the desk with a closed fist. "DISCIPLINE!" he yelled. None of the boys so much as flinched. "You three," Bolton continued. "You think that just because you have rich daddies, that you can do whatever you want, whenever you want."

"I'm not rich," Lonnie interrupted. "I got in this school on a scholarship. Don't lump me in with these two class traitors-"

"Get bent, Lonnie," Jason shouted. "I was born in the Narrows. I didn't choose to get adopted by a billionaire-"

Bolton banged his fist on the desk again. "SHUT UP! BOTH OF YOU!" Both boys fell silent, though they continued to glare at each other. Roy sat in a desk next to Jason with his feet propped up on the seat in front of him and a bored look on his face. "You three think you're such bigshots. Well, you're not! You're just a couple of little boys, acting like men." Bolton punched his hands together. "Well, you won't be little boys after I get through with you. When you leave my detention, you'll leave as real MEN!"

"That sounds dirty to me," Roy sassed. He looked at Jason. "Does that sound dirty to you, Jay?"

Jason snorted. "Sure does, Roy. I think we need an adult!"

"I am an adult!" Bolton shouted. "I know exactly what you two are doing," he glowered. "You won't break me! I'm not that spineless Vice-Principal Gordon!"

"Dork Squad broke you first, Coach," Jason said. "Speaking of which Roy, you smell something?"

Roy smiled, then wrinkled his nose. "I sure do Jay! Smells like a broken Port-o-Potty!"

Bolton's face flushed. "Keep yucking it up, you little brats," he seethed. "I can do this all day."

Jason and Roy exchanged a knowing smirk with each other. "'I can do this all day?' That's what Mr. Nashton said to Doc Young the other day in the teacher's lounge, isn't it Jay?" Roy asked his friend.

"That's what I heard," Jason said. "And they did it, all day. Now that's a real man, Roy."

Bolton gnashed his teeth. "Nashton's a sweater vest wearin' wimp! He's not a real man!

Jason smirked. "He's the sweater vest wearin' wimp who got the woman you wanted. If he's not a 'real man', what does that make you?"

Bolton's face went white, then he walked to the door of the classroom and stepped out, slamming the door shut behind him. As soon as he was gone, Jason and Roy laughed.

"Too easy," Jason laughed. "Did you see his face? It was like we kicked his grandma!"

"That was a low blow," Lonnie muttered. "But I'll admit, it is nice to see that sad sack of toxic masculinity be taken down a peg."

Jason smiled. "Lonnie, you might be alright. Look, Roy and I are gonna bust out of detention after we break Coach. You in?"

Lonnie rubbed his chin. "I'm in."

Before Jason could say anything else, Coach Bolton stormed back in, murder in his eyes. "Alright, you little shits," he said through grinding teeth. "You want to play hardball? We can play hardball." He placed a stack of paper and a pencil in front of each boy. "Write 'I am a failure' 500 times!"

Jason picked up his pencil. "Got it, Coach. We'll write, 'Coach is a failure' 500 times each."

"No!" Bolton shouted. You'll write 'I am a failure'!"

"Yeah, we'll write 'Coach Bolton is a Failure,' just like you asked, Coach," Roy said.

Bolton let out a frustrated scream. The three boys simply looked at each other and smirked. It wouldn't be long before they'd have Coach crying on the floor and be on their way to freedom.

[avelera]

If it's not to late, I'd love to see your take on the soft prompt “You haven’t laughed in a long time, and I guess I was staring ‘cause I forgot how that looked like.”

To the shock of absolutely no one, this got longer than I expected. I hope you enjoy! 

Edit: I actually posted this on the wrong prompt, mea culpa! 

You can find the full series that goes with this fic here.

Ship: Newt/Hermann

Fandom: Pacific Rim (post-Uprising)

Words: 3,150

—

Stay

The final days of the infection were brutal. The Precursors had lost their hold over Newt bit by bit as the time stretched since his last Drift with the hive mind, but that only seemed to make them more desperate.

At times, Hermann truly feared they’d shake Newton apart, or simply kill him out of spite as they struggled and clawed after their waining control. No one dared let Newt out of his cell even as his lucid moments stretched, in case they chose that moment to come roaring back. The effort of will to force them back down again often left Newton trembling and bathed in sweat.

It had been three months since his last incident when the PPDC dared to let him out of the quarantine to walk under his own power to the medical bay for the final scans. The first scans upon his capture had shown a storm of activity in his cerebrum, it was a wonder Newt hadn’t had a stroke from the level of chaos of two consciousnesses fighting for control of his body. Hermann’s knuckles were white from gripping his cane as he waited for the results, watching the doctors as they consulted the images while Newt sat in the locked holding room, looking down at his folded hands.

He was quieter these days than Hermann ever remembered, one might even say subdued. The Newton he had known could never sit still for ten minutes, much less an hour, without jiggling his leg, interjecting some comment, doodling, or tapping out a melody with his fingers. Perhaps it was one mark of his ordeal, a scar, that he had learned silence.

Hermann was Newton’s designated caretaker, had been officially since Newt’s first lucid moment when he’d squeaked out an affirmative from beneath the weight of their control, enough to count as consent. The doctors came to Hermann first now, and he struggled to his feet, as ungainly as a turtle rolling off its shell in the rush to see the scans. Newt watched him, he could feel his eyes through the glass, a twitch of apprehension in the tightening of his jaw.

“The scans are clear, for the most part,” said the doctor, a Dr. Abadi, a distinguished woman a few years older than Hermann. She gestured to a cloud of activity on the scan. “When Jaeger pilots who have lost their partner exhibit this level of activity, we generally consider them out of the woods with regards to suicide risk or other dangerous behavior. Most described the echo of their partner as manageable at that point, an intrusive thought rather than a controlling impulse. Dr. Geiszler’s situation is unusual but, combined with observation, I would consider this grounds to recommend his return to civilian life. Albeit with regular check-ins and light observation, which you would be qualified to carry out, Dr. Gottlieb.”

Hermann exhaled slowly to try to control the spike of his heartbeat, the leap of hope. “When would that be?”

“We could release him into your custody now if you keep to your residence on the base,” Abadi said. “Going beyond these grounds however would require further clearance from the PPDC.”

At those words, Hermann felt suddenly dizzy. He muttered his way through the rest of the paperwork, guides, and assurances by the doctor, but could not stop stealing glances at Newton in the next room. It felt like an eternity before the door was unlocked and he was left alone with Newton.

“So, what’s the damage?” Newt said lightly but his shoulders tensed. They were always dancing around each other, careful not to delve too deeply into what existed between them. Things like the fact that Hermann knew the only time Newton cried the day of the attacks was when his fingers were wrapped around Hermann’s throat. That Newton knew Hermann had moved heaven and earth to ensure Newton was captured and not killed, and had spent every waking moment since working towards his treatment and eventual freedom. That Newton had put himself entirely into Hermann’s hands without hesitation. That in the end, when Newton was finally cleared, they would both…

Hermann cleared his throat. “We can go home now.”

“… Home?” Newt’s eyebrows furrowed in question, as if he hadn’t heard right.

“You’ve been cleared. Do you need anything from your… from your old quarters?”

“From my cell? No! Wait, are you kidding me?” Newt jumped to his feet. Once, Hermann might have expected him to punch the air, whooping or dancing at the news but he stopped there, a grin threatening his lips. Composure. Newt never had that before, either. “I’m never going the fuck back there again. Burn it. I’ll just wear your clothes. Uh… can I borrow some of your clothes? And there’s not gonna be, like, a line painted down the middle of your place, right?”

Hermann snorted, an excellent cover for the sudden lump in his throat. “I’ll happily sacrifice a portion of my wardrobe if it means never seeing that dreadful prison getup again. Which is to say, ah… what’s mine is yours.” He stuttered over the last. Newton met his eye and he knew it clearly as if Newton had spoken that this was it, the moment where they had to finally come to a decision on what they were to one another. It was one thing to tend a friend and colleague through a time of crisis, another to open up his home to that man while he got back on his feet…

But for the first time ever they’d have privacy. There’d be no cameras, no recording devices. No risk that Hermann offering a kind word could be used to wrest Newton’s custody away from him for fear that he couldn’t offer impartiality. For the first time since… since he couldn’t remember how long, perhaps a few moments in the dreadful lead up days to the attack when he still dwelled in ignorance, perhaps when Newton’s hand was wrapped around his throat, they would truly be alone together in a room.

Hermann offered his hand. A stiff, awkward gesture that he half-wished he could pass of as a muscle twitch if Newton didn’t take it. What were they to each other? What could they be?

Newton regarded the hand for a moment before his fingertips slide over Hermann’s palm to take it. Hermann wasn’t sure if he should be surprised that he did.

—

Hermann stood silently by after they entered the flat, to give Newt time to acclimate to the new surroundings, sparse as they were. Living alone, Hermann hadn’t seen much point in bedecking his living quarters. They were simple, functional, containing mostly books and work papers, furniture to accommodate his disability, and one of the Kaiju figurines Newton had left behind when he left for Shao Industries, perched on the corner of a bookshelf beside his desk. It was single level and so could become cramped  before long with two grown men who were not, strictly speaking, together in any way that Hermann might secretly hope. They weren’t there yet. They might never be. Newton might just take the time to get on his feet before seeking out new accommodations and privacy. The thought shouldn’t squirm in Hermann’s chest the way it did.

Finally, Newt sat on the bed and stretched his arms above his head luxuriously. “Fuck it’s good to get a change of scenery. Are you hungry? We could order a pizza. God, I would murder for a pizza.”

Hermann snorted despite himself and took a seat beside Newton on the bed. Newt doesn’t move away which is, in itself, a comfort. “It is a military base, but there are some alternatives to the cafeteria, yes.”

Silence lapsed between them, and he could tell by the fidgeting of Newt’s fingers and the pursing of his lips that it’s one where he would like to say something but can’t find the words. Hermann found himself in very much the same situation. He felt as if he were floating above the full impact of having Newt here, beside him in his home, with a clean bill of health that means that to the best of Earths’s abilities, he’s been determined to be clear, finally, of the Precursors influence. After ten years. Ten years of whatever torments they subjected him to, ten years of isolation, ten years of Hermann’s shameful neglect.

“Newton, I’m so sorry—”

“I’m so fucking proud of you, you know that?” Newt said simultaneously, and both broke off, staring at one another.

“What.”

“What?”

“The hell do you have to be sorry for, man?” Newt gaped. “Uh, in case you hadn’t noticed, I would have been completely shit-outta-luck if you hadn’t been there to pull me out at the end. Like, imprisoned for life or more likely just fucking dead. You saved my life. Again. I seriously, seriously owe you for everything you’ve done since… since, y’know, the attacks. And thanks to those jackasses I haven’t been able to say it.”

Hermann’s mouth worked. “But I abandoned you. I didn’t figure out sooner what had happened. I was too late, a step behind…”

Newt barked a sharp laugh. “What? What are you even talking about, man? You think I… ok wait, wait a minute back it up.” Newt held up a hand before pointing at Hermann. “You think I’m mad at you for not figuring out that I was possessed by aliens who wanted to destroy the world?”

“Well, when you put it that way…” Hermann’s lips twisted. “In a word, yes. And for not discovering their plan sooner.”

Some of the levity fell from Newt’s posture and the corner of his lips twisted down as he shook his head as if weighing Hermann’s words. “Ok, that one was a little on you. I figured once Obsidian Fury turned up with a Kaiju nervous system I’d have a good chance of someone figuring it out, but it’s still on like… the entire PPDC for not figuring out two plus two on that one. I mean, who the fuck else besides the Kaiju expert at Shao could have figured out how to put evil Kaiju parts into an evil Jaeger?” Newt shrieked, annoyance flicking over his face in what looked like a very old and oft-repeated frustration. He took a deep breath, steadying himself. “But before that? Dude, as far as you knew, I told you on no uncertain terms to fuck off because I had a hot new life and a hot new wife, what else were you supposed to do? Stalk me? Frankly, I’m just lucky you wanted to talk to me after all that.”

Hermann cleared his throat, flushing a little at the reference to stalking, the thought might have crossed his mind more than once. “Was any of that you, when I spoke to you, before the attacks? Or was it all… them?”

Newt puffed out a thoughtful sigh and scratched the back of his neck. “A little of both? They had this way of… I dunno, twisting my words. Like, I did want you to come over, but I sure as fuck didn’t want you to ‘meet’ Alice. I missed saving the world together but I’m not that much of a douche as to make it sound like you just helped me, get it? It was like, I’d start to say something to you and then they’d add some dickish twist to it so it was an insult. Sometimes… sometimes I wasn’t mad about it though. You were always ragging on my research, it felt good to rain on your parade, just a little, just to get back and to keep you from giving those fuckers ideas like fucking Kaiju blood for rocket fuel. But even once they were gone I felt like I had to be careful. I didn’t want the PPDC to hear in case they got the wrong idea or thought you were complicit with me or some shit.”

“Hear what?” Hermann said breathlessly. Even with the months spent at Newton’s bedside, or rather just outside his cell, they’d not had the chance to speak candidly. There was, as Newton said, always an audience. His head was spinning.

Newt offered him a crooked smile. “That I’m proud of you, man! Like, holy shit. Kaiju blood for rocket fuel? Becoming a one-man PPDC K-Science lab, saving the fucking world? You cannot tell me those dumbass Jaeger pilots figured out a way to get from Moyulan all the way up to fucking Tokyo in less time than it took for the Precursors to hop in a fucking charter plane, no way. That had to be you, which means you saved the world. Again. You’re a fucking rock star!”

“I… well, that is, I didn’t… it was nothing…” Hermann stuttered.

“Shut up, you totally are!” Newt’s eyes are shining and he has grabbed Hermann’s hand in his enthusiasm, the gesture so familiar to a time gone by that tears prickle in Hermann’s eyes as his gaze jerks up to Newt’s face. “Do you know how pissed off the Precursors were about you, do you? They were fucking livid, you scared them shitless. They wanted you dead!”

“Oh, well that’s terribly comforting,” Hermann said faintly. Newt laughed.

“Are you kidding? Man, I can’t think of a higher compliment. The genocidal bastards that wanted to wipe out our planet almost pissed themselves on the tarmac when they saw you were here too! I thought they were going to faint when you showed up at Shao that night, it was fucking gorgeous.”

“They needn’t have worried,” Hermann muttered, but felt a blush rising inexorably to his cheeks and ears. “I did nothing to prevent the attack.”

“You countered every single weapon they threw at you!” Newt exploded, throwing up his hands. “And it took them ten years to put those together. You did it, man. I thought… I mean, I’m gonna level with you, I hoped there would be someone on the outside smart enough to catch on, even when catching on would have been batshit insane, like come on, who just guesses that a fucking war hero like yours-truly is a sock puppet for aliens? That’s nuts, right? That’s the only reason no one could have figured it out.” There’s a fragility to Newt’s levity, as if he’s repeating a rote lesson he’s said to himself over and over, to reassure himself it was true. His voice cracked over the words, but he forged on. “I hoped there’d be someone. I hoped it would be you, honestly, and I was right. I was right because I had the best lab partner in the fucking world.”

At the words lab partner, Hermann jerked back and looked away. The space between them had been closing, Newt’s enthusiasm was infectious. He had caught himself wanting to close the distance, staring at Newton’s lips. But that was all they’d ever been on paper. Lab partners.

“Well, there were others involved,” Hermann said. “I can’t take all the credit. But it is… kind of you to say, Newton. Thank you. I had no idea you held me in such esteem.”

“Always, man,” Newt said. His voice was faint, and when Hermann glanced back his expression was soft. “Since the first. You never could have pissed me off as much as you did if not.”

“Where will you go next?” Hermann said breathlessly, if only to change the subject so the blush rising up his throat wouldn’t consume him. “That is, I want to help you get back on your feet. You’re not beholden to me, and I don’t want you to feel as if you’ve swapped one prison for another, no matter what the PPDC might say on the matter. Your actions were clearly under duress and we will prove it, if necessary.”

“Next?” Newt said, as if he hadn’t heard any of the rest. He looked around the room, as if seeing it for the first time, and then to Hermann. “I, uh, hadn’t got that far, really? I guess I’m chill to hang out here for a bit, not get tangled up in all that paperwork that comes with leaving or…”

He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Fuck, I can’t do this. I don’t have any plans. The thought of going back out into the world? Scares the ever-loving shit out of me. What if they’re not really gone? What if they’re just waiting, y’know, hiding, and I’m gonna wake up at the helm of another evil corporation in a couple years? I’m right where I want to be, with a fucking army to keep an eye out in case they come back, and the person I… I trust most in the whole goddamn world to keep an eye on me. Hermann,” Newt squeaked, “I haven’t been totally honest and, fuck, you might throw me out for this, but there’s nowhere else I’d rather be right now. I’ve been thinking about you… about seeing you again for a fucking decade. I was hoping… look, you’re the only person that keeps me right, ok? I’m not sure where we stand but if you’re not gonna punch me in the face just for asking I was kinda hoping I could take you out sometime? There’s gotta be a restaurant around here somewhere, right? Or I could, I dunno, cook something for you and we could watch a movie, a real house-arrest style date.” Newt’s eyes grew wild at Hermann’s continued, gaping silence, and his voice rose in pitch. “Or I could be totally off base and I’ll start looking for places of my own right away! Fuck, I shouldn’t have even brought it up, fuck me and my stupid mouth, I could have at least waited a few days but nooo, had to make it weird. Look, I’m sorry, I…”

Newt began to rise to his feet, scrambling away from Hermann, and it sent a jolt through Hermann that jarred him out of the haze that had swallowed his brain. Hermann panicked, and did the only thing he could think of, the only thing to keep Newt from pulling away.

He seized Newton by the shoulders and kissed him with all his might.

It was a messy, unglamorous affair. Their teeth clacked. Hermann’s face was so twisted with warring emotions he probably looked ridiculous. Newton seized up under his hands for a moment, and when Hermann dared open his eyes he saw Newt staring.

“Oh…” Newt breathed, and just before Hermann could break away, babbling his own apologies, he continued, “fuck yes.” And Newt was gripping him in return, pushing Hermann back onto the bed so they were lying flat, kissing one another breathless.

“Stay with me,” Hermann muttered between kisses. “No more lines, no more separation. We’ll figure this out together. Stay.”

“What’s there to figure out?” Newt grinned against his lips. “I’ve got everything I was hoping for, right here.”

[coaldustcanary]

CSJJ Day 4: Heated

My sincere apologies to all for getting the date wrong; I rather thought today was the 4th until most of the way through it, whoops. Mea culpa, @csjanuaryjoy! This is what happens to me over the holidays, I utterly lose track of time. Conveniently, I have a warm and cozy canon-compliant missing scene here from 4x02...about losing track of time. 3.1k words, Rated T. Or read it at [AO3].

The loft was fairly humming with noise that pooled around her head like a muffling blanket of snow, pushing everyone’s voices to arm’s length and a bit beyond, just out of reach of proper comprehension. Emma felt sure that if she was a bit less tired from shivering vigorously in her mountain of blankets she’d be more frustrated at being left out of the conversation. As it was, staying awake and upright (mostly – she was propped up and wedged into the chair quite snugly at this point) seemed to be all she could reasonably manage. It was true that her eyes may have drifted shut, but she was just resting them. Obviously. As long as she hummed vaguely and nodded – well, rolled her head a bit against the chair back – from time to time, she could certainly claim later that she had been listening.

But the ancient building furnace rattled and thumped, each beat echoing through the ductwork as it steadily blew increasingly warm air along the floor, and she couldn’t hear a damn thing over the noise. By her feet, the space heater buzzed and radiated heat, scorching her shins. It was no worse discomfort than the pins and needles that prickled at her extremities, tingling painfully as she wiggled her toes. She fidgeted her hand along the chair’s armrest, and flexed her fingers convulsively, muffling a whine of dismay as she discovered that feeling had returned to them with a vengeance. The heat had seeped fully and pleasantly into her bones, but as the numbness wore off it was uncomfortably rather like standing too close to a fire. But her fuzzy head and muffled hearing were the more pressing annoyance. So she furrowed her brow and shifted restlessly within her blanket pile, hoping that settling herself a bit more upright might help her focus. Emma grimaced, forcing out her breath in a shuddery, growled pant of frustration as the cocooning effect of the blankets and enveloping heat failed to abate even a little, despite her best efforts at squirming free.

Immediately, the chair convulsed beneath her. Dizzy and disoriented, every reaction slowed by her lengthy stay in the cold, she felt a sickly swooping feeling in her gut as if she was falling.  Emma gasped softly and opened her eyes, her heart racing. Though her sense of up and down was momentarily confused, she realized quickly that she was neither falling nor moving. Or in the chair. Because generally chairs don’t vibrate with laughter, even when you’re the Savior and you’re utterly, embarrassingly defeated by a tangle of blankets. But someone had.

“…Hook?”

“Hello, beautiful.” The words were murmured softly, but spoken closely enough for his breath to stir her hair and tickle her neck, she had no trouble hearing them clearly. Playful words they might be, but they carried the same edge of desperate relief that had colored his voice when he’d asked if she was alright earlier when he and her father had pulled her out of the ice.

“Apologies, I didn’t mean to wake you, love,” Killian added as she tilted her head up to peer at his face.  He sounded contrite, but to judge by the quirk of his mouth and the laughter lines still visible around his eyes, he was also amused by her fumbling. Though he tilted his head away slightly to peer down at her, he was still startlingly close, and even in the dim light the weight of his regard settled on her heavily. Though he had loosened his arms from around her as soon as she began to stir, he didn’t move away.

“Wasn’t sleeping,” Emma muttered stubbornly. Though his response was only a quiet huff of laughter, she felt it vibrate through her as before, curled up as she was on his shoulder and very nearly in his lap. Her vague impression of a blanket pile and a supporting pillow or two had apparently been somewhat off the mark. Somehow she had moved – or perhaps been moved – from the chair to the more spacious but somewhat unyielding couch in her parents’ sitting area. Along the way she’d apparently wrapped herself around a rather flushed and solicitous pirate who, despite his proclivity for ridiculously gaping shirtlaces, radiated heat like a furnace.

No wonder she was so warm. It didn’t help that tearing her gaze away from his gently amused expression took nearly physical effort that left her breathless, though she didn’t otherwise move or let go. She had a suspicion that allowing her eyes to lock with his for too long might be responsible for increasing her overheated feeling and perhaps contributing somewhat to her now-intermittent shivering as well. Drained and casting about for a safer option than meeting his gaze, she peered over to glimpse her parents and Elsa speaking in the kitchen, around the corner from where they sat. Though the others were hardly far away, their voices faded in and out like a weak radio station broadcast as they spoke quietly. Her parents’ voices were sure, steady and familiar in counterpoint to Elsa’s concerned, wavering tone. They didn’t spare so much as a glance in the direction of the couch, and Emma had the sudden disorienting feeling that perhaps more time had passed than she thought, and her brow furrowed.

“Where’s Henry?” she asked sharply, rubbing at her eyes.

“Sleeping. He retired to bed a short time ago at your mother’s urging, once he was certain you would be well.”

“Oh.” Emma’s head felt suddenly heavy, and she dropped it again to his shoulder.

Killian’s chest rose beneath her ear as he drew breath to speak.

“If you weren’t sleeping yourself-“

“Wasn’t,” she insisted.

“-perhaps you should find some proper rest somewhere more comfortable, now,” he continued steadily. Emma hesitated, unable to find the words to voice her sharp and certain dismay at that idea. She was reluctant to let this moment end, even if she was fuzzy and sore and increasingly warm, because it was also right, somehow, in a way that not a lot else had been of late. But Killian seemed to interpret her quiet as exhausted agreement and lifted his left arm from around her shoulder and began easing his right – her “armrest” – out from under her still-grasping hand. Emma lifted her head again and blinked rapidly, trying to school her sleepy squint into an expression a bit less embarrassing and more controlled, and she fixed her gaze on his once more.

“Wait.” Killian stilled immediately, watching her with a guarded expression. Emma took a deep breath and tilted own her head back slightly to get a few inches of distance. He was in his shirtsleeves, his sweeping, dramatic coat draped over the back of the couch. His cheeks were flushed and his hair was tousled, the ends damp and curling a bit on his neck. If she was warm, he was probably sweltering under the combined weight of her semi-conscious sprawl and every blanket in the loft, including one from her parents’ bed.

“How did I get on the couch?” Emma demanded.

“Ah-“

“Because I don’t remember getting up from the chair at all and…” Emma trailed off, sniffing suspiciously. Mostly she smelled him (and in that moment Emma couldn’t imagine anything more unfair than how inexplicably amazing that pleasant mix of oiled leather and the strongly-herbal soap Granny stocked at the bed and breakfast smelled on him, it was really just too damn much) but also a different familiar and pleasant odor wafting from the kitchen.

“I think my mother is baking?” Emma couldn’t help but turn what should have been a straightforward observation into an incredulous near-question, because seriously, Mary-Margaret?

“Aye, there was some clattering of pots a bit ago. I think she decided this Elsa lass needed feeding.” Killian’s tone was mocking in a familiar way, but there was something both hard and brittle beneath the usual derision that left Emma a little uneasy. When his gaze shifted to somewhere over her shoulder she assumed he was glaring at Elsa in the kitchen, but to judge by his thousand-yard stare he wasn’t actually seeing much of anything, instead lost in thoughts that were not particularly pleasant. Emma sighed and shifted slightly, tugging at the sleeve of his shirt that was bunched between her fingers before reluctantly letting go. A blanket fell from her shoulders as she straightened, and she welcomed the breathing room. As his gaze pulled back to her, Emma caught his hand in her own as he moved to tuck the blanket around her again and fixed him to stillness again with a pointed look.

“Hey. Let it go,” she said firmly. The corner of Killian’s mouth thinned mutinously, as if he was unlikely to do anything of the sort. Though she trusted Elsa, Emma still understood the impulse fully.

“Swan, she hurt you. She nearly-“ he cut off sharply, his throat working silently as he swallowed, unable to even finish the thought. Though she expected him to look away then – she was sorely tempted herself – he only shook his head and gazed at her with a sort of heartbroken wonder.

If it can be broken, it still works, she thought suddenly, and her own heart lurched unsteadily in her chest. She’d wanted to punch him for that stupid line – still did, really, because oh my god what a shitty thing to say – but it was pain she recognized all too well writ plain on his face.

“I’m fine.” Emma squeezed his hand, lacing her fingers between his and sparing a moment to wonder with a little surprise at how comfortable the gesture was already becoming despite being so new. The hard edges of Killian’s rings were already oddly familiar, and she was beginning to think the way he would immediately begin brushing his thumb gently but steadily against hers wasn’t even a conscious gesture on his part. She was becoming rather partial to it, though.

“She didn’t mean to do it. Magic can be like that. No harm, no foul.” Emma shrugged. Trusting people was hard and unfamiliar work, and yet here she was doing it right and left. Somehow, she trusted Elsa, though she couldn’t yet pinpoint exactly why. Elsa was incredibly earnest, and her attempts at bluster had been as transparent as her magic-conjured icicles, but that shouldn’t have been enough. Yet something about her seemed familiar, and it wasn’t just obligation that drove Emma to want to help her, but something more. Reluctantly, Emma pushed the problem away to wrestle with at another time. Between the warmth and the exertion of the day and the apparently late hour, she knew she wasn’t up to the task. Besides, she had other priorities.

“So how did we get like this without David belting you one with a crowbar?” Killian snorted.

“Perhaps I’ve earned a modicum more of your father’s trust,” he replied, and while he delivered it in the usual dry and self-deprecating manner, Emma’s gut feeling confirmed it was the truth.

“I’m surprised he hasn’t given you the protective Dad speech, yet,” she said lightly, though she choked a little on a laugh as Killian responded with a lifted eyebrow.

“Who says he hasn’t?” He was actually smirking.

“Oh my god I was joking,” Emma protested weakly.

“Yes, but I think your father takes his responsibilities quite seriously, darling.”

“My father and a cop. You are so lucky you’re not locked up down at the sheriff’s office, buddy” Emma said, rolling her eyes and nudging him in the chest with their linked hands.

“To be threatened at sword point I might expect, but what cause would he have to arrest me? Not that you lot seem to need a good reason to clap irons on a man,” Killian huffed in what she was mostly certain was playful indignation.

“I’m sure taking advantage of his daughter in her sleep had to give him some ideas on that score,” she retorted. Emma wasn’t sure whether to expect Killian to resort to his usual over-the-top innuendo or for him to immediately call her out on admitting to sleep in response, though she figured she could handle it, either way. To her surprise, though their banter had felt easy and familiar up until that moment, Killian’s smirk thinned into a pained grimace and his hand fell away from her own abruptly.

“You were still like ice to touch, shivering so hard your teeth were rattling, and I didn’t know what else to do. There was nothing else I could do.” Emma heard the sharp surge of panic in Killian’s clipped, if still softly-spoken, words. His arm tightened around her once more before he even seemed to realize he’d done it. He growled an oath quietly under his breath and pulled away from her, and before she could react he was carefully withdrawing his hook from behind her back with almost exaggerated care, and easing off of his shoulder to the couch. Though she was still wrapped in blankets from head to toe, Emma felt bereft at the sudden loss.

“My apologies for behaving in an untoward manner, Swan,” he said doggedly, raking his fingers through his hair and hanging his head, his earlier humor and anger both drained from his demeanor, replaced by something like weary resignation. Emma’s own head was spinning and she shivered at the the sudden loss of warmth from her body as well as from the moment. Killian’s hand twitched as if he meant to reach for her again, but he arrested the motion swiftly.

“I…forgive me. It’s late, and I should take my leave and let you rest,” he said finally, standing up from the couch with speed she wouldn’t have expected, given how long they’d apparently been tangled together on the unyielding couch. He moved away so quickly she could hardly do more than make a few faint noises of protest that were all but drowned out by the space heater’s hum. But when he spared a glance toward the kitchen and paused to collect his jacket, she grabbed for his arm, her fingers finding purchase in his sleeve. Somehow, her tenuous grip was enough to still him once again, and he hesitated. Emma wasn’t sure which of the two of them were more surprised by what she’d done, but she figured she could make a pretty good case for herself as the more shocked party. As usual, she had acted before thinking, and now her brain struggled to catch up and make sense of it all. The soft clatter and conversation from the other room continued unchanged, giving them a sort of fragile privacy even as she cast about hopelessly for the right thing - or something, even anything - to say.

Words were tricky things. Emma was confident that she could give as well as she could get most of the time with them. She was good at barking an order that would give a skip pause. She could ask the right kind of sharp questions to confirm her gut instincts. Emma had a gift for getting to the point when that’s where she wanted to go. But it was harder when the wanting felt like a risk she couldn’t bear to get wrong again. And so she pulled steadily on Killian’s sleeve, anchoring him in place while she struggled to speak. Inexplicably, he also seemed at a loss for words.

“This couch sucks.” Goddammit. Emma rubbed at her face with her free hand and forced herself to look up at him. She couldn’t properly decipher the expression on his face, but she had a feeling it was confusion.

Right there with you, buddy.

“Swan, I-“ he began before she plunged on ahead, speaking over the beginnings of some kind of objection to her nonsensical comment.

“It is literally the worst, I mean, you’d think they’d have picked out furniture by now that wasn’t placed here by the curse, but there probably hasn’t been the time, I guess. And anyway. It’s terrible,” she babbled. Killian tilted his head at her slightly, and when she tugged firmly at his sleeve, he inched closer, and then crouched down in front of the couch in a way that made her knees ache just to watch.

“Aye, well, you should go to your bed, love, and sleep.” Without dislodging her grip from his sleeve, he turned his hand over and offered it to her, somehow managing not to touch her at all. He half-rose from his crouched position, indicating with a small gesture of his fingers that she could take his arm instead, if she wished, and waited patiently.

“No.” He flinched visibly, his face falling as he rocked back on his heels. His chin jerked downward in a nod as he stood up fully, trapped otherwise in place by her grip on his sleeve but already leaning away from her as much as he could do without dragging at her grip. He glanced over his shoulder toward the kitchen, muttering his next words so softly she could barely make them out.

“Of course. I’ll bid your parents goodnight and they can-“

“Killian.” His mouth snapped shut when she used his name. Emma lifted her free hand to her face, extending her index finger to press against her lips, gesturing for quiet for a moment before she tugged on his sleeve again.

“Shh. C’mon,” she continued, tilting her head down to the space he’d recently vacated. Stiffly, almost warily, he let her pull him back down to the couch, though he sat on the edge, brow furrowed. Slowly, she released her vise-grip on his sleeve, flexing her fingers idly as they tingled in complaint.

“I’ve tried sleeping on this couch so many times. Emphasis on the word tried, before,” Emma said after a moment. Killian’s eyebrows lifted a little but he held his silence, watching her intently. She chewed her lip a little, considering.

“I could stand to sleep here a little more, I think,” she said, loosely wrapping her fingers around Killian’s hand and brushing her thumb against his ever so lightly. She sidled closer, ever so slowly, and leaned her head against his shoulder, closing her eyes. He let out a ragged breath as he settled his arm around her once more.

“Alright?” he whispered hoarsely against the top of her head as his embrace tightened around her shoulders, pulling the blankets more closely around her.

Emma tilted her head to press a kiss below his jaw, smiling sleepily against his neck when his breath hitched in response. She had enough time to hope fleetingly that it was a clear enough answer before she fell back into a comfortable, warm sleep.

[believermag]

ELECTRIC BLUE

All photographs by the author.

Kim Wood on David Bowie

1.

There are roughly ten blocks between the theater where David Bowie watched rehearsals for Lazarus, and the studio where he recorded Blackstar. In his last years, we both lived between them, on opposite sides of Houston Street.

My side is the Bowery, known in real estate speak as NoHo (North of Houston). On the street where I live—a two-block stretch of 3rd Street known as Great Jones—is a chandeliered butcher shop occupying the spot where Basquiat worked, and died, of a heroin overdose. Twenty years before his time, Charlie Mingus’ heroin-addicted presence on this corridor is said to have birthed the term jonesing.

I’ve passed a decade in Brooklyn, but never before now lived in Manhattan and love being a downtown kid, stepping through the door and onto crowded streets, passing CBGBs—now a skinny pants boutique I’ve never entered—on my way to buy groceries, or borrowing books from a library branch housed in the one-time factory of Hawley & Hoops’ Chocolate Candy Cigars—that Bowie lived above, in a modern penthouse perched atop the turn of the century brick building.

For twenty-four months, barring the occasional trip to Central Park, I’ve lived below 14th Street and in this time Bowie loitered here too, sipping La Colombe’s double macchiato, fetching chicken and watercress sandwiches at Olive’s, or dinner supplies at Dean & DeLuca. One day I’d catch him on the street, I figured, hailing a cab or taking out the recycling in his flat cap and sunglasses, and when I did my well-worn New Yorker discretion would be jettisoned as I tried, and likely failed, not to cry.

I didn’t, of course, know that for most of the time we were neighbors David Bowie was dying. Today I walk the familiar stretch of blocks to his building, eyes tearing, I tell myself, from the frigid, bone-dry air. At the front entrance, a group of fans stand gutted, surrounded by news trucks, generators, vulturing reporters.

A growing pile of daisies, tulips, roses, daffodils leans against the wall, along with a few photographs, a pair of silver glitter heels, a Jesus candle with Ziggy Stardust face. Tucked here and there are handwritten notes: Look out your window, I can see his light and We are all stardust and Hot tramp, we love you so.

Everyone here, news crew aside, feels known somehow, the mood is gentle, polite, quiet. Too quiet, I realize, when someone plays “Life On Mars?” from a tinny smartphone speaker. As the closing strings swell, a woman turns to me to say through tears, “I love this song!” All I can do is nod, “I know!” and take comfort among fellow kooks.

A pair behind me wonders aloud about a “world without Bowie,” and while I know what they mean—the way some people feel like a force and invincible—you could argue we’ve been living in such a world for a long while. David Jones-ing.

2.

Three days earlier, on the night of Bowie’s 69th birthday, I danced in my kitchen to the foppish, falsetto, “‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore,” delighting in his rude lyrics and wild whooping. Later at a dinner hosted for the birthday of a friend, I commented on Bowie’s continuing fixation upon mortality, but also his energy, sly humor, return to form, exclaiming, not tentatively, “Bowie’s back!”

I was thrilled he’d finally slipped the ghost of what he called, “my Phil Collins years.”  In one of the endless interviews now flooding my screen in text and video, he explains, “I was performing in front of these huge stadium crowds and at that time I was thinking ‘what are these people doing here? Why did they come to see me? They should be seeing Phil Collins.’ And then that came back at me and I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ It’s a certain kind of mainstream that I’m just not comfortable in.”

Like the divisiveness of fat and skinny Elvis, there were those of us who fancied ourselves glittering, androgynous, apocalyptic half-beast hustlers who bought drugs, watched bands and jumped in the river holding hands, and there were others, contentedly jazzin’ for Blue Jean.

When, in your Golden Years, your mentor of not only music but all things relevant—art, clothes, books, films—enters his Phil Collins Years, suddenly high-kicking in Reeboks and staring in Pepsi commercials, how not to feel betrayed?

I took it personally, coining the unforgiving term David Bowie Syndrome. As a burgeoning artist, I feared (a scaled-back version of) his creative arc with my whole heart—reaching the greatness of Bowie’s 1970s only to follow it up with Let’s Dance. To say nothing of Tin Machine. Like many old-school fans, I’d stopped tuning in to modern Bowie to keep my vintage Bowie flame flickering.

In my most youthfully caustic moment, I joked that Bowie’s personal Oblique Strategies deck—that famous stack of cards, creative prompts such as Ask your body, Abandon normal instruments, and Courage! allegedly used when Bowie and Brian Eno recorded Low and Heroes—should be made up of cards that all read, simply: Call Eno.

Unfair, untrue. Kindly allow this counterpoint mea culpa admission: I secretly love the ham-fisted, cringtastic video for Dancing in the Street.

3.

On the third day after Bowie’s death I step outside, wondering if I’ll still hear his presence hum. Just feet from my front door I’m greeted by his face gracing one of two large posters advertising Blackstar. Well hey there, Mr. Jones.

They’re wet with wheat paste and like a teenage fangirl I consider stealing one, but then notice a smaller poster hung next to them, featuring the Sesame Street characters peering out joyously, encouraging me to attend an event entitled… Let’s Dance!

I accept Bowie’s cosmic joke, had it coming I suppose, and briskly hoof it to Union Square where at the farmer’s market I find apples, apple cider, cider doughnuts and not much else. My gloveless fingertips smart as I pocket change and consider the possibility that the visitation was an invitation to dance through the sorrow. A bit maudlin perhaps, but then, so was Bowie.

When I return home the Blackstar posters are gone. In under an hour someone has pasted them over with clothing and gym ads—leaving all the posters on either side for the length of the street untouched. Like Steppenwolf's Magic Theater, the message—whatever it was—had appeared and just as quickly vanished.

My feet walk me to Bowie’s memorial, which has exploded in a heap of bouquets, black bobbing Prettiest Star balloons, cha-cha lines of platform heels, disco balls, eye shadow, quarts of milk, British flags, drawings and paintings of Bowie’s many incarnations, fuzzy spiders, bluebirds, boas, vinyl copies of David Live annotated Forever in thick silver marker.

A giant orange tissue paper flower hangs from a nearby tree, electric blue eye at its center, petals edged in lyrics: Give me your hands, because you’re wonderful! Let the children lose it, let the children use it, let all the children boogie.

Here and there are tucked personal notes: You taught me that weird = beautiful, and: When I was a teenager I wished I could check off “David Bowie” for both my gender and my race. I still do.

“Taking away all the theatrics…” Bowie said, “I’m a writer. The subject matter…boils down to a few songs, based around loneliness, isolation, spiritual search, and a looking for a way into communication with other people. And that’s about it—about all I’ve ever written about for forty years.”

Perhaps, then, my “Let’s Dance” visitation was an anti-message, a warning against wasting creative juju by pandering for cash. Of course, Bowie made not a dime (relatively, and thanks in large part to shifty management) from his artistic era I find most inspiring. The seed of the fortune that brought him financial security was that very song. So what then?

When I return home, Bowie’s spot on the wall has been papered over yet again, all white this time, as though to say, as he has when pressed to interpret his lyric’s meaning, “nothing further,” “you figure it out,” “space to let.”

4.

I rise before the sun, pull on bright turquoise tights and red clogs and walk the cobblestone of Lafayette Street in the dark. Collar up, breath ghosting, I feel as I secretly do in all such moments, like the cover of Low, or The Middle-Aged Lady Who Fell to Earth. Car headlights slide over me as I approach the memorial that is, it appears, being dismantled.

I quickly make the photograph I awoke imagining: my platforms meeting Bowie’s shore of flickering candles, cigarette butts, stray boa feathers, sea of glitter. Beside me a sweet lone man sorts out the dead flowers, shuffling handmade things to one side, candles to another, not tossing it all as I first suspected, but tidying up, preparing for another day.

What drew me into this frigid darkness, half dressed in pajamas? Perhaps a need to meet Bowie toe to toe, promise to honor the contract, all in, heart wide, funk to funky.

Put on my red shoes and dance the blues.

“I don’t think (the act of creation is) something that I enjoy a hundred percent. There are occasions when I really don’t want to write. It just seems that I have a physical need to do it...I really am writing for myself.”

Before Blackstar, the last time I know of Bowie creating under extreme duress is when making the album Station to Station—which coincidentally also opens with an epically long titular song wherein a man yelps from the darkness, singing with pride and pain about a fame that has isolated him beyond measure.

As the Thin White Duke, Bowie sings with bitter irony, It’s not the side effects of the cocaine! I’m thinking that it must be love! It’s well known that Bowie, living for a year (1975-1976) in his despised, self-chosen, wasteland of Los Angeles, had fallen victim to a kind of Method Writing, unable to escape in life the character he’d crafted to hide behind on stage.

Subsisting on a diet of cocaine, chili peppers and milk, he grew paranoid, hallucinating, allegedly dabbling in Black Magic and storing his jarred urine in his refrigerator. I was six years old at the time, living less than a mile from Cherokee Studios where Station to Station was in session, and smudging my mother’s brand new Young Americans vinyl with powdered sugar fingerprints.

He said of the following album, Low, “It was a dangerous period for me. I was at the end of my tether physically and emotionally and had serious doubts about my sanity. But I get a sense of real optimism through the veils of despair from Low. I can hear myself really struggling to get well.”  

It’s the pale, shimmering hope that makes Low my favorite of all of Bowie’s offerings, but for Station to Station’s Duke of Disillusion it’s too late—for hate, gratitude, any emotion. It’s not, however, too late to lay himself bare in the work: there’s no reach for sanity, just a man collapsing while still directing, as the camera rolls.

Blackstar has been called a gift, and on “Dollar Days,” a song that describes his effort to communicate in the face of death, Bowie breaks the fourth wall to address this directly: Don’t think for just one second I’ve forgotten you/I’m trying to/I’m dying to(o).

I believe as an artist he had no choice, no other way to confront his circumstance other than to talk himself through it, put it in the work.

The profound generosity of Blackstar, and a vast swath of Bowie’s creative output, is that in this most intimate conversation with death, god, time, himself, we’ve been invited to listen in.

5.

What makes a good death? Bowie withdrew from the public in the last decade and was characteristically silent regarding his illness, in this tell-all age (that owes him not a little for its status quo “tolerance” of Chazes and Caitlyns). He was also, in his time post-diagnosis, compelled to make his most raw and exposing work in years, and between the play and album, likely spent a long part of each day in their pursuit, while presumably also tending to his needs as a father, husband, friend, man.

In Walter Tevis’ book The Man who Fell to Earth—the basis of Nicholas Roeg’s film that inspired Bowie’s production Lazarus—stranded, despondent space alien Thomas Jerome Newton records an album called The Visitor: we guarantee you won’t know the language, but you’ll wish you did! Seven out-of-this-world poems! Newton explains it’s a letter to his family and home planet that says, “Oh, goodbye, go to hell. Things of that sort.”

Bowie’s seven-song swansong, Blackstar, is rather more generous, and from a writer notorious for lyrical slipperiness, layered meanings, a cut-up technique (copped from Burroughs) that spawned lines about Cassius Clay and papier-mâché, its text is frequently plain-spoken and direct.

Even my favorite frolic sounds a combative calling down of his illness, time: Man, she punched me like a dude/Hold your mad hands, I cried/She stole my purse, with rattling speed/This is the war. It would not be the first time Bowie referred to Time as a “whore.” (see: Aladdin Sane.)

In the title video’s most vivid sections, Bowie becomes god—less vengeful than dismissive—singing, from heaven’s attic, a swaggering takedown of Bowie himself: You’re a flash in the pan, I’m the great I am. (From Exodus: And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.)

His button eyes in both videos suggest a puppet, and so the presence of a puppet master, but I don’t read these images as signs of deathbed conversion. Bowie was a spiritual seeker who borrowed magpie style—in this case from Egyptian, Kabalistic, Christian and Norse iconography—to create a language to give voice to his fears and dark entries.

“If you can accept—and it’s a big leap—that we live in absolute chaos, it doesn’t look like futility anymore. It only looks like futility if you believe in this bang up structure we’ve created called ‘God’.”

In his last gestures Bowie answered not God, but himself, regarding the way he’d lived, and in particular, as an artist. The pulse returns the prodigal sons suggests that the characters he inhabited—some regrettable, but not irredeemable—are with him as he assesses the intentions behind, and perceived short-comings of, his creative offerings: Seeing more and feeling less/Saying no but meaning yes/This is all I ever meant/That's the message that I sent/(but) I can’t give everything away.

In his almost unbearably haunting last video, it seems we’re finally invited to meet David Jones, or Bowie playing Jones. Jones the man lies in bed, clutching a blanket with those mortal, frightened hands. Nearby the writer manically, fretfully reaches for immortality, while Bowie the performer, dutifully dances to the end.

“There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing.”  “You present a darker picture for yourself to look at, and then reject it, all in the process of writing. I think that’s what’s left for me with music. Now I really find that I address things to myself. That’s what I do. If I hadn’t been able to write songs and sing them, it wouldn’t have mattered what I did. I really feel that. I had to do this.”

This morning I remembered where I'd seen the writer's austere, black and white striped costume before: the program for the 1976 Isolar tour, wherein Bowie self-consciously poses with a notebook or makes chalk drawings of the Kabbalah tree of life. Isolar is a made up word—and name of his current company—said to be comprised of isolation and solar.

I love this costume—a kind of artisan worker-bee uniform. There are satin kimono-sleeved ass-baring rompers for when its time to present the work, but when making it, roll up your revolutionary sleeves and get to it.

1976 saw the success of Station to Station, the premiere of The Man Who Fell to Earth and the recording of The Idiot and Low. It was not the most grounded time for Bowie personally (to understate it), but arguably his most vital creatively, and this nod to the continuum of creative spirit seems to suggest that the artist dies, but through the work, like Lazarus, rises again.

6.

So what, then, is a Blackstar? Perhaps a marked man, a sly reference to Elvis’ song of the same name whose lyrics include, Every man has a black star/A black star over his shoulder/And when a man sees his black star/He knows his time, his time has come.

Although Bowie did not, as rumored, write “Golden Years” for Elvis, he did find (somewhat bashful) significance in their shared birthdays, took pains to catch his concerts, had his white jumpsuit copied to wear while performing “Rock and Roll Suicide,” modeled his own costume in Christiane F after Elvis’ ensemble in Roustabout, and perhaps his Aladdin Sane red/electric blue lightening bolt was inspired by Elvis’ signature gold one. Which is to say, he likely knew of The King’s “Black Star.”

Blackstar could also suggest the theoretical transitional state between a collapsed star and a singularity—a state of infinite value in physics, a metaphor for immortality.

I’m not a gangstar/I’m not a film star/I’m not a popstar/I’m not a marvel star/I’m not a white star/I’m not a porn star/I’m not a wandering star/I’m a star’s star/I’m a blackstar.

“Sometimes I don’t feel as if I’m a person at all...I’m just a collection of other people’s ideas.”  Is Bowie simply claiming his right to throw off all mantles?

The car crash that is the documentary Cracked Actor opens with a reporter asking, “I just wonder if you get tired of being outrageous?” “I don’t think I’m outrageous at all,” Bowie throws back, miffed. The reporter persists, “Do you describe yourself as ordinary? What adjective would you use?” Bowie searches his brain for an appropriate response to the inane question and finally lands upon: “David Bowie.”

Or perhaps, as Isolar suggests, a Blackstar is someone hidden in plain sight. In an interview that seems more therapy session, with Mavis Nicolson in 1979, mostly drug-free and grounded Bowie speaks of the appeal of life in Berlin, whose physical wall seemed to mirror his psyche. Without referencing himself or the characters he’s inhabited, he describes an isolated figure who finds no home in the world, but instead creates “a micro world inside himself.”

When Nicolson suggests that as an artist Jones must keep himself from love, he rejects the idea outright, but when gently pressed about the demands of relationships in actual life and not “from afar,” he concedes, extending his arms before him like a shield, “No, love can’t get quite in my way, I shelter myself from it incredibly.”

The moment is so resonantly raw that the two break into manic humor, shifting to the story of his eye injury in a childhood fight over a girl, wherein he laughs and says, “I wasn’t even in love with her.”

In “Lazarus,” the dying Jones sings: everybody knows me now, and perhaps that is so, as much as it ever could be for a man who spent an artistic career in self-sustained exile.

And why shouldn’t David Jones have been—with the exception of a few deeply druggy years—free from the curse and blessing of being Bowie? What are we owed by our artists?

7.

Blue, blue, electric blue, that's the colour of my room.

The Bowie song that forever circles my brain describes a writer waiting for the muse, describing the loneliness and blessing of the electric blue of creation. Vishuddhi, or the electric blue throat chakra of Hindu tantra, is associated with the vocal cords, communication, creative expression, one’s inner-truth.

For sixteen months I lived in Berlin’s Schöneberg quarter, around the corner from 155 Hauptstrasse and the apartment that song was composed in and of. I’d pedal my bike past and nod to the ghost Bowie inside, still wondering and waiting for the gift of sound and vision.

It’s the seventh day since Bowie’s death, the final day of shiva I’ve sat beneath his window. I’ve never much understood funerals, always felt they were for a “living” that didn’t include me, but this has been different.

Over this week I’ve shared glances with occasional bleary-eyed oldsters coming or going from where I’m headed or have just been–there have been no young folk to speak of and no platform boots necessary to recognize the kooks.

Today, from a block away, I spy a pair of women making the pilgrimage. The taller of the two—who for one moment I mistake for Patti Smith—has Smith’s hair, a floor-length bright blue shearling coat and an armload of exquisite orange, flame-tipped roses.

Trailing my comrades I think of Smith’s line in Woolgathering when, upon being given a dandelion, she asks, “What could I wish for but my breath?”

At Bowie’s door the energy feels less personal, dissipating. After the roses-bearers depart, a lone woman and I stand shivering before the diminished pile of offerings framed by narrowed police barricades: plastic-wrapped bodega flowers and a few handmade items, the most prominent being a cigar box shrine with a Halloween Jack eye patch and what seems a bunch of random stuff tossed in. The woman plays “Starman” on her phone, and rather than poignant, it’s just sad.

A years later follow-up to his first solo release, “Major Tom,” “Starman” takes the isolation of planet earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do and turns it into an anthem where a cosmic DJ messiah tells us misfits not to blow it, ‘cause he thinks it’s all worthwhile.

The 1972 Top of the Pops performance famously featured Bowie’s flirty finger wagging at the viewer, and casually intimate embrace of Mick Ronson, which blew the minds of much of Britain and beyond and marked Bowie as a more than a one-hit wonder. I silently give thanks to many, including Bowie, not to live in a world where a rock and roll arm thrown over a shoulder can cause a stir.

Over the song’s fade out the woman shrugs and says something about bears—at least I think that’s what I hear. I smile and nod remotely, then realize she’s drawing my attention to the carefully rendered Ziggy Stardust teddy bear—complete with lightning bolt and guitar—hanging from the police steel.

This bear abrades me for no good reason. A few young women pass by on their way into American Apparel. “That was David Bowie’s house,” one says over her shoulder, and the other makes an “awww” sound like she might at the sight of a teddy bear, or the memorial of that musician guy that died the way people do—other people, older people. As they pause to take a selfie in front of Bowie’s memorial offerings I turn and nearly sprint downtown.

I learned in this week of Bowie Internet inundation that he trailed these streets too, often at dawn, in solitude, but right now I need Chinatown’s chaotic, smashing life. I’ll buy those killer clementine from that vendor on the corner, I think, and eggplant, scallion and ginger for supper.

I weave among cardboard boxes of dried silver fish and lotus root, tourists linked arm-in-arm in matching New York pom-pom hats, Chinese grandmas pushing plaid shopping carts in (Harold and) Maude braids. A man exits a hallway, arms loaded with red-ribboned funeral flowers. A chef in a paper hat leans against a wall, smoking beneath a pumpkin-sized, spinning dumpling.

Beneath crisscrossing wires strung with giant, glinting snowflakes, I warm my hands on a cup of milky tea and wonder when we’ll get winter’s first snow. Glancing up to cross Mott (the Hoople) Street, I wonder when the city’s details will cease to conjure Bowie.

I tuck dragon fruit into my sack, humming “Starman”—whose chorus melody is plainly lifted from The Wizard of Oz’s “Over the Rainbow.” Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly/Birds fly over the rainbow./Why then, oh, why can't I?

In performance, Bowie sometimes coyly sung a mash-up of these anthems of longing for belonging. On “Lazarus” he sings, seemingly of his death, This way or no way/You know, I’ll be free/Just like that bluebird/Now ain’t that just like me.

Blackstar begins by naming the Norse village of Ormen. In Norse mythology, the rainbow bridge that connects this world to that of the gods is Bifrost, which translates as tremulous way. Tremulous—as in trembling—as Bowie does so heart-wrenchingly as he backs into the armoire and out of this world.

When he heard the call, David Jones, who could walk the streets of Manhattan undetected, slipped over the rainbow and into his own imagination.

But with generosity and courage it seems he did not fully recognize, David Bowie spent his life pulling back the curtain on the Great Oz, showing the man, his frustration and fallibility, questioning art-making and then making it anyway.

I fear in the end he imagined himself “a very bad man but a very good wizard,” when in fact the opposite was true. The droves of people gathered at his front door and around the world may have found the masks fascinating, but only as much as the man, and heart, behind them.

I imagine catching David Jones wandering past shop windows plastered with red New Year monkeys, beneath golden, swaying lanterns. I would thank him for Ziggy Stardust, whose hair my mother copied and Scary Monsters, whose poster graced my eleven-year-old bedroom wall. I’d say thanks for Low and Hunky Dory, which got me through hard times. Thanks for The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Hunger, Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke. Thanks for Diamond Dogs, Heroes, Lodger, Station to Station. Thanks for creating a soundtrack for my life and the lives of my favorite people.

Thanks for being a fierce, literate libertine, giving permission when I so badly needed it and inspiration always. Thanks, from the strange kids, for saying, No love, you’re not alone! You’re wonderful!

On the afternoon of January 10th, in what I later learned were the last hours of Bowie’s life, a double rainbow drew me from my desk and to the window. It arced across the skyline and ended at the Empire State Building, so strikingly that fire fighters in the station across the street took to the emergency dispatch microphone to exclaim to the neighborhood, “There’s a rainbow!”

As the first snow falls over Chinatown’s back alleys, I think: rainbowie!

There’s a Starman, over the rainbow, way up high, and he told me—let the children lose it, let the children use it, let all the children boogie.

Kim Wood's writing has appeared in Out Magazine, McSweeney’s, Tin House's Open Bar, and on National Public Radio. She has received grants from the Jerome Foundation and is a MacDowell Colony fellow. She is working on a book, Advice to Adventurous Girls, based upon the unpublished archive of a 1920s motorcycle daredevil. Her documentary film on this subject has screened internationally in festivals and museums including Sundance and the Guggenheim, where it double-billed with an episode of ChiPs.

[imaginarycircus]

dear yuletide author,

I’m so, so sorry. I’m a big liar. I said I’d write this by the 12th of October? And I totally forgot. Mea culpa. I hope it hasn’t been stressing you out. I wish I could bake you cookies.

My general advice for writing me a fic is that you write something you’ll enjoy writing. I can offer some prompts in case you want them, but you don’t need to use any of them. I’d rather not read major character death scenes, non-con, or excessive violence. But I’m fine with angst, fluff, any rating from G to NC-17. All of these pairings are het, but I love slash and gen too. I’m a sucker for pining and romance, but I love characters to have well developed internal worlds and emotions. I love relationships that are based on friendship, or include it. But enemies to lovers is also good. Whether you go with PWP or a plotted fic is up to you. I’ll be happy either way. You can take a serious tone or a zany one.

All of my requests come from a place of, “What happens next/later?” Future fic for any of these is what I usually request, but if you have an idea for a pocket fic, missing scene, or something else, that’s fine. I like AU’s within reason, but would rather avoid coffee shop AUs or Hogwarts AUs or High School AUs for any of these canons.

Here are prompts if you’d like them:

Venetia. The cut to black at the end of this novel is painful. Heyer always does it and I accept it, but I scream about it every reread. I’m always happy if someone writes what happens next on that dining table *ahem* but Jasper waking up the next morning hungover in bed? *grabby hands*

Austin & Murry-O'Keefe Families - Madeleine L'Engle     

There’s a theme here to my requests, yes there is. Vicky and Adam--what the hell happens later on? We start to see a real shift in their relationship in Troubling a Star.  But where does it go from there? You could literally write them trying to buy a hammer at three am and I would be happy. But Vicky in college and Adam in graduate school, both in Cambridge/Boston would be cool. Or Vicky trying to work an office job after graduating while Adam is still in graduate school. Dude is going to be in graduate school a while I guess. IDK he could be a post-doc.

Pushing Daisies      

So. What happens later? I have a weakness for Ned/Chuck. I am sure you’re shocked. But I love all the characters. If you want to write gen fic about Emerson teaching Olive and Chuck how to knit or fire a gun, or both? Cool. You want to write Ned and Chuck trying to figure out how to live? Great.

Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks - E. Lockhart       

So. I maybe wrote a 77k word Yuletide fic for this a few years ago. It just sort of happened, like a bout of whooping cough. It was Frankie/Alpha insane college fic that turned into international spies. Was I drunk the whole time I wrote it? I can’t even remember. It’s a horrible mess. It was too large to edit well.

I kind of imagine Alpha and Frankie not keeping in touch for years and then they come face to face as lawyers. In court. In corporate board rooms. One as a civil rights advocate and the other gunning for partner at a major firm. Both gunning for partner at a major law firm? This is probably confusing and too many ideas. But they’re intense people and this is totally “we’re fighting and now we’re kissing” situation in my brain.

I never know if the person matched with me hates to write romance or sex and I don’t want you to do that if it makes you unhappy. Plz be happy. I am so sorry you had to ask the mods to make me write this. I’d pour dirt on my head, but the ground is frozen. I’m trying to clean the oven and I’ve had my head in there for two hours? Does that count? It’s super gross, but I don’t want to burn down my house on Thanksgiving. 

[ber39james]

What You Absolutely Must Do After Making a Mistake at Work

You messed up on the job. Big time. Now what?

Making a mistake at work can be both horrifying and humbling. Not only does it leave you feeling embarrassed, but your professional reputation and credibility may hang in the balance. We don’t do our best thinking when we’re stressed or anxious, so knowing how to react before a mistake happens will prepare you to react sensibly.

How to Get a Grip After You Make a Mistake

Before you react, take a deep breath. Remind yourself that every single one of us screws up at one time or another. Your foibles are a sign that you’re human. You’re not the first person to make a mistake on the job. You won’t be the last.

Be kind to yourself.

For the conscientious, mistakes often feel like a bigger deal than they are in reality. If you’re a perfectionist, you may be extra hard on yourself. In times of stress, your brain becomes your own worst enemy. If you find yourself catastrophizing or leaning on negative self-talk, try a new script.

Negative Self-Talk

I’m such an idiot! This is the worst.

Positive Self-Talk

People make mistakes—guess it was my turn. It’s embarrassing, but I’ll get through it.

Although some jobs are exceptions (if you’re a pilot or a surgeon, it’s probably best if you don’t make major gaffes), most jobs aren’t a matter of life and death.

Let’s say you made a noticeable mistake—you forgot your security code and triggered your building’s alarm. Not only did the alarm blare, but the police showed up, and nobody got any work done for much of the morning. Okay, that’s bad. Your whoopsie inconvenienced people. And yet, although they may tease you for a while, everyone’s okay.

Analyze what went wrong and prepare a solution.

After you’ve talked yourself into a calm state, but before you talk to anyone about what’s gone wrong, analyze the mistake. What did you do (or not do) that caused it? Is there something you could do differently to prevent similar screw-ups in the future? If you’re preparing to say “Whoops! I messed up,” you should be ready to follow that statement with “Here’s what I learned” and “Here’s how I’m going to fix it.”

If there’s something you can do to remedy the situation immediately, particularly if doing so would mitigate some of the damage, do it. I once emailed a journalist, except that the person I thought I was emailing wasn’t actually the one I sent the message to.

Fortunately, I caught the mistake right away. I groaned and hit reply. I thought for a moment about how I’d recover from this gaffe and decided that a touch of humor might win the day. Here’s what I wrote:

Hi Bob,

Hey, look! I got your name right this time. Through the magic of Gmail’s email address auto-complete feature, my message intended for Bryan H. went to Bob H. instead. I hope you’ll accept my apologies for the screw-up. I’ve learned a valuable lesson—I should double-check email addresses before hitting send.

We have a cool story coming up that I think would be a great fit for you and your readers. I’ll be sending it your way in a couple weeks. And that email will definitely be intended for you!

All the best, Karen

Of course, if the email I’d mistakenly sent Bob had been something particularly private or sensitive, I would’ve consulted my supervisor before proceeding to this step. High profile mistakes may require that you bring in others to help with the clean-up.

Own it.

After you’ve taken the time to analyze the mistake and figure out a solution, or at least a way to show that you’ve learned something from your error, it’s time to own up. Owning your error gracefully will go a long way toward salvaging your credibility. There are a couple components.

Don’t make excuses.

The worst thing you can do after you mess up is to make excuses or shift the blame onto someone else. Although it’s important to understand and be able to explain what happened, you should make it clear that you’re accepting responsibility.

Making an Excuse

I’m late for our appointment because the sales meeting ran overtime as usual.

Taking Responsibility

I’m sorry I’m late. I know your time is valuable and sitting around is frustrating. In the future, I’ll make a point to excuse myself from meetings that run over so I can be on time for my next appointment.

See the difference? One sounds more like a complaint than an apology. If you drop a whiny “I wasn’t on time because . . .” on a colleague, you’ll be asking them to deal not only with your tardiness but with your negativity about meetings that run overtime. Skip the grumbling and get straight to apologizing.

Apologize, but don’t overdo it.

Be sure not to go overboard with apologies. It’s unlikely that whatever hideous sin you’ve committed requires you to repeatedly fall on your sword in a grand, overwrought mea culpa. In fact, apologizing too profusely can call attention to minor issues and make them seem like bigger problems.

Instead, make one simple apology to the appropriate person or persons. And take time to do it right—no, “I’m sorry, but . . . .” The word “but” renders an apology meaningless because what follows is almost always an excuse intended to deflect responsibility rather than accept it.

Propose a solution.

Here’s where your analysis of the mistake comes in handy! After you apologize, offer a solution that will prevent the same mistake from happening again. It could be anything from an action plan to a simple takeaway you’ve learned as a result of the slip-up.

How to Handle the Aftermath

If you handle your mistake well, odds are there won’t be much of an aftermath. And that’s good. But if you do make an error that could have lingering effects, it could be helpful to get some things in writing. Consider writing a post mortem, breaking down the events that led up to the mistake, what was done to remedy the problem, and what you learned from the experience.

When you document a mistake, you show your capacity for growth. Not only that, but you demonstrate an interest in helping others learn from your errors. Your efforts will contribute not only to mitigating any damage done, but to preventing future damage.

Let it go.

When all is said and done—when you’ve analyzed your mistake, thought through a solution, apologized, and documented your learnings—then the time has come to let go. Forgive yourself for the gaffe and then refuse to hang on to it. Lingering on your mistakes only drags down your self-confidence and makes you less productive.

You’re human, after all. Now go out there and give it your best!

The post What You Absolutely Must Do After Making a Mistake at Work appeared first on Grammarly Blog.

from Grammarly Blog https://www.grammarly.com/blog/mistakes-at-work/