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sad-lutin · 1 year

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TIANSHAN DYNAMIC IN THE PRE-RAPHAELITE SETTINGS

Like I promsied I got more in depth of a couple of figures and tried to apply them to our boys. Here is an interpetation:

TIANSHAN DYNAMIC AS OPHELIA AND HAMLET

I will start by saying that there are some similarities between Mo and Ophelia, but differences as well: for example Ophelia, like Hamlet, is part of the royal court, and her father, Polonius, is a lord, so although she isn’t royalty like Hamlet, she would be a suitable match for him in Danish society; meanwhile Mo, even if is father was a buisnessman probably involved with the Mafia, is from one of the lowest rank in society, therefore is not a suitable partner for He Tian , and above all he is even a "male partner". He is totally inadeguate for this role, but that's a difference that's not important since Ophelia shares this oddity with all the other pre-raphaelite women in general.

Therefore what makes Ophelia a pre-raphaelite woman? The answer is: her madness. She drowns herself; wich is a self-harm action that recalls Mo selfless personality, because Mo is the first to hurt himself, by isolating himself and getting blamed as the evil one in moments of difficulties, his first reaction to uncertainty is self-distruct for others (ex. getting the blame for the rapist boy for his mother sake, being used and molested by She Li for his father sake or getting away from He Tian to not him intrude his chaotic life). Ophelia goes mad for the death of his father and drowns herself. Like Mo, she have a strong attachment to the father figure and both of them suffer from their lost. Ophelia thus became one of Shakespeare’s most famous female tragic figures, along with Cleopatra, Cordelia, Desdemona, and, of course, Juliet (wich can all be analysed in the future if you want ;) )

Yet another similarity Ophelia shares with Mo is that, at some point, they get "turned away" by their partners: Hamlet says that Ophelia has a problem, wich lies not in herself but in what Danish society will encourage her to do: marry and give birth to ‘sinners’ like him (wich, for Hamlet, all men are). Just like He Tian tried to shoo Mo away with all his "aren't you scared of darkness?" speech.

But the biggest similitude between Ophelia and Mo is that they both get used by men. Ophelia is used by two men, her father and Hamlet, as a pawn for them to enact their deceptions. And Mo is used by He Tian and She Li in the same way. They both try to use him to go against eachother. Unfortunally Mo is easily toyed with and used as a pawn. Even He Chen uses him to lure He Tian in doing what he wants, everyone in 19 days at some point deceived Mo to gain something, that's because (like Ophelia) he is the purest character of them all, he has a candid soul which tries to hide under a scowl, but it can be found with ease because he is not made to fool anyone, he IS the fool (say yes for a tarot cards analysis?). Luckily we can say that He Tian uses him in another way tho: to free himself from his shadows. (See the end my previous post) Because if He Tian is this dark figure, Mo is the candid light that can cleanse him. And like the Yin and Yang, light cannot shine without the dark. (But with this I will stop here or the analysis will be 2 days long)

He Tian seems so different from Hamlet, but lets dig into it: Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark, although he is still a student, he is going to take an important role soon. Just like He Tian, but I don't even have to say it out loud, everyobody knows.

Hamlet is often characterised as ‘a man who cannot make up his mind’. The words that tend to come up when people try to analyse the character or personality of Hamlet are indecisive, delaying, and uncertain, with ‘inaction’ being the key defining feature of what Hamlet actually does during the play. Wich can seem like the total opposite of the active and energetic He Tian. BUT HEAR ME OUT: He Tian is exactly that. He knows he is going to take his brother role, he knows he is going to study abroad, he knows he have to leave Mo behind. But what does he do? NOTHING. He keeps delaying everything. He is indecisive about his future with his brother, trying to run away from it without actively doing nothing, he is uncertain of how Mo will feel once he is gone ("will he miss me" note), he keeps delaying telling Mo everything because he is hoping that this solution will solve itself. And at the last She Li action, when he asked his brother for help, he knew he couldn't delay his destiny any longer. But right now what he is trying to do? NOTHING. He keeps running away from his duties, trying to live in the perfect and utopistic bubble that he built around Mo, and he will do this until it pops. But this pop is going to be fucking demaging. How will Mo take the lost of the only other male figure in his life? Will he succumb to madness like Ophelia?

Because like Hamlet contemplated suicide (to be or not to be monologue) but didn't take action, Ophelia drawned herself, the water (a super feminine energy symbol) took her life, and maybe Mo will walk the same path, but unfortunally, we have to wait to know it...

TIANSHAN DYNAMIC AS "LA BELLE DAMME SANSE MERCI"

La Belle Damme sans Merci is a short poem by Keats whom describes the encounter between an unnamed knight and a mysterious fairy; who, in this analysis, are obviusly He Tian and Mo Guan Shan (duh).

The poem opens with a description of the kight in a barren landscape, "haggard" and "woe-begone", wich can represent the solitude of He Tian life before meeting Mo. He was alone surrounded by hypocrisy, sterility and fakeness (his cold and anaffective family, his fake frienships, all the attention-seeking girls... ecc).

The knight tells the reader how he met a beautiful lady whose "eyes were wild" (this should be the perfect moment to analyze the expressions of Mo eyes but, again, you know what I'm talking about), how he set her on his horse (analogy of how He Tian "set" Mo on his wealth) and how they went together to her "elfin grot", where they began to make love. Falling asleep, the knight had a vision of "pale kings and princes", who warn him that the pity-less lady "has you in her charms". He awoke to find himself on the same "cold hill's side" where he is now "palely loitering".

A straightforward reading suggests that the Dame entraps him and punish him because he raped her, so this is a well deserved punishment. In the same way, He Tian, forcing Mo like he did in the beginning of their relationship, violated him, hence Mo decided to "kill him". Mo actively inquired into their relationship and they formed a profound bond. Mo destroyed his aspectation and accidentally seducted He Tian whom, falling for him, escaped the boring and barren life he lived before. Mo murdered He Tian meaningless self and punished his careless ass by letting him care for something (Mo himself and their other 2 friends). And with a further interpretation we could infer that, with falling for Mo, He Tian has now a weakness that could kill him for real if the wrong people get to know it. Like She Li almost killed him, in the future his love for Mo could be even more dangerous.

In this poem the knight is associated with images of death (again a symbol of how He Tian is the darkness): a lily ( a symbol of death in the Western culture), paleness, "fading", "witering",... hence he may well be dead himself at the time of the story. Meaning that He Tian, was already doomed from the start. His life had never been easy, and his fate was already decided. Mo encounter just gave him a last adventure, a reason to die eralier then expected. Because, just like the knight, who is clearly doomed to remain on the hillside, but the cause of this fate is unknown. We don't know what will actually happen to He Tian or Mo. We are just seeing a glimps of what happens and what is going to happen in the future.

I hope that this is of your liking, I'm sorry if there are grammar error, english is not my native language.

If you have any other opinion, please, feel free to comment them, and the same thing apply if you want me to analyze something more specific, something else or something I quoted up here!

#19 days #he tian #mo guan shan #tianshan #old xian #19 days update #19days #19天 #old先 #19 days analysis #character analysis #ophelia #hamlet #la belle dame sans merci #pre raphaelism

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spandexinspace · 7 months

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Rend what little flesh

CW: Abuse, minor gore

This is set when Vril's very young, exact age depends on what timeline you subscribe to.

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A moment of inaction, of carelessness, is all it takes. A pair of tongs, stained dark red from hours of work, slip out of his clammy grip and clatter to the tiled floor with a sound that might as well have been deafening for how it echoes between the tiled walls. He, who doesn't yet know a name nor title, watches helplessly as the tongs still in front of him and the clanging gradually subsides. It is too late. He should pick them up. His teeth sink into his lower lip – pungent copper fills his mouth.

A hand falls heavy on his shoulder, daring him to crumble beneath its weight. Every fibre of his being screams against it, urges him to move forward or out or away or somewhere, anywhere but here and now. Yet he remains, for he knows that there is no somewhere, no place to run. He keeps his spine straight and his breathing shallow, trying to appear perfectly still as he steels himself for what is to come.

“It seems I have once again misjudged the depths of your incompetency.” With curling fingers the hand presses him down, cold points digging into his shoulder with more force than any normal hand could ever exert. He tries to ignore it, to remain. Something cracks in his shoulder and then, with a single loud snap, breaks. It’s a sharp sting of pain that blossoms out like a devouring flame, as if a serrated knife sinks into his flesh, every edge goring the wound ever wider. He yelps, the sound wordlessly forcing apart his lips before he has the good sense to remember to keep them shut.

“More whining,” his father snarls. “You forget yourself, child. I don’t care for your failures, nor your whimpering, yet you continuously whimper and whine instead of doing the one job you were created to do.” His father shoves him to the floor and he hits the cold tile face first, his nose breaking with an audible crack and searing pain, rattling his teeth and flooding his mouth with another wave of acrid copper. This time he manages to resist the urge to vocalise, once again pressing his teeth into his tattered, stinging bottom lip. A single muddy thought thanks the stars that at least his teeth have been spared this time. They haven’t been regrowing right recently.

“It would be a mercy to end your neophytic existence before you realise what you are. Any of the other subjects could replace you and be of more use than you have ever been.” As his father speaks he crawls onto his side and curls in on himself, his shoulder screaming in red hot protest with every movement. His body is growing stiffer by the moment, every movement more of an effort than the last. The sting of copper overwhelms his caved in sinuses, burning like he’s drowning, and there’s a darkness crowding the edge of his blurry vision that threatens to swallow him whole with each new, laboured breath. “Are you paying attention?” It’s only with great effort that he manages to whine in response.

“I should not have permitted you to awaken, much less to live long enough to prove your incompetency to such an undeniable extent.” He dares a glance up at the towering shape of his father, looking much the same as it did that day he took his first breaths. Tall, imposing, leering down at him with empty eyes. His eyes were organic then – many parts of him were – but other than that he’s indeed much the same. They both are. “Many before you have lost their lives for much less. Perhaps it’s time you finally joined them.”

He wants to kill him. Rend what little flesh he has left clean from his bones with his own hands until the very room they stand in is drenched dark green, his own skin slick and warm and reeking of that horrible copper. If only he could force his heavy, aching body to stand, to let him sink his teeth into warm flesh, to claw at the skin and let chipped nails catch on it until it splits open beneath them like an overripe fruit that's been left out in the sun. To rip and tear and hear him wail in agony and to see all those who came before in the mirror images of his wide-open, dying eyes.

The Tyrants would execute him.

They’d win.

And they’d recreate his father, use his own discoveries to create something new. Something worse, undoubtedly. Bones of steels and tendons of thick wires. Dark, viscous liquid in plastic veins and a brain that is little more than a link in a million tethered network. Reconfigure him in their own image.

He cannot kill him. Not yet, he thinks, as his body gives in to the darkness.

#this is technically set during the renaissance #on earth that is #vril dox ii #brainiac #vril dox #my writing #I'm going for a slightly younger/less robotic Brainiac too but idk if that translates

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teruel-a-witch · 2 years

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canon compliant what-if headcanon after 5x04 through 5x06

steve kisses danny. he's been feeling so helpless and out-of-his-depth because danny's been so lifeless and quiet and subdued, he doesn't know what to do, can't stand inaction, so he just takes danny's face in his hands and tries to breathe some life back into him the only way he knows how. even if danny gets angry or punches him it's so much better than the quiet stupor and retreating into himself.

danny surprises him by latching onto him like a drowning man, grabbing the lifeline steve is extending. steve barely holds onto his sanity so he doesn't drown too. he doesn't think this should go any further, this isn't how this was supposed to happen, if it ever did, but he cannot say no to 'yes' and 'please' and 'needs this' 'need you'. danny is so tired of feeling nothing, so empty, he's desperate to fill the void inside him even for a little bit, so he takes as much as steve is willing to give (everything).

afterwards danny escapes to jersey for the funeral without giving steve a chance to talk about it. he ducks the countless calls and deletes voicemails. he doesn't need to hear steve say what he already knows. that it was a one-time thing, a mistake. steve never would have even kissed him if he weren't so pathetic and broken and he knows how steve likes to fix broken things. danny recognises a pity fuck when he's offered one thank-you-very-much.

steve never stops trying. he figures he must have messed up somehow, showed his hand. danny just needed some temporary comfort and took it from the closest available person and now he must regret it thinking steve expects something more from him. clingy, needy steve. if only danny would give him a minute to explain, to show that he's ready to act like nothing ever happened to preserve their friendship. he will do it though it's killing him inside even more now that he knows what it feels like to have everything.

danny comes back without warning steve. doesn't go home, in case the big goof is staking out the place. he isn't ready to face him yet, so he goes to his favourite spot, even if looking at the ocean always makes him think of one of its particular inhabitants. of course, it's where steve promptly tracks him down, the guy is relentless. only he would practically stalk a guy to let him down easy.

turns out he needn't have worried, steve acts like nothing happened, he acts the way he always is, like a good and supportive friend, it's infuriating how he can compartmentalize it all so well. he wishes he had the strength to have it all out in the open, but privately he's grateful that he gets to keep the friendship, because he's missed the bastard and he doesn't have the strength to go cold turkey.

steve is relieved danny doesn't shut him out anymore, he vows to never make the mistake of showing his feelings again, the stakes are too high. when it comes to danny, as always, he'll take what he can get.

back to the status quo. never again. they are both very skilled at lying to themselves. perhaps, they would have stuck to their guns but steve had to go and get kidnapped...

#mcdanno #h50 #myh50 #h50 headcanons #h50 5x04 #h50 5x05 #h50 5x06 #idiots in love #steve mcgarrett #danny williams #hawaii five 0 #h50 season 5 #i couldn't stop thinking about how danny was ducking steve's calls and didn't tell him when he was coming back #so my brain came up with a possible explanation #it's angsty sorry because that's s5 for you

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jukemaid · 2 years

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i wrote a fic on twitter bc im insane. format preserved 6.0 sPOILERS BABEYYYYY

she would oft think of the notion of sacrifice with the same vitriol as she would a betrayal-- something that only exists to take, inherent in its selfishness and cruelty. to sacrifice is to give up a piece of one's self in an exchange for an ideal, rather than fight for it.

and she knows, she knows... to fight is to suffer. it's to risk consequences worse than failure, wherein the thought of simply giving up provides more comfort than the hope for victory. when she's exhausted, battered, beaten, there's little else she desires above rest.

and it's there at those crossroads where her resolve is put to the test. she doesn't want to give up, not for any reason. to do so would be to sacrifice others who cannot fight like she can... yet, these battles waged are in themselves a sacrifice: her body and soul for theirs.

'which is the greater sin,' she'd wonder. 'forcing me to endure the impossible, taking my very existence from me to use as a tool for the hope of all--? or is it how i would sleep peacefully, without care, even knowing my choice of inaction would lead the innocent to demise?'

but as always, that choice was never hers to make... or at least, she thought so. unable to recognize her own hypocrisy in the depths of her hatred, she allowed herself to drown in the riptide. it was easier to give up the brittle pieces of heart, rather than feel them be taken.

and yet. and yet-- she had made her own decision all that time ago, hadn't she? to sacrifice herself for the sake of others-- no, for the sake of the people she'd grown to cherish. even if it hurt, and even if she suffered, she could never escape the reason she yet stood.

there's no such thing as heroic sacrifices. there is only death and not, and the choice one must make with the full weight of their soul. to sacrifice is give up. to sacrifice is to fight. to sacrifice is to live, when all the world presses down upon you. to take another step.

at the end of eternity she yet stands, staring into the abyss of nihil with the gentleness of someone well acquainted with its tides. she has been broken and reforged countless times over, with each successive awakening bringing her another step towards the answer. her answer.

she realizes, understands, in the same moment her grip on the shrieking teleporter loosens, and she allows the howling winds to tear it away. she smiles against the panicked cries of her name, hands desperately reaching out, and speaks words knowing they will never be heard.

she hated the idea of sacrifice. she hated the idea of loss, of helplessness, of giving up. but far greater than those, she hated herself for denying the love she had been given freely, by those who believed with all their heart that she was worth losing themselves for.

she has no plans of sacrificing herself to save the world. if that's what others believe her to do, then so be it. if they would call her heroic, then let them. it matters not to her, not when she's finally reached the precipice, her conviction unyielding and absolute.

the final battle is nothing like any before it. the stakes are limitless, and so is she. every boundary is shattered under heel. every threshold crossed without hesitation. she tears through all that she is with her own hands and rises higher, and higher.

the old her would have never made it this far, so preoccupied by her misdirected grief as she was. in a sense, she was not unlike meteion, and the knowledge of their mutual agony softens her voice. wipes the girl's tears away with gentle hands. a burden shared.

her answer, she would say much later, is that there isn't one. semantics regarding winning and losing and self-sacrifice were only that. the purpose of one's life and the reason for their death cannot be so easily defined, nor should they be.

it was never a matter of sin-- she had those aplenty. but she could yet stand where she is, beyond the end of the world, by virtue of the path she walked to get there. there is love and guilt in her heart both, and they weigh as they should.

#why am i like this #it wasn't supposed to be so long i swear #juke writes #ffxiv #ew spoilers

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paldeansunflowers · 29 days

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🔊

//idk if I said this already (I’m so inactive, I’m sorry:( ), but Our Word by 36 questions- except with the perspective flipped kinda? How I view the song is how Clementine’s parents (mostly her mom) had to lie and protect her from her abusive father (a Rocket mob boss) I can go more in depth on specific lyrics later if you want haha- but the song is her processing her trauma and realizing what happened to her as a kid. Also the ending part where the singer “drowns” I recontextualize for her as her getting hit by a stun spore and falling into a water trough by accident- but of course her Pokémon save her.

//I wish I could make an animatic but I literally don’t have a computer that could run the software- all I have is ibis paint and a 3DS with flip note😭

#asks #ooc asks

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myahawkins · 11 months

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#3 Scared - What have I done. I heard the person I cared for most cry and scream out of loneliness... and he trusted me... To not push my bloody envelope of Love his way, at least not yet. He entrusted me not to push him in a direction he wasn't ready for, he allowed me to coast his ship to shore.

And what did I do? I rocked the boat and he fell over. I was incapable to reason with myself... with my chaos... and so the person that means more than the world to me... the person whos saved me from my own sinking ocean depths... He was afraid of the ocean, and yet trusted me to not sink our ship... but I failed.

Now he's drowning again... and I cannot save him. Please someone help and save him... I can't... I can't do it... I cannot come back home to lose another person I care so deeply for.

I'll swallow my pride and admit that I've pushed you over the edge... that it was me and it should've been someone else to be by your side and not... me.

I love you to much to let my destructive nature sink you. So please. Forget anything and everything you need to lessen the weight you hold so you may float to the surface, please... please... don't go.

You're to special to be treated the way I have you... as others have... I know you don't need space... that you need and want someone to save you... be there for you... I understand it can't be me.

So please float... please float and don't let my actions cripple you in your mental health journey... you can't default to who you were any longer... that person... as you've said... is dead.

I am scared, Not for me... but for you. Don't shut down dear robot... there is much love to compute... do not yet die destroyer... there are more glass houses to shatter.

Don't give up yet please. Love is coming i know it. I know you're reading this so please just message back. Don't think I'm mad or sad or... anything other than scared of your inactivity in my life. If you wanna help me which I know you do. Please just message back.

Ich liebe dich, mein geliebter Roter.

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scriptaed · 3 years

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bygones of the sun. 10 (m)

genre: angst/fluff/(future)smut || dance captain!hoseok, bad boy!au, uni!au

pairing: reader x hoseok

length: 7.2k

synopsis: Jung Hoseok was once the sweetheart of the school, the dance captain whom every girl, including you, can’t help but fall head over heels for. But like the force of the ever-glowing sun, everything that rises must also set. A year of inactivity later and he’s now the school’s resident bad boy. You’re a firm believer of allowing the past be the past, and yet you can’t help but wonder where the risen sun has gone into hiding—because perhaps its shadows have out-shined its own radiance.

Egocentric to pray for a delay in sunrise, but you would do it for a fracture in time would serve well as a sanctuary for your dormant star; nonetheless, when night ends and day arrives, the sweet tears of midnight will vaporize into inexistence.

Night strings along irrationality in an overexposure of our deepest subconscious. At the deepest of troughs and under the darkest of skies, there, we lie more vulnerable and prone to false hope than ever, for last night is the ultimate testament to mankind’s greatest fear.

Emotions could have been running high, lethargy could have gotten the best of him, anything could have and would have shattered the boy of last night's scattered soul poorly taped into a fragile whole; ironically, however, it is exactly the spill of burdens and truths of the night to the attentive ears of a beholder, you, which had saved him from such atrocities.

So you prayed, prayed for dusk to drown dawn in an endless embrace with itself until the boy could finally relish in the long awaited night's rest, and yet, still, you feared the longer he slept in the comforts of superficial dreams, the stronger his demons would return; and so, with a heavy and anxious heart, you had found yourself trapped in your own double edged sword of a state—basking in his warm presence, shivering in your guilty conscience.

In the end, all is for naught when the peak of sun rays through the slit of the curtains showers upon your cheeks perched on the armrest of a couch.

Squinting, you groan in a groggy voice before regretfully slipping the first word which comes to mind.

“Hoseok?”

Your following silence meets its own reflection.

With stained efforts, your body slumps into the couch as your half awakened state scans through the room that remains perfectly untouched. The remnants of your memories recalls how you had somehow stumbled your way to the couch sitting beside the bed of your motel room, refusing to fall asleep just inches beside the boy in your bed; although, said boy remains nowhere to be seen as of now.

Heavy steps and rowdy mumbles muffled by the floor beneath convince your unwilling self to drag yourself off the couch, slipping the blanket you recall being gently draped over and tucked under you in your sleep last night to the floor. Matters of the previous night forgotten, your feet stumble its way to the bathroom, disregarding the perfectly folded and tucked sheets of where he should have been lying. A few splashes of cold water to your drowsy state are surprisingly enough to fully awaken you after a relatively nice albeit anxious night of rest; with alertness, however, floods the remembrance of him.

“Jimin!” you call out, weaving through the incoming crowd of camp attendees packing their bags. Catching sight of the rather petite boy chatting away with his usual friends, Taehyung and Jungkook, you take one final stride before urgently pulling off to the side.

“Hey, Y/N,” his eyes widen in confusion by the sudden greeting, “what’s up?”

“Do you know what’s going on with Hoseok? Did anything happen to him yesterday evening?” you blurt, pausing for a second until another thought comes to mind. “Oh, and what do you mean he wasn’t on patrol duty last night? Then what—” you stop abruptly when you realize Hoseok’s likely desire to keep things between you and him confidential “—who was on patrol?”

“...I was?” Jimin arches a brow. “Why? Did something happen? Is there something wrong with Hoseok?”

So he doesn’t know.

None of the boys know the real reason behind Hoseok’s reluctance to return—or at least the surface level of the seemingly endless depth to that facade of his.

“No,” you quickly deny, shaking your head and scanning the bustling entrance hall; as if innate, your line of sight naturally draws to the centripetal force of your Earth’s center.

“Then why—”

“—hey, I’ll catch up with you later, alright? I still have to pack my bags…” your voice trails along with your eyes which follow Hoseok as he glides from one side of the room across to the other. Hand drifting from Jimin’s shoulder, you gradually whirl around and follow the beckons of your heart akin to pearls under the sway of the ocean’s waves. “Hoseok!”

Body beneath your sway, Hoseok whirls around to face you with a quizzical look glancing down at the hand which grasps his arm.

“Yeah?” he asks gently, arching a brow at you when a smirk tugs at the corner of his lips. “Is there something I can help you with, babe?”

Initially, you had approached him with the intent to confront him about last night. His behavior, his words, his burdens, you know he's hurt and there's nothing you want more than to help him, not to mention the unreasonable guilt stirring inside you for failing to tackle the situation efficiently then and there; but even despite the momentary shock of the return of that egotistical mien of his, it's impossible for you to see him the same way after witnessing his sheer vulnerability.

For once, you must be selfless. Push aside your wants for that of his own, because unbeknownst to you, his own needs became your wants somewhere along the irrevocable path of time.

“About last night…” you start and the crease above his brow only deepens. “I just… I'm sorry I didn't comfort you or ask you this earlier…” you prim and trace your hand along his arm to meet his hands. Peering up to meet his gaze, he flinches yet you refuse to turn a blind eye. “...”...but are you doing alright, Hoseok?”

“What…” he frowns and stiffens in place, “...do you mean by that?”

“I mean,” you clear your throat, shifting your weight, “are you okay? Is there anything you want or need to tell me? Or anyone? Because I just want you to know I'm always here to lend an—”

“—look, I don't know what you're rambling on about,” Hoseok chuckles, retracting his hands from yours to nonchalantly ruffle your hair before crossing his arms, “but all I recall from last night is a certain someone refusing to sleep on the same bed as me. I almost forgot I was dating the most pristine of the untainted.”

“...rambling on about?” you repeat in a mumble, frowning and shaking your head. “No, Hoseok, listen, when you mentioned dance and… and your passion for it, I didn’t know how to respond because you were actually opening up to me.”

Hoseok blinks blankly, deep breaths in and out as his chest rises higher and steadier with each puff before he equivocates, “Y/N, I don’t recall anything of such sorts, and even if they did happen, I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Hoseok—” you pause when your voice fails you “—I’m not forcing you to talk about it, I just want you to know—”

“—Y/N,” he sternly articulates, gaze affixing to yours with impatience. “I have to help the others load their bags onto the charter, and from what I can tell,” his eyes scan you up and down as he chortles, “don’t you have to go pack your things? So if you don’t have anything else important to say, your boy has important matters to attend to.”

The crowd migrates in clutters from the lobby to the coach parked right outside, only adding to the urgency for you to get your point across; but when you recall the events of last night, how he had so defensively proclaimed to abide by the duties of his role as the dance captain, you come to the epiphany that you really are just another roadblock in his tracks at this very moment. So, naturally, you step aside with a short bob of your lowered head.

The boy chuckles softly at your surrender, taking one large stride to enclose the gap between him and you and stroking your cheeks just briefly until the warmth of his touch subsides to his sides. “And about last night… I’m sorry if my stay made you uncomfortable. I think I was just… a bit tipsy.

Clearly, he was sober, but you’re reluctant to further the discussion without the right time and place.

“Don’t look so sad or I can’t bring myself to leave you here,” he laughs bittersweet chords to the pluck of your heartstrings, especially when you notice the lack of effort in his disingenuous grin as he crosses his arms. “Come to think of it, I seem to neglect my duties as the captain whenever I’m around you, huh? Maybe we should be more cautious of our relationship around others, don’t you think?”

In one ear, out the other; more often than not, his incessant teasing would elicit a snide remark from your intolerant state, but after the events of last night, nothing seems to be the same. Rather, his own flirtations are now construed to be poor fruitions to mask the pleas crying yet buried beneath.

“Sorry for bothering you,” you press your lips into a thin line, “let’s talk more later.”

An immediate downturn of his lips tugs at your heavy chest, but never-minding his equivocal language, you turn away and depart to your room in deep pondrance.

Just what could you do to help the real Hoseok?

But who really is Hoseok? And did you ever come to know him?

Rather, did he?

Life truly has its own quirky way of doing things. One second you’re debating between the absurd albeit enticing offer in the kitchen of your house and the next second you’re already packing up your clothes on a journey bound for home.

Piles upon piles upon piles, the abundance of snacks and clothes you had brought but failed to utilize drives you to your wit’s end before you finally toss the last pair of shorts into your luggage, let out a loud, cathartic sigh, and jump into the comforts of your bed.

In reality, this position with your face buried in the depths of your pillow and your arms and legs sprawled across the soft cotton sheets would spell for doom had the occasion of falling asleep and missing the departure of your only ride home, especially since Hoseok doesn’t appear to be in his right mind nor favorable towards you against his prioritized club members enough to catch the one insignificant, missing member; fortunately for you, a good night of rest stirs you awake and incapable of slumber… plus, it turns out someone other than the names of Hoseok seeks for your attention.

Ring, ring, your phone’s vibration tunnels across the pillow to your ears.

Was Jimin asking for your assistance? Or was he wondering about the origins of your odd question earlier this morning? Could it perhaps be a message from the boys you had met and exchanged number with during camp?

Regardless of the myriad predictions, there really is only one thing that’s set in stone: it can’t possibly be Hoseok, because as much as it pains you to admit, you’re the last thing he wants to contact at this moment…

...and to your dismay, you’re right, but what really debunks your seemingly accurate theories is the name glaring from your brightly lit phone screen.

Unknown [2:06 PM] Hey, Y/N. This is Keiko. I was wondering if you have time to chat with me over dinner tonight when you return?

Straight to the point, but still lacking in details.

You can’t quite believe your eyes when they incessantly glide across the word ‘Keiko.’

What could she possibly want from you? After her ambiguous request for you during the last and only time you had interacted with the ex dance captain, you had never expected to hear from her again; in fact, to be quite frank, you had nearly forgotten about her… you had nearly forgotten Hoseok’s relations with her.

A past unrequited love? A past relationship gone wrong?

The endless possibilities tug at your chest in the familiar weighty burden you had so carelessly forgotten in the past month. You’re not exactly sure why the blur of a mystery regarding Hoseok’s relationship with Keiko pains you so, but the panic rising in your beating chest at this very moment is surely elicited by the fear of what this “conversation” could entail.

Slamming your luggage shut, you do a quick scan around your room and grab your last leftovers, but before you could roll your suitcase completely out the doorway, the sway of an unknown force rooted deep in the room keeps you from doing so; and when you glance over your shoulder to assure yourself not to linger any longer, you arrive at the epiphany of reasons residing beneath your reluctance to depart.

Because lying there on the now nicely made up bed is a couple, one asleep and one vigilant, both too vulnerable, too wary to let down their walls against the dangers of the dimming lights and the emerging night.

The longer you stand there watching, the more vividly you recall the subtle glint of his eyes—begging or pleading, you’re unsure—and your sealed lips incapable of appropriate assurance akin to a stuck zipper deserving neither the label of new nor broken; and before you know it, the desire to set things right with Hoseok rises once again within the pits of your wrenching gut.

“Y/N!” you flinch when a voice hollers at you from down the hall, causing the door to slam shut with the absence of your jutting foot. Whirling around, you find Jimin jogging towards you. “I was looking everywhere for you! We’re basically almost all ready to go in ten minutes or so and Hoseok noticed you’ve been missing for a while now, so he told me to find you.”

“Oh—” so he did remember about you “—hey, how did Keiko get my number?”

“Huh?” your peripherals catch his eyes widening into circular orbs when the two of you begin heading down the flight of stairs and he gasps in remembrance. “Oh! She asked me for your number this morning. Why? Did you not want me to? Did she text you?”

“No, that’s...” you quickly answer until your words are interjected by the sight of Hoseok standing alone in the lobby and it’s like the force field of his prevents you from moving your gaze elsewhere, “...totally fine…”

“...do you need to talk to Hoseok?” Jimin asks but proceeds to grab your luggage and head down the stairs before you. He glances over his shoulder at you and nods his head at the figure your eyes struggle to keep off of. “Here, I’ll load your bags onto the bus and you take the next ten minutes to talk it out.”

“What?” you quickly frown and shake your head, attempting to grab the bags from him in vain, “no, it’s fine. There’s nothing to talk about anyways.”

“You won’t have a chance to talk to him again anytime soon after this,” Jimin utters under his breath, gaze firmly affixed to yours. “He looks dead tired. This camp took much more of a toll on him than usual. I don’t know why, but I have a feeling he won’t be hanging around with us much after this.”

Us? Does that include you?

The thought is all too daunting, you simply can’t fathom the thought of Hoseok dropping from your life without a single word or warning; because the scariest thing is… it’s much too real, too similar to something Hoseok would do.

Just. Like. That.

“Okay… I’m sorry,” you regretfully mumble, “I promise I’ll treat you and the boys to dinner someday.”

“Nah,” Jimin chuckles and heads off on his own, “bringing him back here is already enough of a favor for us.”

Gulp. Breathe. In. Out.

His words should be reassuring, yet you find them wrenching at your heart.

Is this really for the better?

Was bringing him here really the right choice, when at the end of the night, you just know Hoseok must be crawling back into the cold embrace of his mattress, shivering from what he can’t even call home, whimpering from the throbbing pain of every inch of his body and the nightmare of a camp’s threshold.

Maybe you had inflicted more pain than cure.

“...Hoseok?”

Your voice stutters amidst the thick silence of the air as you hesitantly take one step and other towards the one boy at the end of the hall, Hoseok.

Turning around, Hoseok spots you and simply arches a brow; the dark purple bags beneath the void in his eyes and the lack of vigor in comparison to his usual smug response to your calls plummet something deep within your stomach.

“Are you… done with everything?” you take one final step to enclose the distance between you two before uncomfortably hooking a hand over your right elbow and peering up at him, who gazes at you from above. “Can I help you in any way?”

Hoseok smiles gently and shakes his head, “no, everything is loaded and the camp ends here. I’m officially free of my duties as a captain and you’re officially free from that bet of ours.”

“What bet?” you let out without a thought, mind too preoccupied with the real question which loiters in your mind: why does it feel like you’re saying goodbye to me?

“The bet we made in your kitchen,” he cocks his head and flashes a crooked smile, “a euphoric kiss for your attendance at camp.”

“Oh, right. I almost forgot I wasn’t an actual member of this club…”

He grins, “and I almost forgot I wasn’t the captain of this club anymore.”

Please don’t say that.

“Hoseok…” your voice nearly cracks, eyes averting to the side in fear of impending waterworks, “I know you don’t want to talk about last night—”

“—then why are you bringing it up,” he deadpans, jaw tightening with the grinding of his teeth.

“I just…” you shake when you take a breath, “I just want to lend an ear. I think it would be helpful for you to let it all out.”

“Or do you just want to fulfill your own curiosities at the expense of my own requests?”

“What?” you immediately peer up at the sharp edges of his eyes with your own wide ones. “No, I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry… I just wanted to help…”

Silence floods the stagnating air and you’re nearly drowned with it—but not nearly as close as the effect his next words has on you.

“...can you stop prying?” he finally utters. “Can you stop mentioning it? I’m a player, don’t you remember? I only started all of… all of this because I was curious. I was intrigued by you only for a second because for once a girl wasn’t fawning over me like the rest.”

His confession plucks at your heartstrings, but your most pressing concerns lies elsewhere beyond your own state; when will he finally confide in you?

Hoseok grabs your shoulders and lightly shakes you, whether as a plea or an attempt to garner your divided attention, you’re unsure of. “I started all of this because of a dare, remember, Y/N?” his voice sounds all too desperate for you to bear. “So don’t fall too hard. Stop burying yourself into my mess and just play along without worrying, okay?”

“I don’t,” you mutter before clearing your voice and swatting his hands off you, “I don’t care, Hoseok! I don’t care how invested I am, because it’s already too late for me to back out and I don’t want to back out! I care about you, can’t you just accept that?”

Can’t you just accept me?

“Don’t you get it?” he groans, pacing in frustration. “I don’t want any help! I don’t need help. Don’t pry into my own business and stop asking Jimin and Taehyung or any of the boys about me. Get it over your head and stop investing so much time in me before you realize just how you right you were that night on our first date when you called me out on being an ass!”

The words echo along with your stunned silence. You had never seen Hoseok so infuriated before, and for the first time in a long while, you’re scared.

You’re scared he’ll drown in his own demons without your help.

You’re scared your own help will turn out to be a manifestation of your own wants over his own needs.

You’re scared the boy you love and care for isn’t the passionate captain you knew nor the renowned heartthrob around school but a enmity completely unknown.

Mostly, you’re scared because fear is the last thing you thought you would ever experience in the wake of Hoseok.

And maybe you’re too transparent or perhaps his words truly did hurt you to the point where even he could decipher, but your entire body language reclines—your eye glued to the floor, your head ducked in shame, and your body facing slightly askew—and Hoseok quickly reaches his hand out in aid.

From the top of your head down to the nape of your neck and to the stroke of your cheek, the cup of his hand brings you a step closer to him until he places a chaste kiss to your temple and retracts himself from you once again.

“Just stop worrying about me, okay? That’s the only way we can keep this…” he struggles to find the right words as he tucks a stray strand of hair behind your right ear. The boy takes a deep breath and neither a sigh nor a chuckle descends from his barely parted lips, for all you hear is a weighty pant crafted of obligations. “...this thing we have going on between us. We’ll both be better of that way, alright? Even if it’s ignorant to do so. I just don’t want us to end.”

Physically, his voice drifts into the foreign wind which sweeps your grasp of time shortly afterwards; but you hear him loud and clear within the resonance of your heart, for his actions speak louder than words.

You don’t expect him to greet you, not to mention even sitting within your vicinity on the ride back… but he does. In moments when you avoid all eye contact the second his foot sets weight onto the bus, shifting towards the windows by your seat and wishing with every ounce of your will for your rather isolated choice of seating and lack of friends to go unnoticed; but he reads you like an open book. With footsteps skimming across the floor, soft yet firm enough to mark his ambitions, the boy beelines to the seat by your side. The lethargic timbre of his murmured “hey” elicits a prim response from you as he plops into the empty seat and fills the painfully heavy air of his absence.

The forecast predicts a dayful of sun, but you don’t quite realize until now, just how reliant you’ve become; for at some point in time, the sun has somehow become your everything.

You don’t expect him to spark any conversations—no, not after that discussion gone astray—and he doesn’t; but the watchful gaze of his, wandering from his chattering friends straight up ahead to eye occasional roll of your sore ankles, inquires more than you could ask for. In fact, it doesn’t take very long for his desires to bloom into fruition when, the next thing you know, he gently lifts your right leg to prop into the lap of his own and begins kneading the knots from your muscles.

“It’s fine,” you mutter through barely parted lips, attempting in vain to retract your leg when his hands firmly hold them in place.

“It’s your first bootcamp, isn’t it?” he continues to knead. “I remember how exhausted I was for my first camp. Just let me help you.”

His words sweep your own right off of your lips.

Glancing him up and down, the courage to speak doesn’t come to you until the charter enters a tunnel, blackening your sights from his soft brown hair, beautifully tan skin, and mustard tee.

“Can you stop playing around with me? Things like this mean so much more to me than what you’re asking for from us.”

The boy doesn’t answer, instead, he pauses; and after a few seconds of silence, he persists to knead for a minute longer before letting down your leg once the tunnel ends and you’re blinded by the incoming flood of sun rays.

Incapable of sight in the bright sun after a long nap, the thought of Keiko’s text remains imprinted throughout your conscious. Weighing heavily in your hands, you grab your phone and swiftly jog off the bus on a mission to inquire advice from the rest of the boys.

While Hoseok lends a hand in unloading the endless stream of camp attendees hastily lining up to grab their bags and head on home, you find the rest of the boys standing in a semicircle, conversing away and responsibly keeping watch on the slowly dwindling crowd as members of the official performance unit.

“What’s crackin’, Y/N?” Jin questions, the group following suit as they peer at you with curious eyes.

“I just,” you glance around, particularly assuring yourself of Hoseok’s distant position before whirling around and proceeding in a hush, “I just wanted to ask you guys for some advice.”

Taehyung wiggles his brows, “you need some dating advice?”

“Ooh, for Hoseok?” Jungkook adds in.

“No, it has nothing to do with him, okay? Well, sort of,” you reach out your phone to show the text to a intrigued group of boys leaning in. “Keiko wants to meet up with me.”

“...okay?” Yoongi frowns at your lack of context.

“No, I mean, she wants to meet up with me and I’m pretty sure it has something to do with Hoseok. It’s literally the only reason she would know me or even talk to me.”

“But what’s so wrong with that?”

Jimin purses his lips at Yoongi’s remark, “you think Hobi would be okay with that? With us talking behind his back, especially to his former teacher? He doesn’t even tell us anything anymore, and we used to be his closest friends.”

“Yeah, so I don’t know what to do,” you shake your head. “I want to know what Keiko needs to tell me. I feel like it’s something important that might help Hoseok…”

“...but…”

“...but I’m scared I’m just taking advantage of Hoseok’s situation for the sake of my own curiosity. I don’t want to accidentally hurt him.”

The boys exchange glances at each other, because they, too, are as abandoned in the shadows as Hoseok had kept you, yourself.

Finally, Namjoon shifts his weight, a stance demanding attention and respect, before asking, “well, do you think Hoseok is going to get any better at this point?”

To be painfully honest, the truthful answer to his question would simply and brutally be a “no.” Just as Jimin had pointed out, Hoseok carries an even more lethargic, poignant mien in him than he had prior to camp. Maybe bringing him here really is a mistake, after all, because now he seems worse than ever before.

Without dance, it’s like he’s a completely different person.

“No, I doubt he’ll be hanging around us anytime soon,” Jimin quickly answers when he notices your downcast eyes. “I don’t think it’s just me when I say: right now, Hoseok despises dance.”

Hoseok. Despises. Dance.

You never thought those three words could ever coexist.

“Then I don’t think there’s any harm in meeting with Keiko,” Namjoon elaborates. “Yes, you might be butting into someone else’s business, but from what I can tell, Hoseok isn’t just ‘someone’ to you and you aren’t just ‘someone’ to him. If you’re doing it out of good intentions, I doubt he would hold it against you for—”

—his words are cut short when everyone in the group removes their eyes off of you and darts to someone from behind you. Suddenly, a heavy arm slings over your shoulders and the rough edge of his masked voice echoes in your right ear.

“Hey, what’s with all the long face?” Hoseok feigns a laugh after glancing at you. “What’re we going on about this time?”

Rather than his untimely presence, it’s his nonchalant performance of swinging his arms over your shoulders which catches your infuriated attention. Not only is he lying to himself, yourself, and his closest friends, but now he’s acting as if he owns you, as if you two were an actual couple, as if he didn’t just tell you to your face that your relationship meant nothing more than leisure to him.

“Why do you care so much about my mood? Actually, why do you pretend to care so much?” you rebuke in spite, pushing off his hands and relishing in the sudden downturn of his lips and furrowed brows. “I thought we weren’t a thing. You told me not to be attached, so why don’t you follow your own advice?”

Your curtly remarks evoke worried albeit curious glances from the boys, but all you care about is the fury boiling under Hoseok’s poor attempt at suppressing with a smirk.

“That’s more like it,” he smugly grins, cocking his head and raising his hands defensively, “the more you push me away, the more I’ll fall. Isn’t that what you want?”

As if.

Scoffing and rolling your eyes, you shake your head and return your attention to boys before bidding them goodbye and walking off without another word to Hoseok.

There isn’t any reason nor thing for you to stay around Hoseok for, and neither does he for you; he doesn’t run after you and he doesn’t even attempt to explain himself nor demand an explanation, because to him, you simply aren’t worth the effort.

To him, you’re just a simple text away.

Hoseok, my beloved [6:56 P.M.] Well played. Let’s keep things that way.

Clink, clink, the glasses of wine tipping against its own fills the rather lavish room you hadn’t expected nor asked to be seated in; and while others hold their own in formal gowns and suits, you sit uncomfortably across Keiko decked out in sweatpants and a messy bun from lack of time between departure and arrival.

Dressed in a sleek black blouse and dangling earrings, Keiko remains the classy woman you had met the first time around; to others, you must seem like a child next to her.

The only perk you could scavenge from your ostracized self is having your expensive dinner, sure to empty your wallet along with college tuitions, paid by a responsible, full-time employed adult.

“So,” she takes a sip from her glass of wine, “how’re you doing?”

“He’s doing…” you quickly respond before stuttering, “a-alright.”

To your surprise, Keiko chuckles a sultry laugh as ripened as red wine. “I was asking about you, not Hoseok; but I guess you have some sort of a guess as to why I called you here, and to be completely honest with you, you’re right.”

“Oh… sorry...” you mumble, eyes wide and enraptured by her poise. “I, um, hope it’s not inappropriate of me to ask this, but why are you asking me and not the boys?”

Keiko cocks her head as if the answer was obvious enough, “because you're the closest one to him right now, are you not?”

“Emotionally? No… physically? Not really,” you frown, especially when she just chortles at you.

“Well, that's what I've deduced from what the boys have told me.”

“They told you about me?” your eyes immediately widen in panic, because for some odd reason, you want to at least appear somewhat decent from someone as respectable as Keiko; and it isn't a competition between you and her in vie for Hoseok’s attention, it's the elegant way she holds herself which has earned your utmost respect. “What… did they say?”

“Oh, nothing too much,” she chuckles with a shrug. “Don't worry, I have other reasons for my deduction.”

The vague answer intimidates you from inquiring further as your gaze becomes affixed to the empty plate splattered with leftover sauce from the now ingested steak. Instead of probing at you to answer her question, she allows you to recollect yourself and your state of mind in silence; and eventually, you do, for your train of thoughts stumble over the real reason you had agreed to this meeting tonight.

“About Hoseok…” you start, eyes lifting to meet Keiko’s, her brows raising to encourage you further. “He's still… reluctant to dance. I don't think he had the best time at camp.”

“Really? Spring boot camp was always his favorite time of the year,” she prims, but all you can do is sigh in a mix of awe and regret, wondering just how much more she knows about Hoseok than you do him. “Well, do you plan on helping him still?”

Helping him? Does she not know about his injury? Hoseok’s voice reverberates in your mind—stop prying—for a remark both raw and real is all too painful to hear and to forget.

It isn't your business neither is it your secret to reveal, especially not to someone he must hold so dearly—in both respect… and love.

“I don't get it…” you stealthily tiptoe around the subject. “Why aren't you helping him? You're much closer to him than I am. I can't do much… we're just acquaintances. It's not like we're dating.”

Your question elicits a loud intake of breath followed by a sigh as she reclines into her seat and crosses her legs, “because I can't.”

'What do you mean…?”

Her fingers begin to play with the glass of wine, swirling the drink round and round and creating whirlpools in the tips of her sleek red nails.

“Are you aware of Hoseok’s main reason for his hiatus?”

Sneakers squeaking and machine buzzing, collapse.

“Well, I can't because…”

Your line of sight subconsciously travels to your leg where you can practically see Hoseok's own, swelling and throbbing as you clutch it in plain just like he had on the blackest of nights.

Keiko looks you straight in the eye.

“...because I'm the one who caused his injury.”

Injury. His injury. Keiko. She caused it.

How did any of this make sense?

“Wait, what? Are you sure?” your brows cinch in confusion. “Maybe he… he…”

Your voice trails to nothing. What else could have evoked someone to blame themselves over something so horrid other than the truth itself?

“I pushed him too far,” she says after a long sigh, staring at the swirl of wine in her delicate fingers. “I was training him into a captain capable of handling anything that would come at him, be it pressure or stress, he has the potential to be the best we've ever had… I don't know if it was me or him and his own expectations which pushed him too far, too fast, but he crumbled.”

If you knew the old and new Hoseok correctly, the latter would be the valid reason. Hoseok pushed himself too far in the face of pressure.

And as much as you know the blame can't be held entirely by Keiko but Hoseok, himself, a part of you errs in the sudden impatience arising within you.

Crumble, she said.

The sun doesn't crumble, it sets.

“...weren't you watching over him…?” you frown at her.

“I did,” she simply nods. “He practiced day and night. There never was a single day when I entered or left the studio and Hoseok wasn't there. Sometimes I think the poor boy even slept in that sweaty old musty room.”

You let out a scoff under your breath, appalled. “And you didn't tell him to stop—”

“—you’re not a dancer, are you, Y/N? You think I can tell someone to stop doing what they love, what they’re so passionate in? You think we have it easy? That talent and a few hours a week are enough to make up for what we lack? You think he would listen to me if I told him to stop? I thought you knew him well,” Keiko rebukes, calm but reprimanding enough for you to wince. “Being a captain requires you to put in time and stress and pressure just comes with it. And even despite that, yeah, sometimes I do wonder if I was asking for too much. If he or I had said something, if he had quit a bit earlier, maybe he wouldn’t be in this situation right now.”

“Quit?” you articulate, narrowing your eyes at her. “I don’t have to be a dancer to know that trying to prevent an injury isn’t quitting.”

“You sound like every other person who begged me to stop when I was training to become the captain myself,” Keiko chuckles, lips pressing into a thin, curved line. “I handled the pressure. I bore all the stress. I conquered it all and I thrived, Y/N, and you and I both know how talented Hoseok is. If I could do it, he most definitely could, too. I don’t know what got to him, but something did.”

“Not everyone’s body works the same…” your words become muffled by your own lips.

“Oh?” she laughs. “You almost sound like you know him better than I have in the past four years.”

Past four years? It’s almost certain they share a history together. Your gut instincts painfully tell you so.

“Anyways, I’m not here to argue with you, Y/N. I apologize if I stepped over the line just now,” her hand reaches for yours over the table and she smiles. “I get it. To you guys, us dancers seem reckless, and I admit it, we go overboard sometimes. That’s why we, especially Hoseok, need people, like you, by our sides to tell us when enough is enough.”

Her gaze sees right through you and there’s nothing you could do other than avert your eyes to the side to prevent her from reading through your transparency. It feels like she’s telling you something, hinting at an implication, but you just can’t quite get it.

You can’t read her like she or even Hoseok does to you.

“If his injury really is the reason behind his hiatus, then why hasn’t he tried to recover? Or,” you nearly choke on your own gasp, “has… he?”

“As much as I seem to know him, Y/N, I actually can’t answer that question. I really don’t know,” she sighs. “Even I’m surprised. I thought he would bounce back. He truly loved dance. He loved it to death… but maybe he never did. I don’t know if I overestimated him. I was hoping you would know. He won’t let me anywhere near him now.”

Of course not, you bite your tongue. As much as you admire Keiko for her sheer willpower, her constant disregard for Hoseok’s well-being and even questioning his passion irks you the wrong way.

“So,” she softly utters, holding your hand to avert your gaze back to hers, “can you help me, Y/N?”

Stop prying, his voice echoes; even your deepest conscience knows Hoseok doesn’t want you to help.

“Why would I do that? We’re not close or anything. I’ll be sticking my nose into someone else’s business.”

Your remark elicits a slight scoff of disbelief from Keiko as she grins at you with furrowed brows.

“Don’t you like him? Don’t you like Hoseok, I mean?”

“W-What?” you immediately shake your head. “No, I don’t know what makes you think that or whatever the boys told you, but even if I wanted to help, I can’t.”

“Oh, but I think you can,” she leans back into her seat and crosses her arms before turning to glance out the window displaying the black silhouette of the cityscape. “In fact, you’re the only one who can. At the rate Hoseok is going, I don’t think he’ll ever return to the dance scene… but you can change that.”

Everyone seems to have expectations from you, but it doesn’t matter when the person in need of help himself refuses your aid.

But you want to help him, even if that means he won’t ever dance again.

You’ve come to realize, through trial and error, all you could wish for him is bliss.

“...what makes you think that?”

“I promise I’m not doing this to gain your favor or try to persuade you, but,” she turns away from the window and leans into the table with a smile, “I’ve seen the look in his eyes when he mentions you.”

“But… but I thought…”

...I thought you never met up with him before after his injury, is what you meant to say, but the rapid beats of your heart elicited by her confession prevents you from budging a single inch.

Maybe they really are dating and you’re just being toyed around by the both of them.

“I… I just have one question,” you blurt before your more rational self could talk you out of it; for once, you’re acting on impulse and ego, but perhaps you deserve it after everything you’ve been through for the sake of him. It’s time you do something for yourself. “...did you and Hoseok ever have a relationship?”

Keiko arches both brows at you in surprise, “a relationship?”

“As in… have you two dated before?”

Silence ensues as she ponders for a few seconds and smiles, a soft chuckle drifting from her lips, “and what would you say if I said yes? Would you dislike me? Would you not do me this favor?”

Immediately, your heart sinks and something in your stomach drops.

Ah, so it’s a yes; crestfallen for reasons unknown, you begin collecting your things.

“I’ll think about it because I want to make sure this does Hoseok more good than it does me or any of us waiting for him to take the stage again,” standing up, you continue, looking her straight in the eye, “and I’m not doing this for you because I don’t appreciate the way you demean Hoseok and his own health and efforts.”

“Then who are you doing this for?”

You frown; isn’t the answer obvious enough?

“Hoseok.”

A wide grin spreads across her lips from ear to ear as she suppresses a giddy smile, quickly grabbing your hand and squeezing it firmly, “thank you, Y/N. Really, thank you. I mean it when I say you’re the only one who can bring him out of his darkest times. I’m counting on you.”

Gradually and hesitantly, you nod, slowly turning your back on the exit to make your way out the way you made it in.

Step by step, they gain momentum until you find yourself marching out of the restaurant on a mission to brew a storm in search of the world’s ends, for the hidden sun is long due for its rise.

311 notes · View notes

the-voltage-diaries · 3 years

Text

Το Βόρειο Αστέρι μου - Lucifer x Diavolo

AO3 Link

Το Βόρειο Αστέρι μου: Greek for ‘My Polar Star’

Word Count: 1859

A/N: I don’t know what this is. All I know is that @simpingw0lfi3 refused to do it, so I did. Of course, please don’t expect this to be perfect because... it really isn’t.

Vote of thanks: @akaiiro-yume for checking and correcting all the grammatical fuck ups I did, making sure I didn’t stop writing this halfway and going through any mental breakdown I might have had instead for me. And, of course, @some-ikemen-snob for making sure this SCREAMED Lucifer energy this way and that. only for now, but ily both.

Devildom 14th February, 20XX Saturday, 7:57 PM

Dear Diary,

I suppose I've never written a journal entry such as this in the past, for I haven't found either the desire or the will to task myself with writing my thoughts down in a manner wherein I speak to an inanimate object. That said, I have been told writing is, in a manner of speaking, therapeutic, and I believe I could do with some of that right now. It would be false to assume I don’t still harbour any inhibitions towards using my time in this manner, especially when I'd much rather be by Diavolo’s side. The very same Diavolo who, as a matter of fact, happens to be the subject of this writing session today. Strangely enough, and if I recall correctly, he was also the one who introduced - which is putting it rather mildly - me to the “art” of journal entries. I admit, I haven’t given this activity the kind of gravity which was probably expected out of me, but then again, today is a little different from the rest. I'm not entirely certain as to where to begin, but I do believe I have been told in situations like these, one should do whatever... feels right.

Diavolo is... well, where do I even begin? He is the future of Devildom, as a few might call it - myself included. While he does appear to be quite the cheerful and at times careless lord, it’d be a lie to deny that he is just as wise and compassionate underneath that wave of buoyancy radiating off of him. Honest to a fault, but with his moral compass always pointing towards the best interest of those around him. I’ll admit, sometimes it proves to be rather difficult to believe that he indeed is a demon. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to compare him to the Polaris considering he does quite radiate the charisma from himself, shining admirably amidst a dark sea of onlookers. While in name he rules over all the demons in the land of Devildom, the right set of eyes won’t take too long to deduce the eloquence with which his fingers reach out to the soul of every single resident of the land, holding them together better than gravity ever bound humans to the earth.

Saying that is all there is to him would be a lie whiter than the wet snow, making its way to the tips of my fingers and sliding off gently onto this page. That, of course, doesn’t mean describing how I feel towards him is no herculean task. There are some cases when a language - no matter the plethora of vocabulary it offers - just isn’t sufficient enough, and this certainly is one of those cases. For the time being, let’s just owe my lack of articulacy to the bond of mutual respect and trust Diavolo and I share, built over centuries upon centuries, braving the ravages of time, and even perhaps the less than pleasing antics my brothers tend to pull. But while the impression the ruler of all demons and I tend to emit may seem to be distanced by a careful degree of professionalism, I don’t believe anybody knows that that might not be the case. Even Diavolo himself. Doesn’t come as a surprise, really, for they simply can’t know.

Why do I believe that to not be the case, then? Well, I would wonder why I felt so strongly about it had I not known the reason myself. The very same reason which is now a secret so surreptitious that I can’t help but consider burning this piece of paper once I finish writing to ensure it is never revealed to another set of eyes. Such dastardly is the nature of this emotion, tricking one into its delusive warmth, encompassing them with the belief that nothing truly is impossible, that what they feel might just be true and meaningful enough to be returned by the other they feel for, only to cackle with glee and turn away when the reality doesn’t match the fantasy it was believed to turn out to be. The very same emotion which in layman’s terms is apparently called... love.

I’m not entirely certain I understand the extent of its exquisite existence myself, to be truthful. All I know is no matter how intensely I try to shut the door on its escaping fumes, it turns futile the second I lay my eyes on the man in question. While the rest of the known universe sees an omnipotent leader binding everyone together, making them sing the same tune in harmony, I see what I can only consider an anchor, grounding me, making it so that I can’t ever fall into the abyss of the darkness that breathes inside of me and float away. He is the quintessence of the best of what the world has to offer, with his golden eyes sparkling like stardust, weaving their ever-lasting magic into the hearts of whoever they come across - be it human, or demon, or angel - wrapping them in their never-ending warmth, letting them sink into the depths of benevolence they promise. His hair are the cerise of a raging inferno, sheltering beneath their canopy a quick, sensible, erudite mind. His smile is but a warm culmination of everything optimistic and positive, like a flame inviting moths to it, reaching out to give their innermost yearnings a hand to grab on to and never let go. Simply divine. And this is where the paths diverge, I suppose.

They see a to-be Demon King, I see Diavolo.

But alas, love is a fickle mistress. Getting too lost in the charm of her alluring arms will only result in a doom of them wrapping around your neck, enticing, until you realise their hold is tightening. Not to hold on, but to suffocate. I might have gotten so lost in that fiery gaze that I didn’t notice it start to crawl along my skin, leaving a charred, burnt path in its wake. The very anchor which I believed to be the one to ground me and hold me close etched itself deeper into the oceanic floor of delirium, drowning me. The threads of his stardust wrapped themselves around me and clutched hard enough to strangle. Before I knew it, the symphony of something meaningful became the cacophony of a nightmare.

This red thread strung through itself earlier today the series of events I’d rather forget. I’ve known how I feel towards Diavolo for a while now, and I had been searching for an opportunity to come clean and let him know about it for the last few days. Not to say I hadn’t gotten said opportunities at all, but one could owe it to me being too prideful to admit I was finally opening up to the idea of accepting feelings and... emotions. Around that time was when Solomon let slip a few details about the significance of Valentine’s day in the human world as an annual occurrence to celebrate romantic love, friendship, and admiration, and with enough persistence, Asmodeus managed to convince Diavolo to declare the day as an official holiday. Just a few hours ago I walked along the empty hallways to Diavolo’s office, knowing him, Barbatos and I to be the only ones in the building, still choosing work over any form of inactivity. By then, I had talked myself into finally telling the most powerful of all demons about the feelings I harboured towards him. I am a little embarrassed to admit that I was indeed a tad hopeful, wishing for the feelings to be returned. Once I reached the door to his private office, my hand settled above the smooth hardwood to give it a knock. And that’s when I noticed that the door was already slightly ajar. I heard a voice inside, other than Diavolo’s, and I took the liberty to glance inside, only for my hopes to come crashing down when the realisation struck me: I shouldn’t have done that.

Inside his office, Diavolo sat in his seat with his mouth pressed against another, a hand trailing across the small face with dark green locks framing it with elegance while the other held on to the person’s waist, pulling him closer. My eyes widened when the smaller man of the two let out a muffled whimper, perched on Diavolo’s lap. Barbatos. I felt my heart squeeze out a pained croak at the sight, and even though every single nerve in my body begged me to move away and forget I ever saw anything, my legs didn’t move. They stayed glued to their spot on the floor even as I felt it crumble beneath my feet, just the way my eyes stayed on Diavolo. My lip trembled with a longing I never thought I’d experience when Barbatos intertwined his fingers with Diavolo’s, smiling into the kiss they shared, like the perfect harmony which was always meant to be. It was when Diavolo broke the kiss, eyes meeting the other’s and whispers of love and confessions floating across the room until they settled on my ears, that I finally felt the mask crack. The facade I had worked on for centuries to lay the foundation of crumbled as my fists clenched, letting myself have a moment of weakness when a lone tear of frustration, delay, anger, and self loathing dripped down my cheek. I looked up at the ceiling, a voiceless laugh tumbling across my lips at the cognisance that the Polaris I was reaching out for, shining proud in the middle of a dark, cloudless sky, was beyond my reach, and... never supposed to be mine. How far I could stretch, how willing were my fingers to make one last attempt to touch it’s light and bask in it - all of that didn’t matter anymore.

I exhaled a shaky breath, blinking once as I tucked away whatever it is I was going to tell Diavolo in some corner of my mind, crushing the key with a hard snap of my fingers. My eyes found Barbatos again, glazing over with a heartfelt wish for him to find his happiness, at least. It was with one last aching smile towards Diavolo and a euphoric laugh spilling from Barbatos’ lips that I turned on my heel, shaking my head at the fate I was handed. Needless to say, I hold no malice towards either of them - they’re both precious to me, as much as I dislike admitting it.

I believe I have shared more than what was required, and I shall burn this piece of paper lest anyone finds it. One might call it wishful thinking on my part, but I do pray that watching the last signs of anything I harbour towards the one who wasn’t meant to be mine from the start burn as the embers of the fire consume it whole makes me put a lid on my feelings once and for all, for they were never supposed matter. They weren’t supposed to exist to begin with.

After all, only a prince deserves a fairy-tale with a happy ending, and I am no prince.

Lucifer.

#Obey Me #obey me shall we date #obey me lucifer #obey me diavolo #obey me barbatos #diavolo x lucifer #diavolo x barbatos #dialuci #obey me swd #obey me... fic?#letter?#diary?#idk what this is #a measly attempt at angst #obey me angst #dialuci angst #FIRST OM FIC JFC

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morsking · 4 years

Text

And so we have concluded Lostbelt 2! Now that I’ve experienced it for myself, I have a much clearer picture about how I feel about this chapter. As I progressed one thing became very clear to me, and that was that Hazuki Minase likely did NOT have any influence with this chapter, and its weakest points can be attributed to its main writer, Hikaru Sakurai, once we more closely scrutinize her work.

For starters, I would like to apologize to the people who kept trying to tell me Minase had nothing to do with the writing of Losbelt 2. You were correct, I simply acted stubbornly because I was terrified that one of the writers I loathe the most had returned to haunt and corrupt the franchise I hold very dear to me. I insisted on blaming him for any flaws because he was an easy scapegoat and a bogeyman, and while we all agree he is a pervert and a hack who should be fired, it is simply not fair to point fingers at imaginary criminals. A person should always be held accountable only for the misdeeds they have actually committed. Indeed, we may now explore Lostbelt 2 and the integrity of its writing with a more objective perspective, or rather as objective as I can manage to be.

The overall theme of the Lostbelt is “acknowledging one’s emotions as a vehicle for personal growth”. The issue persistent in the setting of Lostbelt Scandinavia was that it was a place where only young humans were allowed to survive. These humans would be oblivious to what real growth and prosperity were really like. They were innocent, and emotionally and intellectually stunted groups of people who only knew to live for the truth of their eventual demise. They lived short, rushed lives where they would stay ignorant of basic human experiences, such as love, grudges, aging, vice, hate, competition, and companionship because they devoted themselves to living how Scathach-Skadi ordered them to. They were unable to think or decide what to do for themselves, and were thus incapable of not just taking the reins to decide their own evolution as we do in Proper Human History, but also of fathoming doing such a thing in the first place.

This is a mirror to Ophelia Phamrsolone. Ophelia was conditioned to only listen to others for purpose and direction. Ophelia doesn’t actually know how to listen to her own feelings or even what those feelings even are because she was never allowed to connect not just with herself but with anyone. Ophelia, like Surtr points out, is still very much a little girl terrified by everything around her because she has no balance, no capacity for finding her center as a healthy and normal human being would. Unbeknownst to herself, all her interactions with others are a plea for help. Her very first interaction with Mash in 2017 was asking her if she’d like to have lunch with her and Pepe because Ophelia is terrified by male strangers and wishes to connect with other women as well. Ophelia’s conversations with Kirschtaria are also her not knowing how to proceed with challenges and therefore appealing to authority both for comfort and advice. Finally, her monologues with the Alien Priestess are Ophelia venting about how she feels, as if she were unaware of what to really think of herself as her helplessness and indecision drown her in a lake of self-loathing.

These cries for help extend to the way she summons her Servants. Ophelia is noted to be incredibly proficient at evocation. Some might even call her a genius. In fact, she is such a genius she unknowingly managed to contract not just with one, nor two, but three different Servants all at once. The first Servant to answer her summon was Sigurd, the King of Warriors from Nordic mythology. The second Servant was Surtr the King of Giants and Scourge of Ragnarok (titled by yours truly), who hijacked the summoning and took over Sigurd. The third, and most pivotal, was Napoleon Bonaparte, the French Emperor whose Spirit Origin was modified to embody the “ideal Good Fellow who could make dreams come true” rather than the actual historical Napoleon.

What these three Servants have in common is that Ophelia wished for all of them from the darkest depths of her heart. Ophelia desired capable Servants who could give her some form of direction and stability.

Sigurd, for example, is a hero renown for rescuing Brynhild and giving brand new meaning to her life by showering her with love and devotion. Love and devotion are things that Ophelia not just desires to be shown but actively struggles to adequately express to others because she has never known what it’s like to experience those things. To Ophelia, Sigurd represents “being given that which you have never known and finding fulfillment”.

Surtr, on the other hand, embodies a darker type of direction: the terror stagnation, conformity, monotony, inaction, and eternal suffering. Surtr exercises control over Ophelia by threatening to destroy the world if he is released, prompting Ophelia to flash to her childhood locked away by her abusive parents every dreaded Sunday. Surtr locks Ophelia into a state of helplessness and indecision where she has to carefully consider how she will proceed with dealing with Surtr. Ophelia has decided to lock herself in with him as a way to prevent him from breaking out of both Sigurd’s body and the physical prison inside the Lostbelt’s sun. This is a situation where Ophelia is in a constant state of stress and fear, since as a Crypter the last thing she could ever want to see is the destruction of yet another world by her hands. More personally, the death of the Lostbelt would also mean death for Ophelia, as she has failed her purpose once again and thus would have no worth as a person. However, what Ophelia cannot understand, because Surtr himself does not, is that Surtr’s destructive impulses are how he wants to show love and devotion towards her. Surtr has reasoned that since their worlds abandoned them after they failed to perform their ordained tasks, the only thing left is to annihilate them completely as retribution for their suffering. Surtr does not wish to hurt Ophelia, but because he is a being defined only by his overwhelming desire to burn everything, he cannot help her heal or grow in any way that matters. All he can offer is annihilation. To Ophelia, Surtr represents “self-destruction through a static state of being”.

Finally, there is Napoleon. Napoleon represents a pronounced antithesis to Ophelia’s entire personality. He is an upbeat, improvising, confident man who chooses to not stress over things because what he is seeing is only what lies ahead, not what lies in front of him.He also breaks her defenses by asking something so ridiculous and unexpected as her hand in marriage when they have only just met. Napoleon refuses to give in to any negative outcome regardless of how much the odds are stacked against him, as he demonstrated in Scathach-Skadi’s throne room where he refused to let Sigurd kill his Master despite being restrained by Skadi’s paralyzing rune. He demonstrates this once again when he blows his final shot at Surtr during the final battle, sacrificing his own life to give Chaldea the opportunity to regroup and bombard Surtr to bring him down. He is called the Man of Infinite Possibilities precisely because he faces the unknown head on and finds the best path to walk for his comrades to advance. He does not let fear take over his heart and judgement, he creates a rainbow as a bridge connecting the present to the bright, shining future. He is precisely the hero Ophelia needs, because he embodies “the bravery to grasp your own future and find your own direction”.

But analyzing these characters further is a post for another time. What I want to get into are the gripes I have with this Lostbelt.

Now, I could lead you on through a couple more paragraphs before I wham you with what this all means in a much higher metatextual level, but I don’t have the time nor the creativity to do that so I’m just gonna give it to you straight. This square between Ophelia, Sigurd, Surtr, and Napoleon is the storyline that matters most in Lostbelt 2. Scathach-Skadi matters little despite her own parallels with Ophelia and being the Lostbelt King, and the situation with the Lostbelt’s inhabitants matters even less. Why?

Because Lostbelt 2 is Sakurai coming full circle and writing an otome game like Fate/Prototype was meant to be before Fate/stay night became a thing.

SHOCKER!! SOUND EFFECTS OF SURPRISE!! DRAMATIC KAZOOS GALORE!!

Now, that’s exaggerating a little. Or maybe not that much, actually.

What Sakurai was doing was applying conventional otome game tropes into the setting not just what she’s familiar writing for, but because Lostbelt 2 is inherently an incredibly self-indulgent project.

There is a classic trademark otome fantasy at play here: the fantasy of multiple men being devoted to a female main character a player can relate to. There is no denying there is a certain appeal to the idea that there are several handsome men all willing to devore their entire lives to a person. Sigurd, Surtr, and Napoleon all embody certain otome game love interest archetypes. Sigurd is the cold, composed, intellectual man who is actually earnest, just, affectionate, and wise. Surtr is the dark-hearted troubled man with fiery disposition struggling with expressing love. Napoleon is the strong, confident, borderline pixie manic dream boy with almost zero brains but plenty of empathy and... *ahem*, physique to make up for his seeming lack of tact and intelligence (he’s a himbo is what I’m saying but that comes as no surprise). The problems arise with Napoleon himself, however. Napoleon hounds Ophelia with marriage proposals she refuses time and time and again. When he proposes to her in front of Chaldea for the first time, the narrative has Mash take Napoleon’s side and urges you to do the same because Sakurai believed the reader would’ve caught on to what’s actually going on between Ophelia and Napoleon.

The issue here is that Sakurai’s clues up to that point had been far too hidden for the player to make a proper connection, and it’s not until AFTER the proposal that the player discovers Napoleon is predisposed to fall in love with whoever summons him because that’s what Ophelia wanted out of an ideal Servant. Because of the poor execution in presenting all these factors that completely recontextualize the relationship between Napoleon and Ophelia, when Sakurai has Napoleon say “You did not reject me therefore you DID agree,” we jump to the conclusion that Napoleon is engaging in extremely reprehensible behavior and ideology reminiscent of dangerous and abusive men IRL rather than take it as harmless flirtation from a well-meaning oaf of a man as he tries to break the shell of his beloved. Sakurai invokes a very dangerous trope that does more to excuse misogynistic behavior when done incorrectly rather than successfully appear as a romantic gesture of attempting to liberate a loved one from the clutches of isolation and victimhood.

On a larger scale, the application of these tropes is where Lostbelt 2 starts to suffer, and that’s where Sakurai’s writing further begins to resemble Minase’s. Sakurai spent so much time building these interpersonal dynamics that she spent the least amount of effort actually building upon the situation of the Lostbelt and Scathach-Skadi’s character and motivations for keeping the Scandinavia the way it is.

Upon scrutiny, it’s not very difficult to pick apart the setting and make a mark out of the glaring logistical inconsistencies of maintaining a population of only 10,000 humans for a span of 3,000 years by having them reproduce at 15 years old at the latest to execute them at 25. Anyone with a passing understanding of biology would know that forcing children to carry babies to term can lead to terrible health and psychological complications that would certainly end up in a lot more miscarriages, stillbirths, and failed attempts at impregnation than actual successful births. The problem here then is rather evident. Sakurai wanted to use the fact that all these children are young, innocent, naive, gullible, and ignorant to draw a connection to Ophelia’s own psychological and emotional circumstance. However, she realized that because she was writing a setting that obligated her to work around a 3000-year gap between Ragnarok and the present day. She needed something that would compromise the need for a realistic system that would ensure the reproductive viability of a human population through such a long period of time and the thematic vehicle of childhood and repression of growth as a way to connect Ophelia to her environment. This compromise ended up working for the absolute worse because she chose the worst possible system she was aware was the worst possible system she could’ve come up with and therefore decided to forsake that part of the plot without going through the implications of it and leaving the specifics to the reader’s imagination so they could sort it out in her stead.

This unwillingness to properly explore the problematic implications of Scathach-Skadi’s system not only deprived the player of a possible engaging storyline where child endangerment, a common theme in the Nasuverse, is explored and criticized through a different angle, but also actively hurts Scathach-Skadi’s connection to the player because we never get the opportunity to debate with her about her ideology and the state of the Lostbelt. We never hold her accountable for enforcing such a brutally predatory and dehumanizing system that targets children, instead Sakurai opts to build her up as a flawed, self-absorbed mother figure desperately trying to combat the extinction of the remnant of her world who also never really learned how to deal with the revelation there is an entire life she did not get to have in this universe that we MUST sympathize because she occasionally sees through the characters and acts kind towards them until the time comes for us to fight her in earnest as a matter of principle completely divorced from the question of how she’s managed her Lostbelt. The fact Scathach-Skadi’s model of sustainability does not work is made obvious by the fact it takes place in a Lostbelt, what we are trying to get at here is that it does not work from a writing standpoint because of all the different holes you can poke on it before you’ve punched through the paper screen entirely and revealed the superfluousness of it all.

There is nothing inherently bad about self-indulgent storylines. If I’m being honest, if Sakurai wanted to use Ophelia and Musashi as self-inserts to fantasize about romancing the different kinds of characters she finds attractive, more power to her. But the problem surrounding Lostbelt 2, which is the same problem that plagued Septem and Fate/Extella, is a veritable lack of restraint from her part as a professional writer in charge of a multi-billion dollar mobile game. What the writing room over at Type-Moon has to realize is that they are no longer a small doujin writing circle that can get away with whatever they want because they operate under obscurity. They are visible to the entire world and will be held accountable and criticized as professionals by consumers and their peers in the industry. A little bit of self-fulfillment in a published work never hurt anyone, you can cater to yourself most of all with your professional work (I mean, just look at She-Ra), but you must be sure that in your pursuit of indulgence your work does not suffer for it and ends up alienating and disappointing your fanbase and giving them the wrong impression of what you stand for.

Anyway we’re popping the biggest bottles when GudaMoth becomes canon this December.

#fate series #fate grand order #fgo #fate/grand order #fate go #homecooked meta #WOW THIS WAS LONG #for some reason sakurai ends up bringing the best in me even at her worst #IF I MISSED SOME THINGS IT'S WHATEVER IT'S 4:20 AM

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oniisamaes · 3 years

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Interview With Robert Plant 1977: https://www.interviewmagazine.com/music/new-again-robert-plant

You can find the interview in that article but I cut it down to just the interview.

[April. Late afternoon. On a double bed in Swingo’s Celebrity Hotel, Cleveland, Ohio.]

ROBERT PLANT: [gazing out of the window at a parking lot] Oooh! Is that a Mark V? That is one isn’t it? It’s very nice, I like that. Can you get those in New York? [Shouting to a man with a camera on the street] It’s not worth the pictures! It’s not worth the pictures—forget it!

VOICE: [from the street] You think so?

PLANT: [laughing] Nah—

VOICE: Then I’ll get some tonight at your show.

PLANT: Never heard of it. I’m not going.

VOICE: No?

PLANT: I hear they suck. [to me] So what is your story then, Sir? Or in fact—

MARK GINSBURG: I want to know what yours is…

PLANT: I have no story. My story goes from day to day.

GINSBURG: Okay. What’s today’s?

[silence]

JENINE SAFER: [publicist] Seven Up is great for hair management!

PLANT: Mmm. Well, I just found out that Seven Up left in the hair for 12 hours is the greatest hair conditioner. I mean all this shit on the TV that you see—I don’t believe it at all.

SAFER: But it has to be applied properly by John Bonham [alias Bonzo, Led Zeppelin’s drummer]

PLANT: Where are you going to be?

SAFER: I’ll have to get a schedule off you. Then sit down with Jonsey [John Paul Jones] as well because we’ve got to do the plan. [mumbles]… got to do the plan.

GINSBURG: What’s the plan?

PLANT: Well… discretion is the better part of valor. How to let the family have a wonderful time without knowing it’s all programmed. I might as well tell you that there’s not a lot of towns that I can go to and take family—too many incongruous knocks on doors—”Hello, honey. Have you missed me?”

GINSBURG: So where do you go then?

SAFER: Not Dallas!

PLANT: North Bend, Indiana is rather scenic in August.

GINSBURG: North Bend, Indiana?

PLANT: Ah, well you see I know a lot about the colonies.

GINSBURG: Who colonized them?

PLANT: ‘Twas us! We Redcoats.

SAFER: [after a pause] Last night was so much fun.

PLANT: My jaw’s hurting from just giggling. Now that’s a good sign young man after nine years of rock-‘n’-roll. That you can still laugh at each other for about eight hours ’till you have to go to bed holding your head.

SAFER: [leaving room to re-sew the spider-web design on Plant’s concert shirt] Same time next week—

PLANT: Well, it’s going to be the big one tonight. Now, did you come to another town? I was supposed to see you in Chicago, right? What happened?

GINSBURG: Do you really want to be reminded?

PLANT: Yeah.

GINSBURG: You had a strange afternoon…

PLANT: [screams] Ohhhh! There was nothing strange about tit. It was regular, but…

GINSBURG: Typical strange afternoon, then. It all depends on your point of view—

PLANT: …which angle you lie.

GINSBURG: Right. Well then, what would you like to lie about?

PLANT: No! I was meaning “lie” as in what I’m doing now—lying down.

GINSBURG: And get high?

PLANT: No. I made a vow after two years of not working, because of the accident, that I should, uh, take care of my health 100 percent. With two years of living not quite sure whether you’re going to rock-‘n’-roll again, the build-up to this tour was tremendous. The inspiration was flowing, ’cause when I knew that I could go back onstage again with my foot, I just said, “Right. Now, if I am going to do that, if I’m going to dance again, perform again, then I’m going to sing better than I’ve ever sung before. There’s nothing that’s gonna stop me.”

GINSBURG: You would not have settled for remaining in the studio rather than onstage?

PLANT: Oh, no. When I started all I wanted to do was get out in form. I just wanted to sing. A simple thing. I loved the feeling of letting fly, of pushing as far as I could go with my voice. The only way you can really graduate how you do it is by doing it regularly to people who don’t have to be super impressed. You can do it in the studio all day long but you don’t get the flashback that you get onstage.

GINSBURG: Do you still get the flashback as much each time?

PLANT: More now. Much more now, this tour.

GINSBURG: You realized you’d miss it then.

PLANT: Oh, essentially there’s a very serious aspect underneath everything now for me. Well, not serious but one of relief, I guess. There is nothing that will stand in the way of the fact that I’m going to put out 199 percent every night. So, I’ll leave the pot alone for a bit, ’cause it only clogs up my vocal cords, anyway. You get tar up them. [demonstrates hoarse sounds]

GINSBURG: Any favorite Zeppelin albums?

PLANT: I don’t have any favorites. Each album comes from definitely a different period in the evolution of each of us individually as creators and the role that we take in life. The external stimuli changed… so the songs are full of lots of different meanings. Each album has a different atmosphere. The third album and Houses of the Holy seem to be the two albums that people didn’t get off on quite as strongly as the other ones. But I think they contain the basic ingredients for the further pursuance of what we’re doing… the turning point to relieve the tedium of repetition.

GINSBURG: Presence seems to be a turning point, too.

PLANT: Presence was our phoenix.

GINSBURG: Yours mostly?

PLANT: Well, I know I’m talking so it’s coming from me, but when you sit in a wheelchair and sing the whole album, the very fact that you’ve sung it is fantastic. But for everyone, in that we got it together in such a short space of time under such odds not knowing what the outcome was going to be—not of the album but of the future of the band.

GINSBURG: Why not knowing?

PLANT: Because the doctors could never really quite tell me, all that time, about how inactive I might have been left from the accident. So we were just kicking it from the very depths of our determination.

GINSBURG: Could you have stayed on top without performing live?

PLANT: Oh, I don’t think anybody would have want to. I guess we could have made it cutting studio albums, but it takes shows and tours for, uh—

GINSBURG: Energy?

PLANT: Yes, and inspiration! Events like last night. Silly times, and….

GINSBURG: You used to sing on rather simply about a girl—always one that you couldn’t have but wanted badly, for instance. Now the description is more colored, complex.

PLANT: Sure. Well, I’ve tried to do that on things. Like with Celebration Day, going back: “Her face is cracked from smiling” and that sort of thing. The impression of a free world all the way through. It could still have been greyed but it could have also had that natural effect that time gives it.

GINSBURG: But everything you sang about early on—the open spaces, the beautiful women, the dreams—aren’t these all things you’ve now had—goals you’ve reached?

PLANT: I’ve touched, that’s all. You have nothing. One should never allow themselves to think that they have, one can just touch—to have is to lack appreciation, to touch is to want to touch again.

GINSBURG: So some things are still inaccessible to you now?

PLANT: Definitely. I’d like to think that’s the way it should be. That’s what keeps me going on and on and on. Like that bit in our movie, [The Song Remains the Same], the princess thing. Everybody thought I was out to… well, “There’s Plant after another chick…” But there, the whole thing is that in the end the chick disappears before my eyes. You must just get in reach so that you know you’ve made the effect—the primary effect. And you mustn’t grab it too hard… so the most basic things can still remain a pleasure.

GINSBURG: Ten years ago did you want to become a rock star?

PLANT: Well, I didn’t look at it like that. I just wanted to sing. Nobody ever looks at it like that. Didn’t even know what one was then. Still don’t.

GINSBURG: Well what happened?

PLANT: I’d already played with people who’d got the same amount of adrenaline and drive as I’d got and it just so happened that Jimmy [Page—LZ’s lead guitarist and former member of the infamous Yardbirds] had got more than I’d got. He could channel it. He knew which way to let it go. And that was the best thing that ever happened to me, musically. I’d found someone whose tastes were basically along the same lines. Who’d got the patience to allow me to—it’s like dangling your foot in a swimming pool to see how deep it is or how cold—accustom myself to everything that would come along that he was already aware of from the Yardbirds. Perfect relationship.

GINSBURG: Has it changed much?

PLANT: Yeah, because I’ve grown up. My experiences of course now come up to the same ones as his. I guess we’re both sort of trotting together rather than him showing me the way as he did in the early days.

GINSBURG: Where are your musical roots?

PLANT: In anything that’s done wholeheartedly from Edith Piaf through to Howlin’ Wolf. From anything that comes from that point. Some people say I sing from the groin. In the early days it was Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, Drown My Own Tears—stuff that was ultimately sincere. And some wild, wild rock, too: Little Richard, early Presley stuff—before he went into the Army. Presley was definitely a great inspiration to every guy who ever had a hard-on in the whole of the Western world, I should think. He shook everybody well and true, and we just kept on shakin’. But he started it.

GINSBURG: And now, Led Zeppelin is left to carry the ball…

PLANT: I don’t know… I’d like to go to more concerts to see the overall effect of an audience because I like to see excitement. But I like the excitement to be contained. In the early days when we used to play everybody was bangin’ their heads on the stage and going completely crackers. Now they sit down and absorb. There’s a sort of transfixion between ourselves and the audience, which is wonderful. It’s a great level to have reached with people who you don’t know by name. That is my idea of the ultimate sort of communication level.

GINSBURG: How far away do you feel from an audience when there are tens of thousands of people watching you? How can you see or hear?

PLANT: You pick it up without sight or sound. I suppose for a vocalist it’s super built-in because if I talk, I do the talking. I think I can feel better than I can see.

GINSBURG: What music do you listen to at home when you listen to music?

PLANT: Uh, I like Little Feat, Fleetwood Mac—obviously. That little lady ought to come and sing on one of our albums. If she were to come sing on one of our albums—it would…What’s her name?—Stevie…

GINSBURG: Will you or any LZ member play onstage or record with anyone else?

PLANT: Well, no, I think it would only be impromptu. On other albums maybe just guesting for a track—on a very light-hearted level. I can’t see any serious turn one way or another. We just enjoy playing with each other. I wouldn’t like to go and sing with anybody else at all.

GINSBURG: Why not?

PLANT: I just don’t. When you’re singing we all phrase each other in the most remarkable ways. I might hit some sort of thing I’ve never done before—some vocal pattern. Bonzo will pick it up—he’ll phrase with me instantly and then Pagey may join in or start some other phrase—it’s like a quadrant.

GINSBURG: Where did Kashmir come from?

PLANT: The rhythm came from Bonzo. The sort of striding majestic element really came from Jimmy’s and my leanings toward the East. I wrote the lines after driving into the Sahara Desert because I knew that I was on my way to the Spanish Sahara and there was the war on between Morocco and the Spanish. I kept bumping down a dusty desert track—nobody for miles except, occasionally, a guy on a camel, waving his hand in the most nonchalant Arabic way. And I thought, “Well, this is great but one day—Kashmir.” And the sun was beating down upon my face…

GINSBURG: So your ideas spring from place you’ve been or want to go?

PLANT: Well, Kashmir is my last resort. I think, if I truly deserve it one day, I should go there and stay there for quite a while. Or if I really need it at any point, it should be my haven, my Shangri-la.

GINSBURG: Any place else?

PLANT: Well, the whole point of “Achilles’ Last Stand” is that, though the story builds, it’s centered around one spot on the top of the high Atlas Mountains. One tiny little spot on the side of a track 10,000 feet up—looking down over half of Southern Morocco.

GINSBURG: “Achilles’ Last Stand”—I would have thought the title had something to do with your accident.

PLANT: It did. It did because I fell over when I was singing it in the studio and I was rushed to the hospital. They thought that I had fucked it for good. [moves his leg up and down in the air] So I spent two week yet again with it up in the air. I still hadn’t walked—which is after four months without walking and I’d put all my weight on it—went down, bang! Pagey virtually carried me to the hospital. And when it got to a point where I could lower it gain off the bed without touching the ground, I was wheeled to the studio while the others were asleep and did the whole vocal track all over again from start to finish. I said, “Right from the top, I’m going to do it again and I’m going to call it that.”

GINSBURG: What about the song “For Your Life?”

PLANT: That’s a sarcastic dig at one person in particular that I know, who was a really good person but got swallowed up with the whole quagmire of the downhill slide, the L.A. syndrome. You know the sort of thing. “Hung on the balance of a crystal pane through your nose…”

GINSBURG: But you must see so much of that—

PLANT: Yeah, but when it affects people who I love then I sort of snap back at them—”Don’t you understand that you are now immortalized—The parody of it all… is there for you to behold.”

GINSBURG: And why do you think that happens to people?

PLANT: It’s the way… these aren’t people in the immediate surroundings but they’re people who come and go who we know—usually of the opposite sex. People get carried along with the whole momentum and the adrenaline of a rock-‘n’-roll band. We’re in one that’s been going for nine years, ’cause we can still shake it better than anybody else. Then when you leave people behind in a situation you say, “Bye, see ya next time…,” and they sort of slide into the L.A. syndrome, and New York. You come back, and they don’t look as well as they should do, you know, the smile has changed a bit. And this [“For Your Life”] is sort of waving your finger and saying, “Now you watch it.”

GINSBURG: You think they put too much stock in it all?

PLANT: Well, I think it carries them away.

GINSBURG: It wouldn’t carry you away?

PLANT: It carried me away but I carried me away, because we are it, the thing that rolls.

GINSBURG: So then where can you get carried away to now?

PLANT: Well, it’s entirely up to me how far over the top I want to go, you know.

GINSBURG: Have you peaked?

PLANT: I don’t think there is such a thing as peaking. Because if there is so much change, then how does one know when one’s reached the pinpoint?

GINSBURG: How do you measure your success?

PLANT: By my own satisfaction. If I doubt what I’m doing then I’ll go about putting it right—readjusting. Time is too precious to… dance with half-measures.

GINSBURG: You have kids?

PLANT: Yep. A boy and girl and there’s no compensation for children. You can never compare any elation at all to watching a child… because the child is only the reflection of yourself and those of the people who surround it. So really I guess I prefer to be with them. But, you know, when you can’t take this out of your blood…

GINSBURG: What do you do, more or less, when you aren’t singing?

PLANT: [smiles] Wish I was… I don’t know… I have a great love for the more atmospheric parts of Britain. The parts that contain true atmosphere. The days of Albion, the Dark Ages, if you like.

GINSBURG: You must have a more manic side, too.

PLANT: Oh yeah. I’m a total soccer freak. I total soccer freak. Absolute total.

GINSBURG: Will you be able to start up again, at all?

PLANT: I can’t play anymore. I can play touch soccer where I could tap the ball around and do tricks and things like that. But I couldn’t go in, or tap hard. I spend every weekend, every possible moment with the soccer team that I support. Get involved with them, goin’ to see them and having sort of discussions with the management and chairmen how to project a soccer team in the ’70s—on a parallel on how to project rock-‘n’-roll, I guess.

GINSBURG: Any projections for rock ‘n roll?

PLANT: Yeah. Do it good. And do it so nobody’s going to forget it—and that’s what I say to them—play like fuck and people will never stop talkin’ about you.

GINSBURG: We are so stepped in technology. Someone can listen to a studio record, then go to a concert by the same group and expect the music to come out the same.

PLANT: Well, I don’t know whether they do or not. I know that I go about with the voice, which is the hardest thing to sort of play around with and yet the most enjoyable, obviously, because I’m a singer. I have my little machines that I like to play with. I like to make my voice sound like a piece of tin that’s been stuck on the side of a chair, lifted up as far as it would go and then let to spring—”doooiiinng.” I like to make it into a piece of metal from time to time and I can do it, both with the movements in my throat and with, uh, my little toys… So I like to take it beyond just a voice, more into the realms of a weapon.

GINSBURG: A weapon?

PLANT: A sharp spear.

GINSBURG: Do you care at all what the concert critics and writers get printed up in the papers?

PLANT: Not really, because the proof is in the pudding. I mean the people who come are the people who care.

GINSBURG: And the people come!

PLANT: And if they come and I see a smile on their faces, I know that it’s all right.

#led zeppelin #robert plant #classic rock #jimmy page #ledzep #70s #interview #history #robert plant interview #70s rock

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winteranc156 · 3 years

Text

Let The Soft Animal Of Your Body Love What It Loves

Summary: A collection of vignettes about falling in love.

(Also on AO3)

Nothing extraordinary marks the moment.

Kara is trying to stifle laughter, mouth half full, blue eyes shining with happiness.

Lena’s answering smile is automatic and genuine. Her heart is warm and full.

Their eyes lock and Lena’s mind stalls. She has seen Kara’s blue gaze hundreds of times, but on the precipice of realization her mind insists it’s the gaze of someone other than Kara.

Lena’s world narrows.

And then the world slams back into place. Hard, clear, but somehow all wrong. Lena finally sees her. Really sees Kara. It’s in the slant on her smile and the depth of the blue, blue eyes.

Oh.

The smile slips from Lena’s face.

Silence stretches between them.

“Lena,” Kara says softly, “are you okay?” Her brow is creased and she’s worrying her bottom lip. But, she hasn’t stood, hasn’t moved at all. Lena can see her shoulders are hunched and that she is trying to shrink her presence as much as possible.

Lena doesn’t have words for the feeling that spreads through her at the question and the body language. It’s intense and visceral and wholly engulfing; something she hasn’t felt for anyone is a very long time.

But Lena’s heart feels heavy in her chest with the new knowledge of who Kara is. Sudden pressure beats viciously at her temples.

Lena takes a deep breath before opening her eyes to look at Kara again. “Supergirl…”

Kara seems to shrink further into the chair. Her eyes are screwed shut and she’s biting her lip hard enough to risk drawing blood.

“I have to get back to work,” she says, flatly, for lack of anything else to say. Her face is blank, her eyes hard.

-----------------------------------

This is all they are.

All they’ve ever been.

Kara: the last. Standing alone in the vast universe. Facing the future of solitude with head turned and eyes wide open looking at the past. Broken so thoroughly on the inside that love pours out of her like blood out of an open wound.

She tries to talk to Lena for days. She tries as Kara and is rebuffed by meetings and conflicts of schedule. She tries as Supergirl and Lena shuts her balcony doors and draws the shades. She retreats out of respect for Lena and her own dignity. But, the loss punctures her already broken heart and she bleeds love and anguish into her loneliness.

Lena: the orphan. Unbowed but her eyes closed and face covered. Forever repenting over a sin she did not commit. Broken so thoroughly throughout that guilt and shame crawl into every crevice of her being like water entering the lungs of a drowning man.

She hides in her fortress and behind her name. She has been made to look and feel a fool. She rejects Kara both the woman and the hero to lick her deep wounds in solitude. But, the loss punctures her already broken heart and betrayal and suspicion flood into her loneliness.

This is all they are.

All they’ll ever be.

-----------------------------------

“Lena,” Kara is breathless, “plea—”

Lena’s lips stop any further conversation. She doesn’t want to talk. She doesn’t want to feel.

They’ve fallen into this quite by accident. But at least she has some part of Kara back. She doesn’t want the messy conversation and the messier emotions that will come with talking.

This thing they’ve turned into isn’t good but it feels good in the moment.

They never undress. Their clandestine meetings are always done against a convenient surface with pants haphazardly open and skirts bunched up against thighs and waist, with urgent, searching, hungry hands hidden beneath the flowing folds of fabric.

There is no warmth or affection in their touches. Only desperation and urgency. And rabid hunger.

The heat and passion burns and consumes them until they are only incandescent desire.

Afterwards, they can’t look each other in the eyes. Kara stumbles over her words in a rush to find anything to say besides the obvious; Lena retreats into herself and says nothing. They go days without seeing each other, actively avoiding one another. Because they hate what they do to each other. They hate the hunger and thirst. They hate the release and satisfaction.

Though neither will ever admit it, it’s those secret, stolen moments when there is a possibility of more that they are both truly alive.

-----------------------------------

With tears in her eyes, Kara stops them.

“I can’t, Lena.” She pulls Lena’s hand gently out of her pants. “This,” she motions between them, “is killing us. We can’t anymore.”

Lena recoils, her heart throbbing with pain she doesn’t understand. She turns to leave but a soft hand clasps hers.

“Can we try and be friends again?” It’s a plea.

Lena’s heart pounds in her chest and her eyes burn with unshed tears. “How can I trust you?” She doesn’t turn back, but Lena holds on to Kara’s hand tightly.

“Let me earn it back,” Kara’s voice cracks. “Let me prove myself to you.”

It shouldn’t be so easy. Lena shouldn’t let it be so easy. But, she’s tired of the guilt and the shame and the pain. She relents and for the first time in as long as she can remember, she allows hope to seep into the crevices of her broken heart.

-----------------------------------

How did it get this far? Lena thinks absently.

It is different than before. Lena feels different than before. She’s not angry or hurting. She’s feeling a lot but none of it negative.

“It wasn’t supposed to go this far.”

Kara hums but doesn’t say anything coherent.

It had started with innocent touches. A gentle brush of fingers across a heated forehead. A tight hug as a reminder of solidity. A fleeting kiss for comfort.

Innocuous.

Innocent.

The rekindling of their friendship, nothing more.

But somewhere from there to here, something had stopped being so harmless about the touches. Fingers sparked electricity that set skin on fire. Hugs brought an awareness of how bodies fit together. Kisses were explorations with a ravenous hunger fueling their intent.

And, here she is now, willingly pressed against soft cushions. Kara’s weight a solid anchor above her. Kara’s mouth hot against her own. Kara’s hands undressing her, for the first time. Kara’s fingers burning a trail up her thigh.

Here she is pressing against her, opening her mouth, her knees, her being to Kara’s exploration. Here she is writhing under a wet heat that is all consuming, clenching her teeth to keep from moaning the name tattooed on her heart.

It wasn’t supposed to go this far.

But, it is too good to stop. She is too close to something…

-----------------------------------

It’s an obsession.

Lena knows it.

Kara knows it.

But, they can’t help themselves. They are possessed of something that controls their motivation, and in turn their actions. Every opportune moment becomes heated, passionate, thrilling with the press of skin against skin.

They are ravenous and insatiable, each meeting driving the obsession deeper. But, they continue. Because, obsession can be exhausted, overcome, spent when the object of obsession no longer holds the desired quality. And, that’s what they want: to exhaust this hunger one for the other.

Or so, they force themselves to think.

They only acknowledge the obsession. It’s not an addiction.

And, it can’t possibly be love.

-----------------------------------

Lena rubs her chest to chase away the pressure building under her sternum. It isn’t painful…just…uncomfortable. Overwhelming. A bit like holding her breath too long and her lungs needing to expand to their fullest to take in sufficient air. It makes her lightheaded and it makes her heart stumble over itself.

It’s an odd sensation, though not unfamiliar. Kara seems to elicit it from her as easily as the sun rises in the east. As constant, too.

Warm hands press a square box into Lena’s hands. “Open it.” The command is light. And, the kiss that flutters against her cheek is incentive enough to do Kara’s bidding immediately. But, the second, firmer kiss stuns her into inaction.

And the feeling jammed between her lungs and her heart intensifies. It hurts in the best possible way, like seeing light after a dark night, like tasting water after a long drought, like feeling warmth after a cold winter.

Breath caught between the tightness and warmth of her chest, Lena succumbs to the unsettling—but not entirely unwelcome—sensation.

Happiness.

-----------------------------------

Lena closes her book and looks down. Of course Kara is asleep. It’s a warm autumn day, the picnic they brought with them is all eaten, the colorful plumage of leaves quiet the world beyond the copse of trees where they’re secluded. Kara is comfortable around her. Lena smiles and reaches down to play absently with the blonde hair.

This closeness. This intimacy. It’s effortless with Kara. She can’t remember why she ever thought it would be otherwise. Kara’s warmth and caring would ensure nothing else.

Lena’s heart flutters dangerously with an emotion she’s not sure how to categorize. It’s love, certainly. But a love that aches with longing she doesn’t understand…it’s like a hunger, a thirst, for something she can’t name.

The ambiguity of the emotion should worry her, but she can’t find it within herself to care.

She loves Kara; it makes very little difference if she’s falling in love with her.

-----------------------------------

Kara’s eyes are almost completely closed and her chest is still heaving from exertion.

Lena’s fingertips glide along the thin sheen of perspiration coating soft skin stopping above Kara’s heart. The smell of heat and sex assaults Lena’s senses. It makes her dizzy in a way she can’t quite describe.

Guilt lingers at the edges of her psyche. For not seeing sooner what was being offered her. For hurting them. She can feel the press of it against the pleasure of this moment. But, for the first time since she was a child, she pushes thought of consequences out of her mind. Kara captivates all of her attention because she is the person Lena loves most. And, Lena is famished for her. More is all she can think. It crowds everything else out.

It’s a hunger she can’t sate: the need to touch and be touched. She’s been so starved for it that the realization of the desire leaves her yearning and needy for more. But, she’s not practiced at asking. So, she hopes her need is transmitted across the pads of her fingers and the hitch of her breath and the dilation of her eyes.

“Again.” Kara whispers, hearing what Lena can’t say with words.

And, they possess and are possessed of the other.

-----------------------------------

Kara leans back into Lena.

Lena wraps her arms around her and wonders at the easiness of their intimacy.

Kara smiles her gaze warm and contented and relaxed.

Lena kisses her unexpectedly because she wants to and she can. Kara momentarily freezes, but the smile against her lips encourages her to return the kiss.

The intimacy—the comfort of touch—didn’t come immediately or with ease for them. At times, it still doesn’t.

But, moments like this, where Lena is exuberant and shining from the feeling of her own happiness, are all the more precious for it. The touches and the comfort and the intimacy are effortless in the confines of Lena’s joy.

-----------------------------------

Theirs is an easy intimacy, filled with small touches and warm smiles. It is an odd thing to witness for people who knew them as children. They were both so solitary and disliked being touched when they were young. Kara for fear of hurting anyone; and Lena for fear of anyone hurting her.

But with each other, there is no barrier restricting access. They are wholly together; one flows into the other. So much so that a smile from one is reflected on the other’s face; and a touch is felt against the other’s soft skin.

They are so close that when one closes her eyes the other dreams.

-----------------------------------

It happens at an innocuous moment.

A moment they’ve repeated countless times. A shared lunch in Lena’s office: Lena between meetings, and Kara between interviews.

Nothing extraordinary marks the moment.

Kara is trying to stifle laughter, mouth half full, blue eyes shining with happiness.

Lena’s answering smile is automatic and genuine. She watches as Kara swallows the mouthful of food and washes it down with a gulp of water.

“You’re a bottomless pit,” Lena is equally amused and impressed by Kara’s appetite.

Kara smiles and shrugs. “I skipped breakfast and I’m starving.” She lets out a small laugh, hands fluttering and smoothing out non-existent wrinkles on her pants, before she looks back up.

Their eyes lock and Lena’s mind stalls. She has seen Kara’s blue gaze hundreds of times, but on the precipice of realization her heart stops.

Oh.

“Lena,” Kara says softly, “are you okay?”

Lena sees Kara’s brows crease in worry at what she knows must be the pronounced changes in her heartbeat. Lena recalls every step of their journey to this moment. She remembers every touch and every word and every feeling. And every declaration of love Kara has been making with her words, her affection, and her touches.

Oh.

She walks around her desk and sits in Kara’s lap. Lena knows her smile is wide and happy, she can see it reflected on Kara’s face. She kisses her with all the awe of being in love and knowing it.

“I love you.”

#supercorp #fanfic #kara x lena #i haven't ever written for these two but i have loved them for a long time

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graff1980 · 3 years

Text

I write as well, tell myself I’m not made to perform on stage.

The blank page is the place where my grace is the greatest.

I display this humanness by touching depths I haven’t even swam in yet.

I drown in the sound of men woman and children moaning, begging for a living, when no help is given by those in power who have been taking without returning a single cent of human decency.

I can write clearly, because I have time to edit each line, the same ones which I hide behind and pretend that I am helping when I am just doing enough to not be the enemy, less of an ally and more of a lubricant that helps my own guilt slide off the walls I built.

I have tried to understand how those who were denied a helping hand felt and mirror it in my poetics.

But I am pathetic, self-indulgent pain appropriating social movement inactive student.

Taking out loans I never plan to payback, other than in writing human events.

Some say, I am a good man, but I feel unworthy, uncomfortable because even though they heard me I don’t think they were listening.

Life is a prison, and I am self-convicting, admitting that in my laziness, I might as well be complicit. I write so later on I can ignore it.

Work hard to explore, then exploit what I didn’t earn, take all that I have learned and try to make a better world,

but no matter what I do I feel like a poser. Even when I am trying to help you, I feel like a cheap magician trick exposer.

Though, I am trying to foster, a compassion movement, I am just an empathetic poem writing imposter.

-2020

#poetry #poem #poets on tumblr #poets corner #writerscreed

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darkpoisonouslove · 4 years

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3 and 17❤

3. What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway)

Okay, so this is a sex scene from the fifth part of the Bleeding Hearts series aka the one with the Trix which somehow swerved from torture right back to romance. That installment is supposed to be the final one but it is also going to have to be a multichapter and I so do not have the time, patience or energy for it. So far I only have four scenes from it and this one is the only one I've written so I am going to share it because I don't know if I will ever write the whole fic.

Context is that Griffin and Valtor made a deal involving the Trix (but I will not spoil that because it's from part 4 which I still intend to write even if I will have to do it years from now) and she is his partner again. They even sleep in the same bed (on pretext that he's watching her to make sure she won't escape but she can't because of her witches that are still trapped in CT even if Valtor freed them from his mind control) and they do end up having not so angry sex sometimes quite often.

Oral sex and cum on face (and hair).

Griffin's heart caught in her throat at the sight of Valtor's peaceful expression that was the first thing to greet her after she turned in bed and opened her eyes. Seeing him sleeping next to her so open and vulnerable was a thing of her fantasies not only because of the seventeen years of frozen hearts and burning wounds between them, but also because of the nightmares he'd been having every night when they'd first started sharing a bed again. It might have been the unnatural stillness of his body complementing the distress contorting his face into a nightmare for both of them that had tugged on her heartstrings or it might have been the shivers running down her own spine and shaking her hands until the only thing left on her fingertips was more discomfort to affect him with if she touched him. The dreams - or perhaps they were pieces of reality stuck in his mind and tearing it apart - subsided with time, however, until they were nothing more than distant memories left for dead in the past. Just like their love she had to let go and not fish out of the depths of their hearts.

Her fingers moved of their own accord lured in by the tenderness he wouldn't let her have while he was awake and she only caught them an inch away from his face. It was futile, really, like most of her independent actions were at this point with his magic getting in her way instead of clearing her path to victory. She would have to pull the closeness he'd given her inadvertently out of her own reach the moment she pulled him out of his sleep but she had no choice. Not if she wanted her students to keep having one.

The Tower had been what had seen her awake, alerting her of the movement in its core. Valtor had never snatched control of it away from her, though maybe he couldn't have when it had no mind and just a Heart he couldn't put his mark on. To differ from the Trix, who'd been under the Tower's protection for years, he was definitely an intruder and would have faced undeniable resistance. He might have considered it unnecessary effort to sway the Heart but that left her still connected to it and feeling every shift in the castle, including her students' plan.

The young witches refused to stay inactive and watch passively as Valtor conquered more and more spells with her help while he didn't even let her speak to them. It was their pride and hers they were protecting in their attempts to break into the library and the vault of secret spells to find some magic that would take him down but it all came at the price of testing Valtor's non-existent patience. She didn't have the power to influence his decisions anymore, only to fuel his rage even more, so she had to take a different approach and use the Tower to communicate her advice to stay away to them. Only problem was that Valtor would sense the magic she'd need to put in the veins of Cloud Tower to carry her message to her girls and tipping him off about their plan was exactly what she wanted to avoid. She needed a distraction she could very well be incapable of being anymore but she had to try for her girls. They were doing their best for her.

Griffin leaned in to kiss Valtor's neck and pressed herself against him in an insistent demand for his attention. The softness of his skin against her lips was more startling than the weight of his arm wrapped around her waist when she woke up in the middle of the night and his body pushing into her prompted by the shiver that ran through him was like hot water scalding her nerves.

Focusing on what she was doing and not on his actions was becoming progressively harder as his hands found her waist announcing loudly that he was awake and his hunger was too. He pulled her even closer into the stiffness of his erection against her hip leaving her on the verge of gasping with the acute feeling of being wanted by him again. Sex between them was becoming a regular occurrence, yet she still wasn't used to him stating his desire for her so bluntly after the rejection he'd seen in her betrayal.

She tore herself away from his neck, his excited pulse in her mouth being too overwhelming to the logical part of her brain that was the only thing keeping her from getting lost now that it wasn't fantasies but his being in her hands. She was still left face to face with him, though, which she would've wanted to avoid as his gaze was too keen to not dissect any emotion spilling in the shine of her eyes.

"What's gotten into you today?" Valtor's drowsiness couldn't drown out the curiosity sparkling in his eyes like light reflecting from ice even if it was slightly dulled by the confusion he was fighting to push in his words since he could renounce those. It was usually him who initiated intimacy to make use of their deal and punish her with what she'd thrown away in her departure from the Coven. While she never pushed him away - doing the smart thing had already pulled him out of her embrace once and for all - she grasped at what little control over herself she hadn't surrendered to him just as desperately as she was clutching at him. She couldn't give him everything if he didn't want it.

Griffin ignored the sting in her heart and slid her hand down his body to take a hold of what he was giving her. "Nothing yet," she teased as her fingers closed around his erection and she moved to kiss him again, capturing his lips to keep him from sinking his teeth in the lies she was telling herself and tearing them apart with her as collateral. The heat of his skin brushing against her thigh seared the truth in her body to leave her unable to close her eyes to it even when she couldn't keep them open thanks to his fingers spreading their caresses over more of her sensitive flesh.

Valtor's hand tangled into her hair and he pulled her away from himself and the thoughts in her head leaving her out of breath, her heart pounding. From fear or excitement, she couldn’t really tell. It was more or less the same these days, pleasure mixing with pain - and wasn’t that just their thing? - as he was always in her head and she was all in his hands where she’d put herself again, with his fingerprints all over her skin and brain, and she didn’t even wish to push him away. She loved seeing him in her bed where her being was the only thing he could wreck, and with pleasure. It was a victory she could accept giving him, for it didn’t cause any suffering. Maybe just a little, but she could live with it.

"Perhaps it's time to fix that," he held her gaze as if to push the ice of it among the molten gold of her irises and let her melt all over him to chase any remaining imprint of the frost of Omega. He didn't miss to push his hips into her hand and let her feel him better as if she didn't already feel too much. She should've never let him touch her like that again but it was the only way to come in touch with their old selves, with the lovers who'd trusted each other to get naked and honest without shame or regrets - painfully ironic next to the greater purpose her eagerness was currently serving. And no matter what she said, she'd missed the confident and smug grin pulling his lips into the compelling argument she needed to let him tug on her hair once more, guiding her whole body to where he wanted her.

She allowed him the power over her the one time that it wasn't threatening. He wanted her honoring the desire he'd admitted, leaving himself more exposed to her than he was after she magicked away the clothes separating her from the softness of his body leaving nothing to keep her away. He was all hers.

She didn't waste time - she couldn't even pin her hastiness on the energy she'd smuggled into the veins of Cloud Tower now that she was done - and took him in her mouth to have his grip on her hair tightening. As if he was afraid she could use the opportunity to slip away while he had his eyes closed and submerged himself in the sensations of her wet mouth enveloping his cock and her tongue stroking over the tender flesh to draw out sounds and movements he couldn't contain. He was so soft when he was hard for her with the shaky breaths coming from his parted lips and the twitches of his cock between hers.

He held all her focus even though his own was slipping through his fingers despite the firm grip he had on both the sheets and her tresses. His hips bucked outside of his control making her gag and choke, yet the irritation in her throat only gathered her concentration on keeping him right where she could feel every inch of his being. There was nothing he could hide with the bliss filling him to the point of overflowing and flooding her with the expressions of his desire. Just the sound of his moans had every cell in her body vibrating with life.

Her tongue drew out breathy compliments and praises that had her pulling away to take a breath and steady her heart. Her head was already spinning with his implicit admission of the efforts he was putting in collecting his mind enough to form words to give her pounding in her ears. She could listen to his strained voice all day even if he toppled into the incoherence she was pushing on him as she pressed her tongue against the right spots and sucked everything else out of his mindscape. He was past the point of denying what they'd had in the past and she was floating like a weightless star in the sensations of having him so soft and scattered in her hands once again.

He was stroking her hair and groaning her name while she took him deep inside herself and the reciprocated vulnerability was carving inside her chest to fill it with a cosmic ache. That one wasn't pain, though. It was a need so vicious that finally sating it to have it let go of her left her with marks that hurt. Like she'd been cornered between the jaws of a vise - or two icebergs - and needed some time for the bruises to fade. The pain didn't register through the view that Valtor's blissful expression was and his weakened fingers still threaded loosely through her purple strands.

Valtor shifted, letting go of the sheets to have both hands closing in her hair. He pulled her head down and pushed his whole length into her throat as if to fill every last part of her with himself and she'd be insane to resist that.

She grabbed at his arms instead to hold on to him and the moment as long as possible. His cock was throbbing in her mouth ready to spill his orgasm down her throat right as she choked again but Valtor pulled out, leaving her empty and hungry for his pleasure and their connection, and came all over her face.

Griffin managed to close her eyes to protect them but some of his cum landed in her still open mouth and she could feel it clinging to her hair as well. She'd have to shower but his purposeful carelessness was pushed away by the screaming of her taste buds. She'd forgotten the taste of him after all these years of just vague sensory memories and overwhelming nostalgia. Feeling it again would have required him to let her too close but now the flavor was all over her tongue and mind again nourishing her desire for more of him and acting like poison to everything else that dared demand a fraction of her attention or energy.

"That certainly was up there amongst ways to wake up," Valtor's voice had her eyes snapping open. His breathing had normalized enough to let him speak and she couldn't help but mourn the lost opportunity to see him breathless from her ministrations. "Though, I still have no idea what prompted any of it," his tone was teasing and light but still tripped the alarm wires in her head leaving her almost wincing at the blaring of the sirens her mind was powering now that the warmth of Valtor's body wasn't drowning it out.

"Looking a gift dragon in the mouth now?" Griffin gave him a wide grin that was sure to channel his attention to her lips if her words hadn't done that already.

"I am only interested in your mouth," Valtor's fingers were under her chin making sure her eyes were on the devouring impulse in his, "and whether I can expect more surprises like that." His fire flashed in his irises as if to jump on her and swallow her.

"We'll see." Griffin smirked at him before wiping his cum off her cheek and licking her fingers clean, concentrating on the flavor that was free of any raging suspicions that could be fueling his interest and not on the flip her stomach made. It would be too much to have to question her own bodily reactions and the reasons behind them so she left herself to the ease of the sexual atmosphere they'd created. That always came effortlessly with them.

"Better make the most of it then," Valtor faked contemplation only for a second and pulled her into a kiss to take her breath in exchange for the weakness he'd given her.

17. Do you think readers perceive your work - or you - differently to you? What do you think would surprise your readers about your writing or your motivations?

To be fair, I have no idea how my readers perceive me (or my work for that matter aside from the fact that they like it which I have gathered from all the lovely reviews). So feel free, everyone, to drop by an tell me how you perceive me and what I do! That said, I will try to list a few things that I don't think people could have picked up from reading my stuff.

To start with the one that is the most obvious imo, I LIVE for feedback about my fics or just fangirling about them. It is literally what sustains my soul. I cannot tell you how often I reread comments on my work because I just love hearing that people like it. I mostly stopped reminding people (in the beginning of my stories) that I would appreciate hearing their thoughts because I know that feeling pressured to comment sucks (and I don't want to seem desperate even though I kind of am) but I really, really, really appreciate comments. Any kind of comment, really, but if you come squealing/screaming at me about my stories and which parts are your favorite, I will love you for the rest of my life! And not just the stories I have completed. You can ask questions and talk to me about any of the stories I have mentioned and I will die of happy. I've been told I can come off as intimidating but you could never get on my bad side by being interested in my works (unless you start pushing me to update which is about the only thing I do not vibe with when it comes to talking about my fics).

Kinda related to that last part, I am actually a very shy person and that is why I may seem unapproachable or rude. I am horrible at starting conversations which is why I mostly avoid that. But I always appreciate hearing someone's thoughts on my works or discussing fandom stuff. So, please, don't be intimidated by me and all my bitching. That is only reserved for people it can't hurt (aka writers of the shows I am watching that will never hear of my opinions on their work).

Based on the speed with which I write, readers might think that this is easy for me but, believe me, it is not. Sometimes the words are like bricks you're using to build a neat wall and sometimes it's like throwing pasta at tiles and hoping something sticks. Despite how many works I produce, I do have difficulties with almost each and every one of them but I am motivated to push through by the validation of posting desire to see them finished. The last few days especially I have been having doubts about the very point of writing. I have been feeling like it's useless, but then another idea captures my mind and I am riding the wave again. It is daunting. It is tiring. Sometimes it is even ungrateful. But it is also rewarding and, for me at least, not a choice but a calling. I could not choose not to write because I have a physical reaction against not writing in a couple of days. It is therapeutic and cathartic even when it gets on my nerves. It is inspiring to see a world built out of your own mind, with your own words. It is creation and that leaves a sense of fulfillment that outweighs any struggle that has left you feeling like you're losing your mind (and I have had quite a few of those situations).

Another thing I would like my readers to understand is that I write what speaks to me. And I don't mean it in terms of ships I will take or tropes I will write or anything remotely permanent and long-term. I have some feelings and based on them I decide on what I will be working today. It is the reason why some fics end up abandoned for months. The way I see it, the story needs me to finish it but I don't need it at the moment (or it is too close to home aka what happened to the Client List AU). It can be frustrating to an outsider to this process. Hell, it's frustrating to me at least a third of the time. But that is the way it is. I have no plan for tackling WIPs and even if I do, I will end up not following it for sure. However, if you have sent me something - some request - know that I have not forgotten or ignored it. I am just not vibing with it at the moment but it is on my list of things to get written. Sometimes ideas just don't happen when we want them to and need more time to develop. I have to give them that time. Forcing them, even if possible, will not do me or the idea any favors.

I hope all of this makes sense. I have tried to put my peculiarities as eloquently as possible. Perhaps there is something more that I am forgetting but that's what I can think of atm.

Thanks for the ask!

Send me meta asks

#winx club #griffin x valtor #covenshipping #winx griffin #winx valtor #cloud tower #bleeding hearts series #fanfiction #my fanficion #my writing #about my writing #my writing process #about me #personal #ask #darcyinstilettoes

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ryanccoleman · 4 years

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“All goodness is in jeopardy”: Dead Girls at the End of the Decade

“As another year comes to pass, bringing another decade to pass, we find ourselves awash in the bodies of dead girls and women, fictional and very much real.”

This essay was originally set to be published in December 2019 on Much Ado About Cinema, to coincide with the premiere of Jennifer Reeder’s Knives and Skin.

There is a film that premieres today, the last month of the decade, called Knives and Skin. Directed by Jennifer Reeder, the film depicts the surreal transformation a community undergoes when one of its own, a teenage girl named Carolyn Harper, goes missing and later shows up dead. Knives and Skin may in fact be this decade’s last work of art to employ a narrative device come lately to be known as the “dead girl trope.” This term refers to the use in story of this conceit—a beautiful, young, presumably innocent, usually white girl has gone missing or wound up dead (almost always murdered), plunging the incredulous family/community/town surrounding her into chaos and calling a charismatic detective to chase after answers.

Much lately has been made of the dead girl trope—researching its origins, examining its variations, interrogating its largely uncontested whiteness and cisness. Of course stories of dead and missing women have been around as long as women have died and gone missing, but since the early ‘90s the trope has clogged up the culture, and even moreso in the past decade. Every day we are inundated with stories of women battered, disappeared, manipulated, and killed. We cannot afford to be flip or numb, to treat these stories as just that—fiction, as anything separate from the culture they have a mutually parasitic relationship with. The most important question people have begun to ask of the dead girl trope is whether it has any capacity to attack the misogyny it depicts and uproot the racism and transphobia which support it. Or does recycling the trope again and again, even by creators with the most altruistic intentions, do anything other than entrench the idea that violence is the logical conclusion to the question of a woman?

As the final installment in a decade long saga of women on the verge, how does Knives and Skin measure up? To answer this question we have to do two things. We have to understand the real world stakes, and we have to go back to where this bad dream began.

“When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out. The tender boughs of innocence burn first, and the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy.” -Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

As another year comes to pass, bringing another decade to pass, we find ourselves awash in the bodies of dead girls and women, fictional and very much real.

In the world, women are abducted, disappeared, if returned at all returned in bruised condition, mass graves are discovered, long buried reports of abuse are painfully unearthed, and women are killed. In Nigeria, in 2014, 276 schoolgirls abducted from the town of Chibok by Boko Haram and driven hundreds of miles into ungoverned territory. Five years on, 112 are still missing. Bereft parents have died waiting for their daughters to be returned. “Even in a hundred years,” one mother told a reporter from Al Jazeera this year, “we will keep believing that our daughters will return home.”

In Canada, after years of fierce organizing from within indigenous communities, the government finally launched an inquiry into the murder and disappearance of thousands of indigenous women stretching back decades. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, as it’s called, attribute it to "state actions and inactions rooted in colonialism and colonial ideologies.” Indigenous leaders name it: genocide.

In our own country, thousands of immigrant women are detained, many having fled their homes due to domestic violence, state-sponsored sexual violence and femicide only to wind up in dehumanizing internment, their children confiscated from them like personal effects. A rising number of mass shooters explicitly name the hatred of women as a call to action, their patterns of domestic abuse (86% of the 22 mass shooters analyzed in a recent Mother Jones report had demonstrable records) shored up too late. Trans women and gender non-conforming afab (assigned female at birth) people face an epidemic of transphobic, misogynistic, often racist violence from intimate partners and total strangers alike. Violence in the street is entrenched by the indifference of the state—of the 22 trans women murdered this year to date, 18 cases remain unsolved.

In the culture, the flood of women’s bodies rises from our ankles to our thighs. Scanning best of the decade lists—it’s easy to see if you’re looking, and even if you’re not, it’s hard to ignore—dead and missing girls are everywhere. Though the carnage is not distributed evenly across formats—there is for example a remarkable lack of dead girl stories in film when compared with the superabundance in television and podcasts—the sheer volume is staggering.

Podcasting emerged as the most exciting new storytelling medium this decade, transforming from local radio curio to culture-spanning phenomenon attracting big tech money and A-list celebrity buy-in. The medium, built on the backs of stories of dead and missing women, has proven unable to go on without them. The show that kickstarted the podcast revolution was Serial, a solemn journalistic inquiry into the unsolved murder of a teenage girl. Serial set off a true crime boom as much as it set a template for much of the medium. Though few shows have applied the same rigor to their dead, damaged, or missing subjects, none have needed to in order to become wildly popular. Simply put, there is no dead woman that eludes the reach of the podcaster, and without dead women, there would be no podcasts as we know them.

Finally, my god, television. It’s not that a number of the best shows of the decade centered on the story of a dead or missing girl; there were in fact so many they constituted a thematic center for the entire medium this decade—The Killing, The Fall, Broadchurch, Pretty Little Liars, How to Get Away With Murder, Making A Murderer, Top of the Lake, True Detective, The Night Of, and The Jinx, to name some of the heavy hitters.

One more show waded into the morass this decade, and most notably—it was the reason for all this mess in the first place.

David Lynch came back to television after 25 years with Twin Peaks: The Return, a third season to his legendary 1990 television series. By all accounts, those original eight episodes launched the beautiful dead girl craze we’re still in the vicious throes of. The entire Twin Peaks universe—Lynch and Mark Frost’s surprise smash first season, the meandering second season in which ABC rescinded creative control from Lynch because he refused to identify the dead girl in question’s killer, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lynch’s controversial 1992 feature prequel which features Laura Palmer, dead girl, as an alive protagonist rather than a silent mystery, the new season, and all the apocryphal literary spinoffs—centers on the beautiful, murdered, porcelain-white body of homecoming queen Laura Palmer, washed up on a riverbank in the pilot episode.

Every piece of writing on the dead girl trope addresses Lynch, if not exclusively, then in a fulsome manner. Alice Bolin, who published a comprehensive book of essays on the trope last year called Dead Girls: Surviving an American Obsession, first engaged with the subject in a 2014 essay on Twin Peaks for the Los Angeles Review of Books. And indeed, nearly every review of Knives and Skin I encountered while researching for this essay references Twin Peaks as an obvious ancestor to Reeder’s film.

Why? The aesthetic comparisons are evident—moody score, weird acting, woodsy small town setting, beautiful missing, and then dead, girl. But the comparison is broader than that. It’s almost compulsory, unavoidable. The impact Twin Peaks had on culture is impossible to understate. But the depth to which the twin images of Laura Palmer’s ghostly, smiling, peroxide and permed homecoming photo and her dead, drowned, blue-faced and plastic-wrapped crime scene photo, which the show flashes to in alternation, have seeped into our core imagining of what women fundamentally are in life and in death has absolutely not been reckoned with.

This Knives and Skin grasps. The film’s Laura Palmer, called Carolyn Harper (Raven Whitley), behaves much in the same way. In her first and only alive scene, she and a boy drive up to the shore of a lake at night. Without knowing anything about the film the first time I watched it, I tensed, anticipating exactly what ended up happening. Carolyn and the boy, Andy (Ty Olwin), walk from the car to the lakeside, silhouetted in the glare of the headlights. Before kissing, the two bicker about Carolyn’s glasses, whether they should stay on or be taken off. Andy says “keep ‘em on, I don’t care.” Carolyn responds: “I do care. I actually don’t want to see what’s about to happen.” The next time anyone in the film sees Carolyn, she’s dead.

If Knives and Skin does anything perfectly it’s this. The Laura Palmers of fiction and the Laura Palmers in fact, all around the world, have fused, like the twin images in Twin Peaks—alive: radiant, dead: serene, and in both cases speechless, compliant. It recalls Maggie Nelson’s question after seeing Hitchcock’s Vertigo: “whether women were somehow always already dead, or, conversely, had somehow not yet begun to exist.”

An avatar of young womanhood as always arcing toward extermination has emerged with a juggernaut’s relentlessness out of the scrum of the past three decades of dead girl TV. The characters in Knives and Skin live in this world. Carolyn Harper knows what happens to Carolyn Harpers. She doesn’t want to see “what’s about to happen” because she’s powerless to prevent it. The tagline of the film, “Have you seen Carolyn Harper?” lands as a joke by the end of the film. Carolyn Harpers are all we ever see.

Knives and Skin doesn’t so much rage with righteous injustice over the unfair and unthinkable death of one young girl as it does turn the palpable, ten-ton heavy despair of unfair and unthinkable death as the condition of young girls back on the viewer. “You guys doing okay,” Carolyn’s mother asks three of her daughters classmates who’ve brought her condolence casseroles. Carolyn’s body has just been discovered. An ice cream cake made for her birthday melts into a pale pool of sludge on the table before her. “Yes,” they say, emotionless. “You lying?” They nod again, “yes.”

Reeder has taken us back to the world of Twin Peaks in a time where dead girls are taken for granted, taken as givens. They still, however, even in this most melancholy meditation, destroy communities and upend lives. I’ve said that Knives and Skin doesn’t rage with injustice over the death of Carolyn Harper. But should it?

The reference point that floated into my head while watching Knives and Skin the first time, that I couldn’t shake the second time was not Twin Peaks, but its much maligned and misunderstood prequel, Fire Walk With Me. Lynch made Fire Walk With Me after Bob Iger and ABC tried to stage manage the surprise success of season 1 by forcing him to reveal Laura’s killer. “‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’ was a question that we did not ever really want to answer,” Lynch later told TV Guide. Season 2, largely without Lynch, was as a result baffling, anticlimactic and sensational in all the wrong places. The show was cancelled less than two years after debuting. Fire Walk With Me was a vengeance quest, Lynch’s intent to bring closure and justice to the story of a Pandora he had never intended to let out of the box.

Fire Walk With Me is brutal. Its examination of trauma is surgical, uncompromising, and to the bone. For the majority of the film the camera is glued to Laura, who walks, talks, dances, laughs, gobbles like a turkey, screams, cries, and eventually dies. As a spectator you are shoved in close proximity to Laura. Unlike the silent, pliant Laura Palmer of Twin Peaks, Sheryl Lee’s Laura in Fire Walk With Me is fully alive, every fantasy concocted about her by the characters in season 1 as well as the fans in the audience is in sharp, contested relief. She feels everything done to her immediately, unbearably, and so do you.

Many critics hated Fire Walk With Me, and it was a commercial flop. The film was booed at Cannes. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote: “Everything about David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is a deception. It’s not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be.” In a discussion on the dead girl trope for The New Republic, Sarah Marshall offered a remark that speaks directly to the film’s icy reception: “a dead woman is utterly incapable of offering up even the most cursory contradiction to the narratives that entomb her as readily as any casket.” Fire Walk With Me was one huge, bleeding contradiction.

The original bad dream, the dead girl’s nightmare we still haven’t woken up from was actually unpacked all those years ago, just months after it all began. Laura’s killer was her father, Leland. Her father had been sexually abusing her since she was a child, her mother knew, and within hours of Laura finally perceiving this fact in its full reality, he killed her. All of the weirdness, the quirkiness, and horror of Twin Peaks, along with the enduring, eroticized, and profitable trope it popularized emanates from this very personal, achingly common story of childhood sexual abuse. Is it any wonder people hated it? Or why the Laura Palmer of the original series is the figure we’ve chosen to preserve, pressed flat into the pages of culture forever?

“All goodness is in jeopardy,” the Log Lady warns Laura before entering the roadhouse where her life will begin to tailspin before its eventual crash. This is the essence and the power of the dead girl story. Though we have erected a world that is impossible for women to navigate unscathed, we continue to vest them with the symbolic responsibility of innocence. As if Laura’s singular life was the first domino in a chain that led to the unraveling of the entire world. But wasn’t it?

Many have pointed out the racial and gender-specific freighting of the dead girl trope. Could Laura Palmer have been Latinx? How would the movie change if Carolyn Harper had been African-American, or trans? The answer on every level, symbolic and real, is drastically. What these depictions unconsciously reflect is the priceless value of white life. Imagine an entire town shutting down operations to mourn and search for a missing black trans woman? We can’t, because when trans women are murdered the only efforts to organize and demonstrations of rage come from within queer communities, often queer communities of color, who have historically adverse relationships with law enforcement. Black women face an escalated threat of violence due to the interlocking forces of white supremacy and misogyny. Yet the disappearance and death of black women and other women of color have historically never been met with the same uproar as with white women who meet the same ends.

It’s not that Knives and Skin is a failure because it seems more interested in the aesthetic allure of a dead girl than in drumming up indignation for the circumstances that configured her death. And it’s not that Twin Peaks was a failure because it prioritized white and cis tragedy over all others. Both Reeder and Lynch have done something profound when it comes to thinking and feeling through trauma, sexual violence, and grief. What remains important is to ask is whether each successive appearance of the dead girl trope is amounting to something, not on the individual but on the collective level. As Bolin has written, “It becomes harder and harder to subvert something that’s been used so many times.”

Have we seemed to make much progress from Fire Walk With Me to Knives and Skin? Honestly, no. But have the horrors real world misogynistic, racist, transphobic violence ceased? Even if rates of violent crime are in fact down in the United States, one disappearance or death like the kinds depicted in Lynch and Reeder’s work would be too many. The most successful iterations of the dead girl trope have grappled with these tough, interceding concerns, like race—consider Top of the Lake and The Night Of. The least successful amount merely to prodding a dead woman’s body with a stick just to see how it feels—consider every episode of My Favorite Murder. The most that I can hope is that future creators considering employing the dead girl trope take the long view of all that came before and ask, is it worth it? Does the dead girl in my story deserve this? What kind of justice, in fact, does she deserve?

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panoramamix · 3 years

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Full Album in free download here https://archive.org/details/rADio_eNd_genesis_launch/ The necrophile hummingbird presents the allowed fruit of a process called rADio eNd. About the surface of the album : A rather surprising album that begins with a spoken word cut-up on a fat downtempo beat cut with an ax. Did I say Industrial Triphop ? It’s probably unvoluntary but we can feel influences like Lydia Lunch, Annie Anxiety, Jarboe and Danielle Dax amongst many other. But then the music branches off into unknown territory with well-lit french lyrics and music that looks like nothing known. It’s … foreign music. Did I say Outsider music ? You may agree with me that a passport for somewhere outside is pretty welcome when you’re confined. About the depths of this album : If you’ve got a fruit in your hand, shall you bite it to taste it ? The only certainty is that you’d better not forget to sow the seeds. Did I say Do-It-YoursElf Spirituality ?

Direct download link https://archive.org/compress/rADio_eNd_genesis_launch/formats=VBR MP3&file=/rADio_eNd_genesis_launch.zip Featuring : Antonella EYE Porcelluzzi on tracks 1 to 8 &13 http://www.antonellaeyeaynilporcelluzzi.bandcamp.com Innocent but Guilty on tracks 7/8/9/13 http://www.apocalypsesounds.bandcamp.com Studio 112 on tracks 6/7/10/11/12 http://www.studio112.bandcamp.com Ed End http://www.ello.co/ed_end

rADio eNd is a process more than a simple musical project… It is a rhizome with multiple antennae that probes space and time in search of the keys that will allow humanity to leave the iron prison. Appeared by magic in the fall of 2020, driven by an imperative necessity, perhaps this is linked to the authoritarian drift of the state in fRance combined with climate inaction. Here the republic erected as a religion adorns itself with ideals such as Liberté Egalité Fraternité while nearly never having applied them. Their “brotherhood” is just a corruption network. It is mostly a name squatting for capitalism. As Antonella said “each one a self made religion”, money is not my god, for me it would be humanity : the collective subconscious. Indeed rather than a frontal fight which would amount just us to play a role in the tragedy, it seems to me that the main idea is to show that nothing is written. Everything has to be written, all dreams are possible if we decide to write our future. Thus rADio eNd is being set up, a collaborative pool to help the emergence of new sound forms, which borrows the versality of radio to free itself from any shackles. Once again make resounding music resolutely not normal like a little light through the darkness… We can also consider that it is an additional echo to the long chain of singularities that began with Necktar, then it continued with Necktar 2017 and then the specials PIKADON and “The World is Over!”. Likewise the seeker of another chain of singularities, the one whose Multiple Personality 3, PIRATE Tapes and TKno BeurK are mainly the fruit of my collaboration with Alain Grille aka Studio 112. As well as lastly a mutation of Zone fusION which was already a collaborative pool, resulting from Necktar 2017. It is a lot, in any case it seems, that it is the junction of these three sources which gave birth to this synthetic vortex that is rADio eNd. More information about rADio eNd here http://horsnorme.org/rADio_eNd/rADio_eNd_english.html

Lyrics

Track 1 to 6 and 8 poems by Antonella EYE Porcelluzzi

Track 7 Listen to my Voice

Listen to my voice she is like an animal that would come out of the earth my voice echoes she carries hope far away if i came back from the dead others will come back

Listen to my voice she is like an animal that would come out of the water my voice echoes she carries hope far away if i didn’t drown others will reach the surface

Listen to my voice she is like an animal who would cross the air my voice echoes she carries hope far away if i can reach you others will find their voice

Extract from the book “Illumination Naïve” by Morne.

Track 9 Eco-sphere

Eco-sphere.

Under his milky disc, when the night frees us from our flesh, the mechanical reign is fading. Our shadows can reach our bodies. Essences flow between universes. Our spirits emerge from the ruins, the colors of life mingle with the light of the beyond, touched by the grace of existing.

Under his blazing disc, when the day imprisons us in our bodies, the cogs of everyday life engulf us. Disconnected from everything. Isolated from the essential, forced to play a sinister comedy, dazzled by the artificial brilliance of the simulacrum.

Inhale Exhale.

Alternating current. How many more cycles to wait? Before the ideal configuration is achieved! Before we decided to save ourselves! Before freeing us! When the decisive moment comes, which initiates a-time, the eternal present.

Direct current. How many cycles before we remember that we are the only pilot of the machine? Symbiotes whispered us how to escape from binarity. Mutants are on no side: mobile, evolving outside, outside the norm, invisible but everywhere.

Between Inhale and Exhale, the gap expands.

In everyone the senses are awakened, through the veils of the oblivion’s cocoon, everyone makes their way. No one wants to be a prophet, but all of them as soon as one begins to speak, can’t avoid to vibrate. Magic language, which generates the artificial mechanism, when we forget that it is operational, that it should fit into the natural configuration, to draw the shapes of life.

No one is predestined, but the bud becomes a flower, but the flower becomes fruit, but the fruit becomes seed.

Inhale, exhale, between the two is hidden infinity.

Nobody wants to pretend but in a world where the marginalized are excluded, but in a world where the innocent are guilty, but in a world where mutants are singled out … While we should take each other by the hand and dance around the fire, whose clarity makes the borders disappear, this fire that brings us together.

Between Inhale and Exhale, the link is love.

Inhale - Love - Exhale.

(Ad vitam æternam)

Morne, Foucherans. November 1st, 2020 www.inlibroveritas.net/edition/28719/la-narrateur

Track 13 Mystical Axioms

The shadow axioms.

The fear. Afraid of the change. To exterminate all dangers. Paralyzed by the unknown: we stop loving. To prefer deny your uniqueness than to face hostility. Fear breeds conformism. Conformism. Carried away by the main stream. To exclude all alternatives. Formatted to follow the standard: we stop dreaming. To prefer deny life than run the risk of being excluded. Conformism breeds stratification. Stratification. Bogged down by comfort in routines. To cling with all your might to the material. Imprisoned in a rigid identity: we stop breathing. To prefer the certainty of death over exercising one's will. Stratification breeds resignation. Resignation. Sentenced to voluntary servitude To delegate your choices to any authority. Prisoner of certainties: we stop hoping. To prefer the illusion of life to make an effort to embody it. Resignation generates the proxy. Proxy. Dispossessed of his free will. To idolize simulacra. Engulfed in the abyss: we stop living. To prefer fantasize than to be an actor. The proxy generates the disappearance of the being.

The light axioms.

Love. Love begets the appearance of being. To prefer embody than to remain a spectator. Freed from lures: we begin to live. To develop empathy. To celebrate the franchise. The being can radiate. The simplicity. Simplicity breeds flexibility. To prefer the essential instead of the superficial. Aware of what complexity hides: we begin to find the meaning. To decenter your focus. The being can direct himself. Flexibility. Flexibility breeds pedagogy. To prefer to feel fully than to cling to the past. Deliver from obscurantism: we begin to envision infinity. To adapt to the unknown. The being can mutate. Pedagogy. Pedagogy generates synthesis. To prefer invent his own way than to reproduce by mistake that of others. Freed from imitation: we begin to become fertile. To Experiment to know. People can learn from their mistakes. Synthesis. Synthesis creates a new era. To prefer harmony to the imbalance resulting from ignorance of the whole. Cured of binary violence: we are starting to be able to live together. In all, to leave an opening for change. The being can make his dreams come true.

Morne www.wattpad.com/user/akashique

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