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voiceless-terror · 3 years

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Recognition

@aspecarchivesweek Day Five: Something New

Jonathan Sims/Martin Blackwood, Season One

In which Jon and Martin are more alike than they thought.

Jon, in spite of himself, was starting to get used to Martin living in the Archives.

Offering him shelter had been almost instinctual- after listening to his story, who wouldn’t? Terrorized for almost two weeks and no one, no one noticed. There was also the matter of Jon’s guilt; Martin thought he needed to put himself in danger to be thorough, to please Jon, and now he was homeless. Jon owed him this at the very least. No matter how much Elias disapproved of the situation.

And despite the occasional trouser-less wanderings, his presence was...appreciated. Late nights in the Archives were wearing him down: the statements were getting to him, and the unshakeable feeling of being watched when he knew he was alone was putting him on edge. Now he can blame that feeling on Martin, who he’d caught staring on more than one occasion. Jon was not surprised; he hadn’t been looking or feeling his best, highly unprofessional with his three-day stubble and rumpled clothes. Not a good look.

He’d be lying to himself if he didn’t enjoy the cup of tea when Martin joined him in his worst bouts of insomnia. He would sit on the tiny couch in his office, nursing his own mug and chattering away in a low tone that Jon was starting to find soothing instead of irritating. At first Jon clammed up, uncomfortable with the sudden intrusion on his late night routine, but he soon found Martin didn’t expect him to respond or contribute, save the occasional grunt of acknowledgement. Sometimes Jon even craved the company, the familiar rhythms of Martin’s voice had become an unconscious comfort.

Tonight he was looking particularly exhausted, slumped in his seat with deep purple bags under his eyes. It sent an unwelcome pang through Jon’s chest; Martin should be sleeping, not entertaining him because he chose to stay late. He said as much.

“You don’t have to stay up on my part.”

“Hm?” Martin looked up from his lap, eyes finding Jon’s. “Oh, no. It’s fine. I like the company, to be honest. Unless…?”

“I don’t mind,” Jon assured him. Shockingly, he found he meant it. Still, it didn’t ease his guilt. Martin was always here, never leaving the Archives for more than an hour to get food or other necessities. He considered his next words. “That being said, I hope you know you’re allowed to have a life outside of the institute. I won’t judge if you want to have a...late night, or go out. It’s not my business what you do in your free time.”

Martin squinted his eyes as if he didn’t understand the words Jon spoke. Christ, do I really seem that out of touch? He knew he could be severe and well, a bit of an ass at times. The stress of the job got to him more than he cared to admit. But he didn’t want his assistants to think they should follow his example. He was Head Archivist, it fell on his shoulders to get this place in some semblance of order.

“I’m not really one for nights out, Jon,” Martin gave that familiar, self-deprecating laugh as he leaned back in his chair, an almost defeated-like set to his shoulders. “Well, besides the occasional drink with Tim and Sasha. And even those are sort of...I don’t know. They have their own thing going, and I feel like-”

“A bit of an outsider,” Jon provided before he could activate his ‘word to mouth’ filter. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply-”

“No,” Martin cut him off. “You’re right. Feels like I’m intruding.”

“Their banter can be overwhelming for the, ah, uninitiated.” On the few times he’d gone out with them in research, he’d felt more lonely than included. His awkward attempts at interjecting could make a conversation fall flat and he felt the need to accept every drink they handed in him the hopes of ‘loosening up.’ It never worked. They were never mean about it, no- or at least had the decency not to do it in his presence.

“Tell me about it.” Martin gave Jon a tiny little smirk that sent his heart stuttering in his chest for no particular reason. “I’m used to it, is all. This isn’t much of a change in routine, worms notwithstanding.”

“You, er, don’t have friends you can meet up with? Or maybe a partner?” Christ, why am I prying? What’s gotten into me? Jon felt curious, the man practically lived with him and yet he barely knew him.

The bark of laughter he got in reply was sudden and more than self-deprecating. “A partner? Are you kidding me?” Martin’s tone threw him off-balance; it was jaded, bitter, not like him at all.

“I didn’t mean to pry-”

“No, it’s- to be frank, I don’t think I’m cut out for all that.” Martin toyed with the mug in his hands, gazing into it like it held the answers he needed. “I’ve uh, tried to go on a few dates, meet people, that sort of thing. But they all expect something at the end and it just never feels right, I can’t explain it. Like there’s something missing. ”

Jon paused; the words and their sentiment were not unfamiliar to him. In fact, they resonated quite deeply, if Martin meant what Jon thought he did.

“It’s always been that way- I get a crush, I get to know them, they want to, y’know, and I-I don’t know what's wrong with me, but I can’t-” He cut himself off, sitting up straighter as if suddenly remembering where he was and who he was talking to. “God, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m telling you this-”

“It’s fine.” And it was. Martin looked at his hands and Jon recognized the sadness in the set of his shoulders, the lines etched in his face. He never thought the two of them would have much in common but that- that was a feeling Jon knew all too well. “I think I understand what you’re getting at.”

Martin somehow managed to deflate even further, curling up as if trying to disappear. “Yeah, well- I think it’s time to admit that I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life.”

The words hit Jon harder than expected. His fists tightened in his lap; he was sixteen again, wondering why the kiss he stole in a backroom felt more invasive than intimate. He was reading romance novels, understanding the words but not the feelings they were supposed to invoke. He was in college, being called a ‘tease’ or a ‘prude’ when he pulled away at the end of the night. And it was all accompanied by that deep, crushing fear that he’d never be enough.

No, you’re not that kid anymore.

And Martin shouldn’t have to be either.

“What’s that look for?”

He was drawn from his thoughts at Martin’s words, looking up from the scratched wood of his desk. “Sorry?”

“You’ve- you’ve got that look on your face, like you’re const- like you’re thinking really hard.”

Jon tried to think of a way to word his query delicately, but ‘delicacy’ had never been his strong suit, according to Georgie. Come to think of it, it was never hers either. “Have you ever considered that maybe- that you’re- you’re of the persuasion, that is-”

Martin shot him a deadpan look, unimpressed. “Yeah, I know I’m gay, Jon.”

“That’s not-” He sighed in frustration, fuming at his inability to communicate. “It’s okay to not feel that way. I never have. It’s normal.”

Martin blinked. “Sorry?”

“Asexuality, that is,” he said, finally managing to get out the words. “I was...in a similar position, I guess you could say. I didn’t feel the way you were ‘supposed’ to feel, like how all the books and TV shows describe it. Zero interest in anything sexual, and I thought...well, I thought something was wrong with me.” Jon felt a lump building in his throat, much to his horror. “But being able to put a name to it, an identity, it just felt right.” Martin’s face was unreadable- had he spoken out of turn? Did he have this all wrong?

He tried to clarify. “What I’m trying to say is that I know what it’s like, that...feeling you described. But it doesn’t mean you’re not cut out for love. You...you shouldn’t have to feel that way about yourself. You’ll find people who accept you. You’re not doomed to be lonely.” Now you’re just getting sentimental. Jon wasn’t one to dole out advice. He attempted to reign it in, get himself back on solid, familiar ground. “Maybe don’t take me for an example, though. I assure you, my isolation is very much self-imposed.”

Martin didn’t laugh. For a brief, panicky moment Jon thought he might have offended him, assumed the wrong thing, taken him out of context. But Martin met his eyes and Jon saw it- a look of dawning understanding, of comprehension and knowing and as much as Jon wanted to look away he couldn’t, because for the first time in a while he thought he might have said the right thing.

_____

He watched as Martin puttered about in the break room and took a deep breath, straightening his shoulders. Martin hadn’t said much after their conversation, just thanked him in a choked voice and mumbled some excuse about going off to bed. Jon felt a bit conflicted- he now had time to ruminate on the conversation, pick it apart and wonder if he said anything wrong. He didn’t think he had, but his instincts had been proven wrong before.

Still, the thought of helping one person, sparing them from that crippling self-doubt and inadequacy, made any embarrassment or awkwardness well worth it. So here he was, shuffling his feet and holding a stack of paper, stapled and neat and in some cases, annotated. He cleared his throat and Martin turned away from the sink to face him.

“Oh, g-good morning, Jon.” He wiped his hands on a dish towel, throwing it lightly on the counter. “Did you sleep well?”

He’d gotten two hours tops on the lumpy couch in his office. I need to invest in another cot. But he nodded anyway, walking forward and thrusting the pile out for Martin to take. Martin looked down at it quizzically but took it all the same, his face softening as he flipped through the pages.

“I, um- I printed out some articles that I thought might be of interest,” Jon rambled, feeling more awkward by the second. Was this too forward of me? “I’ve always found it easier to read on paper instead of the screen. For ah, concentration purposes. This- this isn’t required reading, or anything. Just might be helpful for, uh, figuring things out.”

Martin didn’t look up from the pages in his hand, instead zeroing in on them with a more intense stare. When he finally spoke, his voice was tight with sincerity. “Thanks. It uh, it means a lot.”

“Yes,” Jon replied nonsensically, having no response to the emotion in Martin’s words. “You- you don’t need to talk to me about this, if you’d rather not. But I’m available if you’d like to.” He paused. Best to keep this somewhat professional- it was almost nine. “Outside of normal working hours, of course.”

“Of course,” Martin echoed, the ghost of a smile on his lips as he finally met Jon’s eyes. He fought down the urge to smile back, instead muttering an excuse and turning to flee the room. I think I’ve filled my emotional quota for the week.

They don’t talk about it again, but a few days later a sticky note appears on his desk. Thanks- MB. Underneath the clear script he’d doodled a small flag- black, grey, white, and purple.

Jon puts it in his right-hand drawer next to an old polaroid of the Admiral, where it stays.

ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28782318

#my writing #aspecarchives #tma #the magnus archives #jonmartin #cw aphobia and internalized aphobia #jonathan sims #martin blackwood #asexual jonathan sims #asexual martin blackwood #jon helps martin figure out he's ace

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the-fandom-is-now-my-life · 3 years

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Hc inverse au! Fem Reader in Victorian era England and ynm characters are in our time.

You are a character in an anime and ynm are in real life

Williams

( he seems like the type to be into really dense, historical mangas)

He first read a manga featuring you when one of his students left their copy on their desk and he had to overview some students while they were using the presentation room.

He mostly just sat in the first row while the group of teens were recording hamlet for the theater class.

He didn't really took the story seriously so he started reading a lady who was trying to seduce a noble for a few pages, he was about to leave the manga given that he supposed it was a hentai but when you poisoned them with the wine cup he found it interesting

The main character had a set of very strong ideals that weren't so common in the historical context, be it strip nobles and royals from benefits, be a suffragette, or something similar .He ate the manga in five minutes

When he returns home (and leaves the item in lost objects, ofc) he checks online to buy the first volume to see if the background and sort are interesting along with every other volume and official light novel and Novella . He usually isn't home from very early to very late at night so it would be Louis most likely the one who receives the box with the books

"Brother, did you buy a box full of comics" Louis asks from the kitchen after he feels his older brother returning home

" oh? They already arrived? I thought they would be here next week" well Louis always was worries about how his brother didn't have any hobbies aside from teaching at the University so he was happy that he found something else to do with his life

He would ask for a sick day on a Monday or Friday so he could plan everything that was needed at his class that day and spend the weekend lazing around and reading the various volumes and the light novels. That day Louis and albert almost cried of happiness, that was the first time he took a sick day in all of his teaching years to take a break

The type of fan who creates theories that everything is symbolism, how they are ambidextrous to show that even if they intend good sometimes their methods are too extreme or how their hat was placed or the color of their clothes show their political affiliation. Nothing can be just a coincidence with him, everything means something

Is a big pain in the ass about historical inaccuracies, be it dress, manners or social hierarchy being off

" But listen this is the late Victorian era, where is their crinoline??/ They are supposed to be a Victorian dandy and the writer wants me to believe they would wear that? In that society?" williams turned on the lights to his younger brother room while walking in circles as if he was trying to calm down

" Williams it's 3 am. Please I want to sleep"

" Oh and don't let me get started when they crossdressed/dressed as lady northinburg, that tight lacing scene made me so angry" he was dragging his words, Louis guessed he was sleep drunk " how much I hate that, karolina or bernadette would kill those producers if they saw it" Louis simply opted to sleep while his brother was ranting about how the hairstyles were al wrong

When speaking of merchandising he appreciates his mature and elegant reputation so he would buy small things like cute stationery and notebooks and a few pens. Most of them either are about the main character, you, or have the anime title or something similar

A few students think that the professor brings some childish pens in case some student forgets one and he doesn't have to give them his mechanical pencil. He actually uses those pens when he is grading the exams. His notebook annotations look a lot cleaner and are more colorfully bc of the markers and pens

When and if your manga gets and anime he would be 100 percent bitching about how they skipped, if you are a minor character, scenes where you are introduced or you character gets development.

" Oh my goodness, they skipped to this ark? And 'the mask'? In that ark we get the development of many characters, yn, edward, Amélie, Alex. We are absolutely robed of their backgrounds and aspirations and how they are all connected"

" Brother be honest with yourself, you only wanted more animated yn, you follow their voice actor on twitter"

" That is not my point!"

Albert

he was watching it when he came late

Albert usually keeps company to his youngest brother until around 5-6 pm, then he leaves for work and returns around 12 am and eats dinner alone mostly.

When he returns from his job the house is more often than not totally dark so he makes his way to the kitchen and microwaves the leftovers and eats silently.

But one day it seems like Louis or williams forgot to turn off the TV before going to bed, he was about to turn it off but decided that watching something with the tv muted wouldn't wake his brothers up and kept watching.

He didn't pay much attention to it at the start but it became routine, he comes home, heats the food, sits down and watches that show so he grew quite fond of it

How much attention he pays to it depends on the type of plot it has, if it is light-hearted humor he would most likely not pay much attention but laugh when a joke came, one the other hand, if it's a more serious he would find it hard to take his eyes away from the screen

Second least likely to buy merchandising, if he buys it's mostly to wear home, a one size too big shirt for a pj (mostly for the comedy anime) or, if they aren't childish and look professional maybe a pocket watch like the one x character uses ( in the more serious one)

Won't buy the mangas if there are any because he is happy watching the animated version and already has to read a lot at work, but if he is gifted the volumes he will read them sparingly, maybe he will finish one volume every week and a half, unlike williams.

Louis

He spends most of his time home because of his illness and doesn't like to stress too much given that it makes the symptoms worse, he enjoys light hearted comedies or cooking in the victorian era or those typical time travelers who now have to live in different situations than those they are used to

He most likely found it after doing all the housework and being bored so he opted to browse the TV or netflix and fell on one specific serie

If it is a comedy he will listen to it while cleaning or cooking, he feels like he does everything faster and the housework is more enjoyable that way.

If it's a cooking related program he will watch as entertainment after doing everything and to get ideas what to cook, he is always surprised with the recipes that your character comes up with, be them savory ( things he will absolutely do the next day for lunch or dinner) or sweet ( things he will make more sparingly given he can't have too much sugar). I think of mangas and series like the duchess' 50 te recipes or shokugeki no soma

If it the third option he was interested on the alternatives to modern things, like how to make a more natural soap with animal fat and wood ash, or how to use certain plants to help a headache or stomach bug.

With merchandising he doesn't buy much, some kitchenware and some bowls mugs and maybe a tea set that isn't much of an eyesore. Overall he isn't all that crazy over that kind of things if there is a cooking book he will definitely buy it

He, like albert, doesn't care much about historical accuracy and if the events that happen are cohesive, he is there to have fun

Fred

He watched it because he heard his classmates talk about it and wanted to join them but was too scared to bother them if he didn't know anything. Baby has the social abilities of an anxious lobster

He comes home from college and looks the anime up in his phone and, like every broke college student, he watches it from an illegal streaming service.

He gets hooked up and stays all night watching it until his clock snaps him out of his trance and makes him drag his feet to his 7:30 am class

Fred tries and fails to talk to the group so, after the lesson, he drags himself to his room to be miserable alone. It's not until he reaches a certain chapter or episode where you say something that make him think, " if you wish to be loved you must face first your fear to be known" he keeps thinking about it, he didn't truly ever talk to the group, he cowarded before even trying.

The next week at that same lecture he approaches the group and tries to make some small talk

" Oh hey uhm i heard the past class that you liked (maga name)" he was this close to running to his desk and act as if nothing happened

" Yeah! You like it too?" The boy seemed to notice fred was nervous

" Yes! I really like it, what is you favorite character? Mine is yn" he certainly didn't have any favorite one before but after this he thinks your character is pretty good " they are really inspiring"

In terms of merch he is broke so there is none, If he had any money to spare he would buy notebooks and even those chibi statues or funko pops

#yuumori #yuukoku no moriarty x reader #yuukoku no moriarty #moriarty x reader #albert james moriarty #professor moriarty #moriarty the patriot #mtp #ynm #gn reader #william moriarty #williams james moriarty x reader #louis moriarty

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colossalsummer · 4 years

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KOTLC book one READ ALONG part 1 of 5

I read the first Keeper of the Lost Cities book and annotated every page. Here are the highlights. (Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3/ Part 4/ Part 5)

Chapter 1

He didn’t seem to realize that unless the giant dinosaur replicas came to life and started eating people, no one cared. Me, the resident paleontology nut: Shut up Sophie I care

Fitz: "Tell me something. Do you really think that’s what they look like? It’s a little absurd, isn’t it?" Please make a good dinosaur reconstruction I’m begging you

Chapter 2

Fitz’s body broke her fall as she landed across his chest. Sophie: And that’s how I met your father

Chapter 3

What was he going to do, whisk her away to some magic elf land?

Fitz: “All of the Lost Cities are real–but not how you picture them, I’m sure.” OOOOHHH that’s the name of… the book… I see now

Humans broke the law all the time. We’re wild rowdy boys we’ll mess u up

Fitz: “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Who came up with that?” Sophie: “Uh, Albert Einstein.” Fitz: “Huh. Never heard of him. But he was wrong.”

Fitz: “The slowest elf can still trump a human—even one with no proper education.” Kinda racist of you but go off I guess

Chapter 4

Sophie: “Then why are we hiding?” Fitz: “We’re dressed like humans. Humans are forbidden in the lost cities—especially here, in Lumenaria…” You’re on some kind of government mission, don’t you have a hall pass

Sophie opened her mouth to defend her race, but she could see Fitz’s point. War, crime, famine—humans had a lot of problems. OH like elves don’t have problems

Sophie: “But… I’ve been hearing thoughts since I was five.” “Five?” Lol knock him down a peg

Fitz: “You heard me?” Sophie: “Was I not supposed to?” Fitz: “No one else can.” OH HO HO

Sophie: “How will I find you?” Fitz: “Don’t worry, I’ll find you.” Not creepy

Chapter 5

She tugged out an eyelash. Not healthy

Okay. If she’s an elf is she not like… ‘Well my parents must be part elf at least.’ Like why would you not immediately be like ‘Um are we elves?’

You could be normal, like your sister. OOF DIRECT HIT

No one understood how she and Sophie could be sisters—especially Sophie. Even their parents wondered about it in their thoughts.

The silverware slipped through Sophie’s fingers. Whoop there it is

And if they weren’t her family… who was? How are her parents confused about this

Sophie: “Was I adopted?” Thank you

Her mom laughed as her mind flashed back to the twelve hours of very painful labor she’d endured. Okaaay

Did they get magically parasitized? Like a cuckoo bird?

Chapter 6

Is Forkle a magical protector? Somebody around here is.

Suspicious Stranger, Definitely Not An Elf: “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to carry her back to my sister’s house. It’s just a few blocks away, and she seems to like you better than she likes me.” RED FLAG RED FLAG

Sure hope Forkle isn’t gonna die…

Sophie: “How am I supposed to trust you when you won’t even tell me anything?” Yeah thanks, this

She gestured to the tree, but there was no one around. No thoughts nearby, either. - Did she imagine it? You saw a boy disappear once, just go with your gut baby

*Fitz ganks Sophie from school to whisk her to elf land* Can’t you wait until lunch or a free period and make up an excuse like an orthodontist appointment or something

Chapter 7

Alden: “I see Fitz wasn’t kidding about the brown eyes. Most unusual.” You as racist as your son? Let’s find out

“Humans,” Alden muttered. I see

Alden: “Kidnapping is a human crime. I’ve never heard of an elf even considering such a thing, much less trying it. What made you think it was one of us?” Of course not we’re perfect whomp whomp

Alden: “We would never have servants. The gnomes choose to live with us because it’s safer in our world. And they help in our gardens because they enjoy it. We’re privileged to have them.” Don’t come at me with that self righteousness, it was a legitimate question all things considered

…everything she’d seen in the elvin world spoke of wealth. Girl you know there’s an underbelly

As Sophie met his cold gaze, she could see what Alden meant about Bronte being hard to impress.

Sophie: “Sorry, I was surprised by your ears.” LOL this must be rude as heck, like, ‘you’re so wrinkly.’

Fitz: “You eat animals?” That must be horrifying to him

“So, Sophie.” Bronte sneered her name like it bothered him to say it. “Alden tells me you’re a Telepath.” NYEHHH MISTER POTTER

Chapter 8

Bronte’s mind felt different than Fitz’s—somehow deeper. LOLLL NO THOUGHTS HEAD EMPTY

She screamed as the goblets shattered against the table and the chairs crashed to the floor, knocking Bronte flat on his back with a thunderous collision. TOUCHDOWN

“Our language is instinctive,” Alden said. “We speak from birth…” TALKING BABIES >:O

Alden: “…though to humans our language sounds like babbling.” So they’re all googoo gaga around this fancy table R/N

Sophie: “What’s a probe?” Fitz: “Just a different way to read your mind. It’s no big deal.” Just a thermometer that goes in your butt. No big deal.

Alden: “How would you like to see Atlantis?” I WOULD LIKE THAT VERY MUCH

Chapter 9

*reading the description of Atlantis* WHERE ARE THE CRAP CITIES. I KNOW YOU HAVE THEM.

She took a slow, deep breath, closed her eyes, and stepped off the edge, screaming the whole way down. Goodbye dignity miss you

…she launched out of the vortex onto an enormous sponge. It felt like being licked from head to toe by a pack of kittens… WHOA! Is this the flagella, or the spicules? I love that

A child strolled past with some kind of chicken-lizard hybrid on a leash. PLEASE BE A DINOSAUR PLEASE

“An eurypterid,” Alden explained, “A sea scorpion.” EEEEOOOEEE I LOVE IT

Chapter 10

Sophie: “I have a file?” *cough cough* surveillance state much

“Reading should be instinctive,” Alden admitted, “but maybe your human education affected you somehow…” School is brain poison, says the flat-earther’s dad

It would be so awful to be an advanced student and suddenly know nothing.

They turned down a narrow, quiet canal lined with purple trees with thick, broad leaves like kelp. Could it be prototaxite or am I dreaming?

Alden took a small, green cube from his pocket. Credit cards are better ‘cause they don’t hurt when you sit on em. Who’s the master race now?

Despite Fitz’s earlier assurances, she couldn’t help wondering if the probe would hurt. Or worse—what humiliating memories Quinlin would find. “Sure are a lot of boy bands in here…”

…Quinlin’s gaze settled on Sophie. “Brown eyes?” WOW not even gonna say hi first huh

“You lick it,” Fitz explained. “They need your DNA.” OH SO DNA ISN’T FAKE HUH FITZ

He licked a silver strip on the wall… LOL I’m CRYING there are other ways to get DNA you GUYS

Quinlin: “Was he…?” Alden: “An elf?”… “I doubt it.” Qinlin: “How can you be sure?” Why, my biases tell me so, my good man.

Alden: “Humans do so love their chemicals.” Says Mr. Big Brain over here lickin’ doorknobs

Alden, cont’d: “If they’re not lighting something on fire, they’re spilling oil into the ocean or blowing something up.” Okay that’s fair

If you want to see my notes for a specific page, send me a message and I’ll take a picture.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

#kotlc #keeper of the lost cities #read along #part one #kotlc funny #kotlc memes #kotlc sophie #kotlc fitz #kotlc book 1 #keeper 1 #shannon messenger #kotlc read along with me

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allondonboy · 4 years

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Medicine for the Soul (Ch 11)

Chapter 11 - Allegretto non troppo: molto crescendo (Ch 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)

For all of us who have shitty parents.

Thanks as always to Anna @jjeanmorreau

Feedback always gratefully received

---

The start to spring break doesn’t go as they expect.

“Alex.”

There’s something in Eliza’s voice that makes Alex’s chest warm and their throat close up and they take a deep breath.

“Mom.”

They watch each other. Alex’s stance slips into one of defiance when Eliza says nothing more. She reaches for them then thinks better of it and sighs, walking to the couch and settling back against the cushions.

“Come. Sit with me.”

Alex does, slowly, curling one foot beneath them.

“How was the end of the semester?”

“Fine,” Alex says shortly. Eliza’s face drops.

“I’ve done some research,” she says, “into what you told me.”

Alex freezes. They hold their breath as Eliza lets out another long sigh.

“I can’t pretend to understand it, sweetie, but I want to try.”

“You…” Alex struggles to sort through the barrage of emotions thundering through them. “Really?”

“All I want is what’s best for you.”

“Until now, that’s been ignoring ‘this non-binary nonsense’, so what’s changed, Mom?” It’s snide but they can’t help it, can’t help thinking that this is a trap as much as they want to believe Eliza is changing, can’t help hoping that this is where it gets better.

“Alex.” Of all the things they expect to hear, it’s not regret, and they sit up. They’ve never heard either of their parents voice regret. “I was wrong.”

Alex lets out a long, shuddering breath through chattering teeth as their chest tightens again in disbelief.

“You were telling me something important about yourself and I dismissed it because I was scared. I am scared. You’re my – my child, and hearing that you’re choosing a life like this makes me worry as a mother because the world out there isn’t kind to people like that – people like you.”

“I’m not choosing this, Mom.”

They don’t know where to look. They can hear in Eliza’s words the same mother who held them when they were sick, who put their fingerpainted portraits on the fridge, who kissed their bruised knees, who they’ve been longing to see all this time, open and honest and loving and there for them, and now, now, she is.

She’s here.

“Right.” Eliza nods in their peripheral vision. “Yes. Maybe – maybe you could help me? Explain some of this to me?”

Alex swallows. “Okay. Yeah.” A million thoughts fight to be the first one out of their mouth and they force them into now and later. A couple slide into angry, but the loudest one is the overwhelming bruise of hurt.

“I need you to know,” they say, “that you hurt me. I don’t know, I don’t think you meant to, but you did.”

They look at her then, and it’s like they’ve shrunken back to their five-year-old height, nervous about coming clean about what really happened to Jeremiah’s latest bird house.

“I didn’t mean to,” says Eliza. “You have to know that, Alex. I would never try to hurt you.”

Alex nods like they believe it. Eliza sighs.

“I want you to understand – growing up, I was always the oddball. There were even fewer women in my area of work than there are today.”

“I know that.”

“I know you do. To hear you say that you were not a woman -”

Alex shakes their head and holds up a hand. “No, I still – part of me still feels like a woman.”

“Okay.” Eliza nods slowly. “So, to hear you say that you were outside the man-woman binary – yes? – sounded like another obstacle in the way of an incredibly promising career.”

Alex grits their teeth as anger claws its way to the surface. “I need you to stop thinking about grades or work or how any of this is going to affect any of that. This is about me, as a person. This hurts, Mom. Dysphoria hurts. The wrong name, the wrong pronouns, hurts. And you know as well as I do that I want to succeed but right now, I just want to be happy.”

Silence settles between them, thick with charged emotion. Eliza scoots closer to Alex and rests a hand on their knee.

“I wanted you to be better than me. To have all the opportunities that I never had, to take the world by storm and change it like you’ve always tried to do. I realised, when you were last home, that that is down to you and the person you have become, and I am so proud of that person.”

Alex gives a one-armed shrug and Eliza chuckles quietly. “You never could take a compliment. Just like your dad.”

Alex shrugs again. Eliza continues.

“I’m proud of all of you, Alex. Even the parts I don’t understand. It’s something special to see the child you’ve raised become so sure of who they are, especially when society isn’t the most accepting.” Eliza makes sure she has Alex’s eye contact. “I’m sorry I was a part of that.”

Eliza opens her arms and Alex shuffles into them and for the first time in so many years, they don’t shy away from the hug or flinch at the squeeze, and they squeeze back with all of them because now, Eliza wants all of them.

“Just say child.”

“You’re older than a child.”

Alex sighs and looks patiently at Eliza. “I don’t mind it, I promise.”

“Mini-me.”

“Kara - ”

“Oh no, is that offensive?”

“No - ”

“Offspring?”

“No, Kara.”

“Descendant.”

“Child is fine.”

“Progeny.”

Alex and Eliza both stare at Kara as she holds up her hands defensively.

“Just a suggestion!”

“I never should have given you that thesaurus,” mutters Alex and Kara hits them with said thesaurus, held open at child: noun.

“My daughter Kara and my progeny Alex,” says Eliza, and she cracks a smile that startles Alex into a snort. “Nice try, Kara.”

“Just use child,” says Alex. “I would appreciate it.”

Eliza pours another glass of water and takes a long sip.

---

“Alex, what’s this I hear about your violin?”

Alex drops their fork. “You – what – who - ”

“A mother has her ways.” Kara’s innocent eyes aren’t hiding anything and Alex kicks her shin under the table. “It’s great that you’re playing again, sweetie.”

“I guess,” says Alex.

“It’s been a long time.” Alex gives Eliza full marks for trying but they can’t deny how good it feels to talk about something other than work, let alone something from another time completely.

Packing to go to college is the first time they’ve properly sorted through their stuff since Kara arrived and they had to make room for her. It unearths a lot of things they’d forgotten about, both deliberately and not, and what had started a simple exercise of deciding what to take with them ends up as a jolting trip down memory lane.

College is the first big step in their life that Jeremiah isn’t there to take with them.

And they hate it.

More than that, they’re scared.

At least at home, the walls carry whispers of him and the memories are so vivid that Alex can almost see him standing at the foot of the stairs, waiting for them. When they butt heads with Eliza, they imagine him stepping in, always the peacekeeper, calming them down and making sure both sides are heard.

Someone had told them they would be too busy at Stanford to miss home. Alex thinks it was supposed to be reassuring, but instead they feel sick.

If they don’t miss home, they aren’t missing Jeremiah.

If they aren’t missing Jeremiah, they’ll forget him.

If they forget him…

They’ll lose him again.

Vasquez’s advice about the third movement plays through their head on the journey back to Stanford.

The conversations with Eliza had unlocked a new kind of energy inside of them. Getting up was a little less hard, breathing a little more easy, and their mind is clearer and more focussed. It leads to revelations in a way they don’t expect, and one of those revelations is that Jeremiah is the key to unlocking the concerto.

He’d never heard them play it in full. They’d talked about it and planned it, down to the meal they’d have before Alex went on stage, but they’d never got it anywhere near performance standard. Learning to play it is the embodiment of moving on from him and acknowledging that they’re making progress and that he’s never going to show up to graduation or concerts or surfing competitions ever again.

Their first practice back is spent annotating the third movement and letting it run through their mind. For all these years, music had been an escape for them, but as they sit there, pencil tapping the page and describing the odd phrase with broad gestures, it hits them that it could – should – be a memorial.

After all, if music could transcend time and space, who’s to say that he wasn’t watching and listening to them right now?

The more they ruminate and the more they practice, the more their mind starts to drift towards Maggie as they play.

Maggie…Maggie is new. Maggie is post-Jeremiah. They think he’d have loved her. They’d have got on, for sure, and frankly, they can imagine the pair of them ganging up on Alex to tease them.

They want to be vulnerable with Maggie, but fuck is it terrifying. Baring their soul when they’ve spent so long barring it up, letting their heart sit behind a wall of armour, keeping emotions boxed up and tucked neatly away in the back of their mind. But Maggie, Maggie is the first person they’ve met who makes them want to talk about all of those feelings down to their favourite memories of Jeremiah and how the gaping hole in their chest from his death is starting to heal, the tiniest bit, with her help and her love.

Maggie hesitates at the threshold as Alex sets up, aware of what it means, that Alex has invited her to hear them play. One on one, it’s already intimate even as Alex does something as mundane as a couple of warm up scales.

They’ve set out a chair for her at the edge of the room. Finding her leaning against the door jamb, they gesture to it with their head and a smile that sets Maggie’s heart at ease. She slowly sits and slumps down comfortably, legs outstretched and crossed at the ankle. Alex darts forward to press a quick kiss to her lips that leaves her blushing and her thumbs fidgeting happily with each other.

“Vasquez isn’t here, obviously,” says Alex as they flatten out their music and settle their bow in their right hand, “and I don’t have the backing track, so you’ll have to use your imagination.”

Maggie nods, trying to reassure Alex and herself at the same time. It seems to work for them, because they close their eyes, take a deep breath, and then the music starts.

“What makes you happy? What makes you really, uncontrollably happy?”

Alex shrugs. “I like science.”

“You need stronger than ‘like’, Alex. What do you love?”

“I…” Alex looks out of the window. The tree is still there, though there are leaves on its branches now, and as they watch, a squirrel scurries down the trunk and disappears. “I love surfing?”

“Okay.” Their teacher nods. “Why do you love surfing?”

“It’s freedom, I guess.” Alex looks down at their bow and pulls off a stray hair. “It’s me, my board, and the water. I’m in control but I’m free.”

“Good! Good!” The teacher is on her feet once more. “Tell me more! What else do you love?”

“Kara,” Alex says after a minute.

“Your sister?”

“Yeah.” Alex adjusts their violin in their grip and scratches their nose, pushing their glasses back up. “Yeah, I love her,” they say, almost to themselves, and the teacher picks up the hint that there’s not really anything else to be said about that.

“Right. Now play, and think of Kara.”

“What were you thinking about?” Maggie’s soft question surprises even her as it breaks the silence. Alex opens their eyes slowly to meet hers.

"What makes you happy? What makes you really uncontrollably happy?"

"You."

It’s slow, and it’s fast. There are hands everywhere and lips blazing trails across skin. It’s fumbling and clumsy as they get caught in their clothes and trip onto the wall, cursing in breathless exhales that turn into giggles.

It’s unlike anything they’ve done before: not in the substance but in the fervour, in how they hold each other as though they were drowning, in the wordless understanding that suddenly connects them.

Alex keeps their eyes locked with Maggie’s as she masters their body with the same finesse with which she plays her guitar. It’s an indescribable feeling of their heart both bursting and being caressed by someone they trust in a way they’ve never trusted anyone before. Calm and peace fights to undo the grip of blissful chaos winding through them and eventually, limbs tangle in the best of ways as they both succumb to dreamless sleep.

#nb!alex #sanvers #sanvers fic #sanvers au #alex danvers #my fic #medicine for the soul #penultimate chapter y'all #short but sweet i hope

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bma-2020 · 4 years

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Okiedok here’s the delio. I have a list of all the blogs from the last six months who’s actively either responded to a meme i sent, responded to a message ive sent, replied to something regarding mally herself, has actually written with me, written a starter for me from my liking a starter call, has at least liked a starter i wrote for them to awknowedge it exists, all that jazz, i have a lot of open field so it’s not just a possible tumblr didnt let them no option anymore, because i send memes to everyone who posts them that i see. I reply to most peoples ooc posts. I like most starter calls I pass by. I try my darndest to actually interact bc i know how it feels to be ignored and its… i’ve been called one before so i’m using the word, thats fluffing cunty behavior, and honestly if you complain about not being interacted with but never even try when i try with you, ya being cunty, end of. I gotta list. That list only entails Mally because she’s who I care about the most. I’m probably gonna start instilling a new rule in all my blogs that if you ignore Mally and/or Darcy( @tasedandconfused ), since I would say they’re my two main blogs tho darcy gets ignored even more than mally does, probably bc i denied canon and left it entirely we know fandom hates that, if either of them is ignored then… Ya out of luck, I’m gonna unfollow you. I’m debating soft blocking everyone who ignored me on both of them but I don’t want to like be mean and deny the chance to eventually try again but at the same time i shouldnt feel bad for taking a stand and saying this is bullsheet, idk my anxiety says im awful for giving a fluff about myself but also i should give a fluff about myself probably, ive nearly died in the last three months, my brain almost exploded, i just had three root canals on one corner of my face, i have to potentially get surgery on my inner ear which i cant even afford, i dont got time to deal with only being used for like smut memes or like as a resource blog or utter bs like that, i dont got time for it. So new rules here. 1: If Mally or Darcy are not acknowledged, written with, responded to, viewed as more than just their fluffing bodies? ya dropped, im unfollowing, potentially soft blocking, which means blocking and unblocking for those not in the know, on all accounts I follow you on. Every single one. I know most of my muses are on sideblogs but despite not being able to send memes from sideblogs you can block people from sideblogs fun fact, i will do that if i have to. 2: I’m gonna be posting SCs, PCs, memes, etc. I like and respond to plotting calls, starter calls, i send memes, all of that. If I don’t get any response within.. I’m giving one week for people who don’t run on a queue and a month and a half to people on a queue based system, if i dont get anything within that time like at least an im being like ‘its posted’ or ‘its queued i wanted to let you know in case tumblrs a fluffbutt’ (i do this sometimes if i dont get even just a like on the starters i post so i at least know people saw it since i know tumblrs bs, i wait until the day they’re active to do so in case theyre busy yknow) basically i need acknowledgment at all. No you can’t claim this is abt follower count bc when you unfollow someone they inevitably unfollow you too, thats gonna drop my following, not as quickly as soft blocking would but i wanna be fair i guess, which leads to: 3: I’m basing this on your activity too, like if i like a think and you’re gone for a month after that its fine, im not gonna unfollow you unless you never come back or youre online and posting others just not mine because that tells me youre specifically ignoring me and im gonna drop you for that end of. I’m done with the bullsheet im done w the dillish behavior, i love friendship but if im giving and never receiving thats extremely one way and not gonna work. I check through my follow list weekly and i go back about five-10 pages on someones feed before i unfollow them to see their actual activity and see if theyre here or if its a q so. I’m thorough basically. 4: You dont have to be active with me on all your blogs, i mean i’d prefer it but thats hard as fluff so essentially if you have like five blogs and are just like trying w me on two or three thats fine. Ten blogs, four or five with at least a plot formed is cool. Multis just one muse is all I’d need. I’m not gonna unfollow the blogs youre not writing w me on if you at least write w me on some. Again, specifically Mally and/or Darcy. If you ignore both of them, we’re done. I havent been active on darcy because of being ignored and its a huge butt mess and im just tired i wanna use my babies, you don’t get to have my ‘better’ muses like i know a lot of ppl only follow me for my boys or my villains, you don’t get them if you ignore my baby. But, there is a limit there too. 5: If you never respond to a meme or thread even once with Mally or Darcy, or post a starter, i reply, its never replied to again after a month, I’m unfollowing and/or soft blocking for that too. Bc that means youre just raising my hopes to fluff with me or get someone else and honestly, youre even more cunty than than the people just flat out ignoring me if you do that. And this isnt a specific person, this is five of the people actually on my list. Yes, my list is also annotated with specifics again I was very thorough on this yesterday, I hyperfixated I’ll admit it, I’m in a fluffing depressionary bubble and being told to get over it because people want something they dont deserve to have to. I am a believer that people deserve good things but if youre purposefully being cunty… no you dont. 6: No I’m not releasing my list, maybe I will and I’ll omit the urls because I don’t want people being buttholes to each other too but otherwise, yall not seeing it im not giving a callout because… really thats just unnecessary here. I don’t think yall are toxic people or something i just think yall are unintentionally being cunty. And no I don’t mean everyone that follows me i mean the ppl that add up to what i’ve documented so far and fit the bill of butthat that i’ve shown, its behaviors yall gotta check before ya wreck. Yes there will be some people who have priority, everyone has those people, I write w kathryn on other platforms since she doesnt go on here as often but when Kathryn returns from war here (if she does cause she also agrees most ppl on this platform are cunty, i feel really bad saying that word so often but im gonna keep doing it i recently deleted an ask saying I was a huge cunt for not sending someone smut memes when I didn’t even follow them or know they existed so, again the travesty of this place is nutballers) same with owly, alex is here too, my most active partners are always going to be priority because theyre the ones who show the most interest and the most care. I understand that with others as well which is why I have the timeframe set up, because I want to be as open and shizz as possible while atill being firm i guess. I don’t want to have extreme double standards like its impossible for double standards not to exist at least a little bit but I want to avoid a golden chest full of them I guess. 7: I don’t have a seven rn, this was an even number and it bothered me. Seven is nust my warning that I’m bittery writing this on mobile so formatting is not real but i tried my dandest to make this look like something people might actually mind. I dont want to be butty, i dont want to be awful, i dont want to start drama or have drama but that shizz comes around anyways so i might as well make my space as okay for me as i can cause im supposed to avoid stress so my brain doesnt almost explode again, like again i almost fluffing died i dont need ppl fake being my friend or anything, i want stuff to be real and clear. I want to be happy to be on here again and have fun like i used to since my health is plummetting and I’m not allowed to go outside near plants by myself anymore because i welt up. I have plants outside my work place and im surrounded by chemicals all day long I’m welted from here to new york constantly and never comfortable in my own skin because of it and constantly see people online acting like these actual real problems are pretentious because ‘its an excuse’ when, im a fluffing sagittarius, do you know how much i want to magically be a millionaire so i can pay for friends and my own medical stuff and go on traveling and adventures, be outside probably not camping bc as a pagan i know thats a death sentence but like be outside, lay on grass, go back to swimming because i used to swim competitively and due to health reasons i can barely even go in a pool anymore because theres too much sunlight which, bit plot twist i know, im fluffing allergic to vitamin D and the rays of the sun, so go figure, attempts to be healthy kill me more, i also cant eat most plants and am constantly dying from just eating food, they dont know whats wrong with me. i cant fix it by going ve/gan for a month inf act i tried and it almost made my heart stop thanks society. These arent excuses these are the lives of disabled and diseased and to a lesser but still very real point, ethnic lives every fluffing day. This is real shit and its murder and online and gaming? It may be all I have soon since I can’t just go out and make new friends cause, again, I’d fluffing die. I get sick going to the mall or the movie theater, I miss theme parks so much but have to minimize it to weeks i dont have work so i dont get fired for having a welt while working in the beauty industry. I may have to get a degree online and change my field entirely because of my illness that nobody understands. People even make fun of it constantly online and I wish I could just drop online entirely because of how unbelievably ableist the entirety of the world is, i wish i could drop humans in general for their ableism, but i cant. I don’t have choices in most cases, but throwing away people who maybe purposefully maybe unintentionally thats why i’m giving you this warning and will be repeating this warning for awhile, this is where i have choice. I have to use what little choice I have in life while I can since everytime i go to movies or a concert or a theme park i almost die because of not having an immune system that functions or being in certain air qualities pr being near plants or unclean people, I may not have much time and I gotta do whats best for what little mental health I have, and if that means dropping people i care about and really want to write with and do things with but who ignore me then, i guess so be it.

#out.#illness cw #health cw #food mention #ive been writing this since noon and its now two pm so this is great #i’s usually put this under a read more but... maybe most people dont deserve a read more rn lol #their behavior will keep being awful if its not pointed out to them so #im done im gonna go welt up from hugging my cat and cry for a bit because i feel mean

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exeggcute · 5 years

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the way a lot of self-described “bookworms” seem to approach reading strikes me as more of an act of collection and physical/intellectual curation rather than something motivated by any innate enjoyment of reading (other than the inward-gazing spectacle of Look At Me, The Bookworm, Currently Reading A Book! Isn’t That A Sight To Behold!) and it’s obviously not, like, the worst phenomenon that’s ever existed but it is kind of weird and annoying. I don’t think it’s something necessarily unique to reading and there are probably equivalent subcultures for film, music, video games, what have you, but I’m less entrenched in those things than I am with bookworm types (or at least I used to be) and I think books hit the particular sweet spot of being cheap, easily-collectible physical objects while also being somewhat “intellectual.”

actually, I do see this bookworm phenomenon somewhat less than I used to, and I’m not sure if it’s because I just occupy different circles now or if the general population of book-obsessed people have shifted their attention towards something else (if I were being less generous, I’d say that it’s because nobody even pretends to read anymore, but I can’t throw stones in my own glass house here) but back in the 2011-ish internet era I felt like you couldn’t go more than five minutes without running into a picture of someone’s “reading nook” populated by half-drunk cups of tea and a near-untouched copy of whatever young adult novel was popular at the time, or like a coffee mug for sale that said “don’t even talk to me until I’ve eaten every single book on the goodreads top 100 list this year,” or even just some vague platitude about people being really into the mildewy smell of old books. and like, you know, do whatever makes you happy, nobody’s getting hurt, whatever. but it was kind of bizarre seeing so much aesthetic and intellectual value placed on the idea of Books and Reading but so few discussions about the nature or content of any of the things people were supposedly reading (and any rare discussions were almost certainly about a select few genres and titles, and very rarely in-depth or under any kind of critical or analytical lens).

a lot of it strikes me an obsessive worship of Books as a concept more than the information that they contain. like I clearly understand the sentimental value of a well-loved book, don’t get me wrong–I have some books that are so disgustingly old and thrashed and annotated that they’re essentially unreadable, but the emotion and memory associated with them far outweighs their usefulness as an object–but treating anything bound between two covers as a piece of faux-religious iconography is laughable. a copy of shakespeare’s first folio is as much a book as a paperback harlequin novel you buy at an airport bookstore, but they clearly hold different levels of value (both for the content they contain and as physical objects). a sentiment I saw expressed by a lot of people in the golden era of bookworms was how reprehensible it was to physically harm, alter, or modify a book in any way, regardless of the intention behind it. sure, I’d be a little miffed if I loaned someone a book and they dog-eared it without asking, and I’d never do anything to alter a book I borrowed from a library, but I do dog-ear my own books sometimes, especially ones that are old or cheap or not otherwise physically special. maybe a first-edition hardback gets the dignity of a bookmark, but my childhood copies of magic treehouse books didn’t bring me any less enjoyment just because I’d folded down the corners of pages. the same thing goes for annotations, or warped spines, or pretty much any other signs of wear and tear that are incurred by actually engaging with a book–at some point it’s almost impossible to even read the damn thing unless you rough it up a bit, and presumably your motivation for owning books is to read them and not just to put them on a bookshelf so you can take pictures of your collection. (right? right??) same goes for the people who still act like listening to an audiobook somehow doesn’t “count “or that ebooks are for lesser-minded fools (which is distinct from actual criticisms about the nature of DRM, or people who genuinely have an easier time reading something printed on a page, or even matters of pure preference). it’s even more encapsulated by people who decry historical acts of mass book-burning by lamenting the physical loss of libraries being burned, as if the charred pages could feel physical harm, rather than the loss of the ideas contained within those books and (more importantly) the social and political implications of destroying and suppressing information, and what it means to have singled out certain demographics and authors (ahem) to be destroyed.

I think a lot of what it comes down to is a physical fetishism of books (in the non-sexual definition of the word, people, don’t be weird) and an obsession with collection and curation and aesthetics that does extend to pretty much any other hobby on earth and is part of living in a capitalist and consumerist world where it feels good to Own Things, but it’s enhanced by the fact that there’s a supposed intellectual superiority in being a Person Who Reads in a way that extends beyond normal in-group snobbery. like, the guy on /mu/ who owns every radiohead album on vinyl is engaging in his own little dick-measuring contest with other /mu/ users and may decry normie music taste as inferior to his own enlightened collection, but for the most part his sentiment stays contained within niche circles. and even then, very few people would consider the blanket act of “listening to music” to be a hobby (cue the gabriel gundacker vine), let alone one that makes you better or smarter than other people.

even the idea of Reading as a hobby (as in, “oh, I love reading!”) feels kind of alien to me, because I do enjoy lots of genres and forms of writing, but I wouldn’t say I necessarily love reading as an act in itself. reading can be really fucking tedious! especially reading something that sucks, or trying to read when your brain is riddled full of holes like mine is, or reading when you’re just not in the mood. I like to read when it involves authors and works that tickle my fancy, and some may have even described my past reading habits as “voracious,” but it’s not that I’m motivated by the indiscriminate act of drawing my eyes across a sentence and processing those words in my temporal lobe any more than my reason for playing video games is that I enjoy the sensation of analog sticks beneath my thumbs.

#I think this is somehow less coherent than the essay I wrote in my dream but.. anyway

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oberlinexecutivefunctioning-blog · 5 years

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Advice for Long Study Sessions

As finals approach, I imagine that almost everyone is facing down the barrel of long nights reading, cramming, drafting, and editing. Here are some clever ways I've picked up to break up, optimize, and fully utilize that five hour study block on your calendar.

Use the Pomodoro Method. This method is the most famous way I know to break up a long study session, and I have to include it first. The basics are as follows: you work for 25 minutes, take a break for 5 minutes, work for 25, break for 5, etc. Every four cycles (2 hours), you take a 15 minute break to refresh. A lot of people swear by this method or some adjusted version of it. I know some people who promise that a 24 min work/6 min break ratio is ideal. Some insist that 50 min work/10 min break works best. No ratio is right for everyone, so feel free to try a few out to see what you like. There are TONS of pomodoro timer apps out there, including ones that block use of your phone during the work time, and you can always pick up a regular kitchen timer as well if you want to stay well and truly off your phone. I find that the Pomodoro method works well for anyone who a. Doesn't mind working by a timer and b. Wants something simple and customizable that takes little extra thought.

Use Music Cues. This one works really well for me, but it's a bit unorthodox. Basically, you format your study around a certain playlist or set of playlists. First, take some time to decide the "function" for certain songs; the rules can be broad, like "songs without lyrics are study songs and songs with lyrics are break songs," but I find it more effective when actual specific songs have their own functions. After all, I like listening to songs without lyrics when not studying, too! For me, there's a certain song ('oranges in winter' by Bassti) that signals to my brain that It Is Study Time. My study playlist starts with that song, works through around 30 minutes of Study Music, then hits a specific song (like Iron & Wine's awesome version of 'Time After Time') that means it's time for a break. I break for three songs, and then 'oranges in winter' plays again. Every time I listen to the playlist, the cues grow stronger. I recommend this method for anyone who a. Likes listening to music while studying, b. Doesn't like working by a traditional timer, and c. Doesn't mind taking some time to make a study playlist like this.

Plan Breaks in Advance. Personally, I hate the feeling of reaching a study break and suddenly having to decide what to do for 5-10 minutes. Decisions are stressful, and more often than not, I end up spending the whole break thinking up things I could be doing and trying to decide which one I should do OR scrolling something on my phone to avoid the decision, neither of which is a real break. I've listed some possible break activities on this blog before, so go check those out if you dont know what sort of breaks you want to be taking. If you do have some idea of how you like to take your study breaks, try listing them out for yourself on paper. Next time you stare down a long study session, pick a few out and place them in order that you want to do them. If you keep a study playlist, you could even pick certain break songs that indicate different break activities. A key is to choose more than one break activity and alternate them. Your brain thrives on variation!

Spend your First Study Block Planning. You may have noticed a theme in this list by now. Breaking up a large block of study into smaller blocks of time is essential. Unless you manage to tap into your hyper focus (man I wish I could do it on demand), you will need to pace yourself. Part of pacing yourself is making small, manageable goals that each fit into one study block. For example, I'm a slow reader, especially when I'm researching for a paper. My study blocks often say "Read and annotate 25 pages". Do I have 300 pages to read? Yes I do. But there's no way I'm getting that done in even ten 30 minute blocks of time if I want a quality annotation list to use for my paper. It's no use putting down "Read x book," because I'm not going to be able to do that. If you set down manageable goals for your study blocks ahead of time, you will be able to a. Meet your goals!, b. Feel accomplishment, and c. Know what you're supposed to be doing at every moment of the long study session so you're never left floundering in limbo-zone.

Be Open to Changing Locations. Sometimes, staring at the same damn wall for five hours just feels like torture. It's important that you have several study locations in mind for yourself so that you can refresh your mind, especially if you get stuck or frustrated. Even just changing which seat you're sitting in at the same table could provide you with a fresh perspective, both literally and mentally. Bonus points if you manage to sit in every level of Mudd during the same long study session. (They really do each have their own personality.) Extra bonus points if you get some fresh air while you change locations. But caution! Make sure you have a few locations in mind BEFORE YOU START. It's way too easy to end up wandering campus in search of the Perfect Study Spot for hours on end. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be new.

Stock your Backpack. If you're going to be studying for even a few hours, you're gonna need a snack. You're gonna need water (and lots of it). You might want any any point: mouthwash, deodorant, a hairbrush, stim toys, stress balls, extra pens, highlighters, post-its, photos of loved ones, mints, tampons, earbuds, gum, and/or tissues. A long study session is a marathon, so be prepared! Think I'm being dire? These are ALL examples of real things I have really needed during a study sesh. Customize the list for your needs.

Make Yourself at Home. This is related to the previous point, but it's important to emphasize. Studying can be really enjoyable (really!) and it can also be really grueling. Most importantly, it is your own time, and it's important that you make it your own. Bring pillow and blanket to Mudd. Erect a shrine in the corner of a lounge. Do what you need to do to make YOU comfortable. It is incredible that we are allowed, encouraged, and (yes) essentially forced to spend hours on end learning and growing. I know those long finals hours can be super stressful and demoralizing. You might feel like beating yourself up. "Why didn't I just get this done earlier?!" or "Why am I just not getting this?!" Try not to get sucked into that stuff. What's passed is passed, and you will have time for reflection later. When it's study time, you have only the tasks in front of you and the environment around you. As long as you plan those well and make them as nice as possible, you are on your way.

I have spent my share of nights fretting over papers due the next day and long sessions before a test cramming as much information as I can into my head. I'm not here to shame you for being behind or stressed. These tips are meant to be taken as guides, not instructions. If you never make The Perfect Study Bag filled with everything you could need, well guess what me neither. Gosh, who has time for that? Serious props to you if you do it. (Send pics, seriously) But thinking about what you need during a study session is important, and that's why it's on this list. I promise that you are doing GREAT, and I wish you the best of luck these finals!

#ef post #evan post #study tips

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laus-life · 5 years

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senior year

they say history repeats itself. and i can currently say that yeah, that’s true. my senior year of high school i was hella angsty and ready to move out-- ready to gtfo of my house. i was depressed, using exercise to escape reality, and smoking weed to numb my emotions and fears.four years later, my senior year of college i’m in the same spot. sitting in class stoned, depressed, and freaking the fuck out about how behind i am with literally everything.

i struggle with procrastination (ie. this). but it’s rooted in something more than just simple laziness. my procrastination comes from many things, one of which being my fear of being stupid. ever since i was little i felt that i was stupid. one specific memory of this was when i was in second grade and we had to read a book and answer followup questions that would give us points. we could later use those points to buy really neat things at the end of the six weeks. i knew how to read, but for some reason, i wasn’t actually understanding what i was reading, so i never could answer the questions, therefore i never had enough points to buy anything cool. naturally, i felt stupid. i would always see my friends with super cool prizes like a multi-colored disco ball. that really discouraged me and made me think i was a total idiot, so i never would put work in. now, fourteen years later, i still feel that. there’s a reason i’ve taken comp 303 four fucking times! i was too embaressed to turn in my papers. i felt that they would never be good enough.

another thing that my procrastination comes from is disapointment. the look is what really kills me. seeing someone you really admire sigh, look at you with watery eyes, maybe even raising their voice a bit, and then them saying “you’re better than this...” ugh fuck. it wrecks me. so many fucking times that i’ve done stupid shit and disapoint my dad. i tend to have this when it’s for a guy teacher. i see them as father figures and i don’t want to let them down, but i make it basically imposible for myself! i don’t do the work in fear that it’s going to suck or they’re not going to like it. so my smart ass decides not to turn it in, or never fucking do it! now i’ve cornered myself and i’ve fallen in some sort of loop. i have so much fucking shit to do. graduation is less than five weeks away‽‽ i have a 30 page research paper due two nights ago, all of my native american history questions and Inca paper, a five page spanish paper, no clue whats due in NT, two papers for Comp, and of course the one that was supposed to be done last fucking sememster- senior paper. that bloody paper. i hate past me for doing this. all i had to do was an annotated bibligraphy for 20 sources, in spanish. but no, i let myself freak out and now it’s been since october. i’ve avoided that professor and i cry every time i think about it. but i need to get over my fear of disapointing him, and realize i’m not stupid.

in my spanish civilization and culture class today i realized, “hey... i know a lot of stuff” my nickname on my backpacking trip was “fun facts.” i love learning and i know a lot of stuff. yeah a lot of it might be useless information, but for some reason, to me it’s really important. so why not let myself talk about these “important” things? that’s all i really have to do. senior paper is Don Quijote and how Cervantes uses satire in it. i fucking love that shit. but for some fucking reason i cant. i know my professor knows a lot about the topic, and that scares me.

what if i’m not good enough? i am good enough

what if i’m stupid? i am smart

#procrastination #fear #senior year

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denbroughbill · 7 years

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puppy knuckles (pt 1)

summary: “do an eddie and richie meeting in college au fic!” thanks, anon ✿

eddie buried himself deeper in his jacket. the little glowing open sign seems like it’s laughing at him. the neon red letters distort themselves into manic grinning faces, mocking eddie for his inability to open the door and walk in. through the window he can see people gathered in chairs, a short queue at the counter, and the smell of coffee wafts out into the cold autumn's night air. it was just a quaint little coffee shop, right outside of campus where some students worked easy jobs and others studied, and bill promised him a job this morning

"remember why we left d-derry?" bill asked him this morning, ransacking their dorm for the notes from his morning class. it's a question eddie's heard a lot. a question asked, breaking the silence of feeding each other chinese take out while watching shitty week night television, or asked when eddie denied his friend's invitation to whatever frat party was happening that night.

eddie rolled his eyes, flipping the page of his notebook. bill answers his own question, and they speak in unison. "to meet new people."

bill leaned against their shared desk. it seemed the only person eddie spoke to since they left derry besides him, was his mother, the person he was supposed to be running away from. ms. kaspbrak had a tight grip on her son, and bill thought he needed some freedom, and somehow got eddie to agree on going away for college. it only gotten worse. eddie and his mother had a calling schedule and if eddie didn't call her, she was ringing bill's phone for an explanation,

"you're the one who took my baby away from me," she spat through the phone.

bill wasn't phased on bit as he finished annotating his essay. "ms. kasprak, eddie won't be able to get through to you if you're on the line with me,"

there was a pause of silence, "very well then," and a click before the dial tone.

the frigid weather had turned eddie's nose red now, and he thinks about what he should've said this morning

what he should've said when bill said, "you would look g-guh-good at the shop," he was grinning, stuffing stray papers and note book in his book bag. 'good behind the counter of a place that sells overpriced iced coffees for the entire impatient study body when we have a coffee maker in this dorm?' is definitely not what eddie responded with. he didn't respond at all, actually.

bill and eddie had been the best of friends since grade school. bill and silver, his trusty bicycle, were always getting into some sort of trouble. eddie, just so happened to keep bandages in his fanny pack. bill denbrough was the name of the lips of girls and boys alike on the playground, when he snuck off and dragged eddie with him to sneak through holes in the school yard fences. they threw rocks and climbed trees and called out each other's names when they reached the top. everyone liked bill, and bill liked everyone, too. but he chose eddie because he didn't slam doors and speak so loud., like the other kids.

eddie was grateful to have a friend like bill, because he didn't look after him, he encouraged him. there was difference that he couldn't exactly explain, but bill treated him as equally, even when eddie was inches shorter and missing his two front teeth. it made him feel better about himself, and brave. but they weren't boys at recess anymore and they are far from home, they're in college now and this would be eddie's first real job. he's not sure if delivering new papers for scrap change counts yet.

"are you going in?" a voice asks him, and he whips his head around to see a girl holding the door open. the bright chatter of the coffee shop grinds in his ear and he feels his stomach turn, but he swallows hard and smiles at her.

"yeah, thanks,"

there were plant terrariums hanging from the ceiling along with unique light fixtures, but eddie only looked ahead as he walked through the aisle of stools and chattering people. luckily, there was no line at the counter.

bill leaned against the counter, folding his arms and smiling at his approaching friend. "what c-c-can i get you?"

"an apron," eddie scoffed, looking around the place. it was small but definitely crowded. one of those places where there's so many people in one place all you could focus on was yourself. the noises didn't bother him much, he just hoped everything covered their mouth when they sneezed.

when he turned, bill was no longer behind the counter. he was in front of him, now, towering over eddie with an extra foot or so on his height. and when eddie reached for the apron, bill pulled it back.

he leaned down just a tad, and asked, "is that my jacket?"

eddie rolled his eyes, snatching the apron. "it's your beanie, too,"

and that's how his first day of work started. it was just the two of them that night, their work areas separate. eddie was behind a counter stocked full of fresh pastries and desserts, bill was across from him and was in charge for making drinks.

when the store closed, bill took care of that evil, intimidating, neon flashing light outside for eddie, defeating it with a single flick of the OFF switch. while eddie picked up chairs and bill mopped the floor, headphones over his ears, the manager introduced herself. she said she liked how eddie worked, that he was quick, and that she wanted him in tomorrow morning so she could show him how to make the drinks himself.

while walking to their dorms, bill joked about how his friend was stealing his job.

bill was walking in front of eddie, ahead of him and backwards, so he can talk to him still. "we were suppose to w-wuh-work together, now you're taking my shift,"

eddie smirked, but said nothing. he knew bill was probably relieved, the boy complained about his morning shifts all the time, never leaving fast enough to get to class on time. eddie normally liked to sleep in until noon or so, but he didn't mind the extra money, and his boss seemed to really like him, for it being his first day.

bill shook his head, pausing so eddie could catch up. when he did, bill wrapped his arm around his friend, resting his head on top of his. "first my jacket, now my job," he shook his head again, making 'tsk, tsk, tsk' sounds of disapproval. the two walked back to their dorm just like that.

the next morning, eddie awoke to loud beeping and a sticky note placed over the electronic letters of his alarm clock. 'make sure to take your meds :)' scribbled with bill's messy hand writing, the two have joked how it's almost worse than mr. keene's prescription papers. there was also a mug of coffee, still warm, and probably better than the ones he would learn how to make today.

the shop was different this early, the morning light shined through the windows and left sun rays, and eddie heard wind chimes sing above him when he opened the door that he swore he didn't hear last night. manager, name tag indicated her name was miranda, gave eddie his own personalized one. she walked him through the steps and instructed him to fix two coffees, one for her and one for him.

"oh, i'm okay, ma'am. i mean, miranda. i'm okay," but she insists.

they lean against the counter and laugh at classes for a while in the empty store, but the wind chimes sing their soft song again and she leans into him, with one hand on his shoulder, "put the drink away, you have your first customer,"

lots of students, similar to bill, thought taking morning classes was the smart route to take, because it would be just like high school. eddie didn't know of a lot of people who just classes later in the day like himself, but this boy and he shared the same idea.

when eddie first meets him months ago, he is a mess of flailing limbs and worry lines, almost stumbling face first into a pillar covered in club meeting flyers, almost.

he expects the worst, a broken nose would be the second injury he would have to explain to his mom. but a boy catches him, arms out in a hugging gesture that seems a little awkward.

"you okay there, man?"

the boy with glasses takes it in all cool, like he did everything. the boy, from one of his classes, who leaned back with his pen in his mouth and memorized notes instead of writing them down, who bounced his leg while staring at the clock. that boy, who was always cool.

eddie almost thought he would yell at him or something, but he says,

"watch yourself next time, alright?" and walks away with an amused smile.

it's him again, entering the coffee shop on this wednesday morning. he has a cigarette tucked behind one ear and his hair looks like just woke up, but eddie pretends he doesn't notice and is scrubbing the same spot on the counter with a wash rag. he orders a coffee,

"six sugars, plenty of cream, please,"

eddie laughs. he tries to hold it in, he really does. but he remembers how antsy the boy was in class the day before, chewing his gum hard and patting his hands on his knees for the last five minutes of class, and maybe this overly sweet drink was the reason. the boy raises and eyebrow, and eddie explains, "you seem like the type."

he shrugs, smiling sheepishly, his toothy smile, "i guess i am."

he took his drink without another word, and the ghost he left in that shop haunted eddie the rest of his shift. ✿ TAG LIST: @richiestoziers, @ghoulishkaspbrak, @beepbeep-trashmouth

#fan fic #writing #eddie kaspbrak #bill denbrough #richie tozier #sydwrites

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angeltriestoblog · 4 years

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The One With All The Books: My favorites + tips on how to get out of your reading slump!

Ever since I was a kid, I've been obsessed with books: while most children I knew then were preoccupied with Barbie dolls and battleships, I immersed myself in fictional worlds and found trusty companions in protagonists who embarked on adventures that transcended the limits of the physical universe. Back then, I would sleep with them under my pillow, read them in the backseat of our family car even on rather turbulent road trips, and turn to them during boring class discussions.

Over time, they ended up shaping my opinions and world views, fueling my hunger for knowledge, and inspiring me to put my own thoughts down on paper. It's safe to say I wouldn't be the person I am now, had it not been for my love for the written word. Which is why I find it odd that I haven't made any of the standard recommendation posts that would normally be found on the personal blog of someone like me. In an attempt to fix that, I'm sharing with you my eight favorites of all time, not only to give them a fitting tribute (that will still not be able to do their profound impact any justice), but also encourage you to pick up a good read! Who knows, maybe it'll change your life as much as it did to mine!

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

As a kid, I loved both science and fiction, but always saw them as two concepts completely opposite from each other. When I found out that they could marry and live in perfect harmony in a genre of their own, I was over the moon. It was exciting enough, getting to teleport across universes by folding the fabric of space and time, encounter terrifying creatures who somehow parallel actual people on Earth, and learn about obscure scientific concepts. But, the fact that it manages to tie in the triumph of good over evil, and the power of familial love was just the cherry on top for me. I brought this with me everywhere I went for a solid two months, obviously with good reason.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

My mom had recommended this to me in high school, and I put off buying it for so long because I originally thought I was "too old to be reading stuff like that". Much to my surprise, what was practically disguised as a children's book, with its simple prose and watercolor illustrations, served as both as a moral allegory and criticism of the way adults operate in today's world. Though its length can trick you into thinking it's a fast read, most passages demand to be looked at a second time, reflected on, and shared to the nearest person—if you're the type to protest against annotating, you might have to rethink your stance.

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

When I was in grade school, my parents had this rule where I was only allowed to buy a new book during special occasions, to control the growing number we had piling up in our house. I remember seeing this in the NBS branch in Glorietta, and having to wait until the end of the quarter to ask my parents to get it for me. Oh, well: as the cheesy saying goes, "True love waits." Although if there is anyone who loves books more than I do, it's Meggie Folchart, as she has inherited her father's gift of bringing fictional characters to life. But, when disaster strikes, as it always does, she must learn how to harness this special power and save her family. The world-building and imagery is unbelievably rich, Funke doesn't just paint a picture in your head: she creates a whole ass movie. No wonder eight year-old me put her up on a pedestal.

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (the entire series, but maybe the third was my favorite) (ok it was, don't tell the two others) by Jenny Han

The blurb at the back of the book certainly doesn't do it justice: I remember finding this at a nearby Fully Booked and putting it down instantly, dismissing it as another cliche YA novel. Sure, Lara Jean Covey has to deal with all five of her unsent love letters to her crushes being mysteriously sent out, but she also grapples with important issues such as identity, family, and—in the third book—the future. I read Always and Forever, Lara Jean during the summer before I entered university, and every single line resonated with me so much I paused at the end of every chapter to take a crying selfie. Plus, Peter Kavinsky is my literary dream boy: if I ever expect my future significant other to take me on a cross-country road trip to go antique shopping, they'll only have him to blame.

Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler

We're taught that we shouldn't judge books by their covers, but I'm glad my twelve year old self decided to brush that aside when she bought this. Although I didn't end up reading it until five years after, I devoured the thick hardbound in a day and a half, and was reduced to a ball on my couch shortly afterwards. I know the book has the most self-explanatory title, but it's just that it takes on the universal experience of first love and heartbreak so authentically. The stream of consciousness writing style and slow pacing may be an issue for some, but I reckon it adds to its charm, as it allows Min to take readers through all the motions of a relationship in a way so relatable, entering her headspace feels like slipping into a second skin.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens by Sean Covey

A friend of mine in high school had complained to me that her mother had made this required reading for her, and I suggested I'd take it off her hands for a bit. I ended up going through her copy thrice in a month. (Ah, what I would give to go back to the days when I could still afford to read on school days.) An issue a lot of books that claim to "change your life" have is that they elaborate on these supposedly groundbreaking ideas, yet fail to break them down into doable action steps. Fortunately, Covey shares his practical advice in a structured manner, complete with examples, illustrations, and the occasional dad joke, freeing it from any preachy or condescending undertones. I don't know how to say that this is the only self-help book you'll ever need without sounding like someone from the Home Shopping Network.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

This paperback intimidated me from the moment I first saw it on a shelf, because of the metaphorical title and steep price. But, good thing I got around to buying it eventually: this harrowing story is told by a promising doctor with his whole life ahead of him, who turns into a patient as soon as he is diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. Reading this was difficult, because I knew that no matter how hard I tried to dissect and reflect on the questions of life and death being posed by the author, I could never come close to understanding how he felt. But, that didn't make the experience any less necessary.

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

Creativity is a rather difficult concept to talk about in depth, because it seems so abstract. This is why the author advises readers to treat it as a living entity: one that bestows the best of ideas to those who nurture it, complements the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, and demands our full participation despite the looming presence of fear. I finished this on a school bus ride home from school, and the minute I got home, I marathoned Gilbert's TED talks and keynote speeches on YouTube: there is a distinctly tender, somewhat spiritual quality in the way she speaks about her craft, that easily makes you hang on to and follow every word she says.

Now I know books aren't everyone's go-to when looking for a way to pass the time: I've heard people say that they can't find time for it, that there's nothing out there that piques their interest, or they simply don't have the patience, given that social media posts and Netflix shows practically hold our attention spans captive in this day and age. While all are valid points, they can clearly be worked around! I was in a funk during the start of my Christmas break, because I hadn't touched a non-academic book since the new school year had started. But, I managed to finish four in the span of a month, and am currently on my fifth, as of this writing. Here are some tips I have, just in case you want to kick your reading slump in the ass as well.

Start small. Like with any habit you want to build, introduce the behavior in small increments: five push-ups, five minutes of meditation, fifty pages of a novella. Then, once you're starting to get the hang of it again and you don't feel your two brain cells shrieking for help because they can't figure out if "lived" is an actual word in the English language, you can increase it depending on your progress. This happened to me when, thanks to a notably bad case of tsundoku, I had amassed 14 (!!!) unread books in a year. I decided to tackle as soon as my vacation started, so I kicked it off with a rather easy read: Matilda by Roald Dahl, 232 pages thin, with numerous drawings.

Read something you'd actually enjoy! It's gonna be hard to stay engaged in something that doesn't excite or entice you: reading is supposed to be a hobby, not a household chore. Find something written on an interest of yours, a field of study that you've always been curious about, a person that you've looked up to for forever: I truly believe that there is no topic that hasn't been written about at this point in time.

On a somewhat related note, don't be afraid to DNF books that don't satisfy you. A lot of us pick books up because everyone else loves it, and are afraid to put it down for the fear of being othered. But, if we've all come to believe that we should sever ties with people who no longer serve us, what makes it any different for books that just don't touch our lives? I remember reading The Bell Jar when I was 13 because it came highly recommended by someone on Instagram who I found really cool. It was far too heavy for me, but I couldn't find the heart to shelf it especially after how much it cost me.

Remember that physical copies are not the only way to go. Thanks to the presence of audio and e-books, one can now enjoy stories anywhere and any time, without the daunting feel of several pages, or the burden of lugging around heavy hardbounds. (Although you are missing out on one of the best parts of reading: new book smell. Your loss.) One might find it easier to process the information this way, or even appreciate whatever the author has to say.

Talk about it with a friend! They could help keep you accountable in following through your reading goals, give you solid (and sometimes even personalized) recommendations, or accompany you in mourning over the death of a major character. It's always been a dream of mine to start or join a book club for these exact reasons, but I'm afraid this post is possibly the closest I could get to that right now. Nevertheless, I'd love to hear your suggestions and give you more of my own! Drop me a message here (or here, here, and here!) if ever you're interested.

Love and light,

Angel

#recs #angeltriestoblog #life dump #book recommendations #my favorite books #reading slump #this is why i have poor eyesight

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tkwrtnewsfeed · 7 years

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Newsfeed #86 August 13, 2017 (13 Úrimë)

ICYMI: Fantastic Credits and Where to Give Them.

I worked in Hollywood for 4 /12 years and one of my good friends is an intellectual property lawyer I’ve known since then--well over 16 years--with a client list that includes none other than Maurice (Kevin Kline) in the live-action film “Beauty and the Beast” starring Emma Watson.

(My attorney could sue anyone spreading salacious rumors about me and my work should he choose to do so, but I’m not a jerk. But he does know about it; he’s good at what he does--he’s successfully sued Google).

Translation: I’m at least 3-7 degrees of knowing how to give credit to artists. Otherwise, my attorney/friend would have me shot at sunrise. Would you like to learn how to do it without being a pain about it and spreading unscrupulous rumors? Let me explain Copyright © from a legal perspective from 30 years of working with copyrighted materials with an actual attorney that specializes in artistic intellectual properties with 40 years of experience that includes everything from visual art, music, film, books and has won a major copyright infringement case against Google (among other high profile cases) for major A-List celebrities.

1) Whatever you do is copyrighted from the moment you put it on paper by law. You don’t have to bitch about anyone stealing it perpetually. HOWEVER, you can’t complain about someone posting it anywhere in public (Pinterest, mostly) if YOU post it anywhere in public. If you share it, even asking people not to, it is already public and can go anywhere. What people CAN’T do is SAY it’s theirs. If they explicitly say “I did this” and they didn’t, you have a case. Otherwise, it is NOT copyright infringement if someone posts it anywhere.

It would be nice if EVERYONE would give credit--I try to do it if I do or link back to the original place I find something and that is time consuming if the work is not located where it came from (dead-link) or it was digitally stolen--something my attorney told me about a couple years ago. I see it all the time. But, if you make it public, it is assumed to be public. It is NOT ASSUMED to not to be copyrighted. Put that cute copyright sign on it and let it go. You should have the original as collateral, I would think. That’s the only way no one can claim it and you can properly bitch about it w/o an official U.S. Copyright.

2) I PUT “Images: ©2012, 2013, 2014. Warner Brothers Pictures. The Hobbit: The Unexpected Journey, The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug, The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies. All Rights Reserved.” on pretty much every post for The Kingdom of the Woodland Realm Trilogy because the photos I use BELONG to Warner Brothers/New Line Cinema/Wingnut Productions. Altered by someone online doesn’t change this UNLESS the person altering got permission from WB/NLC/Wingnut to alter it. Otherwise, it is their property and they can sue anyone that alters their work and put their name on it if they so choose. I post this disclaimer to keep from GETTING sued--even though I don’t alter the photo in anyway. Gifs are the same way and currently seen as pirated these days and are subject to suit as with screen caps.

The reason no one gets sued over screen caps and gifs is because no one is making $$ off of them. You only get credit for edit not the work of the camera guy that was paid to shoot a film and the studio that owns his camera work. Unlike Marvel that has begun digital copyrights on some photos (you post something on Facebook, it automatically gives credit). The minute someone charges for any altered screen caps, gifs or photos and calls it their own work, that is the legal definition of copyright infringement.

Without proper credit, you are open to lawsuit by the studios, photographers. I go out of my way to avoid altered anything because then I could get sued even if I didn’t alter it--even if I am not making money from it. Which brings me to the next point:

3) IF I was making $$ and using someone’s art, then I could get sued. That means I’m not paying the original person their due (licensing fees) for use of their work. THAT includes my original story that uses and will use a great number of canonical characters from Tolkien. If I want to turn The Kingdom of the Woodland Realm Trilogy into a book, I have to do it the right way--which is get permission from the Tolkien Estate (I’ve had the paperwork since 2016 when it was shown to me by a member of the Mythopoeic Society--they are close to the Estate). They can allow me to publish after negotiations of paying for use of the characters or force me to put “not affiliated with the Tolkien Estate” and/or change names if they so choose.

Example of a Tolkien allowed to go to press with “non-affiliated” tag of Tolkien. It’s clean, so the Estate probably doesn’t mind so much. Not all of these “non-affiliated” books are bad or not liked by the Estate. The label is not exclusively a non-endorsement--there might be something unknown about as to why it’s there.

Example of a book with the coveted “Tolkien Trademark” and approved by the Estate--spoke with one of the authors; pretty cool.

You want this, you better have your %^$* together. Yes, they give them out, but they are particular--do it right: legal and above board.

I’m not making any revenue off of TKWR Trilogy but if I were, I wouldn’t be using film photos. I would HIRE an artist to tag along over to the final phase of getting this book turned into something sold on Amazon or in Barnes & Noble. Then, the artist of choice would get paid for their work properly. They could use the work from this book anywhere they wanted and it would be protected forever--example of this would be Ted Nasmith.

Due to all the rumors about people say I’m doing because they have nothing better to do with their time (regardless of the obvious), I decided not to share any Tolkien Fan Art, use and Tolkien Fan Art or consider any Tolkien Fan Art unsolicited by anyone on Tumblr, Pinterest, DeviantArt or anywhere else that isn’t done by anyone not represented by an agent or a lawyer. If I so choose, artists will have to go through my lawyer--not me. After today, there will be no artists’ works mentioned or shared by me anywhere again until I’m done with the entire trilogy--unless idiots stop spreading lies and rumors (they won’t so don’t hold your breath).

I discovered a lot of fan art pertaining to my book and I could say something, but I’m not a jerk and I’m not complaining. I’m also not making any $$ of the book. It is assumed to be public but not assumed not to be copyrighted--which it actually is (ask my attorney).

I will do something should I decide to take any number of offers to publish after a lot of legalities I will go through. For now, I’ll just watch to make sure no one’s claiming my work--my words--as their own (and some have which is why I sent the book to witnesses so I have a case and proof should I do something later on). The book will change in the final form as I edit; it already has with additions and changes in Book II: The Saga of Thranduil and Book I: The Epic of Eryn Galen and Book III: The Last Tale of Legolas Lasgalen.

I love artists here, but a few ruined it for everyone. I’ve had artists wanting to illustrate Book II: The Saga of Thranduil, but now that’s been narrowed to only one that doesn’t accuse me of salacious and reputation-altering deeds I’ve never done. Having a friend that’s a respected and experienced intellectual properties attorney with connections in the U.S. and Europe that has worked within the industry successfully for 30+ years with a stellar reputation protecting my works--all of them including screenplays, poetry, stage plays--makes it possible for me to help protect an artist of my choosing (and he’s already done wonders for clothing designer friend of mine in Florida that designed things for my film project HERETIC: THE LEGEND OF AKHENATEN*). He loves protecting properties and takes referrals. I’m not helping anyone spreading rumors.

Thank you, Captain Obvious. That was obvious.

I told someone once that I would, but they thought it better to insult me rather than allowing me to connect them to a publisher I knew that could have looked at their work without the long query process. You make connections in the business and it’s good to keep them and I do.

I live by the motto: “The ass you kick today may be the ass you kiss tomorrow” so I try to be nice and respectful to everyone--even I have to draw a line.

[By the way, there will be a LOT of versions coming for The Kingdom of the Woodland Realm Trilogy. This one is the Annotated Version--complete with all the notes and references and explanations of the use of Tolkien to create the entire trilogy. Let’s just say it took 4 hours to do the first bibliography and I just added more books. This one (which will be done for both the original version and extended version) will take years.]

But if you don’t want to be seen as an artist, it’s a safe bet you won’t think pinning = stealing. Pinterest is nothing more than a bulletin board for what people like--it’s not supposed to deal in copyright protection like YouTube or Instagram where you are actually legally protected by copyright law. If they were, a lot of stuff they still allow would be subject to lawsuit against them--not the pinners. They blame pinners to keep themselves from being liable for allowing copyrighted properties. I’ve already deleted my Art page of potential artists for The Kingdom of he Woodland Realm Trilogy. I’ve gotten blocked on Pinterest by people here on Pinterest over pins I re-pinned years ago over what they don’t know--probably out of spite. I don’t mind and don’t care. My job is to finish my work to the best of my ability and move on to the next.

Writing has been my life since the age of two. Only an act of GOD is going to keep me from doing what I love. I write because I love it. If it’s liked, I’m happy. If its not, that isn’t a deterrent for me to stop. Like any artist, I want to protect my work--but I’m going to do it the right way and I’m going to give credit due when credit is due if I eventually use an artist for The Kingdom of the Woodland Realm Trilogy. Full Stop--end of sentence. There is nothing left to say. I have to do it right because I have a too many people in the business watching me and if I’m not doing what is right, they aren’t going to want to work with me and that lessens the work I put in to write this and it will not be able to help a fellow artist along the way. My attorney acts as a free attorney for artists that can’t afford to hire expensive attorneys for protection because he believes in protecting the rights of artists and we often work together on helping artist connect with attorneys that work for free for all artists (Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts).

I know, that won’t keep some people from being jerks--I just wanted to put it out there.

*HERETIC: THE LEGEND OF AKHENATEN by Jaynaé Miller (me) is copyrighted by the U.S. Copyright Office. Any unauthorized use is strictly prohibited without prior consent for the next 100 years. In other words, I could sue a major studio if they don’t buy it from me. This is a wholly LEGAL and Recognized (and stamped) copyright. It doesn’t make the original copyright less potent, it just makes your work recognized by law and gives you further protection for your works. This includes photography, visual art, books, film, plays, videos, logos. Being a copyrighted work, it is also subject to the Berne Agreement (World Copyright Organization) guidelines for international use. With this, it wouldn’t matter where you work is posted, if someone said it was theirs, it’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. Once you put a stamp on it, by law, it is already protected by the government as it is being sent via the federal government--and it is protected from loss of materials sent as well (USPS is good and finding it, too; get a tracking number and it is found faster).

I know all this stuff because I work with copyrighted and trademarked things since I wrote my first opera and lyrics for which my music teacher taught me about this in fifth grade. I’ve written adaptations with permission of the original writers. The More You Know depends on how much you care to know.--J.

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Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 6: All the sounds in all the languages - The International Phonetic Alphabet

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 6: All the sounds in all the languages - The International Phonetic Alphabet. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 6 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, the podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: and I'm Lauren Gawne. And today we're going to be talking about the International Phonetic Alphabet. But first -- it was International Mother Language Day in February and even though it was a couple of weeks ago now on February the 21st, I think it's still worth saying a belated 'Happy Mother Language Day' to you Gretchen!

Gretchen: Happy Mother Language Day to you! Which we are wishing in our of mother languages of English, which is kind of boring.

Lauren: Both wishing it our mother languages. Do you have any other heritage languages that you wish to acknowledge?

Gretchen: I mean, technically Scottish Gaelic is probably a long time ago a mother language for me, but my ancestors were lowland Scots so it's a really long time ago.

Lauren: Well happy Scots Gaelic day

Gretchen: Do you have any other?

Lauren: My grandmaternal language is Polish and thanks to generally typical Australian attitudes towards non-English speaking in the 1960s that wasn't passed on to any of my mother's generation at all. So yeah it's still a very recent part of our family history. I'm the only grandchild who ever learnt enough Polish to speak with my grandmother in her mother tongue

Gretchen: Oh that's cool

Lauren: Which is cool, I wish I still spoke that much

Gretchen: Well I mean it's cool that you learned it, it's not cool that no one else did

Lauren: It's probably questionable how much Polish I remember today. And yeah, I always like to think of my Nan and my lack of opportunities to learn Polish on February 21st. What have you been up to or what's coming up?

Gretchen: Well, by the time this episode goes out I will have been to South by Southwest, where I will have done a panel with Erin Mckean and Jane Solomon and Ben Zimmer

Lauren: How are you not going to like die of fangirling at people?!

Gretchen: Because I've already met all of them anyway?

Lauren: Awwww I'm so jelly

Gretchen: But they're really cool and I'm really excited to be on a panel with them! We're going to be talking about 'Word curation: Dictionaries, tech, and the future' which will happen by the time you guys get this episode so you can check out the hashtag that I'm sure will have some action on it and we'll link to that in the show notes.

Lauren: I'm really excited for that panel. I'm looking forward to it hopefully - is it going to be recorded? Am I going to be able to see it as a non South by Southwest attendee?

Gretchen: I think there's going to be an audio recording on soundcloud that South by Southwest is going to put up online because they've done that for previous years. So I can't promise that they'll do that again but they seem to like doing it in previous years, I don't know why they wouldn't do it again so we'll link to that if we have it.

Lauren: Yay, excellent!

[Music]

Gretchen: So there's a problem when you learn to spell English, which is that it's really hard to spell English.

Lauren: It's really a lifelong learning process as far as I'm concerned

Gretchen: It's a lifelong learning process. You know, some languages don't have spelling bees because their spelling systems are so consistent they don't need them - we can only wish! So, the English spelling system is especially ridiculous, it's got silent letters, it's got something around 14 vowels but only five letters to write them in.

My favorite demonstration of this is that there's a phrase that has all of the English vowels and the phrase goes - I have to have to say it in a non-rhotic accent because it only works that way - the phrase goes 'Who would know aught of art must learn, act and then take his ease'. And each of those words has a different vowel in it.

Lauren: Cool!

Gretchen: And that's one way of remembering the vowels

Lauren: That's a nifty sentence!

Gretchen: Yeah, but if you try to write that down in English it's hard

Lauren: With the English orthography that we have, or the English writing system - orthography - that we have

Gretchen: And spelling systems are also inconsistent across different languages. Even languages that are consistent in themselves are often inconsistent when you compare them with each other. So, some languages use the letter J for the /dʒ/ sound [as in Jane], some languages use it for the /ʒ/ sound like French [Jean], some languages use it for the 'y' /j/ sound like German as in 'Jan' or 'Johann Sebastian Bach', some languages use it for the /x/ sound as in Spanish like 'Juan'. There's a whole bunch of different sounds you can use the same letter for depending on your language

Lauren: There's a really great tumblr post that kind of encapsulates this variety in the ways different alphabets that are based on the same alphabet English is based on, use their orthographies in different ways which we'll link to. When I first read this I was like oh look someone's just posting in Norwegian or Danish or something, but then if you sit there and read it and you know the orthographic conventions in different languages it says something along the lines of 'I wonder if English speakers will notice that I'm writing this in English but using the spelling conventions of my language'

Gretchen: And yeah a whole bunch of people have certain different versions of it - there's a Finnish one which is pretty good, there's an Irish one which is fantastic

Lauren: It's good, because once you know what the phrase is that gives you a feel for what the conventions are in different languages. For example I found the Polish one really easy to read and then for some of the others I was just basically guessing because I knew what the sentence was, and it really nicely illustrates this problem that we have that we all learn different spelling conventions for different languages

Gretchen: And we're not the first people to have noticed this problem! In fact people have been realizing this problem for quite a long time, as long as people have been writing with different systems. And it became especially apparent as writing systems became standardised in the 1700s and 1800s, when dictionaries are becoming popular and people were starting to write in a standardised sort of way and looking at other languages and realising that their standardisations were converging on something different

Lauren: I really love that historically there was no consistent spelling conventions, and so in Old English text we actually have a good idea of the different common literate dialects of people who lived in Mercia or people who live in Cumbria and because the way that they wrote English really reflected the way their accent worked. Once spelling systems became standardized that stopped being the case

Gretchen: It also became really difficult people for who are trying to learn English because even if you learn the spelling systems, then you pronounce the words the way they look and people look at you like "that's not actually how it's pronounced" and you're like "how was I supposed to remember that?" Various people came up with various proposals for spelling reform for either just like a more phonetic way of writing English in total, or for ways of adapting English words so that it could be used for specialised purposes like people who are learning the language, or people who want to write down specific things and annotate exactly how they're said

Lauren: And some people went for massive 'let's create an entirely new alphabet', some people just wanted some small reforms. So Noah Webster is probably one of the people who had the most impressive effect on English especially on American English. It was Webster who decided to take and consistently use conventions like 'i-z-e' instead of 'i-s-e' and using words like colour without the 'u' instead of with the 'u' as part of this attempt to make English spelling more realistically reflect the language that was being spoken

Gretchen: Yeah and there were other British reformers that were trying to do this, so there was a guy named Henry Sweet who came up with an alphabet called the Romic /ɹomɪk/ alphabet or the Romic /ɹɑmɪk/ alphabet, I'm not actually sure how to pronounce the name of this alphabet, which...

Lauren: If only was written down some where in a consistently pronounceable script!

Gretchen: If only! He didn't seem to actually write the name of his own alphabet anywhere in a consistent script so that's a shame. And that was based on mostly Roman letters but with adaptations for sounds that English had and Latin hadn't. And then there was Alexander Ellis who was apparently the real-life origin of Henry Higgins from 'My Fair Lady'

Lauren: Really?!

Gretchen: I dunno, that's what Wikipedia says!

Lauren: Okay, because I'm going to invoke the supremacy of David Crystal, if that's okay. I don't know if Crystal officially trumps Wikipedia, but in his book called 'Wordsmiths and Warriors' he says if Higgins is anyone it has to be Daniel Jones who is a phonetician who is very influential in terms of like codifying the vowel system. So what we think of is the modern International Phonetic Alphabet vowel space kind of started with Daniel Jones' cardinal vowels

Gretchen: I mean I don't know it could have been a composite or something

Lauren: I think to be honest that the most likely is that there was a genre of gentleman academic at the time who's very interested in these topics. Anyway, there was a lot of work being invested in generating some kind of writing system that accurately reflected speech

Gretchen: Yeah and so they made the International Phonetic Association in the late 1800s, which confusingly enough also has the acronym IPA, and they had some meetings and they were like, “yeah, we need to come up with a system for this”

Lauren: So the IPA is where the IPA was created

Gretchen: Yeah I hope they were all drinking IPA but I can't guarantee that

Lauren: In our reenactment that is definitely what's happening

Gretchen: Yeah, when we when we all get dressed up in historic costume (bagsies Henry Sweet), then we will all drink IPA

Lauren: I'm Daniel Jones apparently - no wait, I'm going to dress up as Cardinal Vowel, I always thought that would be a great linguist costume

Gretchen: Ah that's great! Were cardinal vowels invented yet?

Lauren: Well it was Daniel Jones who did that, I don't know when he was working

Gretchen: Oh ok good

Lauren: I mean we'll have to have a whole episode just talking about vowels and how they work, but that was kind of a thing that was figured out at the time

Gretchen: Yeah and they came up with some principles for future development of this International Phonetic Alphabet and these were: each symbol should have its own distinctive sound and the same symbol should be used for the same sound across all languages

Lauren: So instead of having the J sound sounding like /dʒ/ or /ʒ/ or /j/ or /x/ across different languages, every time that sound was used it would be used for exactly the same sound

Gretchen: Every time that *symbol* was used

Lauren: Yes sorry every time that symbol was used it would be used for the same sound

Gretchen: They also came up with some principles that influenced which symbols ended up being chosen for which sounds. So they decided to use as many ordinary Roman letters as possible and to have a very minimal number of new letters, and to use what they called quote unquote “international” usage to decide the sound for each symbol

Lauren: So they wouldn't like, take the symbol that we have for 's' and decide 'oh we're going to make that the sound for 'l' because we're crazy people'

Gretchen: Yeah, they didn't do that. But the other thing is, so if we look at the vowels, the IPA vowels look kind of weird from an English perspective. So the IPA uses the letter that we think of as 'i' to represent the 'ee' /i/ sound and uses the letter we think of as 'e' to represent the 'eh' /e/ sound and so on. And this doesn't make sense for English, but it does make sense when you look at a whole bunch of other languages like Spanish and Italian, and the way the Roman alphabet has been used for non-European languages generally falls along these principles as well. So they said, “Look, even though we're English speakers we're going to not do the English things”

Lauren: Okay, so they really did go with this kind of international general preference

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, they're still eurocentric, they're still starting with European languages and kind of working their way outwards, but they were at least not completely Anglo-centric, which is helpful here, because English does some weird stuff with its sounds

Lauren: Yeah and we only have 26 letters in the English alphabet, a few more if we kind of pull everything from across European languages, and there are so many more sounds that the world's languages can make, so once we've run out of kind of standard letters where do we go from there?

Gretchen: Where we are from there is often Greek letters or Latinised looking versions of Greek letters because those were familiar to these creators. Another thing that they did was they would rotate letters. and this was partly because the shapes are still familiar if you do that and partly because this is the 1800s and people were typing with metal bits of type. So if you just take a lowercase 'e' and turn it upside down, you can just print your new character by flipping or rotating an existing metal type bit rather than casting a new one

Lauren: I have a really nice example from Australia, so I was at a workshop the other day and a colleague was showing me a booklet of Kamilaroi, so it's a language from the New England area of New South Wales in Australia, and William Ridley was working on this language in 1856. So this is even before the IPA was codified. And these languages have a sound like an English sound but you may not notice it in English because it's a sound at the end of words like 'sing' or 'bring', that /ŋ/ sound, but that sound can occur anywhere so you can have it at the start of the word as well as at the end. This /ŋ/ sound now has a symbol in the IPA that looks like an 'n' with a little tail and it's called an 'engma'

Gretchen: Yeah kind of like an 'n' with a 'g' tail shoved on it

Lauren: Yeah, and Ridley is one of the first people who adopted this symbol for use in his describing languages work in the 1850s, which was before the 1880s when the IPA was established. But this symbol had begun to be used for this /ŋ/ and it makes sense because it's like an 'n' and a 'g' squashed together. But when he sent it to the typesetters for his booklet they didn't have a /ŋ/ and so they just turned a capital 'G' upside down which sounds a bit crazy and it looks a bit crazy it looks like it's just full of upside down 'G's, but it meant that that was a way that they could represent this /ŋ/ sound. Apparently he sent it to some other journal in Europe and they just turned it all into a 'z'

Gretchen: Wow, a 'z'!

Lauren: Yeeeah

Gretchen: Wow, that's really bad! So I guess that's why it's good that another principle the IPA had was that the look of the new letters should suggest the sound they represent, so once you've learned the kind of basic ones and if you see a couple languages and you have a sense of what's used in other languages then you can often guess fairly accurately what an IPA letter is going to be like. So it's better to have a symbol for /ŋ/'that looks like an 'n' and a 'g' shoved together because that's how it's often written in different languages, a bit like an 'n' sound, a bit like a 'g' sound.

Another one of their principles was that diacritics should be avoided where possible. So adding extra little like accent marks or other types of small bits on top of letters was something that they tried to avoid for their basic sounds. Diacritics were only was supposed to be for if there's a modified version of a sound, but not for basic sounds in general. So in the current IPA, you still get these rotated letters, which must make the IPA very difficult for people who are dyslexic; you get small capitals; you get Greek stuff like the Greek letter theta is used for the 'th' /θ/ sound, and the runic and ultimately Icelandic sound /ð/ -- so the symbol that looks like an 'o' with kind of a cross above it, that’s from Icelandic and it used to be in English before the Normans came, that got borrowed back in -- so borrowing from other established systems. Because then you could just go to Iceland and grab some of their metal type bits, I don't know, or go to Greece and get some from them

Lauren: It's something that was a problem with the original metal type but it's also been a problem for a long time with modern software. So for a long time computers didn't really have fonts that expanded beyond the kind of really basic font set of like English and French and some diacritics and some special things. If you have some older software or if you look at older digital documents you have, y’know, people using capital 'A' for particular vowel sounds, vowel characters in the IPA that are symbols in the IPA that aren't in regular type or y’know schwa would be a capital 'E' for example

Gretchen: Yeah you can even see this on some old websites, people will use a different system that only uses the basic 26, plus capitals to do the extra stuff or maybe some places use like an 'at' sign @ to indicate a schwa, because we've also had a different version of this encoding problem with technology

Lauren: So it's not just the metal type it's also modern computing

Gretchen: It's also the byte! It's the type and the byte!

Lauren: The type and the byte have been a problem, it's getting better

Gretchen: It's getting better thanks to Unicode, thanks Unicode! So yeah the first version from 1887 was designed to work for sounds in English, French, and German because that's what they were doing at the time. It's a bit weird compared to the modern IPA because we're used to seeing it as a chart and they just gave a list of symbols and keywords that stuff was found in for various languages. So they'd say something like okay this 'a' symbol is going to be like the sound in English 'father' or this symbol is going to be like the sound in German 'Bach' and they just give the keywords like sometimes you see in the front of the dictionary. And then later, so they kept on working on it in the late 1800s and then by the year they expanded, published a version that included Arabic and a few other languages’ sounds, that’s when they finally publish it as a table for the first time

Lauren: So why would it be in it table, for people who aren't familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet?

Gretchen: The cool thing about the table is -- so our English alphabet that you learn as a kid is 'ABCD' in no particular order, that's just the order it is, that's just for historical reasons -- but the table is ordered based on how the sounds are produced. So sounds get produced with constriction in various parts of the mouth and with different degrees of constriction once you're in that place

Lauren: So it's a nice feature based table of all the kind of combination of features in particular places

Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. If you superimpose a mouth onto that table, it looks a bit weird but you can kind of do it and you can see where each of the sounds is produced

Lauren: I have a link somewhere to an audible IPA chart so you can click on the sounds and hear what they sound like, but the ones on the very left side are all produced with just the lips like /p/, and the very front of the mouth. And then the ones at the very right edge are all the way back at the far back of the mouth, and that's things like your velar sounds like /g/ get made with that soft bit there or your uvula like right down in the very far back in the mouth

Gretchen: Yeah, it goes from your lips, through your mouth along the roof of your mouth and back into your throat. And the weird thing about this version from 1900 is that it's a mirror image of that so it has 'p' and 'b', your labial sounds on the right instead of on the left

Lauren: Oh no, that would confuse me so much

Gretchen: You can see an image of it on Wikipedia, it's all like typewritten, we'll link to that

Lauren: Wow, awesome

Gretchen: But it looks really weird, and they also have the vowel chart and the consonant chart on the same chart

Lauren: Right, okay!

Gretchen: They just have like a really wide section where the vowels go

Lauren: How weird!

Gretchen: Yeah, which is something else that changed later

Lauren: So there's now a table for the consonants, there's a few consonants that don't even fit, and then there's a vowel chart that's a separate thing, but it's very similar principle like it starts at the front of the mouth and goes back

Gretchen: Yeah, and what's cool is that the version that we use today is actually very very similar to the version that was solidified in 1932, which was quite a while ago. There were some adjustments made in 1989 and then after that it's just like 'oh well we need to add this one symbol because we found some languages that use it' but pretty much it stays very similar for quite a long time once it's established

Lauren: Nice. So it goes from left to right all the different places in the mouth, and then from top to bottom there are different ways just looking at the consonants, the ways to pronounce different consonants so you have the very plosive sounds like /b/, /k/, /d/, /t/ - we call them stops - along one row and your nasal sounds, so your /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, sounds along another row...

Gretchen: It kind of goes in order of how much you need to drop your jaw. So if you think about the sounds in the top row, your mouth is the most closed when you're making like a 'p' or a 'b'. You have to literally close your mouth for a second, you have to close your lips to make those sounds. Whereas if you're making a sound like 'r' /ɹ/ you don't have to actually close anything you're letting the sounds kinda come through. So the 'r' /ɹ/ sounds are near the bottom, but the /p, b/ sounds are near the top

Lauren: I mean that's the thing I found super neat about it when I was studying the IPA in undergrad was just how elegantly it captures all these different parameters in one table

Gretchen: Yeah, just to realize that someone has thought this through, thinking 'ok what are all the permutations you could put your mouth in and which ones do people actually use and let's organize this'

Lauren: And English just uses one subset of it

Gretchen: Yeah, every language is going to pick some subset of the sounds in this table, or if it doesn't we have to add something. So one of the cool things that you can do with the IPA because it's based on different positions the mouth can be in is adapt it to other mouth stuff. For example, Lauren Ackerman, who has the linguistics blog 'Wug Life', has made a table of emoji with their mouth positions as if they're making sounds in the IPA. So you can look at this table and she has things like the surprised emoji, which has kind of a round mouth and so that's like an 'oo' /u/ sound because you have to round your lips for that, and the 'ee' /i/ is kind of like a smile, and it is completely ludicrous but also great

Lauren: These are the important things that linguists do with their downtime

Gretchen: Yeah and the other cool thing you can do with the IPA is because you can use it to represent mouth sounds is you can write beatboxing in IPA, because beatboxing is done with the mouth

Lauren: Oh yeah, that must look amazing!

Gretchen: It looks so cool! I have a picture of it, of a chart that some beatboxing linguist researchers made

Lauren: That is awesome

Gretchen: So we'll link to that too

Gretchen: I mean we both have a lot of love for the International Phonetic Alphabet, obviously it's something we engage with a lot in all varieties of linguistic work. I think it's worth mentioning though that like, it's not perfect for everything, it can get really annoying sometimes.

Gretchen: Yes!

Lauren: Particularly, as I mentioned in terms of the fact that font encoding on computers is still a problem, you still occasionally will get proofs back from a publisher for a journal article and all the engma, they're all mysteriously like really ugly still, we haven't quite got there with them being part of the font set for every single font

Gretchen: Yeah and it can be hard to write on a normal keyboard

Lauren: Yeah it's also really annoying to write on a normal keyboard sometimes. Also especially in the vowels, like I get a bit of like IPA anxiety when I use IPA and share it with people publicly, especially for long passages of text it's not always that easy to transcribe things

Gretchen: Yeah, and as fluent writers we've gotten used to the Byzantine nature of the English spelling system and we we also know how to talk, but thinking about how you talk in a more conscious way to say 'what sound am I saying here, what sound am I saying there' -- that’s different. So it can be hard to write extended passages in IPA. I know if I make a blog post that has an English sentence or two in IPA, I'll inevitably get some corrections from a linguist or something that says “I think you're probably producing this sound here” and I'm like “Oh yeah you're right” because there's no spellcheck for IPA

Lauren: Yeah and also even if there were a spellcheck, you and I would produce different IPA transcriptions for our own pronunciation of things

Gretchen: Yeah and we're pretty good with understanding people's different pronunciations of things when we're hearing them, because I guess humans have a lot of evolutionary practice at that, but for reading things we have a fairly standardised system. I remember when I was still a young linguist back when John Wells's phonetic blog was active. He's a well-known British linguist who's involved in some of the history of the IPA and he used to keep a blog and he would sometimes write full posts in IPA. And they were really interesting for me to read, to practice but I also found them very difficult because he would be transcribing his own accent. And he was British and so he wouldn't write all these 'r' /ɹ/ after vowels that I would, so I had to figure out where all these /ɹ/ were supposed to be. I'd end up reading his post out loud to myself and hearing the British accent being like “oh yeah this is what he's trying to say”

Lauren: You would be saying it in his accent?

Gretchen: Yeah, I'd be saying it in his accent, because you can write someone's accent, which is the cool thing but also the more challenging thing about reading IPA

Lauren: Linguists also talk about broad IPA and narrow IPA transcription - so like, you can do a kind of rough-and-ready, mostly correct transcription, or actually if you are a phonetician and you're looking really closely at how people actually articulate things, you discover all kinds of things that you need to transcribe to capture the correct and accurate transcription but which people don't hear kind of consciously or would find really weird when you've represented it to them

Gretchen: Yeah or don't notice

Lauren: And there's often like phonological processes, like when you tell people that the vowel that they use in the middle of 'handbag' is actually, for native speakers if they say it quickly, it often becomes 'hambag'

Gretchen: 'hambag', like a ham sandwich

Lauren: Yeah, like a bag-o-ham. If you write it out in IPA, people are like ‘that's incorrect,’ and you're like 'well that's what you said'

Gretchen: There's a fun story about that, so English speakers also often say 'sammich' instead of 'sandwich' because the 'm' the like the nasal sound becomes like the 'w'. Except for Anglo-Italians; so in Canada there's like Italian Torontonians and Italian Montrealers and people who grew up in those communities often have a particular accent. So in that accent they say 'sangwich' instead of sammich' because in Italian the 'w' sound is kind of more velar whereas in English it's more labial and so it like pulls the nasal along with it to be a different sound

Lauren: And when you start transcribing things in really close IPA you can see those distinctions, it's really cool

Gretchen: Yeah and we often just reduce the vowels in words that we’re saying quickly or in the small unimportant function words we often reduce the vowels all to schwa or something like that

Lauren: I still remember in in my undergraduate class learning that English vowels will often change into schwa, this is the /ə/ sound in unstressed syllables and it just made me realize that for a certain set of words, that's why I was really bad at spelling them. Because you sit there and you're like 'is it amu... amuni ammunition?'. I mean, is it ammunitiON or is it ammunitiAN? That’s not a great word to use as an example but it's the first one that came to mind. For certain vowels, because it's unstressed and it's a schwa, it’s possible that any of the vowel letters could be used to spell it. So you just have to memorize what the spelling is because your pronunciation doesn't help you. And that's why I tell people I'm bad at English spelling - it’s not my fault, it's the fault of my stress system and orthography!

Gretchen: The other thing is, is sometimes English orthography gives you useful cues to distinguish between certain words or when a suffix who's added sometimes the stress changes and you have to recover vowels that are kind of there but had turned into schwa. So if you take a word like 'electric' which becomes 'electricity' - in some senses it's weird that it's spelled with a 'c' and not with a 'k' or an 's' because 'c' is completely redundant, it always makes one of those two sounds, but it does reflect that when it's 'electric' with the 'k' sound and then when you add an '-ity' to it, the 'k' sound becomes an 's' sound because that's what happens with 'c', but it doesn't happen with 'k'. Or the vowels also change - with 'electric', 'electricity' you get different sorts of vowels. So it's kind of useful to have some of this stuff there that was historically there and has changed in its sound. But it also creates this extra layer of complication. Or you can get used to speed reading because a word always looks like the same in spelling whereas if you had to speed read a whole bunch of different accents then an unfamiliar accent might be harder to speed read, but then again it's harder to learn spelling in the first place if you have an accent that's less similar to the spelling system

Lauren: But we still love the IPA for all of the occasional detriments that occur

Gretchen: We still love it and it's still useful to have it as an option to write something very specifically even if you don’t want to do that all the tim. I find if I'm meeting somebody and they have a name I haven't heard before, then I write it in IPA and then I can pronounce it correctly when I'm talking back to them. People like it when you pronounce their names correctly.

Lauren: That's handy. The Journal of the International Phonetic Association used to accept articles written in IPA, which blows my mind. So people would write about some feature of phonetics and they would do the whole thing in the IPA. I think it very quickly became apparent that that was more labour both to produce and to consume than there was any benefit in doing that, for many of the reasons that we've already mentioned

Gretchen: Like, 'hi I'm going to write about like long vowels in Sussex' or something and that whole thing would be in IPA

Lauren: Yes, I think academics clearly had more time on their hands 50 years ago.

Gretchen: I mean, to be fair, I have played IPA Scrabble, which is like Scrabble, but you do it in IPA

Lauren: Do you just kind of argue for your own pronunciation or do you have to do it in your own dialect?

Gretchen: The way that I've done it is I combined IPA Scrabble with Descriptivist Scrabble, which is a little bit like those bluffing games, so as long as you can convince other people that it's a word then it's a word

Lauren: Ah, I like that

Gretchen: Yeah, because like, dictionaries are arbitrary authorities anyway, so with Descriptivist Scrabble you can just use whatever means you have at your disposal to convince people that it's a word. Of course choosing an obvious word like dog or something is going to be easier to convince people than saying--

Lauren: blergh?

Gretchen: Yeah, than saying “blerg is a word, honestly it means a colour kind of like grey and blue at the same time” but you can try!

Lauren: There are heaps of cool things people have done with the IPA including someone has made a set of IPA Scrabble

Gretchen: Yeah so I posted on All Things Linguistic a set of frequencies and scores that you can use for IPA Scrabble tiles, because I made it with a friend in undergrad and we had figured this out. We just cut out bits of cardboard to make them, and then some undergrads at Yale came across this post and decided to get their friend who has like a wood cutting machine to cut these out of these gorgeous wood tiles and they sent me some photos which I've also posted. You can see those on the blog, they're amazing, so yeah so someone has made a wooden IPA set that I still have not played but it’s really cool

Lauren: IPA characters also make for popular tattoos because they're quite beautiful, so I've definitely seen a schwa tattoo and I've seen a glottal stop which is a little bit like a question mark - it's our logo!

Gretchen: It is also our logo. Do people get whole words in IPA or like phrases in IPA tattooed on them?

Lauren: Mmm I haven't seen any but if anyone has we will definitely be interested in seeing it

Gretchen: If you know any IPA tattoos please send them to us

Lauren: Well I've seen a couple but not that long

Gretchen: There's also a whole version of Alice in Wonderland that's published in IPA - so this takes us back to the Journal of Phonetics - and she's like talking to the Mad Hatter and so on and it's all in IPA. The weird thing about this particular version is that this publisher decided to also have capital letters

Lauren: Huh, interesting

Gretchen: And of course they had to make capital versions for all of the IPA letters

Lauren: Wow, that's commitment

Gretchen: Because you know if you think about it capitals are redundant, they don't add any extra phonetic information to a sound, so the IPA doesn't use them. And sometimes the IPA uses small cap versions of a letter to indicate a different sound because it's an extra symbol. And so instead this person decided that no, if I'm going to write it as a book I'm going to make capitals and so yeah it's very interesting how they decided them.

Lauren: Yeah, there you go. My IPA nerd craft activity was to cross stitch the consonant chart, I did that quite a few years ago and it's a very useful adornment in the office when you just need to quickly refer to some of the symbols. I also was going to do the vowel chart but the modern vowel chart is very very complicated and messy which is why I went with Jones's much more elegant original cardinal vowels

Gretchen: Ahh so you did a simplified version

Lauren: Yep I'll put links to those in the show notes

Gretchen: And you also did a cookie cutter, right?

Lauren: Oh yeah! I made a schwa cookie cutter for Christmas last year, just what you need, and it's a 3D printable cookie cutter, so you can also download that design and print your own and make your own gingerbread schwa or shortbread schwas.

Gretchen: That's great. There's also an IPA version of the game 2048, which came out when the game 2048 was popular - so that's the one where you like slide the tiles around and you try to combine to make bigger and bigger things. And so you start with a schwa and then you combine them to make an engma, which makes no sense phonetically, and then you combine them to make an esh. Again, this won't teach you anything about phonetics

Lauren: But it goes into more and more elaborate and less frequent forms

Gretchen: Yeah it does get to more and more elaborate stuff, like you end up with like a glottalised bilabial click or something like that

Lauren: Right, it doesn't officially teach you anything about the IPA but it is a good excuse for a distraction

Gretchen: You should not do it if you're a student and you're about to write an exam on the IPA, this is not a good way to procrastinate

Lauren: Official warning!

Gretchen: Instead you should play IPA scrabble

Lauren: Much better way!

Gretchen: Which will teach you some more about the IPA

Lauren: Or read Alice in Wonderland

Gretchen: There's also a fun sketch from the sketch comedy show John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, which is a sketch where some characters encounter some skeletons and the skeletons are pirates but these skeletons cannot tell you that there are pirates because they don't have any lips, so they cannot produce the 'p', sound so they call themselves 'kirates',

Lauren: Awww

Gretchen: And the characters who encounter them are very confused, like 'what are you?' 'we're kirates, I said we're kirates!'. Anyway, I am probably not doing it justice but you should listen to it, we have a link to that as well

Lauren: Excellent

Gretchen: Although they don't make the point which I kept thinking, which was like 'Well, if the don't have any lips, they probably don't have any tongues either, so they probably can't produce any sounds because they're skeletons'

Lauren: They probably don't have any kind of pulmonic air flow ability

Gretchen: Like all they can do is clack

Lauren: Yup, Morse code?

Gretchen: Yeah! So skeletons can communicate with us in Morse code, there we go

Lauren: Yeah. I was going to say sign language just because I always seem to want to mention sign languages because they're always cool

Gretchen: Oh yeah please do

Lauren: it's worth pointing out that like obviously the IPA is for all spoken languages, if you haven't figured that out by this point in the podcast, I'll just make that abundantly clear. It’s for all oral languages. In individual sign languages people talk about like phonemes and morphemes in terms of hand shapes so there are some hand shapes that are possible in some sign languages that don't occur in others. And so you have a similar kind of basic feature sets that you can refer to in in sign languages. But because it uses a more complex modal articulation system and it isn't just limited to the mouth, then it's a bit more complicated cross-sign-linguistically, but they do have their own kind of equivalent of phonemes or phonetics

Gretchen: There's a couple different standardised sign transcription systems, I don't know if any of them have caught on at an international level in the same way to the IPA has, I mean to be fair there there are other phonetic transcription systems that aren't the IPA, it's just the IPA has caught on more than the others. But you can transcribe signs, there's a couple different ways of doing that. There's also the fact that sign languages have alphabets that they use to borrow words in from spoken languages among other functions and within that there are sign equivalents of at least some IPA characters, which I know because I've been to linguistics conferences and seen interpreters signing talks and they will sign a particular IPA symbol when the person who's giving the presentation is talking about that particular IPA symbol

Lauren: There you go

Gretchen: Yeah, I cannot recite any of them for you, but I remember noticing it and thinking 'huh, ok I guess that's what they're doing’

Lauren: Man, awesome!

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode go to Lingthusiasm dot com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow at @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo

Gretchen: And I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter and my blog is All Things Linguistic dot com. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, our producer is Claire and our music by The Triangles. Stay Lingthusiastic! [Music]

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

#linguistics #ipa #International Phonetic Alphabet #phonetics #phonology #lingthusiasm #episode 6 #transcript #transcripts #podcast #accessibility

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alchemistc · 7 years

Text

The Price 8/?

Summary:The Swan’s return heralds the beginning of battle plans. Killian ponders the origin of his losses.

tagging: @captain--kitten, @jadeddiva, @artielu, @kmomof4, @wheres-your-rum (i’m thirsty for your liveblogs, babe), @the-captains-ayebrows, @dreadpirateemma, @thearmorstaysoff

(I feel like I’m missing someone who asked me to tag them after the last chapter, and if so, I apologize, I’m shit at keeping track of this stuff, just yell at me and I’ll add you to the list for next time.)

ao3

Chapter List: One/Two/Three/Four/Five/Six/Seven

Chapter Eight

The small study in his chambers provides a look into those who have come before him - over time, the books and scrolls left in that particular room have accumulated, left behind by those who have done their time and returned to their old world without ever having done more than learn a few useful tricks to make their lives a little easier.

There are annotations in books, and rolls of parchment depicting new methods and descriptions of magic he grasps the concept of, if not the execution. There are symbols of spellwork and grimoires and even journals left behind.

In weeks past, he’d taken comfort in flipping through them, discovering glimpses in them of people who’d lived the life he now found himself in, learning of the names on the pages ahead of his own, his brothers and sisters in this shared well of power. Some of the script was fine and curling, weaving together intricate stories, others were short and simple, telling only spare details of life lived in solitude, so far apart from the rest of the world.

There’d been duchesses, and farmers, and barkeeps, high lords and paupers, and they’d all spent their time secluded and alone save for the lessons the Swan gave them. Some had been curious about her, about the castle, about the true reason for their truly being there. Others had simply been content with the knowledge that their Choosing set them apart from the rest of Misthaven. They had been young and old, rich and poor, confused and satisfied, but all of them had been very much alone.

None of them had ever truly gotten to know the Swan. As far as he could tell, none had ever even learned her name.

One passage, written in a spidery, cramped hand, stuck out particularly to him.

Today marks my fifth year in the Swans castle, and I find myself understanding less and less why I am here. They say she is beautiful and fearsome, and in so much as that is true, I can see a vulnerability in her. She tries to hide it, and usually succeeds, but when she returns from the Tower she is quiet, and forlorn. Though she is often driven to fits of nostalgia, she never shares them, and it is only when she returns from there that it is easy to see. In those rare moments, she seems almost lonely, and her words are sharp, her lessons short, until she recovers from her melancholy, and becomes once again the impenetrable beast she has come to be known as.

I have made no further attempts at discovering what secrets she keeps there. The spellwork is strong and old, the warding so complicated I fear it must have taken decades to build, steeped in shadowy magic I cannot seem to grasp at, no matter how I try.

It is fitting, I think, that the Tower should be her place of refuge in this empty place, for she is just like it - broken and inviolable. There is something in her that is mangled and rent, no matter how she tries to hide it, and I fear with each day spent with her she loses what little is left of her humanity. One day I expect she will be as stone. I can only hope I am not here to see that day.

As he sweeps through the corridors, pulling at the collar of his jacket to warm himself, he cannot help but wonder how long ago this particular passage had been written. He has seen much of the same in the Swan, but there is something else that lurks behind her eyes now, something that forces him to challenge those assumptions of her humanity. She is not without feeling, not without soulful introspection.

She is not the unfeeling monster in that journal.

The library is bathed in the dappled sunlight of her lamps when he enters to find Regina and the Swan both bent over the table that is usually in disarray. It is a surprise to see the lights - in the weeks she’d been gone the castle had more often than not been lit by Regina’s more familiar torchlight, and it is somewhat jarring to his senses.

Regina, in all her usual splendor, is bent over what looks to be a mirror, while the Swan stands across from her, watching the ornately framed looking glass with concern etched across her face.

They both glance up at him when he enters, but surprisingly the Swan waves him closer.

He comes to her side, ignoring the uptick of Regina’s eyebrow at their proximity, his shoulder nearly touching hers as he turns his gaze to the mirror.

The night before, he’d seen something in her she’s shown him only once before, and it has raised her in his estimation in leaps and bounds. No matter what she said about her concern for his tenuous tether to sanity, he knows, deep in his bones, that going to Liam had been an act of kindness. It means more than she can ever know.

Regina breaks the silence.

“The king sent a patrol to the eastern border after you met with him,” she says, eyes lifting momentarily to the Swan. Beside him, she grimaces. “I assume you advised him against such an act of provocation, but we all know he’s hungry for glory.”

Killian keeps his thoughts to himself on that. He and his brother had once yearned to prove their worth to the kingdom, but they’d quickly learned all that it’s current ruler was willing to do to build up his renown.

“He’s been taken by the corruption,” the Swan tells them both, and the tense set of her shoulders tells him there is more to the story than that. “I fear you may have been wrong to believe him when he told you he had no knowledge of why Camelot has raised arms against us. He may be a fool, but he has always been keen to prove that Camelot will never return to it’s former glory. He’s never wanted anything more than to remind the world that Misthaven nearly destroyed it, once.”

“Unhappily for us, he’s forgotten the cost.”

Killian watches the Swan out of the corner of his eye, following the roll of her shoulders against the stretch of her coat, the way she tugs her bottom lip into her mouth before she speaks. “He never cared about the cost.”

Regina’s eyes flash. “And I suppose I’m to blame for that?”

The room, already warm, feels stifling as the two women stare across the length of the table at each other, and Killian closes his eyes against the onslaught of barely suppressed magic, heat scorching across his face as wind and earth build and well beside him.

It’s an odd game they play at, this tenuous truce so fraught with bad blood between them, and though his desire to know their past still sits in the back of his mind, he is more concerned in the moment that the two of them will somehow manage to destroy the castle if left to their petty arguments.

The Swan sighs beside him, the heavy, grasping vines of her magic drawing back as she shoots him a curious look, and in his mind’s eye, he forms the thought specifically for her. You’re welcome.

Her eyes roll skyward, and her gaze darts away from him. “Of course it’s not your fault, Regina. He’s weak, and he’s lived with peace his whole life.”

“What a wretched existence for him.” Killian finds it increasingly difficult to understand how it is this woman is an advisor to the king, when she so clearly despises him.

He expects to see the Swan’s hackles raise once more, but her face has turned stony and still, her body sturdy and calm. Her left hand drifts over the surface of the table to the mirror, and a moment later the surface of it bubbles and shifts, until he is staring into it’s depths not at his own face before the backdrop of the high vaulted ceiling, or the reflection of the women with him, but instead into a dark night.

It’s a village, out to the east where the trees are younger and the people are poorer, and against a sky of stars it is aflame.

The metallic clash of swords rents the night air, grunts of pain and screams of terror following behind the crackling flame as the cottages are devoured by fire.

The Swan and Regina watch the village destroyed in silence, their expressions blank and their bodies still, but Killian cannot help the swelling sense of panic that grows within him as knights in fine shining armor chase down fleeing villagers. A child cries for his mother, and Killian’s hands clench at his sides, tearing his gaze away from the scene. His breathing is heavy as he stares in astonishment at the blank faces of his companions, but the fighting continues in the mirror below, and hearing the chaos without seeing it is somehow worse. He forces his eyes back to the mirror.

In the darkness, it is difficult to make out faces, but the armor of the knights gleams against the flames, and he can clearly make out the four dragons emblazoned across the crest of Camelot.

The child from before screams, louder and louder until suddenly he goes silent, and Killian darts his gaze away even as the Swan waves a hand over the mirror, and the library fades back into silence.

He swallows in disgust - at the scene he has just witnessed, at the careless violence of the soldiers, at the collected features of two women who have lived this nightmare once before.

The Swan’s voice is even when she speaks, and Killian resists the urge to turn on his heel and leave the both of them to their fate. He has no wish for allies who can’t be bothered to drudge up some sympathy, even feigned, for the amount of death they’ve just witnessed.

“That was five days ago, along the border,” she tells them. “The memory is from the only survivor.”

“The boy?” Regina blurts, and Killian’s eyes jump to glance at her. There is little to see in her expression other than the pinch of her brow, but it is enough to realize she is as affected as he is.

The Swan purses her lips, and jerks her head, and they all fall silent for a moment.

“You’re taking memories again.”

Regina’s tone is even, but it sounds accusatory all the same.

“She was better off without this one.”

“Oh yes, much better for her to see the destruction of her entire village with no recollection of how.”

The Swan bristles. “She asked me to take it.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

Once more, Killian is left to let his mind fill in the missing details of their past, but they don’t give him much time to wonder. Moments later they are drawing maps across the table, unable to look each other in the eye as they speak of expected casualties and fortresses that might be used, what support can be found in neighboring kingdoms. They continue on this way, paying no heed to his growing frustration, and Killian can feel the buzz of his magic lifting the hair on his neck, feel the telltale pull of power that has no wish to be contained.

“You’re monsters,” he finally blurts, when he can stand it no longer, and the two of them turn to look at him. “You stand here, bartering away lives, agreeing to acceptable losses, while the men and women of this kingdom sing your bloody praises in the streets!”

“Killian --” the Swan starts, softly.

“No! This is madness! These people trust you to keep them safe, keep them alive, and you take that trust and twist it into malice, into fear, into destruction!”

“You know nothing of --” But Killian cuts across Regina as well.

“I won’t have a part in it. Lock me in the dungeons if you must. Kill me, if you think I am an acceptable loss. But I won’t gamble lives for the sake of a pointless war.”

“You don’t really have a choice in the matter,” Regina tells him, a hint of warning in her voice. “You’re the reason for all of this.”

It should come as a surprise, these words, but Killian swallows, and remembers all that has happened in his life - all the death, all the lies, all the pain and destruction. His mother dead, his father gone, Liam turning to piracy to keep them alive when they were young. The depth of his power, the volatile nature of it, the incomprehensible reservoir of magic that seemed to exist inside of him.

For all he wants to refute her claim, for all he desires to rage against the nonchalance of their battle plans and the callous nature of the beginning stages of their strategy, there is a part of him that believes her. A part of him that has begun to suspect as much himself. A part of him that has always wondered if the worst parts of his life weren’t of his own making.

The Swan opens her mouth, preparing to say something, but Killian finds he suddenly has no desire to hear it.

He turns without another word and sweeps from the room.

------

The wind is stronger on the side of the castle opposite from his chambers, and as he stares out at the lake far below he tries to imagine the sea stretching out endlessly before him.

Until today, he’d never truly contemplated leaving the castle. It had never crossed his mind until the moment he’d stormed from the library, and he’d spent the walk to his rooms thinking of nothing else. He had no doubt he could do it. No doubt that his power was strong enough for it. He’d gotten as far as imagining where he might go, his eyes closing as he raised waves to crash under his skin, before something stopped him.

The Swan was perhaps the only person in the world who might be able to help him understand his power.

Whatever secrets she kept, whatever omissions she’d made so far, she was still the only being in this world who could match his strength. Regina might try, but he’d felt the lick of her fire magic, felt the intrusiveness of it, and he’d batted it away like a fly. She was powerful, older and better at controlling the flow of it, but she was no match for the deep ocean of his own.

Six moons ago, he’d been a sailor with a barely controlled drinking problem, likely to die young without leaving a mark on the world. And now he was… something else entirely, and whatever that was, there was a chance he could destroy everything.

She could help him.

She had to help him.

Her steps are even and measured as she walks across the battlement, and he doesn’t spare her a glance, instead continuing to coax vinework gently away from the walls, mending stone as he goes.

She watches him work, her magic reaching out around him, still held away from his own, but close enough to brush past it, to whisper against it.

“In all my years, I’ve never seen someone so intent on fixing an unfixable thing,” she finally tells him, while rock seals itself together beside them both.

He grunts. “Even broken things are worth mending,” he tells her, and something like a smile flickers across her face, but she is lost in memory, and the amusement has nothing to do with his attempts to distract himself.

“I want to show you something.”

Killian lets his magic ebb out of his fingers, slowly, easing out of the working, and the construction around him slows to a halt. She tilts her head, wide eyes watching him curiously.

“Is it whatever you’ve been hiding from me?”

Her throat bobs as she swallows. “I can’t show you that. Not yet.”

“Am I not ready for that, either?”

Ignoring the snide comment, she takes a step closer to him, extending her hand. “Will you let me show you?”

Every instinct he has tells him to turn away from her. To refuse to allow her his participation in whatever schemes she has planned for him.

He reaches out, his palm pressing against the leather covering her gloved hand. She holds his gaze. “Do you trust me?”

Clenching his jaw, he stares back at her. There is an openness in her expression, and something else, too, some question in the intensity of her gaze, in the flare of her nostrils and the curl of her lip.

Killian feels his head nodding, regardless of his thoughts on the matter.

Used to her magic now, the journey does not disturb him, this time, as they vanish from the battlements, and when he blinks his eyes open it is to a clearing in a heavily wooded forest.

There is something about this particular patch of forest that is intimately familiar. The babbling stream to his left cuts across the ground and dips away, deep into the trees, and around him are bushes laden with berries, heavy and full just now, before the cool of fall fades into winter.

Here the trees are tall and wide, but dappled sunlight filters through the leaves, and as he turns his gaze back to the Swan, their hands still entwined, her image flickers, momentarily, as though he is seeing two different versions of the woman, much as he had when she came to him in the cove the night before the Choosing.

Beneath the austere face and the heavy black leathers, the memory of flowing golden hair and a wide smile glimmers. Killian blinks, and the image is gone.

She looks out of place here, in her rigid dark armor, the pallor of her face and the bright shine of her hair so unlike the woods surrounding them.

“This is where we met,” she tells him, softly, and the forest shifts around them as she drops her hold on him and waves a hand, conjuring up an image of days past.

Ghostly figures settle near the bed of the stream, a young boy with dark hair and bright eyes glancing up at a different Swan than the one standing beside Killian. She is in muted tones, a long flowing dress and a heavy draping cloak, her hair loose and free as she bends down next to the boy.

Killian feels a flicker of memory. He’d gone into the woods alone, looking for a gift for his mother, no real destination in mind, and he’d become lost in the trees, until he’d stumbled on this very clearing.

She’d…

He focuses his mind, trying to draw the memory out clearly.

She’d been there, standing by the edge of the water, and when she’d looked at him he’d felt ancient. And then she’d smiled, and asked him his name, and Killian, so used to the people in his own village shying away from him, whispering about him as he passed by - Killian had been charmed by her kind smile and gentle laughter.

The spectres near the water laugh and grin, and as Killian watches, the boy holds a hand over a flower in the Swans cupped palm. The blossoms swirl closed in her grasp, and then fold open again, and the boy laughs delightedly, glancing up at the new friend he’s made, elated to see her looking at him in something other than fear and distrust.

She looks back, and though he hadn’t seen it then, he sees it now. Pain. Behind her soft smile her eyes were glimmering with unshed tears.

“You were a sweet boy,” the Swan says beside him, and his younger self fades away. “So keen to learn, so happy to share your joy.”

“You were miserable.” It’s more of a question than he means it to be, but she shakes her head.

“I’ve lived a long time. He - you - all of it was a reminder of the things I’ve lost.”

He thinks of the apprentices Regina had spoken of, but beside him, the Swan shoots him a startled glance. He presses back against the intrusion on his mind, and she looks almost sheepish as she turns away from him.

“How often did we meet?”

“Often enough,” she tells him, infuriatingly vague as her fingers slip through the heavy branches of a bush, stepping over a rotting log towards the bank of the stream.

It’s a fine memory, and he understands it as the olive branch it is, but he does not truly know why it is she’s showing him this now. It does not explain his magic, it does not explain why she’d left him the night of the last Choosing. It does not explain all the things that have gone wrong since he first met her.

Her whole body tilts towards him, her gaze meeting his. “Have you ever been beyond this realm?”

He’s heard before of other realms, of places out of reach by land or by sea, but they’ve faded in memory over time, all the people who’d once been able to do such a thing lost long ago. He shakes his head.

“There are thousands of them to choose from, if you have the means. Most of them are long gone. Before the giants died out, they grew beans capable of allowing anyone to travel between the veils. There were enchanted objects capable of the journey, and dark spellwork that could take you.”

“And where have you gone?”

Her smile is soft and distant, and her answer is as infuriatingly ambiguous as always. “Here and there.”

“Why are you telling me this?” he finally asks, as she bends to the stream, reaching for a smooth rock along the shoreline.

She skips the rock across, her magic pushing the stone much farther than her arm could send it. “I thought you might like some time away from the castle.”

“But why here?”

“Things were...more simple, here.”

“I was a child. Of course they were more simple.”

He thinks again of the passage in the journal, sitting at the small table in his study, as she casts her gaze downward, her mouth pulling into a thin line.

“Why was Regina not with your other students, when Camelot made siege on the castle?”

He’d meant to shock her with the knowledge, but she tilts her head back and watches the breeze sift through the leaves high above them, pulling in a deep breath.

“None of them were meant to be there. I’d ask them to stay away from the fighting.”

“And where were you?” She opens her mouth to respond, but Killian, frustrated with her previous answers, cuts across her. “Elsewhere, I gather.”

“Are you angry that I didn’t save them?”

“I’m angry about many things.”

“Yes, but you seem particularly distressed by these deaths, specifically.”

“Aren’t you?”

Above them, a skirmish erupts, two robins scuffling across the length of a thick branch, chirping at each other, and they both fall back into silence.

Whatever the Swan had meant with this little journey, he doesn’t believe she’s succeeded. He still feels irritated, uncomfortable in his own skin, and his confusion with the reason for his being here, with her, inside the castle and without, only grows with every passing moment, as he builds more questions with no hope for answers.

As the sun shifts to the west, they stand together in silence, listening to the forest shift from daytime to twilight, the birds nestling in for the night, a sparrow trilling away on the far bank of the stream, branches rustling around them.

There is something musical about the woods, as the sun fades and the nighttime creatures rise, and Killian’s mind is soothed by it as the ground and the rocks and the stream grow cool, a light mist rising from the water as he watches the Swan.

Her magic is like this - the whole atmosphere of it wrapping around his turbulent thoughts, rushing and whispering through his soul until his body feels weightless and his mind is clear. Time moves strangely, both sluggish and far too quick, suspending the reality of the day.

He can see her, like this, all of her, and not the mask she has constructed. Here she is vulnerable, and lost, and alone.

She’s pulled off her gloves, her fingers dipping in the water, letting it rush across her skin, and as the sun falls low and the light of the forest dims, she glows in the pale light, some ethereal creature of beauty and destruction just waiting for something to stumble across her.

His feet draw him near to her, and he bends down beside her, curling his legs up underneath him to stare in the direction her gaze is lost to.

A flash of memory hits him, as she swirls her hands through the water, drawing up funnels to twirl above the steady flow of the stream. He’d snuck away to meet her, here, grasping on to the length of her cloak as she pressed through thick brambles, until they’d reached a spot not far from this clearing. He’d wanted to show her something, been so eager to demonstrate the new trick he’d learned, but he was patient as she led him on, only stopping when they arrived amidst a field of flowering pink flowers. The smell had been sweet and warm, and he’d been delighted when she raised petals from them, letting them shift and shimmer around her, and then she’d let the flower creature spin and dance across the ground. She’d turned to him, gesturing for him to show her what he’d come all this way for.

He’d focused in on an empty patch of earth, his fingers digging into the dirt, his eyes intent, and as they’d both watched, in a swirl of color and light, a plant had begun to grow from nothing. Killian, so focused on his task, had not seen her expression shift, had not noticed the moment her eyes grew wide and surprised, had only seen the twisting and twining of the hedge he built, thorns curling around each other while dark thistle rose, and heavy purple berries sprouted next to bell shaped flowers, the petals curling back towards the stem after a final push from Killian.

He’d glanced up at her, expected high praise for his efforts, to find her cupping a blossom carefully in one hand, concern etched across her face, and the flower spectre had blown loose in a shifting breeze.

The memory faded, after that, but Killian remembered leaving the clearing distraught, remembered taking a handful of the flowers with him as a gift to his mother.

Beside him, the Swan takes a deep, steadying breath, and turns her head to hold his gaze.

“They were harmless,” she assures him, and he is glad, in that moment, that she can read his thoughts. He cannot think how to articulate the questions he wants to ask.

“That night…”

She pulls her hand from the water, then, and reaches for his own, her cool palm pressing against the back of his hand. In the dim light, with shadows shifting across her face, it feels intimate and secret, much as it always had as a child. “There was darkness in your home that night, Killian. But it wasn’t yours.”

It’s an impulsive, turning his hand, curling his fingers against her own, and he is surprised that she does not pull away from it, instead turning her head away from him to hide her face as she presses her palm more firmly against his.

They sit in silence, listening to the nighttime forest come to life.

------

“We have a problem.”

They’ve barely materialized in the library before Regina is upon them, and she looks wild and untethered as she takes them in. The Swan drops his hand, moving away from him under the pretense of stepping closer to Regina.

“What is it?”

“Anna and Elsa have gone missing.”

“Missing? Who are Anna and Elsa, and how have they -?” Regina cuts him off.

“Elsa, the Queen of Arendelle, and her sister. Keep up, Jones.”

He expects the Swan to barrage Regina with questions immediately, and so is surprised to see her steps falter, her face going pale as she darts a glance at him.

“Who told you this?”

“What does it matter who told me, Emma, our best chance of finding an ally has suddenly disappeared because -.”

“Who told you?!”

“Anna’s bumbling fool of a husband. He was...quite distraught.”

Anger bubbles up within Killian - the man has just lost his wife, of course he was bloody distraught.

“Did he say...did he say anything about an envoy?”

“No, he was too busy panicking about his missing wife. You sent an envoy? What in the world would make you do something so idiotic as send the king’s men through hostile waters to reach Arendelle?”

Her hands are shaking as she reaches blindly behind her for edge of the desk to steady herself.

“I didn’t send the king’s men,” she says, her gaze on Killian, begging him to understand what she cannot seem to say.

Killian swallows, staring back. “Liam.”

Her brows knit, and she gives a quick, jerky nod.

“You sent Liam.”

#the price #cs ff #cs fic #leiutenant dark!swan #here we go guys #here we fucking go

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