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sukunasun · 2 years

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sorry but nanami in ur ivy league bf geto …. please..i want him so bad. im going to think about this until i die

please...save yourself...those little nanami crumbs have all of you in a chokehold...ever since i posted ivy league geto all everyone wants Dr. Kento, N. Ph.D. i didn't think he'd get this much attention it was only a few paragraphs too omg...

and you know what, i bet he'd be so smug about it too...he's sitting comfy somewhere in a leather chair sipping tea knowing he's hot shit. "just call me nanami," he'll say despite having multiple doctorates—even with that too, he'd think it wasn't a big deal, "it's not necessary to have so many qualifications, i just happen to be a man dedicated to research and knowledge...as hesiod said, moderation is best in all things.." humble bragger that he is. wouldn't walk around with a high nose, he doesn't try to win every argument like geto nor does he rub it in people's faces the way gojo does, but he'd definitely correct someone when given the chance. and they can't bring this guy anywhere, gojo takes him out to a club and nanami has brought a book to read. geto can't stop laughing because the stripper asks if she could take a peek at it, batting her eyelashes, pushing her tits up just a little and he's like "sorry, but you're not permitted to, this is for staff only." with the most monotone voice.

he isn't invited to dinner parties either because he ruins trivia night by correcting the game itself. "the great wall of china isn't actually visible from space," he says, and he's always winning these things by 100 points more than anyone else.

and let me just say that he isn't going to be your perfect professor who's so charming and attractive and smart and dreamy, that's what everyone thinks until they actually meet him and learn that nothing gets pass this man, he's so straight-laced he's borderline repressed, "oh can i do anything for extra credit?" they say, trying to be seductive, trying to be sexy and it doesn't phase him. he just thinks they're willing to do more work so he sends them off to do more things, write more essays, take more tests, do more research, do a side project, and they have to say bye to whatever little bit of social life they had left. (but kudos to him because he hates group projects as much as his students, and he won't care about ratemyprofessor reviews because all of them, all of them, are either horny, hateful, or asking for a fight, yuuji leaves the sweetest words of pure joy and gratefulness—'one time he let us play kahoot for a whole hour because he had a hangover and he let me move his slides for him during a talk. i love you nanami sensei! <3' and nanami doesn't even know about it)

yuuji likes him so much and this kid is able to see the good in everyone, which is also why nanami is able to really help him out when he needs to, "you're getting distracted during your explanations, elaborate but don't overdo it, you're meant to bring focus back to your proposed statement." when was the last time someone actually found his critiques and feedback worth something.

and he's awkward okay? he's spent years studying and he always just had a little bit of trouble making friends, like geto and gojo were there because the three of them share the burden of being the smartest, being gifted, gojo's a prodigy and geto's family have a history of being philanthropists, they have been in and out of college before turning twenty and nanami never had the time for a romantic relationship, his only wingmen are the Worst at picking up women, how is he meant to flirt with anyone, and you think he doesn't care? man cares too much! he listens to meet me at our spot on repeat after bad dates because he thinks he's going to be alone forever, spins around his office in the dark as he finishes all that expensive whiskey, and everyone knows that he's been dumped because he stuffs his face full of bread and carbs everytime it happens.

ugh he wants a family so bad, he's so sick of the same old routine and he just wants a break from all of it. can't stand going home to the same old empty apartment, empty bed, empty fridge. he wants a hot meal and a cheery voice greeting him the moment he steps past the threshold, a gorgeous woman who would massage his aching shoulders, let him pick at her insightful brain, and sleep in with him on the weekends. "i became a husband," he replies when asked what he's most proud of and it makes your heart swell, he surprises you like this all the time, he blows your mind because you don't expect it, you wouldn't think he'd adore you the way he does, something so...selfish? just wants you to himself, won't have you visiting his office because he will eat you right up on his desk. it's always the introverted ones, the quiet ones, but nanami is a whole other type of his own. the kind that whispers the dirtiest, filthy things in your ear before he eats you out like he's been craving for it his entire life, hungry and sloppy, his tongue inches deeper and deeper. "i won't fuck you until you've cum three times", he doesn't know when to stop because all he feels is that he should keep going, do a good job, prove to you that he's so capable, that he's more than just his academic accomplishments, he wants to be seen as a man, as a partner.

#i love the love he's getting #but its exactly what he wants..he wants yall to suffer #also..i saw the way he bragged about black flash dont tell me he isnt doing the same with his titles #when will i actually give nanami a happy ending #ask #anon #sunpiece #jujutsu kaisen #jjk fic #nanami kento #nanami kento fic #nanami kento phd #ivy league au #nanami kento hcs #nanami hcs #nanami x reader

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unbreathable · 3 years

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ride home / S. Rogers

Summary : As a girl you were always told to never accept a ride from unknown men. You knew what could happen, you knew the dangers and heck, you`ve seen how it ruined some girls. But hey, he`s your teacher, nothing could happen. Right?

Pairing : Dark(soft)!teacher Steve Rogers x female Reader

Before you read, please understand that this is intended to be a dark fic. There will be noncon elements, rape, violence, manipulation and so much more. If you find any of these disturbing, please click away. 18+ only.

Warnings for this one shot : manipulation, noncon elements, rape, use of drugs, lost of virginity. This is some kind of au and Steve might be out of character a little.

Word count : 3.319

Credit : for the gif I used, the credit goes to its rightful creator.

Note : Don’t expect this to be any good. I came up with this over the course of a few hours and I’m still learning how to write one shots, as I find it much easier to write a series. Also I still suck at writing “smut”. I’m trying to perfect it, tho. Promise. Anyway, hope you guys enjoy this one shot till my mind would be satisfied with the way the next chapter of “The Magpie” turned out and would let me post it. :)) Also, please excuse any mistakes I made. Have a great day you guys!

Also, to all the writers from this platform : thank you !

Girl found wondering around without any memory of the last few days, claims she had been abducted and raped...

Your eyes narrowed as you stared at the case which has been all over the news for the past week. It was quite predictable, really. Young girl, too drunk for her own good woke up by herself in the middle of nowhere. You sighed. In a city as big as New York, cases like this happened almost every other day, but there was always something left behind. Fight marks, blood, hair. Anything that could help the police find the person who did it. This time though, there was nothing.

The poor girl. You couldn`t help but pity her. She must be terrified. All alone against a world that knows nothing better than to judge. You pinched your nose in exasperation.

Cases like this, it`s what made you choose to study law. You wanted to be able to help other women. To offer them a chance at justice. No one deserved to be told that it was their own fault for wondering alone at night or for wearing something more showing. No girl should feel like the law protects only the male population...

“ And what`s your opinion on this matter, miss I`m too busy scrolling on my phone to pay attention to class?”

You cursed in your head, as you put your phone away and lifted your eyes to meet your teacher.

Steve Rogers. America`s hero, savior of the world and an actual pain in your ass, was looking at you expectantly. You held his gaze as you forced your lips to form some kind of smile. Something about him always put you on edge and the way his eyes darkened as he stared at you, didn`t exactly help ease the feeling.

“I`m sorry, I was distracted.” you murmured, not wanting to give him the satisfaction that he caught you unprepared. ”If you would be so kind...”

You looked at him as you raised one eyebrow. It was always like this. No matter what you did he`d always find something to pick at you. At first you took it as a form of banter between a teacher and his students, but with time it became clearly that he had a problem with you. Your grades didn`t reflect the hard work you always put in. Your extra work wouldn`t be considered. Every time you would as much as look at your watch he`d find something to jab at you. He would also have something to say about every paper you handed him. It was a miracle you even made the grade for his class.

You cringed as you remembered the comments he would make about your life outside his class. You seemed to bump into him on a daily. There was also something, in the way he watched your every move, that it made the hair at the back of your neck stay high on alert. You really couldn`t understand what you`ve done that America`s sweetheart despised you that much.

”The women rights...” he smirked down at you.

“Oh, yes. I strongly believe that women should have got their rights the same time men did.” you smiled when you realized that he wanted to add something else. “I mean we know that every society of this world was built around androcentrism, but if we`re real the women were the ones that kept everything from falling apart.” you drew in a short breath. “Oh, and I believe that 1920 was a bit late for our women to get their rights, since women all around the world fought for it since the 18th century.”

You smirked, as for once in your life the bell rang exactly when you needed it. Forcing a smile his way, you stood up gathering your notebooks. You were quite proud of yourself, not because your answer was the desired one, but because you got on professor Rogers nerves. While he didn`t seem to have a problem with women and feminists in general, he sure had a problem with the way you choose to speak on the matter. From the corner of your eye you saw his jaw twitch.

At first you were afraid to even say your opinion lest you would upset him, but now you enjoyed to see that vein on his forehead nearly pop. You held back a giggle. Oh well, at least you won`t have to see him for the next few weeks.

“Professor!” you rolled your eyes when you herd your bestfriend use her sweet voice. “I was wondering if you`d like to come to our party tonight.”

You stood straight, narrowing your eyes at the one that has been your friend since the first day you came to the city. What the hell was happening. You knew she had a crush on him, everyone did, but she wasn`t the one to just go and ask someone out, especially not him. You watched her in confusion as professor Rogers made his way to the front of the class.

“You know, with everything happening right now, the uni council would let us hold the party only if there was someone that could take care of us.”

“Oh!” you supposed that made sense, but even so why did it have to be him.

“Of course professor Barnes already said that he`ll be there, but we`d be thankful if you came too. Please!” your friend bated her eyelashes at him as you rolled your eyes.

Professor Rogers had a pleased smile as he moved his eyes from her to you. You held his gaze, even going as far as raising one eyebrow at him. He blinked, before turning his head towards the rest of the class.

“Since you asked so nicely.” he said after a short moment dismissively. ”`I`ll be there.”

There was something sinister in his eyes. Something that you failed to see as you made your way out of the lecture class.

“I can`t believe you invited him!” you playfully jabbed your friend in the shoulder as she walked next to you.

“Oh, come on! It’s just tonight, and I bet he won’t be able to stay up that late since he’s like... the same age as history?” she bit back a laugh, as she took your hand. “It will be fun, you`ll see.”

You hoped she was right since you were never a big fan of parties of any kind.

_ _ _

This wasn`t fun. Not at all.

You knew you should have stayed home, yet you still wanted to enjoy the last night with your class mates before break. But this wasn`t it. The music was too loud and you couldn`t even hear what some people were saying. Also you`ve never really been a techno fan. The food was crap and you were sure everyone came just because there were free drinks.

It was well past midnight and you have been there since the beginning, but you were already dreading it. You smiled as your only joy came from watching drunk freshmen being rejected by some of your friends. The girls were ruthless and that made you proud.

“Hey girl!” your bestfriend came by your side, holding two glasses in her hands as her body danced along the rhythm of the music. “Look at was professor Rogers sent us.”

Her words were slurred and you could see that she drank already too much. That`s why at first you thought you didn`t hear her right. While it wasn`t unusual for men to send women drinks, getting a drink from your teacher was something you never thought could happen. It was wrong in a way.

“What?” your eyes widened as soon as the word left your mouth.

You eyed the glass she handed you. It seemed to be one of your favorites, and after the sour taste the beer left in your mouth, that would have been like a desert. Still something made you suspicious.

“Come on, take it!” your friend pressed as she smiled broadly. “He must have realized that he’s been an ass all year and wants to make amends.”

She was giggling as her glossy eyes drifted around the room. She didn`t seem to be able to focus on anything, but somehow her shaky hands found yours and brought the glass you were holding closer to your mouth. You weren`t exactly sure what came over you, but you opened your mouth and let the liquid go down your throat. Involuntarily, your eyes wondered around till you saw the back of your least favorite teacher. He didn`t even seem to care about anything around him as he was engaged into a discussion with professor Barnes. That alone made you feel safe, even though the drink left a bitter taste in your mouth.

You were too quick to judge, you resonated. This was probably his way of saying: “Sorry I tormented you that much.” You suddenly giggled. It was shortly followed by your friend`s laughter. She threw the glass to the side and took your hand leading you to the dancefloor.

You weren`t that much of a dancer. You knew just some basics moves and that was it, but now you didn`t seem to care. You let your body move, and only chuckled when your legs started to feel like jelly. It was a strange feeling. You suddenly felt like were floating.

You furrowed your brows as you started to feel that your body didn`t exactly respond to your impulses. Everything around you happened in slow motion.

You cursed. Just how much did you drink? Moving one hand to your head, you tried to get your senses back, but you found it too hard to do. Your head buzzed. For a second you looked around trying to spot your friend among the sweaty bodies on the dancefloor, but it was like you couldn`t recognize anybody.

Fuck this. You had enough of this party already, and the way you felt made you decide that it was time to go home. You moved between the sea of bodies as fast as you could. Your coat and purse were the only thing you spent more than five minutes looking for, but as you found them you practically run out of there.

The bus stop wasn`t that far, but just the thought that you`ll have to go home by bus, made you want to throw up. You didn`t feel well and there was dizziness that started to overcome you. As you watched the empty street, you cursed again. Of course you`ll have to wait till the next bus came. Damn it! You should really get your license.

The sound of a engine from behind you, made you turn your head. Your eyes narrowed as you watched the Range Rover slow down and actually stop right next to you. You squinted your eyes, trying to see through the tinted glass, but as a wave of nausea hit you, you moved your head to the side. You didn`t exactly pay attention when one of the windows went down. You didn`t really care. You felt sick, and all you wanted, was to get home.

“ I saw you left the party early.” the deep voice said. “Are you all right kitten?”

You hissed when you heard the voice of the last person you wanted to see right now. What was he even doing here? Your heart skipped a beat as another wave hit. You took a deep breath and tried to steady yourself. Just ignore him and he`ll go away. You didn`t exactly knew why you choose to act like that but there was something in your head that told you it was for the best.

“Come on girl, I have to make sure everyone is safe and sound.” you heard his voice. “If you don`t feel fine, I can take you home.”

The idea of getting home sooner and in a nice car was looking really good right now. But still, you didn`t feel like it was the best for you. You choose to keep quiet for reasons not even you knew. You glossy eyes scanned the schedule of the bus that was right in front of you. Thirty minutes and you`ll go home.

You heard professor Rogers sigh.

“And here I thought you never shut your mouth.” there was a deep chuckle, fallowed by the sound of the engine coming to life. “Look kitten I can either get you home or I`ll go my merry way and let you here all alone... well not quite. But I`m not sure you`d want that kind of company.”

Confusion filled your mind. The sudden move you made to look at him, made you dizzy. You tried to focus your eyes, in time to see him pointing to somewhere behind you. You slowly turned.

A group of guys were eyeing you like a wolf would his prey. Your mouth fell open as they did obscene gestures at you. Your whole body freeze as fear took over you. You knew what could happen. Suddenly you were more sober that ever and as you heard the car start moving, you nearly threw yourself in front of it. On shaky legs you moved towards the door.

“Wait” you find it hard to speak. “Professor, I`m sorry I... please!”

You looked at him with pleading eyes, and didn`t even register the way he smirked as you got into the car. Everything was a haze. You only felt like you could breath when the car started to gain speed. You didn`t even remembered to give him your address or anything, but as the car rolled down various streets you were only thankful you were far away from them.

“It such a crazy world out there” professor Rogers voice made you move your head towards him, but as the fear was gone, you started to feel the dizziness again.

With unfocused eyes you watched him. America`s hero was giving you a ride home for free and you were acting like he was your biggest enemy. What was wrong with you?

“I have to say I`m impressed.” he suddenly said as the car started to slow down. “That was one of the strongest drugs that you drank, and you still have some of your conscious left. The other ones were down after a few minutes.”

You looked at him and simply blinked. You wondered if your mind was playing games with you. Surely, he hadn`t said what you think you heard. You must have imagined everything.

“E... excuse me?” you asked dully.

You drew in a shaky breath as your trembling hand went to the door. He chuckled darkly at your attempts to open it. You wanted to scream but as your movement became slower and slower you found that fear wasn`t enough to fuel your limp body.

The car came to a sudden stop. You closed your eyes as you felt hands pulling you back.

“Now, now honey.” you could feel his breath on the back of your neck. “Don`t waste your energy, you`ll need it.”

You turned your head and watched him through your eyelashes. Something in your head was screaming at you to fight, to run, to get away. You wanted to punch, scratch, hurt him in any way. But your body didn`t listen.

It happened too fast. In a matter of second your dress was ripped to shreds. And your found yourself pressed to the door. He was over you in an instant. Turning your head to the side so that he could stare into your eyes. He had a hungry look on his face. You`ve seen it many times but it never terrified you as much as now.

“Just as pretty as I imagined.” he said in a husky voice.

You squeezed your legs as you felt his hand moving around along your body. He tugged at your bra till the clasps snapped. Your nipples stood erect, you didn`t know if it was from the cold of the car or the heat that was inside you. One of his hands came forward at pinched at your nipples. You made to move, but as sensing your intention he tugged your head back by your hair.

“Don`t you even dare!” he growled as his thumb played with one of your nipples. “I waited a long time for this”.

He leaned forward kissing down your stretched neck. His mouth was hot against your skin. You gasped when you felt his tongue leaving wet traces along your collarbone. He tugged at your hair one more time before his hand went down.

“Always dressing like this world is your own runaway, always thinking that you know it all.” he let out a moan as he squeezed your ass. “Do you know what a face as pretty as yours and an attitude like that do to a man?”

You whimpered. You never meant to catch his attention in that way, you just wanted to feel good about yourself. You wanted to tell him that. To tell him that you were sorry, but your brain didn`t work anymore. There was no reaction even as he spanked you. You felt like you could pass out every second.

“Don`t even think about it!”

You closed your eyes when your panties were soon the same as your other clothes. Slick was going down your legs. Despite everything, you were aroused.

“So fucking wet already. Good girl!” he praised.

You felt his hand descend down to your very core, proding around. You bit your lips as tears filled your eyes.

“How many have been here before?” he gave a low chuckle the same time his fingers pinched your button.

“One?” he mocked as one of his long fingers entered you.

You held back a gasp. Non, no, no. This wasn`t happening. Nobody touched you like that before. Nobody even came close to it. That`s not how you wanted it not how you dreamt it would happen. You wanted dinner, roses, a man you loved... not him.

“Two?” he continued as another finger stretched you.

You felt your walls clench around his fingers, as he moved them in and out ou you, everything while his thumb circled your most sensitive part.

“Fuck... you`re tight!” his breath was ragged, it was like he couldn`t get enough.

There was a sudden pause. In a quick move you found yourself pressed to the door of the car, as he angled your body to have better access to your burning core. He drew in a breath.

“A virgin.” he moaned.

You closed your eyes as you herd him playing at his clothes. The sudden hardness you felt proding around your core, made you shiver. You didn`t dare to look back and see it. You were scared. It seemed too big. You were afraid it would split you in a half.

You screamed when he entered you. The pain blurred your vision. Your whole body ached and tears fell down your cheeks. No, no, no. You bit back a moan of pain when he started to move, not caring about you at all. His moves were rough, punishing.

“Shhh doll, I`ll take care of you.” he rasped. “You must have waited so long for this... saving yourself for me.”

Your body moved in rhythm with his. His cock dragged along your walls as every move sent a wave of pain through you. Soon though, you found the pain disappeared. A strange feeling took over you. It was almost pleasurable. You guessed you would have enjoyed it under any other circumstances. But now? Now you were just tired.

As you passed out, you failed to notice the feeling of something warm flowing through you.

_ _ _

Steve smiled down at your sleeping form. So pretty, even after being used like that. You had a glow. Too bad you might not remember anything that happened. He chuckled. It`s a good thing he planned to keep you. He`ll make sure you`ll never forget him.

You were his girl after all. The only reason he took that shitty job as a teacher.

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dwellordream · 3 years

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“To understand what friendship between women was, we must first understand what it was not. Before turning to the ways in which female friendship illustrated the play of the Victorian gender system, we must develop grounds for distinguishing it from other relationships between women. This is a detour, for the subject of this chapter is female friendship; erotic desire and marriage between women are the focus of subsequent sections. But friendship, erotic infatuation, and female marriage have so often been conflated, and women’s relationships so commonly understood as essentially ambiguous, that the detour is a necessary one.

The language of Victorian friendship was so ardent, the public face of female marriage so amicable, the comparisons between female friendship and marriage between men and women so constant, that it is no simple task to distinguish female friends from female lovers or female couples. The question “did they have sex?” is the first one on people’s lips today when confronted with a claim that women in the past were lovers—and it is almost always unanswerable. If firsthand testimony about sex is the standard for defining a relationship as sexual, then most Victorians never had sex. Scholars have yet to determine whether Thomas Carlyle was impotent; when, if ever, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor consummated their relationship; or if Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick, whose diaries recorded their experiments with fetishes, cross-dressing, and bootlicking, also had genital intercourse.

Just as one can read hundreds of Victorian letters, diaries, and memoirs without finding a single mention of menstruation or excretion, one rarely finds even oblique references to sex between husband and wife. Men and women were equally reticent about sexual activity inside and outside of marriage. In a journal that described her courtship and wedding in detail, Lady Knightley dispatched the first weeks of wedded life in two lines: “Rainald and I entered on our new life in our own home. May God bless it to us” (173). Elizabeth Butler, whose autobiography included “a little sketch of [her] rather romantic meeting” with the man who became her husband, was similarly and typically laconic about a transition defined by sexual intercourse: “June 11 of that year, 1877, was my wedding day.”

The lack of reliable evidence of sexual activity becomes less problematic, however, if we realize that sex matters because of the social relationships it creates and concentrate on those relationships. In Victorian England, sex was assumed to be part of marriage, but could also drop out of marriage without destroying a bond never defined by sex alone. The diaries and correspondence of Anne Lister and Charlotte Cushman provide solid evidence that nineteenth-century women had genital contact and orgasms with other women, but even more importantly, they demonstrate that sex created different kinds of connections. The fleeting encounters Lister had with women she met abroad were very different from the illicit but sustained affair Cushman had with a much younger woman who became her daughter-in-law.

Those types of affairs were in turn worlds apart from the relationships with women that Lister and Cushman called marriages, a term that did not simply mean the relationships were sexual but also connoted shared households, mingled property, and assumptions about exclusivity and durability. We can best understand what kinds of relationships women had with each other not by hunting for evidence of sex, which even if we find it will not explain much, but rather by anchoring women’s own statements about their relationships in a larger context.

The context I provide here is the complex linguistic field of lifewriting, which brings into focus two types of relationships often confused with friendship, indeed often called friendship, but significantly different from it: 1) unrequited passion and obsessive infatuation; and 2) life partnerships, which some Victorians described as marriages between women. The most famous and best-documented example of a Victorian woman’s avowed but unreciprocated passion for another woman is Edith Simcox’s lifelong love for George Eliot, which has made her a staple figure in histories of lesbianism.

Simcox (1844–1901) was a trade-union organizer and professional writer who regularly contributed book reviews to the periodical press and published fiction and nonfiction, including a study of women’s property ownership in ancient societies, discussed in chapter 5. From 1876 to 1900, Simcox kept a journal in a locked book that surfaced in 1930. Simcox gave her life story a title, The Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, that foregrounded her successful work as a labor activist, but its actual content focused on what Simcox called “the lovepassion of her life,” her longing for George Eliot as an unattainable, idealized beloved whom she called “my goddess” or, even more reverently, “Her.”

Simcox knowingly embraced a love that could not be returned, though she was aware of reciprocated, consummated sexual love between women. Her diary alludes to a “lovers’ quarrel” among three women she knew (61) and mentions her own rejection of a woman who “professed a feeling for me different from what she had ever had for any one, it might make her happiness if I could return it” (159). Tellingly, though twentieth-century scholars often refer to Simcox euphemistically as Eliot’s devoted “friend,” Simcox rarely used the term, and modeled herself instead on a courtly lover made all the more devoted by the one-sidedness of her passion. Simcox defined her diary as an “acta diurna amoris,” a daily act of love, and aspired to keep it with a constancy that would mirror her total absorption in Eliot (3).

After bringing Eliot two valentines in February 1878, Simcox wrote: “Yesterday I went to see her, and have been in a calm glow of happiness since:—for no special reason, only that to have been near her happens to have that effect on me. . . . I did nothing but make reckless love to her . . . I had told her of my ambition to be allowed to lie silently at her feet as she pursued her occupations” (25). George Lewes, the companion whom Eliot’s friends referred to as her husband, was present at most of these scenes, and he and Eliot tolerated and even enjoyed Simcox’s attentions, which they consciously construed as loverlike.

During a conversation about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love poems, Sonnets from the Portugese, Eliot told Simcox “she wished my letters could be printed in the same veiled way— ‘the Newest Heloise,’” thus situating Simcox’s missives to her in the tradition of amatory literature (39). In private, Simcox indulged fantasies of a more sensual connection, reflecting on a persistent “love that made the longing and molded the caress,” and recalling how “[i]n thinking of her, kisses used to form themselves instinctively on my lips—I seldom failed to kiss her a good night in thought” (136).

In trying to define her love for Eliot, Simcox significantly refused to be content with one paradigm; instead, she accumulated analogies, comparing her love for Eliot to both “[m]arried love and passionate friendship” (60). Like a medieval ascetic, Simcox eroticized her lack of sexual fulfillment, arguing that her love was even more powerful than friendship or marriage because, in resigning herself to living “widowed of perfect joy,” she had felt “sharp flames consuming what was left . . . of selfish lust” (60).

In an unsent 1880 letter to Eliot, Simcox again found herself unable to select only one category to explain her love: “Do you see darling that I can only love you three lawful ways, idolatrously as Frater the Virgin Mary, in romance wise as Petrarch, Laura, or with a child’s fondness for the mother” (120). By implication, Simcox also suggested that there would be an unlawful way to love Eliot—as an adulterer who would usurp the uxurious role already occupied by Lewes. She concluded by explaining that her relationship with Eliot was too unequal to be a friendship (120).

In the absence of the sociological and scientific shorthand provided by sexology or a codified subculture, and in the absence of a genuinely shared life that could be represented by a common history or joint possessions, women like Simcox represented their unrequited sexual desire for other women by extravagantly combining incompatible terms such as mother, lover, sister, friend, wife, and idol. Other women deployed similar rhetorical techniques of intensification and accumulation to express sexual loves that were not equally felt and did not lead to long-term partnerships.

At age twenty, Sophia Jex-Blake (1840–1912), one of England’s first female doctors and an activist who helped open medical education to women, met philanthropist Octavia Hill (1838–1912). In a biography of Jex-Blake written in 1918 that still adhered to Victorian rhetorical conventions, Margaret Todd called her subject’s relationship with Hill a “friendship” but qualified it as one that made “the deepest impression . . . of any in the whole of her life.” Jex-Blake considered the degree of love she felt for women to be unusual, writing around 1858, “I believe I love women too much ever to love a man” (78).

During a brief relationship that Hill soon broke off, the two women may have been sexually involved, but even so their feelings were never evenly matched. During the period when the women were closest, Hill reduced their bond to mere chumminess by calling herself and Jex-Blake “great companions” (85). By contrast, Jex-Blake was in awe of Hill and described her as both child and mother, roles often eroticized for Victorians, writing in her diary of “My dear loving strong child . . . I do love and reverence her” (85). Even after the relationship ended, Jex-Blake thought of Hill as her lifelong spouse, referring twenty years later to the “fanciful faithfulness” she maintained for her first love, to whom she left “the whole of her little property” in repeated wills (94).

Like Simcox, Jex-Blake used intensified language to underscore the uniqueness of her emotions. When she described inviting Hill on a vacation that included a visit to Llangollen, a site made famous by the female couple who had lived there together, Jex-Blake wrote of her “heart beating like a hammer” (85) and then described Hill’s response: “She sunk her head on my lap silently, raised it in tears, then such a kiss!” (86). Female friends often exchanged kisses, but Jex-Blake’s account took the kiss out of the realm of friendship into one of heightened sensation. Although it was common for female friends to love each other and write gushingly about it, Simcox and Jex-Blake also wrote of feeling uncommon, different from the general run of women.

Simcox identified closely with men and Jex-Blake felt unable to love men as most women did; both were extraordinarily autonomous, professionally successful, and self-conscious about the significance of their love for women. Other women also had intense erotic relationships that went beyond friendship, but were less self-conscious about those relationships, which they rarely saw as needing special explanation, and which usually lasted years or months rather than a lifetime. An example of outright insouciance about a deeply felt erotic fascination between women is found in the journals of Margaret Leicester Warren, written in the 1870s and published for private circulation in 1924.

Little is known about Warren, who was born in 1847 and led the life of a typical upper-middle-class lady, attending church, studying drawing and music, and marrying a man in 1875. Her diary attests to a fondness for triangulated relationships that included an adolescent crush on her newlywed sister and her sister’s husband, and a brief, tumultuous engagement to a male cousin whose mother was the dramatic center of Warren’s intense emotions. In 1872, when Warren was twenty-five, she began to write incessantly about a distant cousin named Edith Leycester in entries that reveled in the experience of succumbing to another woman’s glamour: “Edith looked very beautiful and as usual I fell in love with her....Tonight Edith took me into her room. . . . She is like an enchanted princess. There is some charm or spell that has been thrown over her.”

Numerous similar entries recorded an infatuation that combined daily familiarity with reverent mystification of a sophisticated and self-dramatizing woman. Warren’s fascination with Edith lasted several years. Unlike Simcox and Jex-Blake, Warren never self-consciously reflected that her feelings for Edith differed from conventional friendship, but like them, Warren ascribed an intensity, exclusivity, and volatility to her feelings for Edith absent from most accounts of female friendship. Indeed, Warren rarely referred to Edith as a friend when she wrote of her desire to see Edith every day and recorded their many exchanges of confidences, poetry, and gifts.

Warren fetishized and idealized Edith, was fixated on her presence and absence, and used superlatives to describe the feelings she inspired. Within months of meeting Edith, most of Warren’s entries consisted of detailed reenactments of their daily visits and the emotions generated by each parting and reunion: “Edith was charming tonight and I was happier with her than I have ever been. She looked beautiful” (287). Warren created an erotic aura around Edith through the very act of writing about her, through a liberal use of adverbs and adjectives, and by infusing her friend’s most ordinary actions with dramatic implications.

Describing how Edith invited her to visit her country home, for example, Warren wrote, “Edith came in and threw herself down on the chair and said quietly and gently ‘come to Toft!’” (291). Although Warren got along well with Edith’s rarely present husband, Rafe, she relished being alone with her and described the awkward, jealous scenes that took place whenever she had to share Edith with other women (362, 369). Warren found ways to dwell on the details of Edith’s beauty through references to fashion and contemporary art. Like many diarists, Warren had an almost novelistic capacity to observe and characterize people in terms of prevailing aesthetic forms.

She described Edith with flowers in her hair, looking like a pre-Raphaelite painting, and recorded her desire to make images of Edith: “I sd. like to paint her. . . . It wd. make a good ‘golden witch’ a beautiful Enchantress” (290–91). A ride with Edith inspired Warren to pen another impassioned tableau: “All the way there in the brougham I looked at Edith’s beautiful profile, the lamp light shining on it, and the wind blowing her hair about—her face also, all lit up with enthusiasm and tenderness as she leant forward to Rafe and told him a long story . . . I . . . only thought how grand she was” (369–70).

Shared confidences about Warren’s broken engagement to their male cousin became another medium for cultivating the women’s special intimacy. By assuring Warren that she did not side with the jilted fiance´, Edith declared an autonomous interest in her: “‘I wanted you to come here because— because I like you.’ She was sitting at her easel and never looking at me as she spoke for I was standing behind her, but when she said ‘because I like you,’ she looked backwards up at me with such an honest, soft, beautiful expression that any distrust I had still left of her trueness melted up into a cinder” (290).

Just as Warren heightened her relationship with Edith by writing about it so effusively and at such length, the two women elevated it by coyly discussing what their interactions and feelings meant. Before one of her many departures from London, Edith asked Warren: “‘[A]re you sorry I am going? . . . How curious—why are you sorry?’ Then I told her a little of all she had done for me . . . how much life and pleasure and interest she had put into my life, and she said nothing but she just put out her hand and laid it on my hand and that from her means a great deal more than 100 things from anyone else” (293). Edith’s gesture drew on the repertory of friendship, but in the private theater of her journal, Warren transformed the touch of a hand into a uniquely meaningful clasp.

This is not to say the relationship was one-sided. If Warren’s diary reports the two women’s interactions with any degree of accuracy, it is clear that both enjoyed creating an atmosphere of pent-up longing. Edith fed Warren’s infatuation with provocative questions and a skill for setting scenes: “She asked what things I cared for now? And I said with truth, for nothing— except seeing her” (303). Three days later, just before another of Edith’s departures, Warren paid a call: When tea was over, the dusk had begun and I . . . sat . . . at the open window. . . . By and bye Edith came and sat near me. . . . The room inside was nearly dark, but outside it was brilliant May moonlight. . . . Edith sat there ready to go, looking very pale and very sad with the light on her face. . . . We did not talk much. She asked me to go to the party tonight and to think of her at 11. . . . She said goodbye and she kissed me, for the first time. (303–4)

Warren is exquisitely sensitive to every element that connotes eroticism: a darkened room, physical proximity, complicit silence, a romantic demand that the beloved remain present in her lover’s mind even when absent, a kiss whose uniqueness—“for the first time”—suggests a beginning. Any one of these actions would have been unremarkable between female friends, but comparison with other women’s diaries shows how distinctive it was for Warren to list so many gestures within one entry, without defining and therefore restricting their meaning. Warren’s attitude also distinguishes her emotions from those articulated by women who took their love for women in a more conjugal or sexual direction. Her journals combine exhaustive attention to the beloved with a pervasive indifference to interrogating what that fascination might mean.

Never classified as friendship or love, Warren’s feelings for Edith had the advantages and limits of remaining in the realm of suggestion, where they could expand infinitely without ever being realized or checked. Women who consummated a mutual love and consolidated it by forming a conjugal household were less likely to leave records of their most impassioned moods and deeds than those whose love went unrequited or undefined. Indeed, women in what were sometimes called “female marriages” (a term I discuss further in chapter 5) used lifewriting to claim the privilege of privacy accorded to opposite-sex spouses.

Like the lifewritings of women married to men, those of women in female marriages assumed intimacy and interdependence rather than displaying it, and folded their sexual bond into a social one. They described shared households and networks of acquaintances who recognized and thus legitimated the women’s coupledom, liberally using words such as “always,” “never,” and “every” to convey an iterated, daily familiarity more typical of spouses than friends.

Martha Vicinus’s Intimate Friends cites many nineteenth-century women who described their relationships with other women as marriages, and Magnus Hirschfeld’s magisterial, international study of The Homosexuality of Men and Women (1914) noted that same sex couples often created “marriage-like associations characterized by the exclusivity and long duration of the relationships, the living together and the common household, the sharing of every interest, and often the existence of legitimate community property.”

Sexual relationships of all stripes were most acceptable when their sexual nature was least visible as such but was instead manifested in terms of marital acts such as cohabitation, fidelity, financial solidarity, and adherence to middle-class norms of respectability. Because friendship between women was so clearly defined and prized, one way to acknowledge a female couple’s existence while respecting their privacy was to call women who were in effect married to each other “friends.” Given that “friends” was used to describe women who were lovers and women who were not, how can we tell when “friends” means more than just friends?

…There are many instances of published writing acknowledging marital relationships between women by calling them friendships. Victorian women in female couples were not automatically subject to the exposure and scandal visited on opposite-sex couples who stepped outside the bounds of respectable sexual behavior. Instead, many female couples enjoyed both the right to privacy associated with marriage and the public privileges accorded to female friendship. The Halifax Guardian obituary of Anne Lister in 1840 recognized her longstanding spousal relationship with Anne Walker by calling her Lister’s “friend and companion,” a gratuitously compound phrase.

Emily Faithfull, whom we will encounter again in chapter 6, was a feminist with a long history of female lovers. An 1894 article entitled “An Afternoon Tea with Miss Emily Faithfull” described her home in Manchester, decorated by “Miss Charlotte Robinson,” whom Faithfull readily disclosed “shares house with me.”80 Faithfull left all her property to Robinson in a will that called her “my beloved friend” whose “countless services” and “affectionate tenderness and care . . . made the last few years of my life the happiest I ever spent.” To call one woman another’s superlative friend was not to disavow their marital relationship but to proclaim it in the language of the day.”

- Sharon Marcus, “Friendship and the Play of the System.” in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

#victorian #sexuality #history #sharon marcus #between women

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yoursecretmuse · 3 years

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My Perception On No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

🥀 This year has brought me many joys, that have left me with melancholy victories. I have been venturing out of my usual book genres and I've found a selection of well to do books that I simply cannot live without. How I've existed this far without them, I will never know. There are many different types of literature out there and of course I only focus on English and European Literature. Not because I'm bias in some way. But I've always found American and European culture very interesting. Despite ignoring my very own culture. It had never occurred to me, that until now, I have never heard of Asian Literature. It's like an unknown phenomenon that no one speaks of. When I think back of my studies in school, I've never even heard of my teachers mentioning Asian writers at all. It was like they didn't exist or people found Asian culture not important enough to read about. Which is odd because in Asian countries they have liberties filled with European novel and American novels. Is it safe to say that Asian people find European and American culture interesting, though we do not share the same feelings toward them. Nevertheless, I stumbled upon Osamu Dazai after reading a mutual friends post about Vincent Van Gogh. It was a silly meme that consisted of Van Gogh and Osamu talking over their depression. Which is not something to joke about but I must confess I found it humorous. Through that humor, I decided to research Osamu and the rest is history. So, here is my thoughts on the exceptional book, No Longer Human. I want to give an in-depth review without giving the book away too much (if at all). But I must warn you that spoilers may become a possibility. No Longer Human is broken into three parts, including an introduction in the beginning by Donald Keene, as well as a Prologue & Epilogue by Osamu Dazai himself. So, to make things easier to understand, I'm going to review each part individually.

The Introduction Normally, I would skip this part of the book because at times it can be very boring and bland. But after reading The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johaan Wolfgang Von Goethe, I found it important to read book introductions because they can have valuable information about the writer. In this section, Donald Keene noted how under appreciated Asian writer are in literature. For some odd reason, American & Europeans cultures specifically seem to feel like we cannot learn anything from Asian culture. Perhaps it has something to do with our history with going to battle with certain Asian countries. Yet, that did not stop countries like Japan and China from filling their liberties with American & European literature. Which upsets me. Had it not been for Van Gogh, I would have missed out on an extremely talented writer. I'm not sure who is to blame for this but I find the idea of not representing Asian writers outside of manga is shameful and sad. There is more to their culture than just that. However, as a whole our world only views Asian people in a small and certain light, that barely gives them any kind of positive recognition outside of the obvious stereotypes. In short, I really urge everyone to take time and read the introduction and share your thoughts on Keene's and my views. What do you think and why is Asian literature so lost and underrepresented? Why do Asian writers rather be on the bottom of American top writing lists, than the top of Asian writer lists? It is very interesting.

🥀

The Prologue In this section, you learn of how Ōba Yōzō (aka Dazai himself) feels alienated and very much of a misfit. He tells you how all of his life he has worn a mask to hid his true sensitive and self destructive self. He harshly criticizes himself and informs you of how he feels about the nature of "humans" and how he never felt like one, thus making him believe that he is not. I like this part of the novel because I can relate to it in so many ways. Many things he explained and said is how I felt (and still very much feel) about myself. Not only of my appearance and state of being but also without people. We both share the same reflection on our confidence or lack there of as a child. I shared his thoughts on normality being ugly and being bland and not standing out is worse than being ugly or beautiful. He even goes on to explain that death has more of a soul or an expression than him. The ugly/void he felt as a child (as well as his whole life) has manifested into a visible void, that crept from his inner darkness and it carries a bland look. Which to me speaks volumes. 🥀

The First Notebook Unable to cope with the world around him, Ōba begins to become a jokester and class clown, in order to mask away the alienation that he feels. He engages in planned fails and acts as if he has no clue as to what he does. He tells us of his environment at home. His father always being gone on business and his mother he did not mention much. He speaks of his maids/servants mistreating him, but he never reported them because he sees it as pointless. We also learn he views a "human" as someone who is happy and hopeful. Perhaps, attractive in some way and could possibly have a great deal or comfortable amount of money. Which is strange because his family were quite wealthy and well known. He speaks of how he feels his life is a shame and the life of a "human" was not cut out for him. There is much more to be said here but I do not wish to spoil everything. I still want readers to get a wow factor from this book, without knowing every details and topic. 🥀

The Second Notebook A very key factor in this part is that Ōba is caught by another student named Takeichi who suspects and confronts him on faking his fall during "gym" class. This sends Ōba into a manic behavior and he somewhat becomes obsessed with Takeichi and fears that he will expose him for being a fraud. I found this interesting given Takeichi had no intention on exposing Ōba or telling anyone about his opinions on his stunts. Certain things happens and the two become somewhat of friends and Takeichi began to mention things to Ōba that were predicting and in a way life changing for Ōba. Ōba also finds an strong interest in art, which leads him to start painting. Ōba also becomes apart of a communist group and becomes a respectable member. Though, he does not share their same views and is only there because he views them as misfits. In this section, a young man now, Ōba meets someone by the name of Horiki. Horiki is also a college student but exposes Ōba into an unfortunate and dreadful life cycles, that pleasures and destroys him further. He also tries to commit suicide with a woman named Tsuneko, who dies but he does not. This even tears him apart and causes his family to the verge of disowning him. 🥀

The Third Notebook: Part One Ōba begans to have multiple affairs with different women, from different walks of life. He becomes a heavy drinker and is expelled from college. He becomes too focus on self destruction, he was not able to create or focus on his artwork. He tries to quite smoking and drinking. But struggles terribly. He marries a young girl, who tries to encourage him to stop drinking and for awhile it works. And for a moment Ōba is happy. The two both marry and move in together. 🥀

The Third Notebook: Part Two Working as a cartoon and sober, Ōba feels somber toward marriage life. He thinks of his wife as native and innocent. But he falls into bad habits once he is visited by an old friend named Horiki, who (with Ōba) witnesses Ōba's wife being sexually assaulted by an associate friend. Ōba begins to blame himself, as well as his wife and becomes manic and fills himself with alcohol and is committed into a mental hospital. After leaving his wife for another woman. This parts ends with him being brought to a home that his brother purchased for him and given the money he needed for living and personal interest. Ōba is left feeling empty and recounts his choices and views of hisself. 🥀

Epilogue We are then given the prospective of an outsider, who wanted to meet Ōba but fails. He then meets a friend of Ōba and she gives him the three notebooks. The man is intrigued by the notebooks and decides to publish them. We are left with a reflects of Ōba's friend telling us that he was a kind and gentle soul, who made everyone laugh and smile. 🥀

My Final Thoughts I believe this is one of the greatest books that I have read. I love the rawness of this book and I adore how the events were true. I feel that Osamu Dazai was a great writer and his death is very unfortunate. I find the way he told his life very interesting and beautiful and poetic. I wish I was able to meet him and praise him for being an amazing artist and writer. But the result would probably remain the same. There is so much that we can learn from Osamu and his life. His perception on life and people is very interesting and a very rare viewpoint on life. I highly suggest that everyone checkout this novel and spread the works of Asian Literature. Thanks For Listening. -𝓒

#dark academia #dark academia aesthetic #dark academia community #light academia aesthetic #light academia #light academia community #academia #academia aesthetic #osamu dazai #no longer human #asian literature #asian writers #asian artist #asian author #independent study academia #independent academia #independent study #book review

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estherdedlock · 3 years

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Okay, I’m still processing The Secret History, so I don’t want to talk about that. Instead, I decided to make a mini-list of some movies/books that are in the Dark Academia vein, but that I haven’t seen on rec lists. All descriptions are from Wikipedia, with my comments below.

Cracks (2009 movie) Set in the 1930s in a strict elite British boarding school called St Mathilda's, the story centres on a clique of girls who idolise their enigmatic diving instructor, Miss G (Eva Green). Di Radfield (Juno Temple) has a crush on Miss G, and is the firm favourite and ringleader of her group. When a beautiful Spanish girl named Fiamma Corona (María Valverde) arrives at the school, Miss G's focus is shifted away from the other girls. It becomes a triangle: Miss G gets increasingly obsessed with Fiamma, Fiamma is disturbed by Miss G and also openly disgusted by the teacher's hypocrisies and deceptions, and Di is terribly jealous and makes Fiamma's life hell. ED: Very atmospheric, with great performances especially from the girls. Warnings for implied underage sexual assault and bullying.

Testament of Youth (2014 movie) In 1914, Vera Brittain wants to escape her traditional family by attending Oxford University with her younger brother Edward and his friends at Uppingham School, Roland Leighton and Victor Richardson. In the face of her father's opposition, she passes the entrance examination for Somerville College, Oxford. Before enrolling at Oxford, Vera and Roland—who shares her interest in writing and poetry—begin a romance, although she knows that Victor is in love with her. ED: This movie’s about Brittain’s service as a VAD nurse in World War I, so that’s obviously the main focus of the plot, but the scenes filmed at Oxford are glorious to look at and provide insight into the experiences of the first wave of women who were allowed to study there. It’s based on her autobiography of the same name, published in 1933, which contains even more descriptions of her life at Oxford, where she returned after the war to complete her degree in English Literature. Warnings for gory depictions of injury and death -- Brittain’s writing style in the book can also be a little hard to get through at times.

Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis (1955 book) A partial autobiography published by C. S. Lewis in 1955. The work describes Lewis’s life from very early childhood (born 1898) until his conversion to Christianity in 1931 ED: Given its focus on Lewis’s religious experience, this won’t be a book to interest everyone, but it’s notable for its unvarnished -- and very, very dark -- description of life in an upper middle-class British boys’ school in the early 20th century. This ain’t no Dead Poets Society: warnings for descriptions of systematic sexual abuse and bullying. Also have to advise that Lewis was very much “a man of his time,” and so his writing tends to be heavy on the masculine-biased language and a generally condescending tone (sorry to all you Lewis lovers).

Things Heard, Things Seen (2021 movie, Netflix original) In 1979, Catherine Clare, an art restorer, lives in Manhattan with her husband George and daughter Franny. When George lands a job teaching art history at a college, the family moves into a large farm house in upstate New York. ED: This is not really a movie about academia but the film’s look and feel is **chef’s kiss!** The college scenes were filmed at Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, New York and they are wonderfully atmospheric, as is the whole movie with many sweeping vistas of the fall/winter landscape. While it may not scratch your Dark Academia itch, this is overall an excellent film with moving performances, some good jump scares, a number of surprises, and an unexpectedly satisfying ending. Warnings for domestic abuse, eating disorders, murder, and some bloody scenes.

#the secret history #dark academia

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imnotwolverine · 4 years

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The marriage pact - A little madness

Henry Cavill x OC Alice - multi-chapter

< Part 8 | Part 9 A little madness | Part 10 >

Disclaimer: some strong language, mention of heavy drinking, bachelorette

Author’s note: Ever sent a drunk text? I did, and girl was it interpreted the wrong way...*woops*

Word count: 1.912

(Link to my Masterlist)

Dear readers,

I am glad to inform you that my on-going attempts at becoming a published novella writer are finally starting to pay off. I cannot blab just yet, but oh my dear I AM SO EXCITED! Everything is so exciting! Life is exciting!

After years of hardship, toil and pure struggle as I crawled through the thick mud of adult life, I can finally see the well defined sparkle of hope on the horizon. Dramatic much? Maybe a little. But also; perhaps, just maybe, I can make one of my dreams come true. And for the hell of it, maybe even more!

Now you may wonder why I am so particularly enthusiastic today. Is it the London air? The existence of chocolate cake? Or perhaps the knowledge that I can make things happen in my life, if I set my mind to it? I think it might just be all of the aforementioned.

My cake baking nan had a simple saying: “Nothing just happens, until I make it so.”

So, dear reader, here I am, making it so.

I hope you have a most wonderful weekend my fellow dream-catching souls.

Ali

‘Ali!! Over here!’ Maddie waved at me from across the busy lunch room, the Jersey seaside casting a warm, salty morning glow through the high paned windows. I waved back at her and weaved my way through the room until I could sink down on one of the chairs with a relieved sigh, my face turning to receive her enthused greeting kisses.

‘Hi Mads.’ I grinned at her teethy smile. ‘You are.. glowing!’ She pointed out, her pearly whites so very straight and shiny that she could probably star in one of those toothpaste commercials.

‘Oh, it’s probably because I went for a run this morning.’ I brushed my hand over my cheek, to check if I was feeling hot - nope.

’Naa...’ She shook her head. ‘It’s definitely not that.’ She reached for her cup of tea as a waiter appeared at our table, my order quick and simple: tea, no milk, no sugar.

Turning back towards Maddie I was welcomed with a knowing raised eyebrow. I sighed. ‘Fine..yes..I’m kind of dating Henry.’ ‘I KNEW IT! Ha! YES for all that is holy!’ She exclaimed, making some people turn around in their chairs, curious glances directed our way as they felt the sudden burst of energy coming from the rather chic looking middle class lady that was Maddie Smith.

‘Madss…’ I warned from between clenched teeth.

‘Haha. Oh sorry. I’m just happy, truly. Besides..I am SO winning this bet.’ She wiggled her eyebrows as mine furrowed with worry. ‘..Bet?’ I gulped.

‘Oh, no worries. I didn’t share my thoughts with our friends yet. Just Frank. And you know me and Frank..’ She shrugged, laughing heartily. ‘Yea..’ I murmured, looking up again as my cup of tea was placed before me. ‘Thank you, sir.’ I smiled at the waiter, then turned back to Maddie, studying her with a curious gaze.

‘So..what’s the bet about?’

‘Oh I can’t say that!’

‘Ugh..Mads! You are the worst. Anyways, we’ll see where it goes. You know how it went the other times, so..’ I shrugged, wishing to not get her hopes up.

I, for one, didn’t want to get my hopes up. This was all just too good to be true, right? An old lover returns to his home town and sweeps me right of my feet. It was too perfect. There had to be a catch. I mean, this was pure madness.

—

‘Yihaaa!!’ Stella walked in with another tray of fluorescent shots, my intoxicated girlfriends either exclaiming full-lunged odes-to-joy or swallowing back a silent protest. It was Loïs’ wedding in a week’s time and as the tradition went, there was to be had a bachelorette.

Fully emerged in litres of strong liquor, dancing sweat and penis-related jokes, the night was running late and we had ended up in a sleazy shots bar, the theme most probably being radioactive drinks, as every new glass seemed to carry an even more chemical looking liquid than the previous one.

Bright pinks, blues and yellows were tipped back in our burning throats, relieved female sighs wavering through the noisy air as loud dance music bounced with a fat bass through the small bar.

‘Ooh oooh Ali Ali. Don’t look, not yet. Behind you, 11 o-clock. Hot HOT guy.’ Ginny nodded excitedly, her eyes wide as she looked over my shoulder. ‘Gin, girl. I’m not really..’ I was already starting to protest, but without further ado Ginny twirled me around by my shoulders, a tall blond man approaching me.

‘Hello angel. Havin’ a good time?’ He bit the lip of his bearded chin and I quite instantly felt appalled by him. Not that he was hideous to look at, or that he smelled bad. He was rather sexually attractive actually..and well..clearly into me.

In this case, I think it was just me. I simply wasn’t in the mood for this.

I swallowed back the remains of the bitter liquor in my throat and smiled at him, not wishing to seem rude. ‘Sure.’

He raised an eyebrow and eyed the rest of the girls, the whole group now quick to step back and form a new circle, excluding me. ‘Looks like I have you all to myself.’ He grinned wolfishly.

Then I felt Maddie’s hand on my shoulder, her sassy tilt of the head catching the attention of the handsome blond stranger. ‘Sorry mate. Looks like she’s taken.’ She said simply, and with a tug on my arm I was dragged back into the group, leaving a confused blond hottie behind. I sighed a quiet thanks to Maddie, but received a firing squad of confused and disdained looks from the other women.

‘Wait..MADS! Come on, you can’t just..-’ One exclaimed.

I quickly interfered. ‘No no! Please. Eh..I AM dating someone actually.’

‘YOU ARE?! ALI?! Why didn’t you say so? You’re like the whole reason we are..’ Stella pointed at the neon lit bar behind her. ‘..here.’

‘Really now?’ I raised an eyebrow, then started to giggle, the alcohol buzzing happily through my hot veins, my usually well contained happy personality bursting out at the seams. I had forgotten for the slightest moment that I really was the last “single” woman left in this group, and as Stella gave me a most exasperated look it became clear that nobody - literally nobody - in the group wanted to be here.

They had thought it would help..me. Me!

‘Who is it? Do we know him? Do we? Tell US!’ Ginny squealed, stepping closer, not wishing to miss a single word escaping my lips.

‘I ..eh…’ I glanced at Maddie and she shrugged, her mouth sipping on yet another alcohol beverage - oh dear we were going to be so hungover tomorrow.

‘It’s Henry.’ I gulped.

‘WHAAAATTTTT?! REallyy?! Oh my word! OH MY!’ - ‘GIRLLLLL YES! Oh that is just..’ The whole group erupted in loud squeals, the excitement further fuelled as yet another round of drinks was delivered to the squad of 30-something-moms-on-a-cheeky-night-out.

Except for me of course. I wasn’t a mom. The odd ball.

‘Ohh..’ Loïs, the bride-to-be, pulled me in for a tight hug, her well coiffed chestnut brown hair smelling of fresh shampoo, the scent mixing with the heavy drop of hard liquor coasting through the air as new shots were being downed.

‘Bring him.’ She said, keeping me in the lock of her arms until finally she leaned back a bit. ‘I mean it, Ali. You gotta bring him to the wedding.’ Her finger brushed a lock of my hair behind my ear - she was so very motherly, even when drunk.

I bit my lip, my alcohol hazed mind not keeping up with the turn of events. It was then that I noticed my phone in Maddie’s hand, the device easily recognisable by its bright blue casing.

‘Anndddd sent!’ She exclaimed, returning my phone to me, my mouth falling down in a quiet gasp. Did she just..did she..? I opened my Whatsapp and saw she had sent Henry a message, my blurry eyes no longer managing to fully focus on the words on the brightly lit screen.

Oh..oh..crap.

—

* Thuthumb..thuthumb *

In the history of headaches, this one was certainly about to set a whole new standard. It was..bad.

With a soft groan I rolled over in my queen sized bed, looking at the alarm clock. 10.30 AM - okay, it could be worse. I grumbled a little as I reached for the glass of water on my night stand, then, after a few large gulps of the cool drink, picked up my phone.

> 15 Unread messages.

Mmmkkkey...

Frowning slightly I pushed myself up against the headboard, blinking the last remains of drunken sleep from my eyes as I scrolled through the flurry of words. I had nearly forgotten about the fact that Maddie had confiscated my phone to send Henry a message. And, well, apparently it had not been just any message.

Me: “Hey sexy beast. How about you, me, and a wedding? Keep the 16th free.” Followed by a wild mix of totally inappropriate emoticons.

I felt my heart rate speed up as I started to read Henry’s messages.

Henry bear: “Hey you. Having a fun night I presume?” - “Ali?” - “Just for inquiry’s sake..is this OUR wedding?” - “Alright I think you’re probably not reading this.” - …

* Knock knock *

Quickly I put down my phone, expecting to see my mom’s head pop around the door of my room. But it wasn’t.

Seeing who it was, made me wish I could just disappear and let myself be swallowed by my pillows. But I couldn’t. And here he was. Henry’s head poking around the corner of my door, his lips curling in an amused smile.

‘Hello party girl.’ He smirked, stepping inside and apparently carrying a tray with some fresh juice, tea and a bowl of fruit with him. I felt my heart stumble, tumble and roll at the sight of this bear of a man carefully carrying my mom’s dainty tray in his hands, his well rounded bum pushing the door closed behind him.

I sighed, laying there like a sickly patient in a mountain of propped up pillows. ‘Morning.’ I grumbled.

His smile grew as he placed the tray on my little writing desk, then sat down next to my hip on the edge of the mattress. ‘Had fun?’ - ‘Mmm..a little too much I’m afraid.’ I sat up a little more, my head immediately starting to protest with loud, dizzying thumps. I groaned. ‘I’m sorry by the way about the text message, I eh…’ I frowned, looking at my phone as it lay there half-hidden between the soft blankets.

I didn’t even read all his messages.

Henry tweaked up an eyebrow and moved up a hand to brush some of my bed hair out of my face, his finger tips riding over my smooth skin with utmost care and gentleness. ‘Mhm.’ He simply nodded, eyebrow still raised in silent question.

‘We had a bachelorette yesterday, you knew that. But eh.. Loïs, the bride caught air of you and I eh..dating.’ Our eyes met and his blues started to shimmer with happiness, making my heart flutter and fly again. ‘So eh..yea..she..invited you, too? I guess? And then Maddie took my phone and sent that message.’

Henry let out a hearty chuckle. ‘Yea right.’ He winked, then smoothed his face back into a warm smile. ‘I won’t judge you for some cute drunk texting, baby.’ He said.

’Noo..Hen. Really. It was Mads.’

‘Mhm.’ He hummed again, not believing a word of it, his face leaning closer to brush his lips against mine. ‘Ah. Whisky morning breath, my favourite.’ He chuckled.

I blushed fiercely, wishing to roll away from him and hide, but, of course I was too slow and my small frame was instantly caught in the cage of Henry’s large arms. ‘No getting away from me now, bridey.’ He whispered huskily, his mouth eager to lay its claim on me.

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#henry cavill fanfiction #henry cavill fanfic #henry cavill fluff #henry bear #henry cavill x OC #henry cavill x author #romcom #bachelorette #drunk text #friends

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dillydedalus · 3 years

Text

april reading

oh yeah this is a thing. anyway in april i read about uhhh.... first contact (twice), murderers on skis & victorian church politics

the yield, tara june winch a novel about indigenous australian identity and history (now and throughout the 20th century) in three narrative strands. imo the narrative strand that consists of a grandfather writing a dictionary of his language (wiradjuri) in order to prove a claim to some land is by far the strongest, but overall i liked this quite a lot. 3/5

land of big numbers, te-ping chen a solid short story collection focused on modern china and young(ish) chinese people, both in china and the diaspora. i particularly liked the stories that had some slighty surreal or speculative elements, such as one about fruit that strongly evoke emotions when eaten and a group of people stuck in a train station for months as the train is delayed, which imo use their speculative aspects in effective (if not super subtle) ways to talk about society. 3/5

the pear field, nana ekvtimishvili (tr. from georgian by elizabeth heighway) international booker prize longlist! a short, fairly depressing read about a 18-year-old girl at a post-soviet school for developmentally disabled childred (but also orphans, abandoned children & other random kids) who is trying to get a younger boy adopted by an american couple. there seem to be a lot of novels set at post-soviet orphanages etc & imo this is a well-executed example of the microgenre, with the pear field full of pears that are never picked bc they don’t taste right as a strong central image. 3/5

the warden, anthony trollope (chronicles of barsetshire #1) ah yes, a 6-part victorian series about church politics in an english town, exactly the kind of thing i’m interested in. not sure why i committed to at least the first two entries of the series but here we are. despite this lack of interest (and disagreement with most of the politics on display here) i found this quite charming; trollope has a gift for an amusing turn of phrase & making fun of his characters in benevolent ways. 3/5

the lesson, cadwell turnbull first contact scifi novel set on the virgin islands, where an alien ship arrives one day. the aliens seem benevolent & share helpful technology, but also react with extreme violence to any aggression. they claim to be on earth to study.... something, but it’s never entirely clear what. the book makes some interesting choices (like immediately skipping over the actual first contact to a few years in the future, when the aliens are already established on the islands) but i thought much of it was kinda disjointed and confusing. 2/5

the heart is a lonely hunter, carson mccullers look, i get it, it’s all about the isolation & alienation (& dare i say loneliness) of 4 miserable characters projecting their issues on the central character singer, who is kind and patient and also deaf and mute, thus making him the perfect receptacle for their issues without really having to connect with him as a person and how that isolation hinders them socially, artistically, emotionally, politically, but like... i didn’t really like it. i didn’t hate it but i just felt very meh about it all. 2.5/5

acht tage im mai: die letzte woche des dritten reiches, volker ulrich fascinating history book about the last week(ish) of the third reich, starting with the day of hitler’s suicide and ending with the total surrender (but with plenty of flashbacks and forwards), and looking at military&political leadership (german and allied) as well as prisoners of war, forced laborers, concentration camp prisoners, and everyone else. very interesting look at what kästner described as the “gap between the not-anymore and the not-yet.” 3.5/5

firekeeper’s daughter, angeline boulley) i’ve been mostly off the YA train for the last few years, but this was a really good example of contemporary YA with a focus on ~social issues. ANYWAY. this is YA crime novel about daunis, a mixed-race unenrolled ojibwe girl close to finishing high school who is struggling with family problems, university plans, and feeling caught between her white and her native familiy when her best friend is shot in front of her and she decides to become a CI for an fbi investigation into meth production in the community. i really appreciated how hard this went both with the broader social issues (racism, addiction) and daunis’ personal struggles. there are a few bits that felt a bit didactic & on the nose (and the romance... oh well), but overall the themes of community, family, and the value of living indigenous culture are really well done & i teared up several times. 4/5

the magic toyshop, angela carter i love carter’s short stories but struggle with (while still liking) her novels so far. this one, a tale of melanie, suddenly orphaned after trying on her mother’s wedding dress in the garden, coming of age and awakening to womanhood or whatever. carter’s really into that. it’s well-written, sensual as carter always is, and the family melanie and her siblings are sent to, her tyrannical puppet-maker uncle, his mute wife and the wife’s two brothers, both fascinating and offputting (& dirty) make for an interesting cast of characters, but overall i just wish i was reading the bloody chamber again. 3/5

barchester towers, anthony trollope (chronicles of barsetshire #2) (audio) lol tbh i still don’t know why i am committing to this series about, again, church politics in 19th century rural england, but it’s just so chill & warm & funny (we love gently or not so gently - but always politely - mocking our characters) that i’m enjoying it as a nice little trip where people do some #crazyschemes to gain church positions or fight over whether there should be songs in church or whatever it is people in the 19th century fought about. it’s very relaxing. there also is a lot of love quadrangleyness going on and that’s also fun. trollope has weird ideas about women but like whatever, i for one wish mrs proudie much joy of her position as defacto bishop of barchester, she really girlbossed her way to the top. 3.5/5

semiosis, sue burke (semiosis #1) i love spinning the wheel on the “first contact with X weird alien species” & i guess this time we landed on plants! plant intelligence is interesting and the idea of plant warfare is really cool. i do like the structure, with different generations of human settlers on the planet pax providing a long-term view but this allows the author to skip over a lot of the development of the relationship between the settlers and the plant and locating the plot elsewhere, which i think is ultimately a mistake. i might continue w/ the series tho, depending on library availability. 2.5/5

one by one, ruth ware a bunch of start-up people go on a corporate retreat to a ski chalet in the alps, avalanche warning goes up, one of them disappears, presumably on a black piste, the rest get snowed in & completely cut off when the avalanche hits and then they get picked off *title drop* (altho really not that many of them). nice fluff when i had a miserable cold (not covid) but fails when it tries to go for deeper themes... like an attempt to address classism and entitlement sure... was made. also like what kind of luxury skiing chalet does not have emergency communication devices in case internet/phone lines are down... i’d have sued just for that. 2/5

fake accounts, lauren oyler the microgenre of ‘alienated intellectual(ish) probably anglophone person has some sort of crisis, goes to berlin about it’ is my ultimate literary weakness - i almost never really like them, they mostly irritate me & yet i can never resist their siren call. this one is p strong on the irritation, altho at least the narrator does not ascribe much meaning to her decision to go to berlin after she a) discovers her boyf is an online conspiracy theorist (probably not sincerely) and b) gets a call that said boyf has died, it’s really just something to do to avoid doing anything else. but other than that it’s so BerlinExpat by the numbers, like she lives in kreuzkölln! put her somewhere else at least! there is one scene that elevates the BerlinExpat-ness of it all (narrator asks expatfriend for advice on visa applications, expatfriend assures her that it’s really easy for americans to get visa, adds “especially now” while literally, as the narrator remarks, gesturing at the falafel she’s eating) other than that, the novel is.... fine. it’s smart, but not really as smart as it thinks it is, which is a problem bc it thinks it’s just sooo incisive. whatever. 2/5

the tenant of wildfell hall, anne bronte this is reductive but: jane eyre: i could fix him // wuthering heights: i could make him worse // wildfell hall: lmao i’m gonna leave his ass anyway i enjoyed the part that is actually narrated by the titular tenant of wildfell hall, helen (which thankfully, i think, is most of it) because the perspective of a woman who runs away from her abusive alcoholic of a husband is genuinely interesting and engaging, while gilbert, the frame story narrator who falls in love with helen, is.... the worst. i mean he’s not the worst bc the abusive husband arthur is there and hard to beat in terms of worseness, but he’s pretty fucking bad. imagine if helen had found out that gilbert attacked her secret brother over a misunderstanding, severely injured him & LEFT HIM TO DIE & then (when dude survived & the misunderstanding got cleared up) apologised like well i guess i didn’t treat you quite right! she’d have to run away from her second husband as well! poor girl. 3/5

#the books i read #long post #lol i keep forgetting to finish & post these #anyway gilbert fucking sucks! like his name is gilbert you can do better helen

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windmilltothestars · 4 years

Text

Another (less) short piece for @mynameisremyiamadumbass - who suggested the other day be “Grantaire Appreciation Day” - right before I had to my tutoring job. I thought of this idea WHILE I was tutoring, when I supposed to be thinking of eighth grade math!! Anyway, it ended up being more of ensemble piece, and (of course) longer than planned, but Grantaire does get appreciated! Enjoy a very ridiculous story, my friend!

Combeferre, Feuilly and Enjolras were all hunched over the table in the back room of the Café Musain, in serious consultation of the wording of their latest manifesto to be taken to the printers’. Enjolras was grinning faintly – out all of his friends, these two were the least likely to let women or booze or even artistic excitement or personal problems interfere with their focus on the cause, and today’s progress had been swift and efficient.

Suddenly, the thudding of urgent, ungainly footsteps approached, and they all tensed and raised their eyes to the door in anticipation. The sound had been so loud and forceful that they were all surprised when it was Jehan who appeared in the doorway, pale-faced, clinging to the doorframe, and gasping for breath.

“Jehan? What is it?” wondered Feuilly, approaching him in concern.

“I was – just – talking to –” Jehan panted, leaning over and bracing his hands on his knees.

“Catch your breath first,” Combeferre advised, laying a calming hand on his shoulder. Jehan nodded vaguely and held them all in suspense as he inhaled.

“To an inspector!” he said at last, straightening up. “He seemed – suspicious – heard some rumor! He was asking – questions – about our organization – ‘What is the aim and purpose of the Friends of the ABC?’ I told him – we teach poor children – teach them to read! ABCs, you know! Then he asked – where? Where we met – and did our teaching! And – I – I panicked, I thought – I’d better not say here – so I said – the Café Corinthe! And he’s going there – now! And I’m – I’m sorry,” his contrite eyes were more on Enjolras than the others, “I didn’t know what to say – I panicked.”

They all glanced at each other anxiously.

“Is anyone there now?” Combeferre wondered.

“It’s too late for breakfast –”

“They might all be in class –”

“Though it’s possible – Bahorel or Grantaire –”

“But if he questions the staff, poor old Mère Hucheloup – might not know what to say,” Feuilly concluded uneasily.

“I’m sorry,” Jehan repeated, ducking his eyes.

“It’s alright,” Enjolras told him firmly, “you did nothing wrong. We’ve just got to go there now – and pray God we can get him off the scent.”

This was all the incentive they needed to be on their way. They even sprung for a carriage ride just to get them there faster and stand a better chance of catching the inspector and minimizing the possible damage to their cause – not to mention their lives.

With terror hammering in each of their hearts to varying degrees, the four of them poured through the door and came upon a surprising sight.

Grantaire, fists raised in front of his face, was mock-sparring – the blows connecting but ever-so-lightly – with a scrawny, ragged young boy who sometimes delivered messages for them, whilst the inspector, tall, imposing, and in full uniform, stood to the side and watched the proceedings with a puzzled expression. There was a faint blush to Grantaire’s cheeks that someone who didn’t know him might have taken for exertion or embarrassment, but he seemed, on the whole, but minimally impaired; he had the presence of mind to subtly roll his hastily-hidden wine bottle further behind the counter with his foot as he passed. He allowed the boy to get a good mock-hit on face, before tumbling dramatically to the floor in response as the boy cheered his victory, and then straightening up and smiling pleasantly to the inspector.

“So you see,” he panted, “how he’s improving in his self-defense lessons! Now, I may be biased, Monsieur Inspector, but to my mind, self-defense is one of the most important skills for our students to learn! Though the others –” his eyes turned upon his four friends at last, and his grin widened – “are sure to correct me! Monsieur, might I introduce our afternoon teachers?”

The inspector turned to look at the four of them. Combeferre faintly raised a hand in greeting, and Grantaire therefore honed in on him as the calmest and most ready to convincingly play his part.

“This is Monsieur Combeferre,” he said, indicating him. “He teaches anatomy and other sciences. Fantastically gruesome stuff! Talking for hours about blood and bones!”

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Combeferre greeted the inspector, shaking his hand. He turned pleasantly to the raggedy boy. “Can you tell the inspector what you call the bones in your fingers?”

“Knuckles!” the boy shot back.

“He prefers boxing to science,” Combeferre informed the inspector ruefully. “We’re working on it. Though it’s a testament to my honored colleague Monsieur Grantaire’s skill, I’m sure. He also teaches art.”

“Art and science?” the inspector wondered, tilting his head. “And self-defense? I was given to believe you were teaching them to read!”

“We here of the Friends of ABC believe in a balanced education,” Feuilly put in. He, too, held out his hand to shake the inspector’s. “In started with just literacy, but we’ve since expanded our aims. I’m Monsieur Feuilly; I teach woodworking and handicrafts. And here, you’ve met Monsieur Prouvaire. He helps our advanced readers to reach a higher understanding of literature and poetry; sometimes they write their own!”

“And he teaches the Bible in Hebrew and Greek! Quite a polymath, our Monsieur Prouvaire,” Grantaire added fondly, causing Jehan to hastily withdraw the hand he was extending to the inspector and use it to quickly hide his furiously-blushing face.

“And this,” Grantaire went on as his eyes fell with their regular glowing admiration on Enjolras, who had been standing like a statue watching the proceedings, “is the chief and foundation of our whole enterprise, Monsieur Enjolras!”

Enjolras gave him a slight nod and shook his hand mechanically, but said nothing.

“And – what do you teach, Monsieur Enjolras?” the inspector asked, his expression unreadable.

“History,” he replied swiftly. “French history – especially of the last century – is my specialty, and quite enough to fill a whole course, I daresay, but Monsieur Feuilly has persuaded me to expand the area of study across centuries and continents – to have a more whole and complete picture of the world.”

“The way he tells those stories,” Jehan put in shyly, “why, he puts you there, in the shoes one living in that moment! To listen to them is to be enthralled by some fey creature! His is the magic to transport one across time and space!”

“I can see why he teaches poetry,” the inspector muttered.

“Monsieur Prouvaire is right,” the boy added suddenly, dashing over to Enjolras and clinging to his leg. “Monsieur Enjolras’s stories are amazing! His class is my favorite – after boxing, of course!” Enjolras awkwardly patted the boy’s shoulder.

“It’s true,” added Mère Hucheloup, ducking her head out of the kitchen, “Even I get distracted in my serving by dear Monsieur Enjolras’s history lessons!”

The boy faced down the inspector and continued. “I was one of the first students to learn with the Friends the ABC! Back when it was just Monsiers Enjolras and Combeferre teaching reading! Monsieur Enjolras taught me my ABCs – right at that table over there!”

There was a silence as they all gazed intently at the inspector’s impassive face – even Mère Hucheloup had paused in laying out oysters – and collectively willed him to believe their elaborate castle of lies and half-truths. He gazed from face to face and seemed to be reading for nerves or lies in each of them. They each internally trembled for Jehan’s exceptionally timid manners and propensity for blushing. But his inner valor upheld him, and his face stayed pale, and he did not duck his eyes.

At last, the inspector completed his sweep, he gave a soft breath of satisfaction, and slightly smiled. Five pairs of tensed shoulders relaxed.

“Is there anything else, Inspector?” Combeferre said. “Only our afternoon students will be arriving in twenty minutes, and we really must prepare!”

“And the sort of children we teach,” Feuilly made bold to add, “are sometimes afraid of the police! They might not show up today if they see you here!”

“Er – yes, alright,” the inspector agreed awkwardly. “I’ll be going, and I’ll tell them at the precinct that we’ve nothing to fear from the Friends of the ABC, that they’re but a lot of harmless dreamers – who in my opinion,” he added, casting a dubious glance at the ragged boy now holding Enjolras’s hand, “are wasting considerable talent on this sort of riffraff!”

Enjolras’s outrage at this comment managed to confine itself to tightening his grip on the boy’s hand and clenching his fist; but Feuilly’s expression darkened dangerously.

“Now, see here, Inspector,” he said, stepping up two paces closer to the man. “To educate is to deliver a soul out of darkness, and to offer a chance at a life of use and light and joy and purpose! Do you say we should condemn every poor man’s child to darkness? Dismiss this whole class of people, as not worth consideration?”

“It is our philosophy,” Combeferre added, “that education – the illumination of all minds into greater truth and understanding – will bring light and progress to all the peoples of the world; thus, starting in childhood, and not excluding any class of child, is vital for the progress of the human race.”

The inspector gave a sort of snort, his mouth upturned in a somewhat derisive smile. “What did I say?” he shrugged, “Dreamers! Harmless dreamers!” And without another word, he turned on his heel and left the café.

Jehan immediately sunk down into a chair. The urchin ran to window and stuck his tongue out at the inspector’s departing back. Combeferre and Enjolras confined themselves to sighs of relief. Grantaire, also sitting, said, “I need a drink.”

“You and me both, brother,” Feuilly said fervently, clapping him on the back and going to pick up his hidden wine bottle. “I think perhaps we all do. Mère Hucheloup, some more cups, if you please!”

“Do you know,” Combeferre said softly to Enjolras as they watched Feuilly accepting the cups and pouring out the wine, “I rather liked the idea – all of us as teachers! Molding young minds! I had myself half-convinced!”

“In the new world – in the Republic,” Enjolras promised him, “that will be the way. When that day comes, I freely pass my torch to you – in your hands, the light of illumination!”

Jehan, during this exchange, had risen to his feet and gone to the window to join the boy. “You saved us,” he told him earnestly. “The Friends of the ABC will forever be in your debt! Here,” he added, reaching into his pocket and handing the boy an entire five-franc coin, “get yourself something nice!” The boy excitedly rushed to the counter to buy himself a pastry.

“And he’s not the only who saved us!” Feuilly added as he passed the cups into each of their hands. “Without Grantaire’s being here, his quick thinking and adaptability, we’d be lost!”

“Certainly, we would!” agreed Jehan, smiling warmly at him.

“Oh – oh, really,” Grantaire dismissed, ducking his own head and trying not to look too pleased by this praise, “it was nothing, my friends – nothing, really!”

“It was far from nothing,” Feuilly assured him heartily. “Gentlemen, let’s raise our glasses – to Grantaire!”

“To Grantaire!” they all echoed, smiling at him.

Grantaire’s face was rather blank as he observed his friends – it was, like the inspector’s scanning over each one as if to ascertain this was real. As they knew it would, it settled last of all on the fair countenance of Enjolras, a desperate question in his eyes. To reassure him, Enjolras raised his glass a fraction of an inch again, widened his smile gave him a little nod. At last, Grantaire’s face relaxed and reflected his smile, and they all drank deep.

Next second, Bahorel burst into the shop, greeting them with a shout of, “Afternoon, my friends! ARE WE ALL READY TO SMASH THE GOVERNMENT?!?”

Jehan choked on his wine, and fell out of his chair.

#mini fic #my fic #fan fic #les miserables #i am sorry #i am a people pleaser at the depths of my (canine-like) soul #so i hope you are pleased with this :')#i forgot how to spell feuilly's name every single time i typed it #and don't ever ask me to say it out loud #ignore me #it's 4am again here

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subbyboymax · 4 years

Note

I want to ask you all of them 🙈🙈

So why won’t you ask all of them? Huh anon?

Jk I love you whoever you are. As requested:

1. Zodiac sign

Taurus. I don’t really pay much attention to zodiac stuff but I’ve heard from friends that I fit the stereotypes somewhat.

2. Sexual orientation

This is hard because I’m kinda questioning atm, but I would say I like women and identify as NB using male pronouns which I personally feel is accurate to me, but I still am unsure myself what that actually means. I am still figuring myself out.

3. Relationship status

Single and honestly looking. I’ve had one girlfriend in high school and I’ve had romantic interests since but I have such low self confidence that I end up being too nervous to really pursue a relationship.

4. Someone you miss

My friend Rebekah. I miss her a lot. She’s like a sister to me.

5. Person who’s arms you’d like to be in

Hmmmmmmmmm... anyone really...

6. What you find attractive in Men/Women?

Typically I find personality attractive and looks don’t really matter, but usually someone’s smile and eyes draw my attention the most.

7. How tall are you?

5’7 or ~170cm but I wish I was more smol.

8. What you love about yourself?

Already answered

9. What you’re doing tomorrow?

I’m probably going to exercise and play games with my gaming clan.

10. What are your future plans?

My goal is to become an electrician, but I also want to go to various Asian countries and try to improve my Asian cooking by studying the food culture all over east asia.

11. Your last night out in detail?

Oh god I don’t even remember the last time I was out at night... I guess it was last year when I had my heart broken and I went to a really nice bar and spent $200 on alcohol and was GONE. Never again. Ended up being hung over for the first time in my life.

12. Your favorite book?

Hmm... favorite book(s) would have to be the Ranger’s Apprentice series of books. Good story, good characters.

13. All of pets you’ve ever had?

I’ve had so many pets I could make a whole post about them and may do that later.

14. Something that changed your life?

Unfortunately too many things have happened to change my life more than I would like. I still can’t really answer this question fully.

15. Do you remember your last dream?

I was basically playing a game that turned out to be an isekai and I basically had a SMG and had to fight off a dragon. Shit was weird but very vivid. It’s weird because I don’t particularly like guns or dangerous stuff in general.

16. What your last text message says?

“Keep me posted! We should meet up and have a toast to it!” was sent to my friend Renè, who has been my best friend since birth pretty much. Our parents were close while they were pregnant with us and we are practically brothers. He’s getting a house near where I live and we will live in the same state for the first time since we were 8 years old. Obviously we will social distance but we still had to celebrate and see each other to mark the occasion.

17. Do you respect your government and the way your country is run?

Absolutely not. Please vote biden if you live in the US. Even if you hate the idea of voting for biden, he’s better than trump. If hillary had won, she would have been putting her third justice on the supreme court. Biden is the only chance for our freedom and for the freedom of many people. I am terrified of 4 more years of trump.

18. Where you would like to live?

South Florida, where I was born.

19. Your favorite flavor of ice cream?

Depends on my mood, but typically strawberry.

20. Last thing you ate?

Pizza that was left over from last night.

21. Which swear word do you use the most?

Fuck. Like I use it so much it’s stupid.

22. Your plans for summer?

Heh... plans...

23. Any upcoming concerts?

Bruh if only. Like I work as an usher and as a stagehand, so if any concerts were happening at all I would JUMP for joy. And I am CHONK so jumping is not exactly the most comfortable thing to do.

24. Something that you’re proud of?

That I am finally committing to getting therapy for my long list of traumas.

25. Do you still talk to your first crush?

I wish I could, but she’s not part of my life anymore, sadly. She was a good friend.

26. What language do you want to learn?

Japanese, because I really have a strong interest in their history and culture and want to go sightseeing there someday.

27. Where have you lived before?

Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and St. Louis, Missouri.

28. Eye color?

I think it’s green or something but it changes depending on the light because it’s sometimes more silvery idk.

29. Favorite style of clothing?

Traditional Japanese formal wear. It’s always been an interest of mine.

30. How long does it take you to get ready in the morning?

All of one minute to throw on an outfit and get socks on. I wish I had an eye for fashion but hopefully if I ever have a partner, they will help me with my style choices a bit lol.

31. Where did you go today?

Nowhere, because pandemic lmao.

32. Where are you right now?

In my room wishing I could have cuddles.

33. How many countries have you visited?

None because money is not exactly a thing we have an abundance of.

34. Something old?

What does this mean? I guess I have my great grandfather’s old stamp collection.

35. Something new?

Hell if I know, I’ve had nothing new in months.

36. Something inherited?

My laptop.

37. Is death more scary than life?

Hell no. Death is easy. Life is scary and overwhelming but it’s worth living the life you have. You only lose out on life by dying before your time. You gain nothing in death, despite it being less scary and uncertain than living is. Keep living to experience everything you can and have no regrets once you do pass on.

38. Experience you’ll never forget?

The time my high school crush complimented my hair in physics class. I get very few compliments and I never feel that attractive so I hardly focus on my appearance but I had brushed my hair that day and the fact she commented on it made me smile very wide.

39. What’s your favorite part about today so far?

Honestly today has sucked and I have been dealing with depression but I am trying to stay positive. Hopefully the answer to this question changes later today!

40. Who is your hero?

My Great-Grandmother. She was part of my life until I was 17 and she taught me that kindness and compassion is the most important trait for a human to have. She was the most amazing woman I have ever met in my life.

41. Are you happy with where you live?

I love this house, but it’s definitely not perfect and I would love to have my own place someday.

42. Do you like your handwriting?

Ew no it looks like alien language. It’s so bad. I can barely read my own writing.

43. What do you wear to bed?

Typically just underwear, or in the winter I will wear a T-shirt and fleecy pants.

44. Tea or coffee?

Tea

45. Chocolate or Vanilla?

Chocolate hands down. It’s such a varied flavor imo.

46. Are you excited for anything?

Being okay someday.

47. How late did you stay up last night and why?

Midnight because sleep is hard.

48. What’s your ringtone?

I’m boring and keep my phone on vibrate so no ringtone.

49. Did you have a dream last night?

Yes, I said it earlier.

50. What keeps you going each day?

Honestly no fucking idea lmao.

51. Picture of yourself?

You’ll have to DM me for that one, friendo. Anons get no face pics!

Also for the other people who sent in asks, I saw them, but I figured I could just use this ask to consolidate and not spam posts. Thank all of you for sending in asks, you are the best <3

#Asks #Thank you anon

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chandlerwilde · 4 years

Text

My Perception On No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai🥀

🥀

This year has brought me many joys, that have left me with melancholy victories. I have been venturing out of my usual book genres and I've found a selection of well to do books that I simply cannot live without. How I've existed this far without them, I will never know.

There are many different types of literature out there and of course I only focus on English and European Literature. Not because I'm bias in some way. But I've always found American and European culture very interesting. Despite ignoring my very own culture. It had never occurred to me, that until now, I have never heard of Asian Literature. It's like an unknown phenomenon that no one speaks of. When I think back of my studies in school, I've never even heard of my teachers mentioning Asian writers at all. It was like they didn't exist or people found Asian culture not important enough to read about. Which is odd because in Asian countries they have libraries filled with European novels and American novels. Is it safe to say that Asian people find European and American culture interesting, though we do not share the same feelings toward them.

Nevertheless, I stumbled upon Osamu Dazai after reading a mutual friends post about Vincent Van Gogh. It was a silly meme that consisted of Van Gogh and Osamu talking over their depression. Which is not something to joke about but I must confess I found it humorous. Through that humor, I decided to research Osamu and the rest is history.

So, here is my thoughts on the exceptional book, No Longer Human.

I want to give an in-depth review without giving the book away too much (if at all). But I must warn you that spoilers may become a possibility.

No Longer Human is broken into three parts, including an introduction in the beginning by Donald Keene, as well as a Prologue & Epilogue by Osamu Dazai himself. So, to make things easier to understand, I'm going to review each part individually.

The Introduction

Normally, I would skip this part of the book because at times it can be very boring and bland. But after reading The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johaan Wolfgang Von Goethe, I found it important to read book introductions because they can have valuable information about the writer.

In this section, Donald Keene noted how under appreciated Asian writer are in literature. For some odd reason, American & Europeans cultures specifically seem to feel like we cannot learn anything from Asian culture. Perhaps it has something to do with our history with going to battle with certain Asian countries. Yet, that did not stop countries like Japan and China from filling their liberties with American & European literature. Which upsets me. Had it not been for Van Gogh, I would have missed out on an extremely talented writer. I'm not sure who is to blame for this but I find the idea of not representing Asian writers outside of manga is shameful and sad. There is more to their culture than just that. However, as a whole our world only views Asian people in a small and certain light, that barely gives them any kind of positive recognition outside of the obvious stereotypes.

In short, I really urge everyone to take time and read the introduction and share your thoughts on Keene's and my views. What do you think and why is Asian literature so lost and underrepresented? Why do Asian writers rather be on the bottom of American top writing lists, than the top of Asian writer lists? It is very interesting.

🥀

The Prologue

In this section, you learn of how Ōba Yōzō (aka Dazai himself) feels alienated and very much of a misfit. He tells you how all of his life he has worn a mask to hid his true sensitive and self destructive self. He harshly criticizes himself and informs you of how he feels about the nature of "humans" and how he never felt like one, thus making him believe that he is not.

I like this part of the novel because I can relate to it in so many ways. Many things he explained and said is how I felt (and still very much feel) about myself. Not only of my appearance and state of being but also without people. We both share the same reflection on our confidence or lack there of as a child. I shared his thoughts on normality being ugly and being bland and not standing out is worse than being ugly or beautiful. He even goes on to explain that death has more of a soul or an expression than him.

The ugly/void he felt as a child (as well as his whole life) has manifested into a visible void, that crept from his inner darkness and it carries a bland look.

Which to me speaks volumes.

🥀

The First Notebook

Unable to cope with the world around him, Ōba begins to become a jokester and class clown, in order to mask away the alienation that he feels. He engages in planned fails and acts as if he has no clue as to what he does. He tells us of his environment at home. His father always being gone on business and his mother he did not mention much. He speaks of his maids/servants mistreating him, but he never reported them because he sees it as pointless.

We also learn he views a "human" as someone who is happy and hopeful. Perhaps, attractive in some way and could possibly have a great deal or comfortable amount of money. Which is strange because his family were quite wealthy and well known. He speaks of how he feels his life is a shame and the life of a "human" was not cut out for him.

There is much more to be said here but I do not wish to spoil everything. I still want readers to get a wow factor from this book, without knowing every details and topic.

🥀

The Second Notebook

A very key factor in this part is that Ōba is caught by another student named Takeichi who suspects and confronts him on faking his fall during "gym" class. This sends Ōba into a manic behavior and he somewhat becomes obsessed with Takeichi and fears that he will expose him for being a fraud. I found this interesting given Takeichi had no intention on exposing Ōba or telling anyone about his opinions on his stunts. Certain things happens and the two become somewhat of friends and Takeichi began to mention things to Ōba that were predicting and in a way life changing for Ōba.

Ōba also finds an strong interest in art, which leads him to start painting.

Ōba also becomes apart of a communist group and becomes a respectable member. Though, he does not share their same views and is only there because he views them as misfits.

In this section, a young man now, Ōba meets someone by the name of Horiki. Horiki is also a college student but exposes Ōba into an unfortunate and dreadful life cycles, that pleasures and destroys him further.

He also tries to commit suicide with a woman named Tsuneko, who dies but he does not. This even tears him apart and causes his family to the verge of disowning him.

🥀

The Third Notebook: Part One

Ōba begans to have multiple affairs with different women, from different walks of life. He becomes a heavy drinker and is expelled from college. He becomes too focus on self destruction, he was not able to create or focus on his artwork. He tries to quite smoking and drinking. But struggles terribly.

He marries a young girl, who tries to encourage him to stop drinking and for awhile it works. And for a moment Ōba is happy. The two both marry and move in together.

🥀

The Third Notebook: Part Two

Working as a cartoon and sober, Ōba feels somber toward marriage life. He thinks of his wife as native and innocent. But he falls into bad habits once he is visited by an old friend named Horiki, who (with Ōba) witnesses Ōba's wife being sexually assaulted by an associate friend.

Ōba begins to blame himself, as well as his wife and becomes manic and fills himself with alcohol and is committed into a mental hospital. After leaving his wife for another woman.

This parts ends with him being brought to a home that his brother purchased for him and given the money he needed for living and personal interest. Ōba is left feeling empty and recounts his choices and views of hisself.

🥀

Epilogue

We are then given the prospective of an outsider, who wanted to meet Ōba but fails. He then meets a friend of Ōba and she gives him the three notebooks. The man is intrigued by the notebooks and decides to publish them. We are left with a reflects of Ōba's friend telling us that he was a kind and gentle soul, who made everyone laugh and smile.

🥀

My Final Thoughts

I believe this is one of the greatest books that I have read. I love the rawness of this book and I adore how the events were true. I feel that Osamu Dazai was a great writer and his death is very unfortunate. I find the way he told his life very interesting and beautiful and poetic. I wish I was able to meet him and praise him for being an amazing artist and writer. But the result would probably remain the same. There is so much that we can learn from Osamu and his life. His perception on life and people is very interesting and a very rare viewpoint on life.

I highly suggest that everyone checkout this novel and spread the works of Asian Literature.

Thanks For Listening.

-𝓒𝓱𝓪𝓷𝓭𝓵𝓮𝓻 𝓦𝓲𝓵𝓭𝓮

Chandler Wilde

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picassho-18 · 4 years

Text

creative writing piece!

A/N: Hi guys! So I am in a introduction to prose writing class right now, and I just wrote a short story I am really proud of and thought I would share it on here. Its not marvel or fandom related but it is set in the 1800′s and I like to think it’s interesting! Please feel free to read it, and it would be great if I got some feedback on it! Thanks!!

Word Count: 2190

Trees on the Horizon

Short story by Kate

19 years old.

The words were simply not writing themselves down on the blank, yellowed paper in front of her. Her fingertips danced on top of the paper, fountain pen tucked in the crook of her hand as she debated the message she wanted to send.

Elizabeth Mae Williams.

Her name was written neatly, perfectly, scrawled across the top with her best ink. But what was needed underneath was undetermined. Who was she and how did she want to convey herself?

Was she progressive? This unwavering and determined woman, alone in a cruel world made by men. Or was she someone who craved the comfort and support of one of those men? Surrendering to a role designated for women in this society that meant warmth and security, but limited any and all freedom.

While she was already her father’s possession, surely she must want escape from a limited lifestyle of servitude. But must that lead her into the arms of another man, a transference of property and dowry, a transaction, that never allows any form of decisions or wants on behalf of the woman?

Or could this promise of education provide the escape she craves? Could society be moving forward enough to allow her into a college that enables her into an independent individual?

All these thoughts swirled inside her head as she debated the perfect message, one that must convince a group of people that she was worthy of college, which would provide her passageway from the only world she knows; the ever shrinking Georgetown; a place she has called home since birth and yet her only desire is to leave it.

11 years old.

Elizabeth always sat in the front row. Every day, her mother would remind her how lucky she was that Georgetown had a schoolhouse, especially with how it allowed girls to learn with the young boys as well. So she sat upright and at attention, her eyes following the teachers every movement of her wrist as she wrote on the blackboard.

“Our lovely Georgetown has suffered many fires, but the very first one caused our town to relocate. Does anyone know what year that was?”

No one raised their hands. Elizabeth looked around, hesitant when none of the boys in the classroom appeared like they knew.

Slowly, she raised her hand, “It was in 1852, Miss Everling.”

The teacher clapped her hands together in joy, “That is correct, Miss Williams.”

The boys groaned, annoyed that she yet again got an answer correct. The few other girls glared at her from rows away. Only the red-headed boy gave her a soft smile of encouragement.

Miss Everling glanced around the room, noticing the hostility before clearing her throat and continuing the history lesson, “Alright, boys and girls. Can anyone explain how the fire department was established in Georgetown?”

Elizabeth peered around the room again, the answer on the tip of her tongue. Yet again no one raised their hands. And neither did she. Instead she looked out her window, staring at the trees on the horizon that seemed to grow farther and farther away.

12 years old.

Slowly passing the wooden buildings on their sides, the bar soon approaching on their left, Elizabeth and Mary matched stride for stride, the pair leaned close, heads tilted together. With ever so slightly hushed voices, Mary began to talk, explaining exactly what Elizabeth has been anticipating to hear since she had woken up this morning.

“And now my aunt is the Dean at DePauw University!” she exclaimed a little too loudly, earning a few undesired glances from a few of the drunks lounging outside the bar. Quickly, the pair walked past the entrance, before resuming, “she got promoted; the University thought it would be progressive and recognized her talent!”

Elizabeth’s eyes widened in surprise, not believing that a woman could actually become a Dean of the University. “Please tell me you are not joking!”

“I swear it. It is bottom fact!” Mary said, grinning madly, excitement coursing through the pair as Elizabeth heart swelled at the revelation, pulse picking up at the new possibilities springing into her head.

“Oh, how desperately jealous I am of your Aunt!” Elizabeth shook her head, grin still on her face, as she thought about how lucky —

Mary nudged Elizabeth playfully, interrupting her thoughts, “Don’t you think Dean Arabella Mansfield of DePauw University just sounds lovely?!”

A hopeful grin rested on Elizabeth’s face, as she sighed woefully, “Yes. It sounds splendid.”

14 years old.

Oh how lucky she was! Elizabeth was ecstatic, and a beaming smile shining brightly, as she had an old edition of a law textbook in her hand. The pages were battered, the spine worn and discolored, yet the name written inside the book was as evident and bright as day; Arabella Mansfield.

Mary had requested any study materials that Arabella could spare, which led to her aunt sending back two law textbooks she had used to study for the Iowa Bar exam.

Elizabeth was walking home from Mary’s home, her heart beating fast like she just acquired pounds of treasure.

The book opened in her hands, her fingers brushed over the pages delicately, squinting closely at the handwritten marks left behind by Arabella. Her focus was directed entirely on her new possession, her face decorated in awe at what was right there, between her hands.

She had no time to notice the approaching wagon, pulled by two brown horses, coming closer right in her path.

The man holding the reins shouted out, “Get out of the road!” trying to pull the horses to the side.

Elizabeth yelped out, barely getting out the way of the gigantic horses as they squealed at the close quarters. She lost balance, falling down, her dress now directly in the muddy water off the side of the road.

The man grumbled, “Ya damn girl!” before continuing down the road, getting control over his horses once again.

Teeth gritted, and hands clenched in tight fists, she calmed herself while her fingernails dug into her palms. Slowly, she gathered herself, trying her best to brush off the dirt and mud from her skirts, but her heart sank when she saw the book laying open, and faced down. She quickly got up and reached for the book, frantically wiping off the mud that was caking the exposed pages. Her chest tightened, tears threatening to spill down her face, but she refused.

Elizabeth straightened her back and continued her walk home.

15 years old.

Alone in the school room, save for the teacher that was gathering her worn leather bound books, Elizabeth sat in the front row, the familiar seat an echo of comfort. Her window framing a dark and cloudy landscape outside, as her classmates trudged home through the gusty winds.

Miss Everling walked right in front of the desk that separated the two ladies, soft eyes staring at the young student, “Miss Williams, do you know why I wanted to talk to you after the lessons?”

“No, ma’am. I do not know.” Elizabeth gulped, worry now eating away at her, as the teacher looked around the room, ample time on her hands.

“You are a very bright student, Miss Williams. Do you have any dreams of furthering your education?” Miss Everling asked simply, as Elizabeth’s breath caught, becoming excruciating aware of the book she had stashed in her bag, alongside her feet.

Elizabeth responded hesitantly, choosing her words wisely, “Well, it is not deemed very proper for a woman to go to a university. Not many would accept me.”

“But would you want to go? If you could?” Miss Everling continued to prod, but then said something that caused Elizabeth’s heart to skip a beat, “What if I could help you get into a University?”

Elizabeth sat completely still, confusion flooding her system, yet deep inside her, hope began to grow despite her refusing to believe.

“How?” she asked quietly, refusing to make eye contact.

Miss Everling smiled, seeing her student’s possible excitement at the notion. “I would make it work. Are you interested?”

Elizabeth stared at her, wonder in her eyes, breath caught in her chest, but she managed to nod, “Wholeheartedly.”

16 years old.

They were nicknamed the Growlers. The miners covered from head to toe in dirt and ash, save for the clean skin around their eyes, nose, and mouth. When Elizabeth and Mary would walk to the school house in the mornings, the Growlers would be breaking their fast from the west.

Today was no exception. They were huddled, coffee and biscuits scattered around the dirty bunch, nibbling hungrily around the food, most of them barely batting an eye towards the pair as they passed every morning.

Mary always liked to pass them. For when they broke their fast, they would strip to their trousers and pants, leaving the sweaty and dirty skin of their abdomens and chests exposed.

Elizabeth found it very entertaining, gesturing to the men, “You are in such a dire search for a husband, are you not?”

Mary giggled under her breath, catching the eye of her favorite, one of the miners’ sons. She gave him a soft wave along with a slightly flirtatious wink, as she walked past, before whispering to Elizabeth, “Oh, however did you know?”

“It could possibly have been the desire in your eyes whenever they lack shirts,” Elizabeth stated, smiling at her friend’s action. However, there was a young miner Elizabeth looked out for; his vibrant red hair only partially covered by the ash of the mine. The books in her hands slightly forgotten as she looked for the recognizable color whenever passing, a blush creeping over her face whenever the pair made eye contact, and more soft smiles were exchanged.

17 years old.

The neighbor's old wife was in her usual position, a ball of yarn nestled on top of her lap, as she rocked steadily in her wooden chair.

“Darling, I simply do not know why you are playing around with this little dream of yours.”

Elizabeth glanced up, seeing the disapproving frown plastered on her face.

She continued, a shadow covering her eyes, cast by the white house behind her, shaking her head as she eyed Elizabeth up and down, “You should stop before you become too unobtainable. You do not want to appear unattractive with that wild spirit of yours.”

Mr. Smith, her husband who was somewhere in the house, called out, “Is that John's daughter?”

His wife responded, “Yes, darling. She was just stopping by for a chat.” She turned back towards Elizabeth, “I really do want what’s best for you. I do not want you ruining that life your daddy worked so hard to give you.”

Elizabeth gritted her teeth slightly, stopping the rushed response she so desperately wanted to yell out, before she curtseyed, grabbing the front of her skirts in the proper fashion and tipping her head. “Thank you, ma’am. I will most definitely keep that in mind.”

Suddenly her husband called from inside the house, his voice louder and booming, causing both Elizabeth and his wife to flinch suddenly, “Woman! Get in here and fetch me some whiskey!”

The wife glared and shook her head one last time at Elizabeth before standing up and brushing her skirts off. Elizabeth curtseyed one last time, calling out to her husband inside the house, “How a good afternoon, Mr. Smith!” and nodded a goodbye to the dutiful wife, “And you as well.”

27 years old.

She sat there, alone in the middle of the school house. The chair was much smaller than she remembered; The wooden desk in front of her, covered in etchings and symbols from past students from Georgetown. Looking around, Elizabeth observed the eerily familiar walls, old and withering maps adorning the wooden planks, and the same dirty and rusted blackboard at the front of the room. Chalk laid scattered about the floor, the dust collecting in shallow piles on the floor.

The window to her right, the one she would usually sit next to, was open. Outside, she saw the familiar head of red hair, her husband giving her a moment alone.The landscape beyond him consisted of an array of trees scattered about the horizon that still called out to her, as it always has.

But now.

Now she knew what it was like to have an education outside the four walls of the small school house. Now she knew exactly what it took to go beyond these confines of the small Georgetown, and that she had what it took to get there.

Elizabeth now knew what was beyond the trees in the horizon, and she planned to know even more.

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Let me know if you liked it! And if you would like to see more of my not fandom related writing as well! Thank you!

#prose writing #creative writing #original character #not marvel #1800's #1800's aesthetic #western #western au #western aesthetic #short story #poem #poetry #fictional #researched fiction

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judemahoney-blog · 4 years

Text

The Best Way to Learn History is to Read Fiction

Why study historic fiction?

A former ee-e book membership member HATED it while the organization study historic fiction. She become adamant that analyzing novels approximately real historic occasions become a waste of time. All the ones conversations withinside the ee-e book have been made up due to the fact nobody alive now may want to probably recognize what have been stated among characters in a preceding generation.

Historical fiction is simply FICTION, she declared.

I adamantly disagreed.

“Writers do lots of studies earlier than crafting a historic novel, regularly gaining access to real journals, letters, and newspaper articles of the time. They recognize the outstanding gamers of the period. They recognize approximately the dialect, the costumes, the residing conditions, the political situations, and the accoutrements of lifestyles after they write their novel. Isn’t it higher to get a FEEL for the generation and a few information of the problems and the peoples’ responses to them than to be placed to sleep with the aid of using a few dry, dull, dull nonfiction textual content or flat-voiced biography?”

(My apologies to biographers and nonfiction writers everywhere. This become a announcement I made earlier than I started out analyzing a number of nonfiction and knowing that now no longer all biographies have been dull. Not all records texts have been dull.)

My pal became her head away and lifted her nostril barely as though the scent of what I had stated become offensive.

We by no means got here to any type of settlement approximately the fee of historic fiction. For her, it become nonsense — a waste of highbrow energy. For me, historic fiction is a joy, the first-rate manner to research records.

Ironic, don’t you think?

I discovered extra approximately records from made-up memories than I did from a presentation of the facts.

What’s the first-rate a part of historic fiction?

History.

Of course, the tale is important. It has to have a compelling plot, interesting, third-dimensional characters, sensible dialog, and keep-it-transferring pacing. The writing is important. The cowl design, ee-e book blurb, strengthen reviews, and exposure are tantamount to a ee-e book’s success, however it’s the records of a historic novel that entices me.

I am now no longer by myself in taking part in historic fiction. It’s a famous style with the strains among literary fiction, women’s fiction, historic fiction, or even thriller and suspense blurring.

I discovered some distance extra approximately records from analyzing novels than I ever did from analyzing a textbook

I become a great scholar in excessive school. I sat withinside the the front row, took notes, and paid interest to regardless of the instructor stated. (No note-passing, spitballs, or having a pipe dream for me!) But as attentive as I become, I didn’t get plenty concept of records outdoor of some simple concepts. I discovered the Civil War took place from 1861–1865 and that the most important problem become slavery. I knew that World War II started out for America with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and that hundreds of thousands of Jews have been gassed in chambers with the aid of using Adolph Hitler. America received her independence in 1776; there has been a “Cold War” with Russia, and we landed a person at the moon in 1969.

My information of records existed of simple dates and standard terms.

But as an avid reader, I actually have discovered some distance extra records from novels than I ever did from textbooks. Not handiest have I discovered approximately historic movements, however I’ve internalized them. History is a part of my waking focus due to the memories I’ve study. I recognize how exclusive occasions impacted the human beings of the time. I get how the numerous viewpoints of a criminal selection stirred controversy and the way wars affected households on a private level.

What I’ve discovered approximately records from analyzing fiction constitutes a large catalog. If you consider it, you’ll in all likelihood give you a protracted listing of historic occasions you wouldn’t have understood with out analyzing, too.

Here are only some of mine off the pinnacle of my head.

America’s First Daughter with the aid of using Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie taught me approximately Thomas Jefferson’s slave-retaining past, his dating with Sally Hemmings and her offspring, and the lifestyles of his high-quality daughter, Patsy Randolph.

Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio taught me approximately Varian Fry and his Emergency Rescue Committee who smuggled artists, writers, and philosophers out of German-occupied France on the onset of World War II.

The position of Guernsey Island in World War II — and the spirit of the Resistance Movement, as properly the transportation of kids to maintain them safe — have become clean to me from studying The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society with the aid of using Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.

The Bronze Horseman with the aid of using Paullina Simons introduced to existence the brutal situations of existence in Russia all through Hitler’s march to Leningrad. (I didn’t recognise that human beings had been ravenous and died withinside the streets!)

I could now no longer actually have a touch of an concept approximately the American whaling enterprise of the 1850s with out studying Moby Dick with the aid of using Herman Melville.

Did you recognize approximately the child-abduction-trafficking operation run with the aid of using Georgia Tann withinside the early 1940s? Me neither. I found out approximately it from studying Lisa Wingate’s Before We Were Yours.

While I’m on Lisa Wingate’s work…I dabble in Civil War records, however I had by no means heard of the Lost Friends pages of the Southwestern Christian Advocate, a manner for greater than 3.five million freed slaves to discover misplaced pals and relatives. Check out The Book of Lost Friends.

I’ll possibly by no means get to the bullfights in Spain. And I dislike Ernest Hemingway’s writing, however I felt the color, the manic energy, the violence of bullfighting in Spain with the aid of using studying The Sun Also Rises.

How did they construct the ones big cathedrals 800 years in the past with out high-powered system or computer-aided design? I located out. Read Pillars of the Earth with the aid of using Ken Follett.

Did you recognize that one of the maximum beautiful, glamorous girls of all time became additionally the spouse of Hitler’s fingers supplier and one of the first-rate clinical minds of the time? Read how Hedy Lamarr helped create the cutting-edge mobileular telecellsmartphone in Heather Terrill’s The Only Woman withinside the Room.

I should cross on and on and on. You get the picture.

Reading ancient fiction has coloured my selections and modified my movements — I clearly accept as true with it has made me a higher person. — Crystal King

Reasons to examine ancient fiction

Anna Diamond in The Atlantic: “Using Historical Fiction to Connect Past and Present” gives motives to examine ancient fiction as adults — and as kids. She remarks at the strength novels have withinside the lecture room with the aid of using

easing into hard topics

providing a couple of perspectives

developing a story — a story arc — that heightens exhilaration and the choice to recognise what happened

growing empathy while the testimonies experience personal

“humanizing” records, and making it approximately actual human beings, now no longer dates and statistics.

reducing the skepticism of minority college students who won't accept as true with that textbooks appropriately constitute their testimonies

enhancing vital questioning capabilities with the aid of using encouraging discernment among truth and fiction, fact from falsehood.

She notes,

“ historical fiction books can provide the chance, if taught conscientiously, to interact college students with a couple of perspectives, that are crucial to information records; to assist college students recognize ancient styles and political analogies; and to introduce college students to historiography — how records is written and studied.”

No marvel I like ancient fiction. Not most effective does it assist me find out about the past, however it additionally enables me make selections withinside the present. From studying, I’ve visible the effects of different human beings’s comparable movements and might weigh my selections with theirs.

Reading ancient fiction also can assist me see tendencies for the future. If people repeat the equal styles over time, we recognise what may lie ahead. Heather Webb, the writer of Rodin’s Lover, says it best:

History is likewise a window into our future. As creatures of habit, we stay our lives in a chain of styles and movements. Studying those styles may be beneficial in predicting what comes next, how we need to put together ourselves, or maybe what we need to communicate out towards in a significant manner.

What greater should you need from a book? Reading ancient fiction offers you information of the past, readability withinside the present, and foreknowledge of the future. It takes you to exceptional eras and exceptional places. You get to recognise heaps of characters. It’s knowledge, however it’s additionally simply simple FUN!

#historical fiction books #best historical fiction #historical novels #historical fiction

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tangodancerxxxmumu · 4 years

Text

meet... harlow harding

age: 107

pronouns: she / her

birthplace: cape elizabeth, maine

species: vampire ( former witch )

sexuality: bisexual ( homoromantic )

occupation: owner of the harding planetarium

faceclaim: jodie comer

&. “i hate rarely, though when i hate, i hate murderously.” --anaïs nin, from henry & june

under the cut are multiple triggers, including ( tw plague, tw murder, tw miscarriage, tw blood, tw depression, lowkey tw prostitution ). if i seemed to have missed anything, please let me know.

it should have been a clear sign to lucille harding when her youngest daughter, harlow, was born the same day that tragedy struck. april 14th, 1912, and the titanic began to sink. so, too, did the luck of the harding family as the years crept on, and no amount of magic from their bloodline could turn their luck around. while her elder sister, pearl, led a charmed childhood, harlow’s was filled with trials and tribulations. her father passed away when she was only six, leaving her older brother, abraham, the man of the house. abraham, as harlow remembers, was a sickly young man who would suppress his powers, fearing that he even had them. he was set to inherit everything at the ripe old age of fifteen. unfortunately for lucille and for the luck of her daughters, young abraham succumbed to the influenza, leaving only the three women and a few maids in the house. her eldest sister, pearl, was married off to the nearest man at seventeen in a vain attempt to save her from falling into obscurity with the rest of her family. but harlow remained.

the harding estate was a wealthy beach estate in the north of maine, the pride and joy of harlow’s late father, ezekiel. the only one built on that beach, and at least an hour ride to the nearest town. it was a fortress of sorts and a grand sight to behold, but harlow remembers it being quiet. lonely, at times. her mother, lucille, rarely left the estate, and, as such, neither did her youngest child. lucille, as well, never talked to her youngest child. so harlow had her father’s old library, her brother’s studies, and the sharp ocean air to keep her company. so, she did as anyone might have in her position–she learned. as her sister danced the night away at the parties of the 1920’s, harlow stayed up reading. a growing fascination grew within her for astronomy, and she spent a good deal of time watching the stars, writing her observations. sometimes, she’d play on the beach. it was there, after eighteen years of being alone in that huge house that she met what she’d assumed was the man of her dreams–lachlan emerson.

lachlan was a charming man of some small fortune and the editor of a prestigious astronomy journal. he’d recently moved to maine to escape the city life, finding it stifling, and, while exploring a quiet beach, he’d found the harding’s, and, in turn, harlow. she was smitten almost immediately, and thought she’d found the one person who was on her level. someone who held her interests, who could be trusted with her innermost secrets. he was a human, so that secret would have to be maintained, but her others she felt eager to share. finally, she had a companion. he would show up to court her four times a week and secretly meet her on the beach during the other three days. the pair became inseparable, and, after a while, lachlan moved the harding family back into the spotlight. he helped show off harlow, throw parties at the estate, and lucille was as enamored as her youngest daughter.

sadly, this brief period of joy was not to last long. as lachlan and harlow grew closer, she shared more and more with him. her heart, her body… her findings. her work. she only realized what a fool she’d been to give all of these things to a man when she realized she was with child. her mother was ashamed, and the family begged lachlan to marry harlow to save her and her family from the shame. they’d just become a feature in maine society again, and this could ruin them. lachlan, however, never answered a single letter from the family. about a month later, when the newest edition of his journal came out, harlow was mortified to find that her own work had been stolen, published in his name, and the stress of it all led to an uneasy pregnancy. rumors spread, and harlow harding was disgraced. she was bedridden during her pregnancy, only to lose the child. harlow had never felt so low, so beaten down–or so full of rage.

harlow spent the next two years at her family’s estate, avoiding the town nearby and planning… something. she wanted lachlan to suffer for what he’d done to her. maybe she’d sell some findings to his competitors. she tried, and the competition laughed off the work of a woman. she attempted to get him fired from his job, but people knew who she was by this point. her reputation was ruined, and it seemed that lachlan had also slandered her name personally, telling people about how she threw herself upon him. however, the pair didn’t see each other until a dinner two years later, when lachlan announced his engagement to her newly widowed sister, pearl. harlow had lost it. threw her dinner plate at him, demanded answers from her elder sister. both tried to reason with her, but the youngest harding was beyond reason. she was upset, betrayed, and felt more alone than ever.

the young witch now understood that what she’d been planning before was small, too small for the wrongs that had been done to her. however, with teleportation and premonitions as her inherent powers, and her mother not wanting to train her, she found that she did not have the skills to do what needed to be done. she knew of a man, a fellow witch, much more powerful than her who could help bring ruin to her sister and lachlan. she had an idea–kill lachlan, have her sister turned into a crow, place both in the basement until the crow started to starve and she had no choice but to peck out the eyes of her lover and eat them. the man said he would help her–for a price. but when she gave him what he wanted, he left, simply saying that he’d only wanted a warm body for the night. he wasn’t a murderer. harlow, now desperate for something, turned to another–a vampire, who changed her into what he was.

that night, harlow went back home and drained her mother, drained almost all of the maids… and then she found her sister. she must have looked a sight, covered in blood as she was, because the last sounds harlow remembers pearl making were prayers to their god, screaming, crying. once she was dead, the youngest and how only harding left put on her sister’s old wedding dress from her first marriage and went over to see lachlan. having sufficiently scared him, she knocked him out, brought him home to her house, and turned him. left him locked alone in the basement, tied up, two of the only maids she’d left alive tied up as well. if he got to them, he survived. as for harlow, she broke into her family’s safe, took as much money as she could carry. she packed away a spare dress, a few beloved books, and a few of her sister’s bones, leaving the rest on a heap in front of lachlan.

with her humanity turned off, the young woman didn’t have to deal with the guilt of slaughtering people, of essentially ending her family line. instead, she could focus on history passing her by as she traveled, city by city, place by place. on the off chance that lachlan had survived the fright of his life, she didn’t want to run into him. she watched as science progressed, as astronomy grew more and more impressive. she watched as women gained more and more rights, which made traveling alone a lot less conspicuous. sometimes, when she felt like she might be alright, she turned her humanity back on for a bit, only to be consumed with guilt. the most she lasted was three weeks, during which she saved a boy’s life and got him a daylight ring. she also buried most of her sister’s bones she’d saved along the way.

after a while, harlow was tired of running. her bones ached to rest for a while, so she picked a smaller town and settled in it, keeping herself quiet and busy. opened up her own observatory, where she continues the work she finds herself so lucky to be able to do. and, while nearly thirty years of peace has left her feeling a little restless, she’s thankful to have a place to call home. a place where she can thrive to the best of her ability, even if it’s just to spite the people who wronged her in the past. she found a new past time over the years--fighting. fist on face, knee to gut sort of fighting. it helped keep her anger at bay and keep her place in the town secure. her prized possession? a fiddle made out of the breastbone of her sister, placed above the mantle of her fireplace as a reminder to her of what she’d done. of what she was, and still is, capable of when hurt.

#;; & intro : harlow #;; & character : harlow harding #tw plague #tw miscarriage #tw murder #tw blood #tw depression #tw prostitution

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